Issuing body: Emergency Conference of the Fourth International
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Resolution on the French Section
Having taken cognizance of the political report and the activity report presented by the Central Committee of the Committees of the Fourth International¹ (French Section), the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International:
1. Greets the French comrades and assures them that everything possible will be done to help them in every way.
2. Congratulates them on their energetic work, pursued heroically under conditions of illegality.
3. Considering the political line developed in the letters of Gilbert Craipeau,
a) Condemns the Gilbert tendency of the Central Committee for its defeatist position with regard to the USSR and for its attempt to violate the orientation of the First World Congress of the Fourth International on this point²;
b) Congratulates the Gilbert tendency on its organizational loyalty to the Fourth International, as expressed in Gilbert's comments concerning the factional struggles within the American Socialist Workers Party;
c) Informs the French Section that the democratic guarantees proposed in their political report for resolving the conflict were met by the SWP congress, which concluded a seven-month debate, and were rejected by the splitters of the Shachtman-Burnham minority;
d) Invites the Gilbert tendency to publicly dissociate itself from the SWP splitters.
4. Informs the French Section of the conditions governing the proceedings of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, and further informs it that, until such time as it becomes possible to hold a plenary congress of the Fourth International, the decisions of the First Congress, confirmed by this Emergency Conference, are binding on all sections.
5. Reminds the French Section that the American minority — which had Gilbert's full support with regard to its defeatist position on the USSR — has called into question the entire Marxist political conception and has revealed itself to be a centrist tendency, and warns the French Section that persisting in the orientation developed in Gilbert's letter can only lead to the same centrist morass.
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Notes
1. The name "Committee of the Fourth International" was adopted at the beginning of September 1939 by the entrist tendency within the PSOP (Rous-Craipeau), the only one recognized by the Fourth International.
2. Gilbert (Craipeau) had presented to the second congress of the POI in November 1937 a counter-report, "The Fourth International and the Russian Counter-Revolution," which Trotsky refuted in an article of 4 November 1937 (cf. Défense du marxisme, pp. 73 and 311, EDI).