December 1943 (published in Quatrième Internationale, n° 2, December 1943) Issuing body: The Provisional European Secretariat
---
1. Given the partly spontaneous character of the partisan movement, the expression of the open and inevitable revolt of broad sections of the working population against German imperialism and against the order and the state of the native bourgeoisie, who in their eyes personify those responsible for their present misery and suffering, the Bolshevik-Leninists are obliged to take this will to struggle of the masses into account and to try, despite the many dangers arising from the nationalist forms this struggle assumes, to orient it towards class objectives.
2. When it is a question of raiding parties organised by nationalist or Stalino-patriotic organisations, the attitude of the B-Ls depends on the objectives and results of their action: military, nationalist action, essentially reactionary, in the service of national capitalism and of the Anglo-Saxon imperialisms. This attitude holds good even where such partisan action claims to have as its objective the defence of the USSR through the exclusive organisation of sabotage, guerrilla warfare, the disruption of transport towards the East, etc. The B-Ls are not, as a matter of course, opposed to military aid to the USSR, including through sabotage. But the military aid furnished by these groups to the Soviet army remains insignificant. On the other hand, by destroying the class spirit of the workers, by developing and inflaming chauvinism, by diverting the workers from their own struggle on the terrain of the factory, by dividing them, by throwing them bound hand and foot into the sacred union, by setting them against German soldiers, they disarm the working class, weld the German proletariat to its bourgeoisie and to Hitler, and prepare the murder of the German revolution and the strangling of the world revolution. That is to say, in exchange for their insignificant military aid, they obstruct the only real support for the USSR and reinforce its dependence on the imperialisms.
Such was the exclusive character of the franc-tireur movements, notably in the occupied countries of the West (Belgium, France, etc.) up until 1942. The BLs could do nothing but combat these movements, while saluting the individual heroism of the fighters of these groups who believed they were fighting for the defence of the USSR and of liberty.
3. But such an attitude has proved absolutely insufficient every time the partisan movement has taken on a broad mass character. This has been the case:
a) in the Balkan countries where, as a result of geographical, economic and historical conditions, broad layers of poor peasants and, in part, of workers have taken to the mountains and engaged in the struggle against the occupier;
b) in the West, from the point of the mass deportation of labour to Germany onwards, the partisan groups then being reinforced by important layers of workers and petty bourgeois, notably of the youth, determined to fight against the slavery of forced labour, for their liberties, against imperialist oppression, for the defence of the USSR.
The participation of the masses does not change the objective role of the military organisations tied to the coat-tails of Anglo-Saxon imperialism, into which the partisan movements are for the most part channelled. But it does modify several features of the struggle:
a) it can make effective military aid to the USSR (Yugoslavia);
b) it brings about the entry into political life of armed masses who tend to act according to their own objective class interests;
c) by mobilising a considerable part of the living forces of the working-class and petty-bourgeois youth, it poses in burning fashion the following problem: will this youth go to feed the revolution or the most reactionary forces of imperialism?
d) in the revolutionary events to come, in the chaos now being prepared, these small armies, positioned at strategic points, will play an important role for or against the working class and the revolution.
4. Thus the B-Ls cannot today content themselves with denouncing these organisations as working in the service of imperialism. They will not content themselves with reminding the proletarians of the primacy of factory work and with making every effort to hold them within the cycle of production. They will strive, at the same time, to get their policy adopted within the ranks of the partisans, with a view to regrouping the latent revolutionary forces to be found there on a political and organisational class basis.
To this end, they develop the following programme:
a) to understand that they must play the role of armed detachments in the service of the proletarian revolution, of an advance guard of workers' militias, and not that of a substitute for the imperialist army;
b) to organise themselves, wherever this is possible, in an autonomous fashion on a democratic basis, to the exclusion of every bourgeois or reactionary element;
c) to constitute themselves, within the ranks of the military organisations controlled by the sacred union of the anti-German bourgeoisie and the Stalinists, into a camouflaged fraction with its own discipline, resolutely oriented towards a break with these organisations at every moment when this becomes advantageous or necessary;
d) to reject any policy of assassinating German soldiers, any sabotage action, even of a military character, which would widen the gulf between native workers and German soldiers;
e) to place themselves under the control and political leadership of the proletarian movement. To support workers' struggles by means appropriate to the general and local situation. To link the action of the partisans to the struggles in the factories. To favour the formation of worker military cadres and the general arming of workers and peasants;
f) to participate in the class struggle in the countryside by taking part in agricultural work, by supporting the labouring peasants against state exploitation and against the rich peasants, the landed gentry, the millers, etc., all policy of brigandage against the labouring peasantry being mercilessly punished;
g) to organise propaganda for fraternisation with the occupying troops, and to open their ranks to German deserters;
h) to form proletarian militants through the study of Marxism and through political discussions, in contradiction to the bourgeois theory: "No politics in the army."
5. The sections of the Fourth International must pursue this policy both outside the partisan organisations and within them, with the aim of regrouping, in the final analysis, all the revolutionary forces of the partisan movement on an autonomous ideological and organisational class basis — forces which, in the absence of a correct policy, will inevitably be captured by reactionary currents.
The Provisional European Secretariat
In Quatrième Internationale, n° 2, December 1943