Subtitle: Letter from the IEC to All Members of the PCI Issuing body: International Executive Committee (IEC) of the Fourth International
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Comrades,
The Eleventh Plenum of the IEC has once again had to examine the evolution of the French section. The documents prepared for the party's Eighth Congress obliged it to re-examine the situation in your organization and the development of the tendency struggle dividing it. This was inevitable once it found itself confronted with documents drawn up by the majority stemming from the Seventh Congress of the party — documents manifestly contrary to the line laid down for the French organization by the Tenth Plenum of the IEC.
THE PRINCIPAL POLITICAL DIFFERENCES
Analysing the situation of the French workers' movement and its dynamic, within the framework of our international perspectives, the Tenth Plenum of the IEC had reached the conclusion that the first stage of the revolutionary upsurge in France would be triggered above all by the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist action of the CP's worker militants. In order to participate actively and effectively in these actions, and to be able to influence them in the direction of building a new revolutionary leadership, it is necessary, before the decisive events, to integrate the maximum number of our militants into the Stalinist and para-Stalinist organizations. This idea, taken up word for word by the Political Bureau's resolution on the framework of the discussion preparatory to the Eighth Congress — a resolution adopted unanimously, including the votes of all the representatives of the party majority — is the central idea of the strategy of party-building as conceived by the international. This idea is explicitly rejected by the draft political report presented by the majority, which explicitly pushes the entrist turn off into some future time.
Drawing the organizational conclusion from this strategy of party-building, the international decided, in the documents of the Tenth Plenum of the IEC, to apply the tactic of entrism sui generis in France — that is, the simultaneous existence of an entrist sector and an independent sector, the latter subordinated to the needs of the former, while continuing all its own activities (recruitment, press, youth work, trade-union work, etc.) and while naturally defending the whole of the Trotskyist programme. The framework text adopted unanimously by the Political Bureau, including by the representatives of the majority, expressed the same idea clearly: "It is a matter of understanding that the independent organization must above all assist the entrist work, by speaking a language addressed essentially to Communist workers, and that the entrist work will expand as we draw closer to the war." The draft political report presented by the majority for the Eighth Congress expresses the opposite idea: that entrist ("fractional") work in the Stalinist organizations must necessarily remain subordinate, until the war or the revolutionary upsurge, to the independent work.
Analysing the particular tasks arising from the present situation of the French workers' movement as regards the independent sector, the Tenth Plenum of the IEC had reached the conclusion that the organization of an independent current within the CGT was no longer justified. The trade-union text presented by the majority to the party's Eighth Congress maintains the whole of the old trade-union orientation of building an independent trade-union current centred on an autonomous trade-union paper.
On fundamental questions of orientation, then, the documents prepared for the Eighth Congress by the majority tendency stand opposed to the line of the Tenth Plenum, which this tendency had nevertheless undertaken to apply. By contrast, the documents preparatory to the Eighth Congress adopted by the Political Bureau currently functioning within the PCI remain, on the whole, on the line of the Tenth Plenum. On pain of calling into question the seriousness of its own conviction in its own line, the international leadership could not fail to examine the consequences that follow from the presentation to the party congress of documents of this character.
THE POLITICAL DIFFERENCES IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT EVENTS
The documents prepared by the majority tendency are not confined to presenting a line of orientation opposed to that of the Tenth Plenum. They also wage, against this line, a veiled polemic which can only sow confusion and make it still more difficult for the whole of the PCI to understand what the international actually wants and says.
Yet the problem under discussion is not so complicated. Until the spring of 1951, the party as a whole held a common conception — correct, moreover, for the period up to the end of 1950 — as to the strategy of party-building. This conception was expressed, in a resolution of the party's CC of that time, as follows: "The party, at the stage it has reached today, will be able to strengthen itself numerically, win over, organize and educate a proletarian vanguard within its ranks, and solidly extend its influence, only if it is capable, above all, of demonstrating in action its capacity to organize and lead currents aspiring to independence [from both blocs] within and on the periphery of the working class, so as to strengthen ourselves as a pole of attraction for Stalinist militants."
This conception of party-building, starting from the organization, under our leadership, of various more or less peripheral currents "aspiring to independence from both blocs", was indeed applied by the party: the brigades, l'Unité, the MRJ, etc. Such a conception is no longer applicable today. This is so not only because these "currents" tend to disappear with the polarization of class forces on both the international and national scale, but above all because even hypothetical successes in organizing such currents would make our connection with the vanguard Communist militants not easier but more difficult. These militants will no longer feel drawn towards a "more effective" organization, but only towards the clearest, sharpest, most unequivocal affirmation of the defence of the USSR, the people's democracies, China, the colonial revolution, of a communist and revolutionary strategy in France itself, of a revolutionary and communist struggle against the approaching war.
Now, these vanguard Communist militants of the PCF are the essential elements who will constitute the revolutionary party of tomorrow. To fight at their side under any circumstances, even when they are fighting momentarily isolated from the effective support of the broad working masses and of the "independent currents" — as on 12 February, as on the 28th of May and the 4th of June just past — is a question of life or death for our future fusion with this vanguard on our programme. The choice of the party's principal milieu of activity therefore poses itself imperiously. This principal milieu can only be that of the vanguard Communist worker militants within the PCF. It can only be that of those who, on 28 May, had cudgels in their hands, and not of those who stayed at home. And since these militants will not be ready to leave their party in a period of intensified bourgeois struggle against it, and of a leftward twisting of its line in action, the only way to find this milieu of work in practice, to integrate into it the maximum of our forces, is entrism into the Stalinist mass organizations and into the PCF itself.
To this clear and precise conception of party-building, the representatives of the majority tendency counterpose no other coherent conception. They no longer defend the old orientation of the Seventh Congress; they possess no new conception. All their effort goes into minimizing the understanding and application of the new orientation, into surrounding it with so many reservations, conditions and restrictions that it becomes inoperative in practice.
Yet the most recent events have confirmed in striking fashion the orientation defended by the international. Can anyone still really doubt a real turn to the left by the PCF, not only in its slogans but in its action too? Can anyone seriously question the effects of this leftward turn, however bureaucratic it may be, upon the vanguard militants, and speak of a "lack of combativity among militants for diplomatic objectives" after the Ridgway demonstration? Can anyone really still speak of a "false problem of a tightening of ranks" after the 28th of May and the 4th of June? Of course, it is not to the mass of those who vote for the PCF or belong to the CGT that our characterization of growing combativity, of a hardening of revolutionary aspirations, of a tightening of ranks around the PCF applies. In our view these characteristics apply in France, in the first place, to the 30,000, 40,000 or 50,000 vanguard Communist worker militants in the factories. It is these vanguard Communist militants who constitute the bulk of the forces of tomorrow's revolutionary party. It is these militants who remain the general staff of the working class and who will lead the great battles of tomorrow, as soon as the masses are ready to engage in such battles. It is these militants who represent the decisive element for the victory or defeat of the future French revolution. It is with these militants that we strive to link ourselves at all costs; it is they who constitute our essential milieu of work, on which we concentrate our efforts.
THE NECESSITY OF THE INDEPENDENT ORGANIZATION
It is precisely because our whole conception of party-building is bound up with the necessity of integrating ourselves into this vanguard milieu, of making it progress politically step by step, through its own experience — which we must undergo together with it, at its side, towards the practical application of our programme — that the maintenance of the independent organization is, in our view, indispensable.
The tightening of the ranks of the vanguard Communist militants around their party does not exclude but implies that these militants ask and re-ask themselves numerous questions as to the ineffectiveness of the policy defended by the leaders of their party today and yesterday. Never since 1944 have these militants been as solidly bound to their party as on the 28th of May and the 4th of June. Yet never have they asked themselves so many questions as in the wake of these two actions, which clearly revealed the divorce between the Communist vanguard and the great masses — masses which are not, for the moment, prepared to follow it into more advanced actions, even while granting it their full sympathy.
Entrism is necessary because even the best constructive criticism made from outside will not allow our militants to link up effectively with the vanguard Communist militants. The maintenance of the independent organization is necessary because even the most effective entrist work cannot, at the present stage, answer, from within the PCF, the questions and doubts that trouble these vanguard militants. The combination of entrist work and independent work is the combination of integration into the Communist vanguard milieu with its political propulsion forward — two tasks that cannot yet coincide at the present stage. This is a matter of safeguarding all future possibilities while not failing to prepare that future from now on.
The accusations of the party majority, according to which the international would wish to abolish independent work, are absurd. The two principal proposals for independent activity made in recent months were put to the Political Bureau by members of the International Secretariat: the proposal to draft a party programme of action centred on the united front and the united-front government, and the proposal to participate in the by-elections in the second sector of the Seine. The disagreement does not concern the maintenance of the independent sector but its function. At bottom, the leaders of the majority tendency are nostalgic for times gone by and strive to orient the independent sector towards the old tasks of "organizing and leading independent currents". The international, on the contrary, maintains that the independent sector must reorient its activity in the direction described above, so as organically to complement the work of the entrist sector. It is convinced that it is along this path alone that the independent sector will be able to recruit new forces for Trotskyism in France. Only a correct political orientation will permit organizational strengthening. An orientation of work which no longer corresponds to reality can never achieve organizational successes.
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF AN "ENGLISH" SOLUTION
It is for the same reason that an "English" solution is absolutely inoperative in France. (To speak of an "Austrian" solution is absurd, since neither of the two Austrian organizations does independent work; in Austria there are two clandestine organizations, the whole of whose work is carried on inside the SP.) For the international, entrism sui generis implies the maintenance of an independent and public organization and press. The division of the party into two organizations would consequently have to be carried out as a division into two independent organizations, each with its own public agitational press, indispensable to the success of the entrist work. It would be an absurd solution, one that would make our international ridiculous and discredit it, for two French organs to be published in France, both speaking in the name of the international, with different languages and different political orientations.
To this must be added something else. The international is convinced that the course proposed by the majority documents is a course of suicide for the organization. It is convinced that an orientation running counter to what the objective situation demands is condemned to swift decomposition. It has an eloquent precedent for this: precisely that of the Haston organization. The formal maintenance of the Haston organization within the international did not save it from complete decomposition as a result of the false orientation it followed. At the end of its evolution, more than 90 percent of its militants found themselves outside our movement. Despite the success and the unforeseen expansion of the entrist work in Great Britain, only an infinitesimal minority of the Hastonite organization managed to assimilate itself to this work, after the irreparable loss of the decisive years of integration. The international has no wish to pursue a policy of the worst towards its French section. It does not wish to accept as a fait accompli the loss of 90 percent of the militants of the majority tendency. It does not wish merely to save appearances. It desires to keep the whole of the party united within the international. It cannot accept a proposal which, in its view, definitively seals the fate of the majority of the party.
These comrades have said: the separation of the organization into two groups will allow experience to unfold and to convince one side or the other. Why hurry? Why not give the party the time it needs to learn from experience? Those who use this language show that they have not yet understood the acceleration of the pace of events, that even the Ridgway demonstration has still taught them nothing. Can anyone reasonably suppose that we have four to six years ahead of us before decisive events in France, as was the case at the time we carried out the separation in England? Is it not obvious that we are already suffering great delay in applying the new orientation in France, given the short time that separates us from decisive events and the period always needed for integration into an organization one is entering? Is it not obvious that, because of the crisis of the party, we have just missed a unique opportunity to rapidly achieve the integration of the maximum of our forces, during the recent events in which the Communist militants, having to fight in isolation against the bourgeoisie, were all the more open to any practical action of solidarity at their side? The party as a whole knew how to carry out such actions of solidarity, but it missed an exceptionally favourable opportunity to realize our new orientation — that is, to draw the organizational conclusions from these actions, conclusions favoured by the many initiatives taken towards our militants by the militants of the PCF themselves.
WHY HAS THE CRISIS OF THE PARTY SUDDENLY WORSENED?
The representative of the French majority to the IEC read out to it a resolution adopted by the "National Conference of Cadres of the Majority Tendency", held on 3 June — a resolution kept hidden until then from the party leadership and from the IS. This declaration, reinforced by Bleibtreu's oral statements to the IEC, represents an open and cold-blooded threat of a split. It declares in advance that it will not accept any organizational solution whatever adopted by the international leadership, on the pretext that such a solution would represent a "veiled or deferred sanction" against the majority leaders.
This resolution suddenly aggravates the crisis of the party and widens it to the very brink of a split and a break with the Fourth International.
Such a decision of the utmost gravity, taken by the leaders of the majority tendency, seeks in vain for a justification in the attitude of the IS or of the IEC's representative towards this tendency. The assertions contained on this subject in the resolution can be characterized only as mendacious.
Never have either the IS or the IEC's representative on the Political Bureau restricted any party member's right to discuss. Never have either the IS or the IEC's representative restricted the right to form tendencies within the party. On the contrary, both Comrade Albert's letter to the majority tendency and his oral intervention before the meeting of 3 June — an intervention made at the start of this meeting, which then proceeded without his participation, despite his request, made before the leaders of this tendency, to be allowed to take part in it at least in part — explicitly confirm that, as in every Trotskyist organization, freedom of discussion before congresses will be full and entire within the PCI.
The present session of the IEC has once again solemnly confirmed these same rights, so as to remove from those who are preparing splits every possible pretext and to cut short all slanders.
In reality, it is a question of something else. It is a question of a necessary choice between freedom of discussion as an oppositional and minority tendency within the international, and the responsibilities of being the leadership of a section, which must prepare an adequate application of the international's line.
What Comrade Albert told and wrote to you, and what the international repeats to you today, comrades of the majority, is this: you cannot at once demand the prerogatives of an opposition and those of a leadership, in a period following the world congress and the Tenth Plenum. Either you behave as an opposition, continuing to fight and obstruct the application of the line — in which case, the effective application of the line requires another leadership, and you ought yourselves to have decided, had you wished to be honest and loyal towards the international, to abandon this leadership of your own accord. Or else you commit yourselves to applying the line of the international, as you did at the Tenth Plenum — in which case discussion, on your part, must be confined to problems of application, and cannot call the line itself back into question. You yourselves entered into a commitment to this effect by voting for the framework text in the Political Bureau. It is by breaking this commitment — of which your resolution of 3 June breathes not a word, just as it entirely passes over in silence the first basis of the Tenth Plenum agreements, namely the commitment made by your leaders to apply the line of the Tenth Plenum — that you have terribly aggravated the crisis of the party.
THE INTERNATIONAL, THE ONLY POSSIBLE FRAMEWORK FOR REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITY
So this is what it comes to: the whole functioning of the international, all the principles of democratic centralism, called into question by the attitude of the cadres of the majority tendency and their resolution of 3 June last. This resolution says to the international, in substance: we disagree with your line. We want the full right to fight it. At the same time, we do not want to give up the leadership of the party. If you do anything at all to guarantee the application of your line, whether within the framework of the statutes or not, we shall split.
On pain of destroying its own foundations, the international cannot yield to such blackmail. It declares before the French party: we have fully guaranteed all the rights of expression of international minorities. We shall continue strictly to guarantee these rights. But we have, at the same time, a duty towards the overwhelming majority of the international to provide every guarantee that its line will be effectively applied. After trusting, for nearly a year, in the majority of the PCI and in its formal commitments to discipline, we note the evident obstruction offered to this application; we note the breach of the commitments made by the majority leaders, and we hand the leadership of the party, as we have the right to do under the statutes of the movement, to those who have shown themselves ready to apply the line. Having fully enjoyed the rights of an international minority, the majority tendency must now demonstrate its willingness to fulfil its duties as an international minority.
To refuse to observe these duties is to trample on the principles of democratic centralism and to break, in practice, with Bolshevism. Irresponsible elements within the majority tendency are beginning to use language that is most significant: after all, what is the international? It is, above all, the programme. Beyond that, there is not much. The leadership is very weak. The organizations are, for the most part, bluff. If we leave, we shall still apply the programme. That is what matters. This is, almost word for word, the language used by the Right-wingers before their break with the international. It must be said clearly: such language is the language of people preparing to betray Trotskyism!
The international is, above all, the programme. But a programme is embodied in an organization, in cadres, in a common, living experience, in continual development — and not merely in printed paper. The international certainly has neither a Lenin nor a Trotsky at its head. But it possesses today something it never possessed in the past: cadres solidly rooted in the workers' movement of their respective countries, who have begun to apply its programme in practice and who have enriched it, and enrich it daily, with experiences that only practice can provide.
This collective experience has for the first time made possible the constitution of a collective, homogeneous international leadership, spread across the five continents, whose bonds — as is evident to anyone who knows the extreme weakness of our apparatus — are purely bonds of thought, of common orientation. Herein lies an indestructible force, by virtue of the solidity of its convictions. Never in the past has such a cadre existed on a world scale. All the workers' actions, all the experiences of struggle in forty countries, are summed up in the experiences, the ideas and the practice of this cadre. Outside of it, no effective revolutionary action is possible anywhere in the world.
All policy today is world policy. Even the most perceptive genius would be incapable of elaborating such a policy inside his own head, in his own room, city or country alone. "Trotskyism in one country" is the worst of aberrations. What is needed is the collective international elaboration of the political line, the constant checking of the general orientation against the concrete experiences of the main countries of the world, in order to arrive at a correct analysis of the world situation and, consequently, to fix a correct line of action. Outside this collective collaboration there is room only for abstraction or crude empiricism. It is precisely because the majority tendency has, for a year now, begun to "elaborate" outside the collective experience of the international that it has inevitably accumulated political errors and misunderstandings. Any break with the international Trotskyist organization would inevitably lead to a break with the Trotskyist programme.
Nothing would be more light-minded and irresponsible than to play with the idea of the international. Our whole movement, our whole tradition, rest essentially upon this idea. Each international, embodying the historical interests of the proletariat at a given epoch, represents an entire epoch of struggles, defeats and victories of the international proletariat. It takes gigantic events, upheaving the lives of millions of human beings, before the fate of an international is at stake. Is there anyone among the members of the majority tendency who would claim that such events have proved that the Fourth International has failed in its task, and that a new international must be built? But how is it that such ideas appear only in France? Or should we link up with other partisans of a new international — Munis, Shachtman, the Bordigists? Without answering these questions, militants of principle have no right to break with the international. They may, at the very most, tell themselves that their international is gravely mistaken, that its errors have effects that are even graver still — but that, so long as there exists no other historical instrument of the world revolution than the Fourth International, anything is preferable to separating from it. In that case they must apply its decisions, submit to its discipline, and — while retaining their ideas, their right to form a tendency and their right of expression — wait for new conditions that will demonstrate to the international majority that it was mistaken.
THE BREAK WITH THE INTERNATIONAL IS THE BREAK WITH TROTSKYISM AND THE REVOLUTION
At the very moment when they have suspended the threat of a split over the international and its French section, the International Executive Committee solemnly addresses itself once again to the members, cadres and leaders of the majority tendency within the PCI, in order to hold them back from the path of political suicide on which they have embarked.
Reflect on the course you have followed for the past eighteen months, comrades of the majority. Reflect on the succession of differences between yourselves and the international. This struggle began with your criticisms of the IS's letter to the Yugoslav Communist Party, judged too "violent". Whom have events proved right? Do you remember your differences over the theses of the Ninth Plenum? Do you remember your differences over the timetable of the war, over the conclusion of a compromise between the Kremlin and Wall Street, over the character of the "war of the bureaucracy"? Do you remember your characterization of the world congress documents as "confused" on the question of Stalinism? Sliding from position to position, silently abandoning one after another differences still forcefully asserted the day before, you now come to prepare a break with the international over differences which you describe by the term "confusion" — while events have proved you wrong time after time!
How is this astonishing evolution to be explained? How is it to be explained that, while all the sections found themselves, through the international discussion, converging on a common line, you have moved further and further away from that common line? All the members of the IEC have indignantly rejected your leaders' slanders about the "manipulation of the apparatus" within the international — an insult that is, moreover, ridiculous, since anyone who knows our international movement knows that no force exists capable of compelling our cadres to adopt this or that position. If someone had told you, at the time of your attack on the IS's letter to the YCP or during your struggle against the theses of the Ninth Plenum, that the logic of your struggle would lead you to break with the international through your refusal to apply an almost unanimous decision of the IEC, you would have condemned him as a slanderer. And yet you have come to the point of coldly preparing the split with the international.¹ There is only one possible explanation for this evolution, a single materialist explanation not to be found in demonology (the successive "crimes" of Frank, of Pablo, of Albert, etc.): you are being driven by hostile class forces, despite your intentions, despite your will. The enormous, objective pressure of adverse class forces in the world, and particularly in France, in a period of extreme tension of social contradictions that stand on the eve of a universal and final reckoning — this alone explains your struggle against the international and your threatening rupture with it. This pressure is not perceptible to individuals; it is not to be attributed to "agents"; but it is the objective, undeniable resultant of the general sense of your evolution and your actions. Only the pressure of the adverse class can bring sections of a revolutionary organization such as the Fourth International to break with it on the eve of decisive revolutionary struggles. Become conscious of the forces weighing upon you, and stop before it is too late.
You characterize yourselves as a proletarian tendency, comrades of the majority. What determines the social character of a political tendency is not solely, nor even primarily, the social composition of that tendency; it is, above all, the objective meaning of its political positions and of its evolution. No proletarian tendency abandons the Fourth International and Trotskyism; only petty-bourgeois tendencies break with it. Now, you have already begun to break with Trotskyism. For international discipline is an integral and essential part of the Trotskyist programme, which cannot conceive of "ideas" separated from "organization", of spirit detached from flesh. In breaking with the international organization, your break with the Trotskyist programme will inevitably deepen, because the objective forces driving you will have been freed from the principal brake, which is your membership of the international.
Shachtman, too, when he broke with the international, had abandoned neither our characterization of the USSR nor even, entirely, the defence of the USSR. He, too, appeared to be breaking over "conjunctural questions", over trifles. His evolution confirmed the rule: every tendency that breaks with the international organization has degenerated into a petty-bourgeois tendency, moving away from the camp of the revolution.
The International Executive Committee was unanimous, and it expressed the view of the whole international Trotskyist movement, as the letter of an American Trotskyist leader confirmed to you, in denouncing as criminal the idea of a split with the international. It adds that a split carried out on the eve of the French and international civil war would be a veritable desertion in the face of the enemy. It would be the exact counterpart, on the eve of the third world war, of Shachtman's desertion on the eve of the second imperialist war. Those who committed such an act could hope to be judged by the whole international, by all its sections in every country and by all Trotskyists, in no other way than with the contempt and the hatred that such a betrayal would deserve.
The International Executive Committee calls on all members, cadres and leaders of the majority tendency to remain faithful to Trotskyism and to maintain the unity of the PCI within the international. Declare openly, and as soon as possible, that, despite all your differences, you will respect the decisions of the Eleventh Plenum. Lift the heavy mortgage weighing on the party. The international has guaranteed you not only your rights of free expression and your rights as a tendency, but even as broad an association as you desire with the new leadership, whose composition it will announce at the party's Eighth Congress. It will be ready to discuss with you all the plans for the reorganization of the party and all the proposed compositions of the leadership. The sole condition placed upon you is respect for the decisions of the Tenth and Eleventh Plenums. Show in practice that you are ready to observe your duties as disciplined militants of the international, and you will once again, as in the past, be an integral part of our world party.
At this crucial moment of their existence, the IEC declares to all the members of the majority tendency: far from wishing to exclude you, as ridiculous slanderers claim, we wish to do everything possible to keep you — each one of you, and all of you together — within the international. We know that in your heart of hearts you hesitate before committing the irreparable. Silence those who criticize this hesitation. It does you honour, more than anything you have done over the past eighteen months. Your whole existence as Communists, as revolutionaries, is at stake. No group outside the international has been able, or will be able, to remain Trotskyist. Trotskyism lives, and will live, in France, whatever you decide. For Trotskyism is the revolution of our epoch, and no force on earth will be able to destroy it. But your life as revolutionaries can be, and will be, destroyed if you commit the crime of a split. It is no shame, nor any "capitulation", to apply the discipline of your own international. Others, greater than you and than us, have done so in the face of differences far more profound. There is the example to follow! That is what must inspire you to find once more the path towards respect for the organizational principles of Bolshevism, so that you remain within the camp of the Fourth International, which is the camp of the world socialist revolution.
The International Executive Committee
7 June 1952
[Translator's note: the source text carries a footnote marker (¹) after "the split with the international" but the corresponding footnote text is not present at this point in the OCR of the printed volume and could not be recovered.]