From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-The Fourth International During The Second World War
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Proletarian Military Policy
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter, No. 13, August-September 1972
The sharpening inter-imperialist antagonisms upsurge in imperialist rivalry and "surprising" new alignments pose for the third time in this century the specter of a world war, this time with thermonuclear weaponry. Imperialist war has always been a decisive test for the communist movement. Such wars are the consummate expression of the inability of capitalism to transcend the contradiction between the productive forces, which have outgrown both national boundaries and private property relations, and the relations of production which define the two great classes of modern society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Imperialist war brings only increased misery, enslavement and suffering to the working class, exacerbating the tensions of class society to a fever pitch. Marxists seek to use these periodic violent disruptions of decaying capitalism to bring about the liberation of the proletariat. This is due not to a "the worse the better" outlook, but rather is the necessary recognition of the objective conditions of crisis weakening bourgeois society which Marxists must seek to utilize in order to drive forward to the socialist revolution.
As the outlines and alignments of yet a third global inter-imperialist war begin to take shape, it is essential to examine the policy of the Trotskyist movement in World War II and to understand the role and nature of the modern bourgeois state and its army, in order to prepare ourselves for the coming period of increasing international conflicts and war. Failure to take the basic Leninist conception of the state as a starting point for any strategy towards the bourgeois army leads almost inevitably to major theoretical errors, as was the case with the Socialist Workers Party’s adoption of the "Proletarian Military Policy" (PMP) in 1940. A study of the PMP and of Trotsky’s writings on the coming war, fascism and military policy in 1940 reveal a sliding off from basic Leninist concepts of the bourgeois state and army.
The PMP was a misdirected attempt to turn the American working class’s desire to fight fascism into a revolutionary perspective of overthrowing its "own" imperialist state. The core of the PMP was a call for trade union control of the compulsory military training being instituted by the state. The SWP resolution on "Proletarian Military Policy" adopted at the SWP’s Plenum-Conference in Chicago in September 1940 states:
"We fight against sending the worker-soldiers into battle without proper training and equipment. We oppose the military direction of worker-soldiers by bourgeois officers who have no regard for their treatment, their protection and their lives. We demand federal funds for the military training of workers and worker-officers under the control of the trade unions. Military appropriations? Yes–but only for the establishment and equipment of worker training camps! Compulsory military training of workers? Yes–but only under the control of the trade unions!"
James P. Cannon, leader of the SWP, defended the policy, primarily against the criticisms of Max Shachtman who had recently broken from the SWP and founded the Workers Party. Essentially, the PMP contained a reformist thrust; it implied that it was possible for the working class to control the bourgeois army. The logic of the PMP leads to reformist concepts of workers’ control of the state–which stand in opposition to the Marxist understanding that the proletariat must smash the organs of bourgeois state power in order to carry through a socialist revolution.
Cannon "Telescopes" the Tasks
It is necessary to see the background against which the PMP was developed, and what the expectations of the SWP and Trotsky were in World War II, as these expectations were the assumptions which led them to the PMP. Cannon said at the 1940 SWP Conference:
"We didn’t visualize a world situation in which whole countries would be conquered by fascist armies. The workers don't want to be conquered by foreign invaders, above all by the fascists. They require a program of military struggle against foreign invaders which assures their class independence. That is the gist of the problem.
"Many times in the past we were put to a certain disadvantage: the demagogy of the social democrats against us was effective to a certain extent. They said: ‘You have no answer to the question of how to fight Hitler...’ Well, we answered in a general way, the workers will fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie at home, and then they will take care of invaders. That was a good program, but the workers did not make the revolution in time. Now the two tasks must be telescoped and carried out simultaneously….
"We are willing to fight Hitler. No worker wants to see that gang of fascist barbarians overrun this country or any country. But we want to fight fascism under a leadership we can trust."
Cannon strongly emphasized that capitalism has plunged the world into an epoch of universal militarism, and that from now on, "great questions can be decided only by military means." For Cannon, "anti-militarism was all right when we were fighting against war in time of peace. But here you have a new situation of universal militarism."
Trotsky and the SWP were attempting to take advantage of the intersection of the "universal militarism" of the bourgeois states’ preparation for imperialist war with the genuine anti-fascist sentiment of the masses. Trotsky’s writings of 1939-40 reveal an apocalyptic vision of the coming war which led him to see the need to develop some strategy to fairly immediately win over the army. Trotsky and the SWP vastly overestimated the extent to which the processes of the war itself would rip the facade off the (Anglo-American) bourgeoisie’s ideology of "democracy" fighting "dictatorship." Trotsky, in conversations with SWP leaders in Mexico in 1940, said, "If the bourgeoisie could preserve democracy, good, but within a year they will impose a dictatorship. Naturally in principle we would overthrow so-called bourgeois democracy given the opportunity but the bourgeoisie won’t give us time" (discussion with Trotsky, 12 June 1940, Writings Leon Trotsky, 1939-40).
"Reformism Cannot Live Today"
As part of his projection, Trotsky also believed that reformism had exhausted all its possibilities: "At one time America was rich in reformist tendencies, but the New Deal was the last flareup. Now with the war it is clear that the New Deal exhausted all the reformist and democratic possibilities and created incomparably more favorable possibilities for revolution." The SWP developed the viewpoint that as a result of the crisis resulting from the war, reformism could not survive. A section of the SWP Resolution titled "Reformism Cannot Live Today" stated, "In the first place the victories of the fascist war machine of Hitler have destroyed every plausible basis for the illusion that a serious struggle against fascism can be conducted under the leadership of a bourgeois democratic regime." But following World War II, because of the hatred of the working class for fascism and the broad strike wave, the bourgeoisie was forced to reinstate liberal reformist ideology and parliamentary politics, in an effort to mollify the workers.
The Trotskyists took as the basis and starting point of their new policy, the deeply popular working class sentiment against fascism. The working class was being conscripted, and part of their acceptance of this conscription was based on their desire to fight fascism, the SWP reasoned, so therefore their acceptance of conscription has a "progressive" character. The PMP was based on the belief that the bourgeoisie would be forced to institute military dictatorships and thus would be forced to expose its reactionary character in the midst of war, in a situation when the working class was armed (by the state itself) and motivated by deeply anti-dictatorship and anti-fascist feelings. This would lead inevitably to a revolutionary situation, and very quickly at that. These were the primary assumptions of Trotsky and the SWP. They do not serve to justify the adoption of the PMP, however, but rather only illuminate the background against which it was developed.
The slogan, "For trade union control of military training," implies trade union control of the bourgeois army. The PMP slid over the particular nature and role of the imperialist army as the bulwark of capitalism. Shachtman caught the core of the PMP’s reformist thrust and this sliding over when he wrote:
"I characterized his [Cannon’s] formula as essentially social-patriotic… Cannon used to say: We will be defensists when we have a country to defend, that is, when the workers have taken power in the land, for then it will not be an imperialist war we are waging but rather a revolutionary war against imperialist assailants.… Now he says something different, because the revolution did not come in time. Now the two tasks–the task of bringing about the socialist revolution and defending the fatherland–‘must be telescoped and carried out simultaneously.’"
-"Working Class Policy in War and Peace," The New International, January, 1941
In 1941 Shachtman had not yet been a year on his uneven eighteen-year-long centrist course from revolutionary Marxism to social democracy. In the first years Shachtman’s Workers Party claimed to be a section of the Fourth International and argued for the "conditional defense" of the Soviet Union whose "bureaucratic collectivism"–as he designated the degenerated workers state–was still progressive relative to capitalism. And as late as 1947 the issue of unification between the SWP and the Workers Party was sharply posed. His revisionist break with Marxism was nonetheless profound from the outset: a complete repudiation of its philosophic methodology coupled with the concrete betrayal of the Soviet Union in the real wars that took place, first with Finland in 1939 and then the German invasion in 1941. Thus the SWP’s departure from the clear principled thrust of Leninism in advancing the ambiguous PMP was for the early revisionist Shachtman a gift which he was able to exploit because it did not center on his own areas of decisive departure from Marxism.
Ten years later, however, under the pressures of the Korean War, Shachtman’s revisionism had become all-encompassing and he advanced a grotesquely reactionary version of the PMP of his own. Writing of the anticipated Third World War he asserted that "the only greater disaster than the war itself… would be the victory of Stalinism as the outcome of the war." From this he concluded that "socialist policy must be based upon the idea of transforming the imperialist war into a democratic war [against Stalinism]." And to achieve this transformation he looked to "a workers’ government, no matter how modest its aims would be at the beginning, no matter how far removed from a consistently socialist objective" ("Socialist Policy in the War," New International, 1951). Shachtman’s "workers’ government" is clearly no dictatorship of the proletariat–without socialist aims!–but rather the blood relative of Major Atlee’s British Labour government, fantasized into an American labor government headed by Walter Reuther. Here the class character of the state has been disappeared with a vengeance. (Shachtman’s group, by 1949 the Independent Socialist League, entered the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation in 1958. In the early 1960’s nostalgic ISL types, most notably Hal Draper, gradually separated from the SP–especially after Shachtman himself defended the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion. Draper et al. went on to found what has now become the present-day International Socialists.)
Trotsky on the PMP
The fragmentary material that Trotsky wrote on the subject in his last few months makes it clear that he bears responsibility for initiating the PMP; however, he was murdered prior to its full-blown public inauguration and development by the SWP. Trotsky’s prediction that the bourgeoisie would not give the workers time to overthrow the bourgeois state before they had to fight against fascism feeds directly into Cannon’s ambiguity over revolutionary defeatism and the "telescoping" process of combining national defense with the workers’ fight against fascism.
Trotsky writes in Some Questions on American Problems, "The American workers do not want to be conquered by Hitler and to those who say, ‘Let us have a peace program,’ we say, ‘We will defend the United States with a workers’ army, with workers’ officers, with a workers’ government, etc.’ If we are not pacifists, who wait for a better future, and if we are active revolutionists, our job is to penetrate into the whole military machine." What is left out of this agitational approach is significant. Marxists do not defend the U.S.! At least not until the U.S. is a socialist U. S., only after the bourgeoisie and all its institutions, including the army, have been crushed. Marxists must oppose imperialist war; World War II was being fought not for "democracy" against "fascism" but purely for redivision of the world for imperialist ends. The workers’ army Trotsky writes of cannot develop organically out of the bourgeois army, but must be built up under conditions of class tension and revolutionary crisis through independent workers militias and by polarization of the bourgeois armed forces–that is, as the counterposed military arm of the working class organizing itself as the state power dual to the capitalists’ government.
The PMP’s thrust was that of supporting a war against fascism without making clear whose class state was waging the war. Because of the popularity of a "democratic war against fascism," the actual effect of the PMP would have been merely to make the bourgeois state’s war more efficient and more democratically conducted.
Workers Control of the Army?
The logic of the PMP impelled the SWP to see the bourgeois army as only one more arena of working-class struggle, like a factory, rather than as the main coercive force of the bourgeois state. If Marxists can favor trade union control of industry, why not trade union control of military training? We agree that Marxists seek to fight oppression wherever it arises, including fighting for soldiers’ rights–but from this it does not follow that we should call for "workers’ control of the army" as a parallel slogan to "workers' control of the factories." There will always be a need for development of the forces of production; the proletarian revolution does not need to smash them for its own purposes. The army’s sole function is to maintain the dominant class in power through coercion and repression; during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the revolutionary state will have its own army, organized to serve its own class purposes; a developed socialist society will have no need for this special repressive apparatus, which will gradually dissolve into the whole self-armed population, and then, like the state, it too will wither away. The army is not a class-neutral institution. As part of the "special bodies of armed men" which constitute the basis of the state, it cannot be a workers’ army unless it is the army of a workers’ state.
Similarly we do not delude the workers with slogans of "workers’ control" of the police or of the prisons either, since both are at the essence of the bourgeois state. If we called for "workers’ control of the prisons," the blood of Attica would be on our hands as well as Rockefeller’s. The storming of the Bastille represents the only possible form of "workers’ control" of the repressive apparatus of the state–i.e., smashing it utterly.
The PMP was a proposal for the unions to make the bourgeois army more democratic and efficient to prosecute the war "against fascism." But the bourgeoisie cannot fight fascism! The U.S. bourgeoisie wanted to fight the Germans and Japanese to further its own imperialist goals, not to "fight fascism."
The PMP error can be most clearly seen in the case of an unpopular war: should we demand trade union control of military training in order to better fight in Vietnam? Obviously not. But the point is the same. Only those social chauvinists who support "their" government’s war aims can reasonably raise the PMP.
As an SWP programmatic demand, the PMP never took life and shortly was shelved, because the SWP did oppose the second imperialist war and therefore the autonomous social-patriotic implications of the PMP did not take hold. But neither was the error corrected in those years, and it has been a source of disorientation ever since for those young militants who seek to counterpose en bloc the revolutionary SWP of the 1940’s to the wretched reformist vehicle which today still bears the initials SWP.
The whole authority of the state is based ultimately on its ability to successfully employ its coercive power, which rests on its standing army, police and prisons; the coercive power of the state is the very essence of its structure. This development of state power is linked directly to the development of class antagonisms, so that while the state appears to stand above and outside of class conflict, as a "neutral" third force, in reality it is nothing more than an agent of the dominant, more powerful class in society. These considerations give rise to two major premises of revolutionary strategy: (1) that the existing bourgeois state machinery, including its army, must be crushed, and (2) in order to successfully accomplish this, the bourgeois state must be unable to rely upon its own coercive power; it must be unable to use it successfully against the revolutionary forces who seek to fundamentally change the class structure upon which the state rests. It is impossible to use the bourgeois army for proletarian ends; it must be smashed. The destabilizing of the bourgeois army, turning a section of it to the side of the proletariat, is inseparably linked with, but not the same as, the process of arming the proletariat.
For the Independent Arming of the Working Class!
The SWP was trying to use the bourgeoisie’s militarism for its own ends, and so it dropped entirely any fight against bourgeois militarism and patriotism as the main danger to the working class, and instead of exposing the nature of the imperialist armies, concentrated on attacking pacifism. Had the working class had such pacifist illusions of peaceful resistance to war, one could find more justification for this emphasis–however, as Trotsky recognized, the workers were "95 to 98 percent patriotic" in 1940, and thus accepted conscription into the army, because they were willing to fight fascism. Since the workers were for conscription, the pressure on the SWP to blunt a defeatist policy was strong. The SWP should have counterposed at every step the independent arming of the proletariat; but instead it undercut opposition to bourgeois conscription. Cannon attacks the fight of the social-pacifists against conscription because it "overlooked realities and sowed illusions. The workers were for conscription…a certain amount of compulsion has always been invoked by the labor movement against the backward, the slackers…. Compulsion in the class war is a class necessity" (Cannon’s speech at 1940 SWP Conference). Yes, of course compulsion is a class necessity–but conscription into the bourgeois army is a class necessity for the bourgeois class. The fact that the workers may have supported it does not alter the class nature of the coercion being applied. It is not the job of the proletarian vanguard to help the bourgeoisie wage its imperialist wars, to provide it with cannon fodder. Communists must call for revolutionary defeatism and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in wars between imperialist powers–not for the working class in each country to "control" the fighting arm of its "own" bourgeoisie. The call must be to "turn the guns the other way," not to control the military apparatus.
As Trotsky wrote in 1934 in his comprehensive systematization of the revolutionary Marxist experience in World War I in application to the approaching second World War, "War and the Fourth International":
"If the proletariat should find it beyond its power to prevent war by means of revolution–and this is the only means of preventing war–the workers, together with the whole people, will be forced to participate in the army and in war. Individualistic and anarchistic slogans of refusal to undergo military service, passive resistance, desertion, sabotage are in basic contradiction to the methods of the proletarian revolution. But just as in the factory the advanced worker feels himself a slave of capital, preparing for his liberation, so in the capitalist army too he feels himself a slave of imperialism. Compelled today to give his muscles and even his life, he does not surrender his revolutionary consciousness. He remains a fighter, learns how to use arms, explains even in the trenches the class meaning of war, groups around himself the discontented, connects them into cells, transmits the ideas and slogans of the party, watches closely the changes in the mood of the masses, the subsiding of the patriotic wave, the growth of indignation, and summons the soldiers to the aid of the workers at the critical moment."
-Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1933-34, Trotsky's emphasis
The bourgeois state will only arm the workers for its own purposes–while this contradiction can and must be exploited by Marxists, it is utopian to expect that the trade unions could be able to use the bourgeois army for their own purposes. The modern imperialist armies created by the state have a largely working-class composition, but their function is directly counterposed to the interests of the world proletariat. The crucial task of Marxists is to always and everywhere smash bourgeois ideology in the ranks of the working class, to call for the independent arming and struggle of the organizations of the working class.
FOR WORKERS’ SELF-DEFENSE GROUPS BASED ON THE TRADE UNIONS!
FOR UNITED CLASS DEFENSE OF MINORITIES AND THE UNEMPLOYED! FIGHT FOR SOLDIERS’ RIGHTS THROUGH SOLDIERS’ COUNCILS!
TOWARDS THE INDEPENDENT ORGANIZATION OF WORKERS’ MILITIAS!
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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The Fourth International during the Second World War
The following article first appeared in French in the form of prefaces to
the different sections of the second volume of Les congrès de la IVe
Internationale entitled L’Internationale dans la guerre
1940-1946 published by Editions La Brêche in 1981. It was translated by
John Archer and appears here in English with the author’s permission for
diffusion to a wider readership.
Rodolphe Prager was born in 1918, and joined the French Socialist Youth
in 1932 and the Gauche Bolshevik-Leniniste (Bolshevik-Leninist Left) in 1935.
When the Trotskyist Youth, the Jeunesses socialistes révolutionaires, was set up
in 1936 he was a member of its Central Committee. From 1937 he joined the Parti
Communiste Internationaliste (International Communist Party) of Pierre Frank and
Raymond Molinier, was elected onto its Central Committee, and was a founder and
leader of the Jeunesses Communistes Internationalistes. When the Molinier
tendency sent its delegation abroad at the outbreak of war, when it was made
illegal, Comrade Prager represented the youth on this committee, and along with
Georges Vereeken and Molinier and Frank edited its Correspondance
lnternationaliste. From December 1939 to May 1940 Comrade Prager was
imprisoned but in July 1940 he returned to Paris illegally and helped to
reconstruct the Trotskyist organisation that later assumed the name of the
Comité Communiste Internationaliste (International Communist Committee). As one
of its leaders, he conducted the negotiations that led to the unification of his
group with the POI of Marcel Hic and the European Secretariat of Michel Pablo,
on which he sat as a representative from September 1943 onwards. On the
Political Bureau of the PCI he had special responsibility for its anti-colonial
work, and had charge of the same aspect of the work of the International
Secretariat from 1946 onwards. During the fifties and sixties he was elected
onto the Political Bureau of the PCI and served on the Control Commission of the
United Secretariat of the Fourth International from 1964 to 1969. The third and
fourth volumes of his documentary survey of the International Secretariat of the
Fourth International covering the period up to 1952 are shortly to
appear.
Material on the history of the French Trotskyists during the Second World
War is sadly lacking in English, a situation that Revolutionary
History hopes to help overcome. French readers can consult J. Rousset,
Les Enfants du Prophète, Paris 1970, pp.25-33, J.J. Marie,
Le Trotskyisme, Paris 1970, pp.73-77, Quelques
Enseignements de notre Historie, La Verité, May 1970, and
two major studies on which Revolutionary History intends to
comment at greater length in its next issue, Y. Craipeau, Contre vents
et marées: les révolutionaires pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale
1938-1945, Paris 1977, and J. Pluet-Despatin, Les trotskystes
et la guerre: 1940-1944, Paris 1980. In 1945 the French Trotskyists
published a pamphlet, La lutte des trotskystes sous la terreur
nazie, and another major treatment, J.P. Cassanol, Les
trotskyistes en France pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (1939-1944),
has also recently appeared, adding to a rich body of literature not even hinted
at in English.
Part 1: The International Executive Committee
The new leadership, which was installed in May 1940 by the emergency
International Conference of the Fourth International, which met in New York,
began its work in very special conditions, as may be imagined. The war made
relations between different countries very chancy. But, especially, the movement
found itself divided and produced by the profound crisis which in 1939-40 had
affected the two most important sections of the International, the French and
then the American. The Workers Party of the USA, which arose from the split in
April 1940, did its best to extend the separation internationally, and set up
for that purpose a ‘Committee for the Fourth International’, which enjoyed the
support of four former members of the International Executive Committee, Max
Shachtman; Nathan Anton (Gould); Mario Pedrosa (Lebrun), Brazil; and C.L.R.
James (J.R. Johnson), Britain. To achieve its aims, this Committee made as many
international contacts as it could. The new International Secretariat had little
means by which to confront this situation. It was hardly appointed before it was
still further weakened by the loss of Leon Trotsky, who was murdered in August.
His support was decisive and this revealed more clearly that the IEC was not
fully representative. The International Secretariat was aware of this state of
things. It could claim support only from the American section, the Socialist
Workers Party, and it decided to use its mandate within consciously determined
limits. It was sparing of efforts to undertake a role of real leadership, and
devoted itself primarily to maintaining or restoring its links with as many
countries as possible, to getting information circulated and to publishing only
a few texts, in the form of manifestos, which made known the solutions which the
Fourth International advanced to the challenges of the great turns in the
war.
One of its principal concerns, naturally, was to overcome the divisions in
the Trotskyist forces in various countries and to help to unify them. This
mission was entrusted in particular to Sherry Mangan in Latin America. His job
as a journalist, a correspondent of Time,
Life, and Fortune, provided this member of the
SWP with the possibility to travel in various Latin American countries and to
render valuable services. He arrived in Argentina early in 1941 and worked to
bring together more closely some five groups which claimed to be Trotskyist. The
divergences which separated these groups did not seem to him to be such as could
not be debated inside the same organisation. A unification committee was formed
and bore fruit in the founding conference of the Workers Party of the Socialist
Revolution, which brought four of these organisations together. Unhappily the
new organisation did not hold together for long, perhaps for lack of political
preparation of the fusion, because Mangan and the International Secretariat were
anxious to act as quickly as possible, in anticipation of coming events. The
unity which was achieved in Chile in June 1941 seemed to have a better chance of
survival. The Partido Obrero Revolutionario came into existence as one
(proportionately) of the larger sections and was well implanted in the working
class in mining and transport. In Cuba, the section which received the support
of a number of leaders who had emigrated from Europe, such as Louis Rigaudias
(Rigal), a pre-war leader in France of the POI, came out of isolation and took
part in important strikes, in particular among railwaymen.
In India, the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Burma and Ceylon was founded
in May 1942. It brought together the original groups in Ceylon, Bengal, the
United Provinces and Madras. This implantation owed much to the activity of the
Ceylonese Trotskyists of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, who in 1939 had sent
militants to India to found groups in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and other cities.
Four Ceylonese leaders, Colvin de Silva, D.P.R. Gunawardena, N.M. Perera and E.
Samarakkody, who had been jailed in 1940, escaped in April 1942, with the guards
among whom they had formed a Trotskyist cell. They took an active part in India
in the struggles of the newly-formed party, which suffered severely from
repression, with many Trotskyists arrested in Bombay and Madras in July 1943.
Perera and Gunawardena were re-captured in Bombay and brought to trial in Kandy
on 8 February 1944, when they distinguished themselves by their brilliant
revolutionary defence. A second conference of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of
India was held on 20-25 September 1944, and produced the thesis: The
Political Situation in India Today.
The International Executive Committee then again despatched Sherry Mangan to
busy himself with correcting the situation in Britain. The activity of the
official British section, the Revolutionary Socialist League, was weak and the
organisation declined. Mangan had to put fresh life into it, and succeeded in
getting a national conference held, to put it back on the rails. The aim in view
would be a unification with the Workers’ International League, which had
experienced a certain development and improved its implantation in the trade
unions. The fusion of the two groups at a congress on 12-13 March 1944, produced
the Revolutionary Communist Party, in which the former members of the WIL had a
substantial majority.
Some good news reached the USA in 1944: British and American Trotskyists in
uniform were able to make contact with a group in Italy formed by Nicola Di
Bartolemeo (Fosco). He was an experienced Trotskyist militant, back from
deportation to the island of Tremiti. When this group first applied to join the
Fourth International, the International Secretariat was slow to reply in the
absence of Jean Van Heijenoort. He strongly opposed delay and prevailed upon the
IEC to send a positive reply. Fosco was a former member of the PCI (Pierre
Frank-Raymond Molinier); during a period in Spain in 1936, he had come into
conflict with the representatives of the International Secretariat. Fosco had
been completely isolated. He had had no information about the Fourth
International, having since 1939 been pushed about between prison, internment
and deportation in France and Italy. He voiced doubt about the legitimacy of
leading bodies of the International and his positions on the USSR seemed to be
suspect; he had, also, been in correspondence with Shachtman. All this explains
why the American representative on the IEC, Bert Cochran (E.R. Frank), was
reluctant to admit this newly-formed Italian group fully into the International
without more complete information and political clarification on the points at
issue.
Relations with France had been kept open more or less through Marseilles
until the Trotskyist leadership in the South was arrested on 2 June 1942; they
were not restored until September 1944. In the early days of the war they had
been maintained by Sherry Mangan, who had lived in France since 1938, and who,
as a journalist, could carry out very useful tasks when the French organisation
had to go underground. His dispatches about the deserted state of Paris, from
which he was one of the few who did not run away on the eve of the entry of the
German forces, were a great success. He also helped to reconstruct the
Trotskyist organisation during the first weeks of the Nazi occupation., until
the Nazis expelled him on 17 August 1940. There were some shadows over the
political relations between the International Secretariat and the French
section, or its various components, as a result of the dissolution of the
International Executive Committee in June 1939, which affected it adversely. The
regroupment of its forces in July 1940 did not entirely satisfy the
International Secretariat, which was disagreeably surprised by the new name
which they adopted - Committee for the Fourth International. The report from
Marcel Hic and Yvan Craipeau, dated 7 August 1940, which reached New York during
October 1940, explained clearly the two orders of consideration on which this
decision was based. First, on the observation that “recent events have in fact
reduced the organisational and political cohesion of the world party of
socialist revolution, the Fourth International”, and secondly, that “the period
of the war has been marked by an indubitable organisational retreat”, after the
splits which had occurred in the two ‘key’ sections, the French and American.
Today it seems doubtful that in these conditions the International Executive
Committee could assume the role of a real leadership, when one takes into
account that for a long time it had had no documents whatever analysing the
situation in Europe, and that it refused to set up a sub-secretariat in Europe.
The report also defended the choice of title on a deeper level: “the existence
of the principles of the Fourth International is not in itself sufficient to
create an International … we cannot really speak about an International, except
to the extent that it rests on parties which are well-rooted in the working
class”.
Centrism
Hic and Craipeau concluded their letter by pleading with the American
Trotskyists to re-unite in the SWP. They called for an early international
conference to be held and announced their intention of working on their own
initiative to create a European Secretariat. The International Executive
Committee replied somewhat sharply to this document in November 1940. Their
reply expresses the opinion that this “alarming” document expressed nothing but
“capitulation to centrism”. For, was it not repeating the arguments which the
German SAP, the Brandlerites and the POUM in Spain had used against the Fourth
International? The International Executive Committee rejected the idea that the
International had declined; it considered that the victorious resistance to the
revisionism of James Burnham and Max Shachtman was, on the contrary, a gain for
the movement which was being tested in the fires of war. It expressed concern
also about the view of the French organisation on the subject of the USSR (which
the Hic-Craipeau document did not mention), because they knew that Craipeau was
fundamentally in agreement with the line of Burnham and Shachtman, and had
defended them in their controversy with Trotsky. The International Executive
Committee declared without hesitation that “a correct approach to the burning
tasks of the French section at the present time calls for the organisation to be
politically rearmed, and the entire orientation of H (Hic) and C (Craipeau) to
be rejected”. The International Executive Committee appealed, in a way, from
them to the membership, by laying down that “this must begin by immediate
rejection of the suggested capitulation to centrism. We are not an organisation
for the Fourth International, but the organisation of the Fourth
International”.
News from France continued to be incomplete and to arrive irregularly and be
subject to varying periods of delay. They wondered in the USA what would be the
future of the French section, which had been destabilised when it broke up in
1939 when it lost its principal ‘historic’ leaders, Pierre Naville, Gerard
Rosenthal, Alexis Bardin, Joannès Bardin (Boitel) and finally Jean Rous, on whom
Trotsky and the American leaders rested their last hopes. These were the
uncertainties which explain why the International Secretariat did not follow up,
after September 1939, the proposal to set up a European sub-secretariat.
Moreover, they placed no great reliance on Craipeau, who played a central ro1e
up to June 1940. The International Conference in May 1940 once more gave
evidence of prudence and caution in this connection. It agreed that a European
Secretariat might be set up – when the conditions for it arose. The document of
the International Executive Committee does not seem to have been known in
France. None of the militants who have been questioned remembers it. In any
case, there is no sign of any political ‘turn’ resulting possibly from it. For
this reason, it happened that the organisation met the wishes of the
International Executive Committee, consciously or otherwise, only in April 1942,
when it resumed the name, Committee of the Fourth International, before it
returned from that to its pre-war title, Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste, at the
meeting of its National Council on 26-27 December 1942. These formal changes
went in step with changes of perspective and orientation, such as the policy of
the ‘Workers’ Front’.
We should note that the Trotskyists in the Southern (unoccupied) zone of
France, who enjoyed a certain independence, never did accept the formulation
“for the Fourth International”. They opposed the political line of the
‘Parisians’, not without passion, especially on the national question. The
International Executive Committee could derive some satisfaction particularly
from the Monthly Bulletin of the Fourth International, which
was produced in Marseilles, and which developed its own line and did not spare
its criticism of the theses of the national leadership. It was their texts
especially which were reproduced in the bulletins published in the USA and in
particular the resolutions of the second and third regional conferences of June
and December 1941. The international leadership took care to observe that these
documents agreed with the analyses of the International Executive Committee as
far as concerned both the situation in France and the defence of the USSR, a
point on which – we must stress – the whole of the French organisation stood
firm on the traditional Trotskyist positions.
The International Secretariat published eleven issues of the
International Bulletin between 1940 and 1945: three in 1940,
four in 1941, two in 1942, but none in 1943 and only one in 1944 and
1945.
Voorhis Act
The composition of the International Secretarial: was subject to many
hazards. After Trotsky, another member of the International Executive Committee,
Waiter Held, fell victim to Stalin’s killers, when he was trying to reach the
USA from Sweden by crossing the USSR. At the beginning, the International
Secretariat consisted of Sam Gordon (J.B. Stuart), USA, who acted as its
administrative secretary, Van Heijenoort, France; Ludwig-Suhl, Germany and A.
Gonzales, USA/Mexico. Sam Gordon departed at the end of 1941 to join the US
merchant navy. At first his place was taken by E.R. Frank (Cochran), while Van
Heijenoort took over the functions of secretary. As years passed this team was
reduced. The delegate of the German section ended up withdrawing from the
International Secretariat, as a result of tensions caused by the discussion of
the Three Theses, which the SWP vigorously opposed but which had
favourable reception from the Workers Party. Towards the end of the war, the
International Secretariat was reduced to two members, after Gonzales left the
USA. Its situation became all the more delicate in that the SWP itself was
deprived of the most eminent members of its leadership, who were in jail
throughout 1944 following the verdict of the Minneapolis trial. We should
remember also that the American section found itself compelled, under the
Voorhis Act, to decide at its special convention on 21 December 1940, to
disaffiliate from the Fourth International in order to avoid being forced into
illegality. The SWP declared loosely that its convictions remained unchanged and
that it remained in complete solidarity with the Fourth International. Its
relations and the collaboration of its members with the International at all
levels continued in other forms, such as fraternal delegations or the presence
of its members as observers.
The presence of Jean Van Heijenoort contributed to ensuring that the
International Secretariat had a certain continuity and legitimacy. He was better
informed than anyone else about the experience of the international Trotskyist
movement and its sections, thanks to his long collaboration with Trotsky, which
gave him the benefit of a certain notoriety. His political contributions and
studies of the development of the war and of European problems, reproduced in
the international Trotskyist press, and even in the underground La
Verité in France, indicate his authority and his work during these
years. However, what he wrote did not always meet with the agreement of the SWP
leaders, especially in 1943-44, on the national question, democratic demands and
revolutionary perspectives in Europe. He shared the criticisms of the Albert
Goldman-Felix Morrow minority, and opposed the theses of the SWP majority on the
ground that they expressed over-simplified opinions, neglected nuances and
failed to take into account any alternatives but those of socialist revolution
or military dictatorship, to the exclusion of the hypothesis that bourgeois
democracy could be restored. We may think that it was these political
differences, as they deepened, which explain the absence of any documents from
the International Executive Committee in the final, decisive phase of the war,
from the fall of Mussolini in 1943 onwards.
The five declarations by the International Executive Committee drew their
inspiration from the theoretical legacy of Trotsky and principally from his last
programmatic document, Imperialist War and the World Proletarian
Revolution. The manifesto, France under Hitler and Petain,
is generally based upon that document and extends its analysis. It was written
by Jean Van Heijenoort, and brings the situation created by the Nazi occupation
together with the experience of class struggle in the 1930s. He made clear how
the set-back of the great revolutionary wave of 1936, which was consciously
obstructed by the traditional organisations of the workers’ movement,
consolidated the power of Hitler, encouraged him to be audacious and thus made
the war inevitable. The humiliating military defeat of May and June 1940
expressed the decline of French imperialism, which dated back to before World
War One. Its military General Staff was paralysed with fear and hated nothing so
much as having to fight battles and deal with the disturbances which could
result from them. So they doomed themselves to that period of passive waiting
which public opinion had labelled ‘the phoney war’. They decided not to make war
– after they had declared it.
The military disaster in the spring and summer of 1940 led to indescribable
chaos in France. The government no longer had control of anything whatsoever.
The concern of the generals to forestall any uncontrolled intervention by the
masses into the conflict inclined them to think immediately about an armistice
with Hitler. The more comforting choice of surrendering to Hitler was made – in
preference to withdrawing to North Africa and continuing; the war. It was not a
long way from patriotism to defeatism for these ‘brass hats’ when their class
interests guided them. The Chamber of Deputies, on which the Popular Front
governments had been based since 1936, was shorn of its Communist Party members,
who were jailed. It voted, without a struggle, for its own dissolution, and
handed absolute powers over to Petain. The Bonapartist regime of Petain lacked a
mass base and did not have the characteristics of fascism. De Gaulle and his
following of ex-colonial governors and slave-owners, could not establish any
regime in France different from that of Petain.
Jean Van Heijenoort’s judgement has to be read in the light of the state of
affairs towards the end of 1940. It expresses a legitimate suspicion of the
design to “restore” the greatness of France “by way of an Allied victory” and
resisted Gaullist illusions about a “sacred union”.
Decadence
The supremacy of the Nazis was not to last long. The test of strength on the
world scale had only just begun. The document of the International Executive
Committee came down against impressionistic or even fatalistic tendencies to
regard Nazi rule as likely to endure. It placed the ‘blitzkrieg’ and Hitler’s
overwhelming supremacy in their world setting. The spiral of war was to extend
from continent to continent. Hitler had for the moment reduced Europe to one
vast concentration camp, but national oppression was to bring a powerful
national movement against this oppression into existence. The epoch of bourgeois
democracy in decadence, which had led to this incredible collapse, seemed to
have passed away for ever, in the light of the colossal revolutionary crises to
come. Both the reformists who had basely gone on their knees to Petain, and the
Stalinists, the former apostles of ‘anti-fascism’, who were now negotiating with
the Nazi occupiers to be made legal, had disqualified themselves. The influence
of Stalinism remained the principal threat to the workers' movement: “One of the
essential tasks of the French comrades is to turn towards the Communist
workers”. The key to the future situation was the construction of the
revolutionary party. The new epoch was that of the Fourth International.
Trotsky’s prognostication was to be repeated constantly in documents published
on both sides of the Atlantic, taking its place in the perspective of the
revolutionary crisis embracing every continent and reaching unprecedented
dimensions.
The resolution on US intervention in China, the authors of which had the
benefit of the co-operation of Harold Isaacs, who initiated the original
proposal, as well, probably, as that of Frank Glass, bears witness to the
exceptional complexity of the problems which arose during World War Two. China,
stated the resolution, was waging a war for national liberation against Japanese
imperialism. It should, of course, accept material aid from USA, without, at the
same time, agreeing in return to economic, military or political concessions,
which would open up a new imperialist penetration. They had, therefore, to be
careful not to idealise US aid by concealing the real motives for which it was
provided. The resolution, however, opposed those who, like Shachtman and certain
Chinese Trotskyists, held the opinion that the struggle of China against Japan
was ceasing to be progressive because it was becoming entirely subordinated to
the inter-imperialist war; despite the reactionary policy of Chiang Kai-shek,
the resolution continued, as in the past, to support the cause of China. It
advocated a revolutionary war to coincide with the emancipation of the peasant
masses, which alone could mobilise the population, could break up the Japanese
army and lead to a real liberation of China by driving out Chiang Kai-shek. It
declared its solidarity with the peasant armies which the Chinese Communist
Party led, which under attack from the reactionary government and had to fight
both Japan and Chiang Kai-shek at once. Nonetheless, they subjected the
Stalinist policy of class collaboration to severe criticism.
One of the turning-points in the world conflict was the war which Hitler
unleashed against the Soviet Union in June 1941. The manifesto, For the
Defence of the USSR, was drafted by Van Heijenoort; it emphasised that
the mortal danger which threatened the Soviet Union was due to the policies of
Stalin. Those policies had made Hitler’s access to power easier. They had
strengthened his position by their sabotage of the revolutionary movements in
France and Spain. It had speeded up the approaching outbreak of war by
concluding the pact with Germany and had supported Hitler’s conquests. The task
of rooting out Stalinism fell to the working class; the overthrow of Stalin
could not be left to Hitler. The manifesto called on the Trotskyists to be the
best soldiers in the USSR. It repeated the forecast that the bureaucracy would
not survive the war, whether the USSR emerged victorious or defeated. In Germany
and in the occupied countries, the defence of the USSR implied sabotage of the
Nazi war machine. The unconditional defence of the USSR did not, in any case,
involve any concession or relaxation on the part of the Trotskyists of their
struggle against the ruling bureaucracy. The task of organising the Soviet
section of the Fourth International had become more urgent than ever. We still
can find the phrase: “The imperialist allies of the Kremlin are not our allies”.
Our revolutionary struggle in the ‘democratic’ countries continued and should be
intensified. The war was spreading and becoming still more serious on the world
scene with the upheavals which followed in its train.
In India the national movement had experienced a fresh revival when the war
began. The nationalist leaders demanded the independence of their country in
exchange for their participation in the war on the side of the ‘democracies’.
British colonialism was not disposed to make concessions; it decided to use the
strong hand. There were widespread arrests; demonstrations were violently broken
up. In response, a vast strike movement spread in 1942 from city to city; these
were strikes of workers, students and traders, usually without any real
leadership. The ‘democratic’ aeroplanes of Britain machine gunned and then
bombed the crowds. The Indian Communist Party placed itself squarely across the
nationalist movement of the great masses and condemned the strikes in token
loyalty to the Anglo-American allies. The manifesto, To the Workers and
Peasants of India, probably written largely by Felix Morrow, appeared in
response to these events. The strategic position of India in the process of
dislocation of the great colonial empires was only too evident. The manifesto
saw India as the weakest link in the imperialist chain, as Tsarist Russia had
been in 1914. It saw in the uprisings of 1942 the sign that the coming
revolutionary wave would be on quite a different scale from that of World War
One.
The dissolution of the Communist International in May 1943 caused a
considerable sensation. Many people questioned its purpose and there were
Communist militants who criticised it. Nazi propaganda claimed that it was no
more than a manoeuvre of camouflage, and linked to this claim the fact that a
number of the Communist parties wanted to play down the importance of the event.
The explanations at the level of principle which Moscow provided, and which the
top leaders of the Comintern endorsed, were so mutually inconsistent that they
could not be taken seriously. In fact Stalin had taken a step which cost him
hardly anything. He had decided to liquidate the apparatus which had become an
embarrassment to him and which he despised. He chose a suitable moment to give a
guarantee to the Allies and raise his credit in the eyes of Roosevelt and
Churchill. He went further than they asked, because they in no way imposed the
decision on him. We have to note that, in its time the dissolution did cause a
certain amount of feeling in the ranks of the Communist parties. But today there
appears to be no one who regrets the disappearance of the Comintern, in these
circles, where they now tend to blame the Comintern for many of their sins and
to hold it responsible for all the false steps of the 1930s. That avoids the
need to call themselves directly into question, and makes Stalinism “an external
factor”.
Part 2: The French and German Sections at the beginning of the war
The overwhelming victory of Hitler’s armies and their disconcerting
effectiveness, together with their occupation of France and a large part of
Europe, created a new situation in the summer of 1940, one which overturned
everyone’s preconceived ideas. The collapse of the economic and administrative
apparatus in France produced a certain vacuum. The working class was engulfed in
the storm and, at the time, was almost driven from the scene of society. It was
deeply disoriented and dispersed; only a quarter of the workers were engaged in
production. They asked themselves what could have caused the disaster, and felt
extremely suspicious of all political formations. The reformist CGT took out of
its constitution every reference to the class struggle and put in a prohibition
of strikes. The movement of retreat went to the very bottom of the wave. It is
true that the clandestine Communist Party still existed, reduced to a few
thousand scattered militants, shaken by its successive ‘turns’ which ended with
the German-Soviet Pact, but its audience among the workers was noticeably
thinner. The military supremacy of Germany was such that no one questioned the
future of the Nazi reign in Europe. There were many uncertainties in the future,
which depended on the fortunes of war on the world scale. The immediate question
was that of the outcome of the Battle of Britain, which would have great weight
in the development of the balance of forces.
As, for the revolutionaries, they had important problems to rethink and
political and tactical readjustments to make. Everything had to be re-considered
in clandestine organisational forms in order to evade the much-feared Gestapo.
The Trotskyists were no better prepared than other currents for such events.
They had to. rebuild the organisation and to undertake its political rearmament
on delicate and unexpected questions. Their members were reduced by the
defection of their former leader’s and founders of the movement, as well as by a
split, which had lasted for a year and a half. A great majority of the young and
very young militants who had been recently recruited were to form the
organisation which brought together again the former ‘entrists’ and
‘non-entrists’ of Pivert’s PSOP, These young people displayed strong tendencies
to activism in the Youth Hostels movement, the CLAJ, which Trotskyists led in
the early months of the occupation. One would witness surprising scenes in the
hostels, with political discussions going on openly, punctuated by revolutionary
songs and by the emotional singing of the International when Trotsky’s
murder was announced – in Paris with the Wehrmacht patrolling everywhere!
Preoccupation with agitation and immediate mass intervention led to the
Report on the National Question, drafted by Marcel Hic in very
special circumstances. This bears the mark of June 1940 more than any other
written document. Its very emotional character does not represent the policies
which were being followed during this whole period. Its influence was to be
reflected in the early issues of La Verité, but one does not
find anywhere else in the texts to which we can refer the over-hasty, summary
judgements, nor in particular, the idea of a convergence with the bourgeoisie
“which wishes to be French” and the slogan of committees of national vigilance.
The more subtle analyses which are contained in the theses of the Conference of
August 1941, which saw “something fundamentally healthy” in the support of the
masses for De Gaulle, and which declared that Trotskyists were “ready to fight
shoulder to shoulder with this current”, were nonetheless appreciably more
moderate. If we wish to judge better the thinking of Marcel Hic on the national
question, we may go to the theses of the European Secretariat in July 1942, and
leave aside the report of 1940. His evolution took him a long way from his
original positions. It can be seen clearly in the documents and the manifesto
which emerged from the Congress of the POI in June 1943. Hic I emphasised in an
appreciation which he wrote of the work of that Congress:
The Congress marked a certain strengthening of the political line of the
organisation. A more thorough assessment has been made of the party's policy
over the last three years. The Central Committee has recognised clearly and
without equivocation that it has too often expressed our programme in an
incorrect or equivocal theoretical form, in its desire to make itself the echo
of the current concerns of the masses and to link itself to their immediate
struggles. It has recognised the correctness of a certain number of the
criticisms formulated by the minority.
This minority, called the Internationalist Opposition, was led by Gibelin and
Salle. It existed from 1940 onwards and reappeared in February 1943 with the
publication of an extremely critical document, Return to Lenin! The
Belgian section thought this useful enough to reproduce it in its own internal
bulletin.
But now let us turn to the Resolution on the Moral Report of the
1943 Congress, which devoted itself to the self-critical assessment. In that way
we can grasp its meaning:
The organisation found itself fully engaged in battle in July 1940, with its
doctrine still imprecise, its organisation very loose, its leadership lacking
cohesion and its cadres inexperienced and lacking political education.
Consequently in the first period its politics were often incoherent,
opportunistic and confused. Its press appeared practically outside the control
of the party. Even the Bulletin of the Fourth International
expressed no more than the opinions of its chief editor, including the
Letter to an English Worker, which evoked sharp protests because,
starting from current concerns, it ran the risk of concealing from the comrades,
behind tactical formulations, the defeatist content of our policy. As for
La Verité, its editors revealed the most regrettable
opportunist and nationalist illusions … These deviations expressed themselves in
a generally opportunist policy. The opportunism found a place for itself within
a perfectly praiseworthy concern (which is to be found particularly in the
Transitional Programme) for leading the patriotism of the
masses, which expresses healthy aspirations, into opposition to the nationalism
of the bourgeoisie … But the leadership, in applying this policy at the time,
committed grave mistakes, and today it will in no way intend to hide these
mistakes; we want to pin-point them, so that we can draw out the lessons of
experience.
But the document which was to carry the deeper self-criticism, which the
Central Committee was instructed to prepare, does not seem to have appeared –
perhaps because Marcel Hic and the principal members of the leadership were
arrested at the beginning of October 1943. However, a new political
readjustment, including a more radical, condemnation of the course taken in
1940-1942, came out of the preparatory discussion for the European Conference of
February 1944. The discussion on the national question, which had been going on
in nearly every country, reappeared slightly at the end of the war, but never
was really carried through to the end.
As for the Three Theses of the emigré German comrades of the IKD, we
are not dealing here with a sudden transitory act, but with the completion of
something which had been developing for several years. The supreme importance
which the Committee in Exile (AK) of the IKD attached in 1935 to the resistance
of the churches to being integrated into the Nazi system, to the point that the
IKD gave ‘unconditional support’ to the church in its operations in workplaces,
had already been an alarming sign, as Felix Morrow points out. The IKD came into
conflict on this question with Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, who collaborated
in the International Secretariat without belonging to the German section;
Trotsky finally came down on the side of the IKD, with circumspection, against
the sectarian position of the former leaders of the German Communist Party. But
he made no concessions, and emphasised the priority of work in the factories,
observing that “we have already had too much debate on this question”.
The prospect that society was developing backwards under the effects of
Fascism, and of having to pass through the phase of a popular democratic
movement, was gaining support during the years preceding the war. The theses of
Walter Held on the construction of the Fourth International, which the
Conference of the, IKD adopted in August 1937, and which, it was hoped, would be
considered by the Founding Conference of the Fourth International in September
1938, included certain ambiguities. A more systematic development of this
variation was to be advanced by Johre, the principal theoretician of the group,
in Unser Wort for October 1938. It drew the conclusion that a
historically retrogressive evolution of humanity, which culminated in the
victory of Nazism, placed at the head of the agenda the need to reconquer the
philosophical gains of the 19th century.
The victories of Hitler in the early part of the war could not fail to
encourage such tendencies further. Walter Held had clearly in his mind that
“Europe will be subjected to Fascism for the coming period of history”. The
epoch of national uprisings and wars of national liberation of past centuries
had returned to the order of the day, he continued in his article, one of his
last, which was sent from Stockholm, where he had taken refuge from the Nazi
invasion of Norway. In his opinion, the Fourth International should adapt itself
to these tasks, and should free itself from the narrow framework of workers’
demands about pay and conditions, directing its activities towards the needs of
the liberation movement which embraces every layer of the people.
Johre then took a decisive step after he arrived in New York in the autumn of
1943. He had personally experienced the horrors of the ‘Fall of France’ and the
agony of the destitute German exiles, whom the French Government interned in the
sinister camps in the South-West, and who were in danger of falling into the
clutches of the Gestapo.
Johre had made up his mind that the activity of the Fourth International was
thoroughly outdated, and that nothing but a radical reconversion could save it
from total bankruptcy. This transformation should take the form in particular of
an entirely new press and new publications, adapted to the milieux of the
radical-democratic petty bourgeoisie. He was already forming this opinion in
1938, but was unable to carry it into practical effect until June 1947, with the
appearance in the USA of Dinge der Zeit (Contemporary
Things)
The Three Theses were strongly ‘catastrophist’, and drew a sombre
picture, but they did not develop a real political analysis, and this deficiency
supports Morrow’s statement that they are vague and confused. They start from
the perspective of a long war, the outcome of which cannot be foreseen, which
would destroy civilisation from top to bottom, in the absence of a revolt of the
masses. They distinguished no way forward specifically identified with the
movement of the working class until after the national-democratic revolution had
been accomplished. This vision was developed in other documents, such as
Socialism and Barbarism, which Johre wrote in a literary-philosophical
style peculiar to him, which had already been met in Unser
Wort. The events at the end of the war did not change the views of the
few dozen German exiles in the USA and Britain, most of whom had anyway no
intention of going back to Germany. He forecast that the most developed nations,
former colonial powers, would be subjected to national oppression, which would
reduce them “to a level below that of India”. Pessimism raised to the level of
theory is a bad counsellor. Historic retrogression and the threat of barbarism
are realities, to be sure, and they are not to be underestimated. The Fourth
International never ceased to present the dilemma of socialism or barbarism. But
the one-sided, mechanical picture of an imminent return to the Middle Ages was a
mere caricature of an historical perspective, which failed to take revolutionary
possibilities into account. Raised like a scarecrow, it served to disguise an
abandonment of the Trotskyist programme of world revolution and a return to a
policy of ‘stages’, which is essentially a social-democratic one and is based on
illusions about regenerating bourgeois democracy. The symptoms of barbarism are
by no means confined to Fascist regimes alone, which are only one of its
manifestations. They are essential features of the survival of capitalism, and
make the direct struggle for socialism more immediately relevant and more
urgent.
Part 3: The European Secretariat (1942-43) and the Provisional European
Secretariat (1943)
The ‘underground’ Trotskyist groups, in their isolation and inspired as they
were with internationalist convictions, felt the need to group together within a
European framework when the links with the USA were broken. Communications
between France and Belgium were possible if secondary roads were used,
especially between Tourcoing in France and Mouscron in Belgium, where there was
a Trotskyist group sympathetic to Vereeken. The Belgian section had lost a good
part of its former cadres, and was reconstructed at the beginning of the
occupation around young militants such as Henry Opta, Abraham Leon (Wajnsztok),
Camille Loos and Ernest Mandel. There were exchanges between France and Belgium,
and in January 1942 a French delegation, which included Marcel Hic, Craipeau and
Swarm went to Brussels, The meeting to form the new European Secretariat finally
took place in the Belgian Ardennes, at St Hubert, in the family property of
Henry Opta, who represented the Belgian section with Leon-Wajnsztok and possibly
Widelin-Monat. We know little about this meeting. What Craipeau says about it
has unfortunately to be taken with caution. We may guess that the debate on the
political situation dealt partly with the national question, and that this could
have led Hic to write his theses on that question. An important contribution by
Leon, on 7 February 1942, was The Tasks of the Fourth International in
Europe, which presents a very complete platform, and enables an idea of the
positions of the Belgian section to be obtained.
The tasks of the European Secretariat were defined as follows:
- To reorganise a German section as quickly as possible;
- To get in touch with the sections in Switzerland, Holland, Poland and
Greece;
- To renew publication of the journal, Quatrième
Internationale;
- To renew regular contact with the International Secretariat.
These proposals are evidence of ambitious projects when their forces and
their resources were so few. Moreover, the document revealed that the profound
changes in the situation as well as the new tasks should offer a favourable
setting for approaches to various currents which claimed to he attached in
principle to the Fourth International. Hence the proposal to hold an enlarged
conference “of official sections of the Fourth International with dissident
groups”, such as the PCI of France (Frank-Molinier), Henk Sneevliet’s RSAP in
the Netherlands, Contre le Courant (Vereeken) in Belgium and the Spanish POUM,
to explore the possibility of a closer relationship and of studying the tasks
and tactics of the vanguard in the existing situation. We do not know whether
this scheme received the assent of the French section, because it seems to have
made no moves in that direction. Leon’s work remained at the level of a plan,
for reasons which we do not know.
The European Secretariat which resulted from this meeting was centred in
Paris, but in the absence of collective work the entire responsibility was
carried by Marcel Hic, who wrote and acted in its name. Criticisms were levelled
at the “ultra-bureaucratic methods” of the European Secretariat by the minority
of the POI. The European theses of 1944 allude to the European Secretariat as
being “controlled at this period exclusively by the French comrades”. We can see
here nothing more than Hic’s concern to build and at all costs to give life to
the movement in very adverse conditions. In order to emerge from this state of
isolation and to seek a broader basis, he urged Daniel Guerin and Paul Thalmann
to collaborate more closely with the European Secretariat by submitting to them
the draft theses on the national question.
Both of them refused his invitation. Guerin was former leader of the
Pivertist Left who had moved nearer to the Trotskyists during the war and
co-operated with the organisation without joining it. The cooperation of Paul
Thalmann, a German-speaking political militant, was of obvious interest. He was
a former leader of the Swiss Communist Party and an early Oppositionist, but he
had moved away from Trotskyism particularly on the Russian question. Hic
addressed himself to Thalmann knowing this full well, in the hope that he would
nonetheless contribute to rebuilding the German section. Proposals for
collaboration the Belgian section in July 1942, and were ratified by the
national council of the POI at the end of December by nine votes to one. They
are the most developed study of the problem to be produced in occupied Europe,
and deserve to receive attention, whatever criticisms may be made of them. The
importance which they gave to the national movement and to its ‘progressive
character’, as the road along which proletarian struggles would go as they
developed, still strongly recalls the period. In the following year this
emphasis decreased, giving way to the new, upward movement of the working class
which revealed that the revolution was approaching. In 1943 the POI leaders were
to admit that the theses “included certain equivocal formulations”, before the
Paris Regional Congress of the POI in 1944 once more confirmed its abandonment
of the nationalist deviations, the text-book of which was the theses on the
national question of 1941. The European Conference was to go so far as to
condemn the theses as “a social-patriotic deviation … incompatible with the
programme of the Fourth International”. These criticisms of the theses may seem
severe, but in reality they included in the same condemnation the more serious
errors of 1940, and sought to break completely from a certain past.
Proposals for collaboration from the CCI, on the other hand, received a
negative reply. The group was invited simply to join the official section and to
fight for its position within it. Relations between the two organisations were
to take a different turn in 1943.
Marcel Hic’s theses on the national question received the support of the
Belgian section in July 1942, and were ratified by the national council of the
POI at the end of December by nine votes to one.
The Manifesto on the Dissolution of the Comintern is a
vigorous and clearly written pamphlet which no doubt appeared on Hic’s sole
responsibility. Naturally its main purpose was to encourage a dialogue with
Communist militants, shaken by this unexpected decision and its great symbolic
value. The cover of the mimeographed brochure reads: “Long Live the Fourth
International”.
The re-formation of the international organisation really began only with the
establishment of the Provisional European Secretariat in the summer of 1943. The
resolution, The Reconstruction and Reinforcement of the Fourth
International of July 1943 in a way marks its birth. Its new name implies
that it was distancing itself from what had been done before, that it desired
renewal and deeper political analysis, accompanied by firmer and more collective
methods of work. There was also a concern to avoid imposing a self-appointed
organism. The first aim of the Provisional European Secretariat was to prepare,
over a period of a few months, an extended European Conference, not reserved
exclusively for groups affiliated to the International, but open to all the
organisations which favoured its essential principles and the Transitional
Programme. The Conference would decide on a common policy and common lines of
activity. It also would select democratically the leading bodies. The will to
grow and to leave outdated feuds and divisions behind emerges clearly from this
new course. It included a re-examination, in which none of the political
questions posed by current events “would be regarded as finally settled in
advance, and not subject to criticism or revision”. The spirit of self-criticism
is underlined also – with resort to a quotation from Rosa Luxemburg – in the
introduction to the first issue of the journal, Quatrième
Internationale in August 1943, which was to appear regularly
thereafter.
Reunification
The orientation and activity of the Provisional European Secretariat, which
existed in its own right, owes an enormous amount to the contribution of Michel
Raptis, who beyond doubt was the author of the resolution and of the
Introduction in Quatrième Internationale, which
perfectly express his thinking. Raptis had been cut off from activity by his
stay in a sanatorium at St Hilaire du Touvet (Isère) in 1940-42, during which he
remained in contact with the movement. He believed that there had to be an
improvement at the political level as well as at that of clandestine
organisation, which left much to be desired. He had been living in France since
1938 and had been disagreeably impressed by the very slack organisation of the
POI, and then by its crisis and collapse in 1939. Nor did the policy which it
had followed since 1940 satisfy him. He laid great importance on reunifying the
Trotskyist forces, which the coming revolutionary events were making a matter of
great urgency, and he combined this with his plan to centralise the movement
politically and to organise its underground work more tightly. His concern with
unification was all the dearer to him, because he had belonged himself to the
‘unofficial’ Greek organisation of Pouliopoulos. The members of the Provisional
European Secretariat were Hic (whose place was taken when he was arrested by
Craipeau) and Marcoux-Spoulber for the POI, Leon (Wajnsztok) for the Belgian
section and Monat-Widelin for the ‘German work’. The Secretariat was then
enlarged, at Font-Farran, to take in the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninist Group (in
which the CCI had a majority), and Prager, a delegate of the CCI, in September
1943.
Attempts were made to get the Belgian group, Contre le Courant, led by
Vereeken, to participate in the Conference. However, they failed in the face of
the refusal of the latter. He continued to believe that the foundation of the
Fourth International had been a mistake and that the organisations which claimed
to stand for it were failures. He attacked the CCI for joining in the
Provisional European Secretariat instead of working with his group for a new,
authentically revolutionary, international grouping. Long discussions between
Prager and Vereeken at Mouscon, at which Marguerite Bonnet also was present, did
not succeed in smoothing out the differences, which were not exclusively about
unification within the Fourth International. The CCI defended the view that it
was important to struggle against deviations and to undertake an improvement in
the movement. But serious divergences revealed themselves between Vereeken and
the CCI on nearly every subject which they discussed – the Italian Revolution,
the USSR and political perspectives. Nonetheless contact was kept up with his
group. The efforts of the Provisional European Secretariat to repair its links
with Trotskyists in the Netherlands were unsuccessful.
The manifesto; To the Italian Workers and Peasants, the first appeal
of this kind by the Provisional European Secretariat, was to appear amid a
certain confusion. Marcel Hic had taken upon himself to reply immediately to the
sensational fall of Mussolini by publishing, on 30 July 1943, in a special issue
of La Verité, a manifesto bearing the signature of the European
Secretariat. The Provisional European Secretariat could not permit itself to be
confronted by an accomplished fact and did not want a precedent to be created.
Without hesitation it published a resolution dated 8 August, stating that a
manifesto had been issued in its name “following an irregular procedure”. While
it agreed with the political basis of the manifesto, “the Provisional European
Secretariat takes the view that it is incomplete and the its presentation of the
slogan of a Constituent Assembly is inopportune.” Consequently, it decided to
“halt the distribution of the manifesto” and to publish a new text (which is the
one reproduced by Prager). This incident is significant in that it emphasises
that the Provisional European Secretariat intended to assert the fact of its
existence and to make collective work the rule. We do not detect any very
remarkable differences between the two versions of the manifesto when we read
them today, apart from the disappearance of the slogan of the National
Convention, but democratic demands were not neglected in the document for all
that.
The reconstruction of the German [section] and the work directed towards the
soldiers the Wehrmacht, which was at the centre of concerns of the Provisional
European Secretariat, was to receive new force when Widelin-Monat, a German
exile and a member of the leadership of the Belgian section, came to France. He
collaborated with Paul Thalmann and his group – at the price of mutual
concessions on the question of the USSR and of the Fourth International – to
produce Arbeiter und Soldat in July 1943. This ten-page
bulletin discussed the problems of the time in simple language, but it was notot
exactly an agitational sheet. More concise leaflets appeared at the same time
for wider distribution and two other issues of Arbeiter und
Soldat were to be written in a lighter style. The approach to the
German soldiers was best carried out by the young militants of the POI at Brest,
where the military concentration m as particularly heavy. On the initiative of
the postal worker, Robert Cruau, and of Georges Berthome who had recently come
to Brest, some fifteen soldiers who opposed Hitlerism and were weary of the war
were brought together and met in a discussion group. They provided travel
documents and prepared to supply arms. Monat followed this activity. One of the
soldiers, who came from Hamburg, was sent to Paris to meet the leaders of the
POI. It was he who betrayed his own comrades and the POI militants to the
Gestapo. The arrests began simultaneously in Brest and Paris on 6 October 1943.
The organisation was hard hit and came near to experiencing an even worse
catastrophe. Many militants barely escaped arrest and each was instructed to
find a hiding-place. In Brittany more than twenty members and sympathisers were
arrested and eleven of them were deported. We have not been able to confirm the
statement that the soldiers were shot. The principal leaders, Hic, Rousset,
Filâltre, Fournie and Beaufrère were arrested, tortured by the Gestapo and
deported to Buchenwald.
Disaster
The activity of the Provisional European Secretariat suffered from this
disaster and slowed down for a short time. Monat likewise was targetted and
hunted, and he took refuge in Belgium. The preparation of the European
Conference, the documents for which were in the process of being drafted with
the co-operation of Hic, as well as the appearance of Quatrième
Internationale, were delayed.
In November and December 1943 the Provisional European Secretariat made
special efforts to carry out its plans. Monat came back to Paris, accompanied by
Ernest Mandel, who appeared in, the Provisional European Secretariat for the
first time. In December the first version of the thesis, Report on the
International Situation and the Tasks of the Fourth International, appeared
for discussion in the sections. The joint commission of the POI-CCI-PES, which
had the task of organising the unification of the French organisations, made its
own contribution to overcoming the various obstacles. The chances of success
seemed to improve when the discussion was raised to the international level, all
the more so because when the CCI joined the Provisional European Secretariat it
agreed to respect international discipline. The weakening of the POI made the
task of recovering strength through unity all the more urgent. The influence of
Raptis, the most highly qualified political leader, became more noticeable. The
unity of the two organisations seemed to him to be important in view of the new
perspectives which it opened up and he worked actively to overcome prejudices
and resistances of every kind and contributed greatly to the successful outcome
of the negotiations.
The joint commission was widened in December by the adherence of the October
Group, which had been formed at the beginning of 1943. Most of its members came
from the ‘bondancist’ movement, led
by Jacques Dubois and the Jeunes. What they wrote was near to some of the
themes of the CCI, which is not surprising, since essentially they were written
by Henri Molinier, who was a member both of the October Group and of the CCI,
and whose political education enabled him to exert a preponderant influence in
the former. The invitation to join the work of the joint commission which was
addressed to the small Lutte des Classes group, led by Barta-Korner (which had
only five members) received a negative response.
The resolution on the partisan movement was a great effort to make up for the
delay in studying the development of the maquis, which took on the character of
a mass movement when young people joined it in order to evade being drafted for
compulsory labour service in Germany. To tell the truth, no important turn in
this direction was ever made. The problem was complicated by the fact that one
had to take care to avoid being identified as a political militant in order to
participate in the armed groups at all. The life of anyone discovered to be a
Trotskyist would have been in danger.
Part 4: The Underground European Conference of the Fourth International
The world-wide conflict was reaching its final stage. The inevitable
transformation of imperialist war into civil war was ceasing to be a general
perspective and was becoming an imminent reality. This dominated the labours of
the underground European Conference, which met in February 1944 at St
Germain-la-Poterie, a few kilometres from Beauvais, in the Department of the
Oise.
In Northern Italy, “the dress rehearsal of the coming European Revolution”
was already on the scene. Mussolini and the Fascist regime were swept away
without a blow being struck. The military-monarchist palace revolution, which
preceded the abandonment of the camp of Hitler to its fate and a move into that
of the Allies, aroused a genuine revolutionary movement. Every Fascist
institution was taken by storm and the avenging people hunted down its
controlling barons. The ‘internal commissions’, embryo Soviets, came into
existence spontaneously in the factories in Milan and Turin, a process
consistent with the forecasts in the Transitional Programme.
The new government of Marshal Badoglio did not intend to let such a development
have its head. Machine-guns were set up in the Fiat plant. Allied bombers judged
the time suitable to make heavy attacks on the workers' quarters in the great
Italian cities, anticipating the arrival of the Wehrmacht to re-establish order
and a reign of terror. After landing in Calabria, the Allied armies took their
time to advance from South to North with calculated slowness.
Military strategy was more than ever subject to the class-aims of capital, to
ensure that capital remained inviolate. International reactionary forces worked
together to prevent at any price the defeat of Germany from leading to a
breakdown of bourgeois rule and the collapse of the state apparatus. Every
breach through which the revolutionary movement might surge forward had to be
closed. Civil war was not only a ‘Trotskyist vision’ but a spectre which haunted
Roosevelt, Churchill, De Gaulle and their military chiefs – but Stalin no less.
Their common preoccupation with the revolution was to be the cement of their
agreements at Teheran and at Yalta and of the counter-revolutionary Holy
Alliance, based on the dismemberment of Germany and its division into zones of
influence.
The Theses on the Liquidation of World War II and the Rise of the
Revolution deepened the analysis of the new conditions to which the heavy
defeats of the Germans on the Eastern fronts and the upheavals in Italy had led.
From then on, every continent was to be affected by social upheavals, which
ensured that the character of the approaching revolution would be world-wide.
Things would not be the same as they had been in World War 1. Trotsky’s
forecasts in the Manifesto of May 1940 were being confirmed by the most
recent developments: “Infinitely more than any other crisis in the past, the
present experience of the Second Imperialist War opens the period of a social
crisis that will be gigantic in its dimensions and its consequences.”
It was quite natural that all the documents should deal with problems of the
European Revolution, the principal centre of the revolution. Within this
perspective a decisive ro1e was allotted to the German, proletariat and the
German Revolution, the “spinal column” and the “necessary base” for the European
Revolution. This conviction was to inspire the campaigns of the Trotskyist
movement in its persistent efforts to achieve fraternisation with the German
workers in uniform.
No one had any illusions about the counter-revolutionary role of the Soviet
bureaucracy. “Against imperialism it could resort only to the methods of
imperialism itself: it must ensure strategic frontiers and create spheres of
influence for itself.” The hypothesis that the bureaucracy would perish, under
the blows of imperialism or those of the world revolution, which Trotsky
developed in The Revolution Betrayed, still appeared to be
fully relevant.
The territorial expansion of the USSR and the creation of satellite states –
which had already happened in 1939-40, with the agreement of Hitler, in Poland,
Rumania and the Baltic states – did not seem likely to be extended on a vast
scale. The risk of revolutionary contamination made “the large-scale employment
of the Red Army as a counter-revolutionary force impossible”. The revolutionary
flood would “begin by placing the Stalinist parties at the head of the masses”.
Nonetheless, the role of super-Noskes which they would be called upon to assume
would finally determine their ruin.
The conference accepted more refined opinions in opposition to the argument
of the CCI, to the effect that the revolutionary period would take the form of
one vast immediate confrontation, as soon as Nazism collapsed, and that this
would decide the fate of humanity; Socialism or a relapse into barbarism under
the form of American rule. However, the conference envisaged entering “an entire
revolutionary epoch”, which would include situations that would be different in
different countries and continents, with different specific levels of
consciousness and problems. Far from developing in straight lines, they would
see alternations of advance and retreat according to circumstances, momentary
defeats followed by victories. The prevailing optimism went along with an
enquiry as to the capacity of the proletariat to organise strongly to realise
its own aims and the possibilities of forming a revolutionary party.
This question particularly held the attention of the conference, as is clear
from the Theses on the Situation in the Workers’ Movement and the
Perspectives of the Development of the Fourth International. The draft
submitted by the Belgian delegation spoke of an international crisis in the
workers’ movement, characterised by the opportunism of the traditional
leaderships of the Second and Third Internationals, an opportunism to be
explained by the weakness of consciousness of the workers themselves and by
their reformism. The POI delegates said that these statements were “un-Marxist”,
and the statements were turned down. The CCI sharply condemned them, in the
opinion that they tended to make the working class responsible for the mistakes
and betrayals of the reformist and Stalinist leaderships. In a formulation close
to that in the Transitional Programme, the Conference declared
that only the lack of maturity of a revolutionary leadership in countries other
than Russia was the cause of the great defeats which had followed World War
I.
Another area of discussion was to make a critical appraisal of the Fourth
International, and this was treated at length in the theses. In this connection,
the CCI tried to provide an historical foundation for the prolonged split in
France, which had lasted for eight years. It seized on the intervention by
Trotsky in the discussion in the Socialist Workers Party with Shachtman to
support its argument that the POI presented the characteristic features of a
petty bourgeois current. The conference went beyond episodic conflicts and
personal quarrels, and analysed the social roots of the crisis of the
Bolshevik-Leninists, who had been condemned to prolonged isolation and subjected
to heavy imperialist pressure. It rejected such a standpoint as that of the CCI,
but it considered the shortcomings of the organisations of the Fourth
International with commendable frankness, deploring their dilettantism, their
verbosity, their intellectualism, their weak implantation in the working class
and their opportunistic and sectarian deviations. It severely condemned the
serious deviations which had happened during the War, accusing the French
section by name of having succumbed to social-patriotism, while, with a just
balance, it also rejected the sectarianism of the CCI.
Deep change
The approach of the revolutionary situation raised the hope that the Fourth
International would be transformed into a mass organisation. But this
transformation was not to come of its own accord. The movement had to carry
through “a real internal revolution” in the short time before the storm would
break. A deep change had to affect the thinking of the comrades. They had to
adjust their political tasks in mass work and improved party organisation. The
emphasis laid upon this indispensable change gave its whole meaning, that of a
new start, to the conference. An important element in the new course was the
call for the rules of underground work to be more strictly followed, which was
in the same way the spirit of the “additions to the constitution”, and these
formed an important element in the new course. It was hoped that the
contribution of the CCI to this improvement would be a positive one. But for all
that the requirements of security must not interfere with the principles of
healthy democracy. For that reason the functions of leadership must not remain
in the hands of irremovable individuals. The educational level of all the cadres
had to he raised, so that leading positions could be “rotated” constantly. The
sacrifice of militants must be reduced; the existence of the organisations must
be defended by reinforcing the illegal work and its first rule, division into
cells. The POI had paid for its weaknesses at the cost of numerous imprisonments
and deportations, but it had not been alone in failing to take precautions.
Craipeau had voiced serious criticisms of the Belgian section after having
attended its conference in July-August 1943, which had been held in very
indifferent conditions of security
As if to reinforce these concerns, a new wave of arrests, the range of which
was due to negligence, struck the POI at the very moment when the fusion was due
to be completed at the base.
This affair was serious enough to hold up the fusion proceedings. It led the
newly elected European Secretariat to substitute itself in mid-March 1944 for
the leading bodies of the new party, the PCI. It was then decided to carry out a
preliminary check of the memberships of the three organisations which were in
the process of fusing. This extreme measure was needed because it appeared that
in the POI full members were not always registered separately from candidate
members and sympathisers. Contrary to certain interpretations which could be
placed on this practice, the POI had no factional purpose. The first Congress of
the PCI in November 1944 recognised by a large majority that this operation was
necessary – with the exception of the rightist minority which opposed the
fusion. The European Secretariat stressed that this intervention was very
exceptional and justified only by the extreme gravity of the situation, as well
as the federative, provisional character of the Central Committee. It should by
no means be taken as “an example of the way in which the International should
normally intervene in the life of the national sections”.
The European Conference had to spend much time and attention on the problem
of how the French organisations were to be fused. The CCI wanted to surround
itself with every possible guarantee; it skilfully raised its demands very high,
while resolving to unite in the end. Mistrust due to years of confrontation was
not easily disposed of. Certain earlier experiences counselled prudence. Doubts
about the sincerity of the short-lived fusion of 1936, as well as the collusion
of the POI with the Pivertists to keep Frank and Molinier out of the PSOP, were
searing memories. The CCI had accepted unity as a minority, without a political
agreement embodied in a common document, and consequently was all the more
demanding in matters of organisation. It agreed to submit to the line of the
European documents which did not wholly satisfy it but which provided for a
clear political rapprochement and included a specific repudiation of the former
course of the POI. But the CCI also wanted to ensure that it had the means to
carry on a political battle inside the unified party against the
“petty-bourgeois current” in the hope of winning a majority. The matters at
issue were particularly those of parity in the leadership; three POI, three CCI
and one October; the right to form a faction and the right to produce
The Only Road as a factional organ. Another of their conditions
was that the exclusion of Molinier who, like Frank, was out of the country
should be lifted; this had been a sore point for a long time. Raptis used his
influence to overcome the principal obstacles. Trotsky’s last declarations about
the ‘Molinier case’ had been more moderate and conciliatory, and served
conveniently to win the decision for the CCI. The POI wanted a Central Committee
which more accurately expressed the relation of forces between the groups, which
would consist of four POI, two CCI and one October. A compromise was reached;
3-2-1 was accepted, plus one delegate from the European Secretariat, who was to
have a casting vote if two sides were equally divided. Factional rights, but not
the right to publish a factional journal, were recognised up to the first
Congress of the party. In fact, four more issues of The Only
Road were still to appear. The name of the new organisation was to be
the PCI, and that of its journal, La Verité.
Renewal
There can be no doubt that the results of the unification were ‘absolutely
positive’ from every point of view, as the first congress emphasised, and went
far beyond the inevitable tumults and periods of tension. The ability of the
party to intervene was greatly strengthened and the divergences were
progressively cleared away until the party reached the point when they had been
left behind; this process was encouraged by the renewal of the generations and
the arrival of new national and international upheavals.
But the essential documents were still opposed by the CCI, with the support
of the Spanish delegates, and the October Group chose to abstain.
The former members of the CCI undertook a self-criticism at the beginning of
1945 and themselves characterised their document as “schematic and non-Marxist”,
particularly on the following points:
- The conception that the imperialist war would be transformed into a civil
war from the moment of the first serious defeat of German imperialism.
- The conception that the fundamental historic tendencies would be immediately
and totally realised, in the form of a return to barbarism taking the form of
absolute American domination of Europe and its semi-colonialisation if the
revolution was defeated.
- The conception that the degenerated USSR would inevitably suffer military
defeat.
- The conception that the counter-revolutionary struggle of the USA dominated
its entire policy and strategy and was expressed above all in making the
destruction of the USSR its first priority.
These mistakes cannot be evaluated if we leave out of consideration the
extreme youth of the organisation, which was completely reconstructed in the
absence of its former leading cadres. The CCI had the merit of having corrected
some of the false steps of the old PCI, relating to the character of the USSR
and its defence andto applying the necessary illegal methods of work. The
activity which the CCI developed in the factories was far from negligible, as
its numerous factory leaflets show. This was not the only time that a young
leadership, in its enthusiasm to prove that it wanted to succeed, succumbed to
‘infantile sickness’.
Circumstances prevented the European Conference from representing everyone
who stood for its aims, but nonetheless it was of great political importance,
and counts as one of the most remarkable performances of the Trotskyists during
the war. It must be recorded that the theses of the Provisional European
Secretariat were submitted for approval to national conferences of the
participating organisations held in January 1944. Raptis and Leon Wajnmok, the
leader of the Belgian section, went to defend the theses at the congress of the
CCI, but did not succeed in convincing the delegates, who rejected them.
Craipeau then went there to take part in the debate on “the crisis of the
Bolshevik-Leninists”, with no greater success. At the conference of the Spanish
group, some members of which belonged at the same time to the CCI, a majority
came out in support of the document of that organisation. The general meeting of
the October Group leaned rather towards the draft of the Provisional European
Secretariat, but wanted to elevate itself a little above the struggle because it
felt itself still to be a novice in Trotskyist milieux. The orientation of the
Provisional European Secretariat was to receive wide approval, on the other
hand, at the national council of the POI, in which Leon and Raptis also took
part. The principal spokesman in that meeting for the new course was Spoulber,
who had actually collaborated in drafting the theses and found his ideas in
agreement with those of Raptis. He strongly emphasised that the policy of the
POI on the national question had to be condemned. On this point there was
resistance. Some delegates, such as Schmitt and Laval supported Swarm, who did
not agree that the policy of the POI, which he believed to have been correct,
must be characterised as infected with social-patriotism. A special meeting of
the Central Committee of the Belgian section (RCP) had already ratified the
general line of the theses. This concern for democracy and this effort, under
the Occupation, needs to be highlighted.
The conference lasted for six days, or, more correctly, for six days and six
nights, as its work was interrupted only by the short periods of sleep which the
participants took lying on the ground. The fifteen delegates separated only
after the proceedings ended, as was usual and as circumstances required. They
arrived at Beauvais by train and were quickly hidden in a small covered truck,
which took them in small groups to an isolated farm building belonging to Daniel
Nat and Louis Dalmas, in the village of St Germain-la-Poterie. The fire in the
large chimney-piece warmed only half of the large room and the delegates took it
in turns to occupy the chairs near the hearth. Young members of the POI armed
with revolvers had the task of ensuring that the place was guarded. The very
difficult task of getting food and preparing meals fell to Nat and Dalmas and
their companions, while the secretariat was in the hands of Simone M of the CCI
and Jacqueline G of the POI. It goes without saying that the participants came
out of this experience exhausted but greatly heartened by what they had
accomplished. The enthusiastic comment could be heard that “this was one of the
best international meetings of our movement since it began”.
It was remarkable also in being the first international conference to be held
without the help of Leon Trotsky, which had been stamped on all earlier
gatherings. It elected a European Executive Committee and a European
Secretariat, which worked for the reconstruction of the Fourth
International.
Notes
1. Trans: see P Brouè, Notes on the History of the Oppositions and the
Trotskyist Movement in India in the first half of the Twentieth Century,
Cahiers Leon Trotsky No.21, March 1985.
2. A French-language text of The Political Situation in India Today
can be found in Quatrième Internationale, Nos.20-21,
July-August 1945.
3. Trans: Fosco’s own account of the events in which he was involved
in Spain in 1936 has been reproduced from an internal bulletin of the
PCI in 1938 and published in La Revolution Espagnole, by Leon
Trotsky, which consists of articles by Trotsky about Spain in the years
1930-1940, collected and edited with comments by Pierre Broué,
published by Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1975, See p.624.
4. International Bulletin, February 1940.
5. International Bulletin, No.3, December 1940.
6. International Information Bulletin, issues of August and
December 1941, and Fourth International, March 1942.
7. Fourth International, May 1941.
8. La Verité No.3, September 1941, (American).
9. Fourth International, October 1942
10. Fourth International, July 1943. Trans: in this
connection it is worth looking at the official history of the Communist Party of
Great Britain. “At last, in 1943, the Communist Party of Great Britain was no
longer to function as a section of a world party. International solidarity
would, of course, remain one of its fundamental aims. But it was finally to
emerge as an independent political party, responsible to itself alone for its
policies, its strategy and tactics in the battles that lay ahead.” (N. Branson,
History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, London 1985,
p.336)
11. La Verité No.47, 5 July 1943, and Internal
Bulletin of the POI, No.19, June 1943.
12. L. Trotsky, Letter to the German Commission, and Letter to
the Emigré Committee of the IKD, Writings of Leon Trotsky
(1935-1936), >New York 1977, pp.79-83, pp.112-4.
13. Unser Wort, January 1938. Thesis of Wolfgang Alles,
On the Politics and History of the German Trotskyists
(Zur Politik und Geschichie der deutschen Troiskisten),
University of Marinheim, 1978, p225.
14. Unser Wort, April 1941, New York ed. Alles, op.
cit., p.269.
15. Alles, op. cit., p.269.
16. Problèmes de la Revolution Europeen, in Quatrième
Internationale, No.25-26, December 1945-January 1946.
17. See Yvan Craipeau, in his Contre Vents et Marées, Paris
1977, p.142. In fact only five or six people took part; there could not have
been fifteen. Raptis was still receiving medical treatment in the Isère and
evidently could not have been present. Craipeau confuses the aim of this meeting
with the decisions which were reached nearly a year and a half later, when it
was decided to form the Provisional European Secretariat and when the ‘German
work’ was undertaken in France with the help of Widelin-Monat.
18. Clara and Paul Thalmann, Revolution für die Freiheit,
Hamburg 1977, p.305.
19. La Seule Voie, Nos. 1 and 7, March 1942 and March
1943.
20. The first two issues, in August and in December 1943, were mimeographed.
The journal thereafter was to appear in print from January 1944, from a
printshop which was fitted out for the use of the International. Five issues in
all were published in 1944.
21. R. Prager, Les Congrès de la Quatrième Internationale,
Vol.1, p295.
22. This is reproduced in the Facsimiles of La Verité
1940-1944, p.119.
23. Quatrième Internationale, No.1, August 1944.
24. This is not exactly the formulation which was used in the document
itself, but that of the National Convention.
25. C. and P. Thalmann, op. cit., p.316.
26. In Facsimiles of La Verité, p.183-210.
27. Robert Cruau was a postal worker at Nantes. He led the POI group there at
the beginning of the war, ensuring that contact was maintained between Brest and
Paris. In March 1943 he succeeded in organising cells of German Trotskyists at
Brest. He was denounced in October 1943 and made a fake escape attempt in order
to get himself killed.
Georges Berthome (1924-1945) was federal secretary of the Socialist Youth in
the department of Loire-Inferieur. He joined the POI in 1942 and helped Robert
Cruau with the ‘German work’. He was deported to Buchenwald, where he died in
May 1945, just before the camp was liberated.
28. Michel Raptis (also known as Pablo, Gabriel and Jerome) was born in 1911.
He joined the Greek Archaeo-Marxist organisation as a revolutionary militant in
1928. He left it and, in 1934, formed a Trotskyist organisation, with
Pouliopoulos. He was imprisoned in 1936-7 and emigrated from Greece on his
release. He took part in the founding conference of the Fourth International in
1938 and, after spending from 1940-42 in a sanatorium, he collaborated with the
European Secretariat. After the war he took part in the European Pre-Conference
of the Fourth International in Paris in spring 1946 and became the leading
figure in the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International.
29. Jeunes Equipes unies pour une nouvelle economic sociale: Young Teams
United for a New Social Economy.
30. The organisation Lutte Ouvrière regards itself today as the historical
successor to this group. However, Korner disputed this claim in his
lifetime.
31. All the documents of the European Conference were published in the
clandestine journal, Quatrième Internationale, Nos.4-5 and 6-7,
for February-March and April-May 1944.
32. In English: Documents of the Fourth International, New
York 1973, p.311.
33. Theses on the Situation in the Workers’ Movement and the Perspectives
of the Development of the Fourth International.
34. This chapter of the theses deals with a draft contributed by the Belgian
section.
35. ER (E. Mandel), The World Crisis of the Workers’ Movement and the
Role of the Fourth International, Quatrième
Internationale, No.3, January 1944.
36. AJ (Prager-Bonnet), The Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership – the
Single Cause of the Defeats of the World Revolution, Quatrième
Internationale, Nos.6-7, 8-10, April-May and June-August 1944.
37. L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, London 1975, p.12811
[?].
38. Internal Bulletin of the PCI, No.9, November 1944.
39. Declarations by the European Secretariat dated 17 March and 10 April
1944, Internal Bulletin of the PCI, No.1.
40. L. Trotsky, Avuncular Advice, Writings of Leon Trotsky:
1939-40, New York 1969, p.300.
41. Internal Bulletin of the PCI, No.14, March 1945.
42. The delegates present were: Abraham Leon (Wajnsztok) and E. Mandel (RCP,
Belgium); Yvan Craipeau, Nicolas Spoulber, Marcel Gibelin, Alain Le Dem (POI,
France); Jacques Grimblat, Rodolphe Prager (CCI, France); Henri Claude-Pouge
(October Group, France); Martin Monat (German Group), Michel Raptis, Georges
Vitsoris (Greek section); Ernesto Morris, Rafael Font-Farran (Spanish
Group).
43. Facsimile of La Verité, 1940-1944, Paris
1978.
44. ibid.
45. Fred Zeller, Trois Points, c’est tout, p.222.
46. Internal Bulletin of the PCI, No.8, November 1944.
47. Internal Bulletin of the PCI, No.13, February 1945.
48. Bulletin of the European Secretariat, No.1, November
1944.
49. Quatrième Internationale, Nos.11- 13, September-November
1944.
50. Internal Bulletin of the PCI, No.16, May 1945.
51. Bulletin of the European Secretariat, No.8, October
1945.
52. Ibid., No.9, January 1946: letter from Morrow to the
European Executive Committee of 10 July 1945; reply of the European Executive to
Cde Morrow, January 1946; letter from Morrow to all sections of the Fourth
International, November 1945.
53. Draft political resolution for the Second Congress of the PCI, 8 December
1945.
54. Ibid.
55. Bulletin of the European Secretariat, No.9, January
1946.
56. Leblanc, Proposals for a New Appreciation of the International
Situation, October 1945; reply by Gabriel-Raptis, Against the
Liquidators and the Centrist Capitulators, December 1940. The second
congress of the PCI rejected the Leblanc thesis in February 1946.
57. Quatrième Internationate, issues of June, July and
August-September 1946.
58. La Verité, Nos.113 and 114, 9 and 16 March 1946.
59. The commission consisted of Haston, Bleibtreu and Heinrich
Buchbinder.
60. The Congresses of the Fourth International, Vol.1,
pp.123 and 203.
61. Georges Jungclas 1902-1975, Hamburg, 1980,
pp.118-125.
62. ‘Kampfbund zur Befreiung der Arbeiterklasse.’
63. F. Keller, Trotskyism in Austria 1934-45, Cahiers Leon
Trotsky, No.5, January-March 1980.
64. R. Dazy, Fusiliez ces chiens enragés: le genocide des
trotskyistes (Shoot the Mad Dogs), Paris 1981,
pp266-74.
65. Internal Bulletin of the International Secretariat,
N.o8, October 1946.
66. Internal Bulletin, No.11, resolution of the European
Secretariat, 20 January 1946; reply to the Greek Trotskyists.
67. These were the EDKE (Internationalist Workers Party of Greece), the DEKE
(Internationalist Revolutionary Party of Greece), the independent Regional
organisation of Macedonia as well as a group which emerged from the ELD-SK
(Union of the Popular Democracy-Socialist Party).
68. Bulletin of the European Secretariat, No.l, November
1944 and Workers’ International News, No.7, October 1944.
69. Statement by Charles Van Gelderen on 18 June 1980.
70. Evidence of Sam Gordon on 16 June 1980.
71. Internal Bulletin of the International Secretariat,
No.5, August 1946, and Quatrième Internationale,
August-September 1946.
72. This decision was “a tactical error” in the opinion of the International
Secretariat, which disapproved of it and wanted a search for political solutions
instead of disciplinary measures.
73. Internal Bulletin of the International Secretariat,
No.1, May 1946. Letter from Natalia Trotsky to the European Secretariat of 18
March 1946, and the reply of the IS, signed Pilar (Raptis) 9 April 1946.
74. Internal Bulletin of the International Secretariat,
No.5, August 1946, and Quatrième Internationale,
August-September 1946.
Notes continued from page 7.
p221.
Sorry!
Due to a technical problem, an omission was made in column three on page
24. 7he text should read.
Proposals for collaboration from the CCI, on the other hand, received a
negative reply. The group was invited simply to join the official section and to
fight for its position within it. Relations between the two organisations were
to take a different turn in 1943.
Marcel Hic’s theses on the national question received the support of the
Belgian section in July 1942, and were ratified by the national council of the
POI at the end of December by nine votes to one.
