“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-Founding Conference of the Fourth International-1938
Thursday, September 11, 2014
As Obama Beats
The War Drums-Again- Stop The Escalations-No New U.S. War In Iraq- No Intervention
In Syria! Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries! Stop The Bombings! –Stop The Arms Shipments …
Frank Jackman
comment:
As the Nobel
Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, orders more air bombing
strikes in the north, sends more “advisers” to “protect” American outposts in
Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds guys who served in the American
military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on
the war issue as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old
world might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps
pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point
to the slippery slope of escalation. Now not every event in history gets
exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in
Iraq those vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners,
placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In
Iraq
***
Here is something to think about:
Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant
or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. However, the
international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist
intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops
and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to
the world’s working people and downtrodden.
Hands Off The Ferguson, Missouri
Protesters-Stop The Police Killings Of Black Youth-Stop The Harassment Of The
Press- Free All Protesters Now!
Frank Jackman comment:
It has always been easy for the
American imperialist capitalist government and their police to treat black
youth, especially black males and increasing Latinos like they have treated the
peoples of Southeast Asia in the past, and in Iraq and Afghanistan more
recently as so much collateral damage when they pulled the hammer down. Trayvon
Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and a myriad of others shot down over the
years by the police and/or vigilantes cry out for justice in Ferguson, Missouri
and New York City this day and will not accept another whitewash.
************The Latest From Ferguson-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ferguson-protest-tries-to-shut-down-i-70-as-calls-continue-for-prosecutor-to-step-down/2014/09/10/2cb3a97c-37b4-11e4-8601-97ba88884ffd_story.html?wpisrc=nl_politics&wpmm=1
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As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner-German Jewish Poets
ERNST TOLLER (1893-
THE ROAD TO THE TRENCHES
Through grenade furrows
And filthy puddles
They walk.
Over soldiers
Freezing in a hole in the ground
They stagger.
Rats dart squeaking over their path
Stormy rain knocks with fingers of death
On decaying doors
Signal rockets
Plague lanterns…
From trench to trench.
Translated by Peter Appelbaum
CORPSES IN THE PRIESTER WOODS
A dung heap of rotting corpses:
Glazed eyes, bloodshot,
Brains split, guts spewed out
The air poisoned by the stink of corpses
A single awful cry of madness
Oh women of France,
Women of Germany
Regard your menfolk!
They fumble with torn hands
For the swollen bodies of their enemies,
Gestures, stiff in death, become the touch of brotherhood,
Yes they embrace each other,
Oh, horrible embrace!
I see and see and am struck dumb
Am I a beast, a murderous dog?
Men violated….
Murdered….
Ernst Toller -
NIGHTMARE
On a pole, rotten and foul
Squats the conscience of nations,
Three childrens’ bones dance around the pole
Broken from a young mother’s body.
A sheep bleats the rhythm bäh bäh.
Ernst Toller -
From The Labor History Archives -In
The 80th Anniversary Year Of The Great San Francisco, Minneapolis
And Toledo General Strikes- Lessons In The History Of Class Struggle
The Toledo Auto-Lite strike, 1934 - Jeremy Brecher
Jeremy Brecher's short history of the victorious strike at an auto parts plant in 1934, in which the unemployed played a key role in helping workers win the strike.
The point about Toledo was this: that it is nothing new to see organized unemployed appear in the streets, fight police, and raise hell in general. But usually they do this for their own ends, to protest against unemployment or relief conditions. At Toledo they appeared on the picket lines to help striking employees win a strike, though you would expect their interest would lie the other way-that is, in going down and getting the jobs the other men had laid down.1The Lucas County Unemployed League was affiliated with the American Workers Party, a small radical organization led by A.J. Muste, which emphasized mutual support of employed and unemployed workers, and A. W.P. leaders played an important part in the conflict.
When the strikers and unemployed blocked the plant gates with mass picketing, the employers got an injunction limiting them to twenty-five pickets at each gate. The Unemployed League, determined to "smash the injunction," continued picketing, and when leaders were arrested for contempt of court, hundreds of unemployed packed the courtroom and cheered and sang as the trial progressed. On May 21st, 1,000 gathered for a noon mass meeting at the gates of the Toledo Auto-Lite plant; next day 4,000 came to the noon rally, and the third day 6,000.
At this point, Sheriff David Krieger decided, as he later testified in court, that the time had come to take the offensive. Unwilling to rely on the local police, who were disaffected themselves and sympathetic to the strikers, he deputized special police, paid for by National Guardsmen attacked the picket lines and evacuated strikebreakers from Auto-Lite plants, but were driven back by the crowds. Guardsmen advanced again with bayonets; they were ordered to fire.
He then began arresting pickets, and a deputy began beating an old man in front of a crowd of 10,000 which had gathered. This was too much for the crowd, which proceeded to surround the Auto-Lite plant, holding 1,500 strikebreakers inside. The special deputies dropped tear gas on the crowd from the plant and attacked them with fire hoses, iron bars and some gunfire. The crowd systematically collected bricks and stones, deposited them in piles around the streets, and heaved them through the factory windows. Three times the strikers broke into the factory and were driven out in hand-to-hand fighting. The battle raged for seven hours.
At dawn next morning 900 National Guardsmen, complete with machine-gun units, were rushed into Toledo from elsewhere in the state-Sheriff Krieger being unwilling to call up the local Guard. The Guardsmen evacuated the strikebreakers from the plant, but failed to intimidate the crowds, who stoned them and drove them against the factory walls. The Guardsmen advanced with bayonets. The crowd drove them back again, and were in turn pushed back with bayonets. As the crowd advanced the third time the troops were ordered to fire; they let go, killing two and wounding fifteen. Even this did not disperse the crowd, which attacked again that night and was again fired on by the Guard.
Only the sending of four more militia companies to the plant-more troops than ever seen in Ohio before in peacetime-and the agreement of the companies to close down finally pacified the situation. Meanwhile, eighty-five local unions pledged themselves to support a general strike in sympathy with another dispute, growing from the demands of workers at the electric power company. The strike was headed off when the company offered a twenty-two percent wage increase and union recognition.
Leaders of the unemployed were arrested and one was seized by the Guard and held incommunicado. With their plants closed, the auto parts makers finally agreed to recognize the union, grant a wage increase, and rehire the strikers. Rehiring proceeded slowly as the plants reopened until a crowd began gathering at the Auto-Lite gates and the company, fearing a renewal of direct action, rehired all the strikers at once.
Excepted and very slightly edited from Strike! - Jeremy Brecher.
- 1. Roy W. Howard of Scripps-Howard newspapers to Louis Howe in the White House, cited in Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 221.
From The Archives Of The Socialist
Workers Party (America)- Some Lessons of the Toledo Strike
Frank Jackman comment:
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 that in
the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A
recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space
that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely
the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second
International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist
International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International
before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class
organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the
Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots
are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist
Labor League, Deb’s 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 made
up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers
Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive.
Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of
revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked,
and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should
start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that
premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this
headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the
Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper
socialists (descendants of those socialism for dentist-types) just now,
screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his
henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations
starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party
in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the
Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want
to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my
sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his
career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can
hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from
the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest
my case.
********************
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
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***Carry It On-With Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep In Mind-Take Two
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
A while back, maybe a few months ago now, I watched (and reviewed) a 2012 film starring Robert Redford, Julie Christie, Nick Nolte and about a million other faces that started their film careers in the 1960s or thereabouts entitled The Company You Keep. The film dealt in Hollywood style, although that treatment should not cause one to dismiss the film out of hand, with the question of what happened to those idealistic students and other young radicals (they were not all students, no question, as the social base of the Black Panthers and supporters of the Ohio Seven attest to) who went to the extremes in order to right the wrongs of this American behemoth. Of course that is really the question of the Weather Underground and what happened to those who though they were in the immediate term building a “second front” in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and more distantly trying to build a new society here “in the heart of the beast.” The film was probably motivated in part by the continuing drama up until recent years of those “fugitives” who went underground when that establishment that was being fought tooth and nail decided to seriously fight back, to defend to the death it prerogatives surfacing to take whatever punishment (or not as in the cases of Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn) or who were “captured” by some law enforcement agency.
Many of us from the generation of ’68, the generation, or part of it and I like to think the best part of it, that tried to turn the world upside down in the turbulent 1960s when all hell broke loose in this country around lots of stuff, war, civil and human rights, the free expression of one’s self and took a bad beating for it have spent some time recently cutting up old touches about the old days. Much to the amazement, or maybe better, the total incomprehensibly of the two generations that have come after. So a lot of that reminiscing really is geared toward ourselves out in our little cafes and other gathering spots and our “new found” wisdom about all the mistakes that we made back in the day.
Chief among them were the sense that we, and here I mean those of us who were students at the time, could face down the “monster” by ourselves without some more socially significant force on our side. As the students in Paris learned in 1968 students can jump start things but if you want to bring down the old regime having working people at your back is the beginning of wisdom (what happens then, what happens if they don’t, won’t or can’t go all the way is a separate question). Also we very seriously underestimated both the actual strength we had (students then and even now are a diverse lot and let us say at South Dakota State then were not as radical as U/Cal-Berkeley students, although some of them were getting there. But most critical was the total misunderstanding of the “blow-back” the establishment was ready to mete out to its own (after all a significant number of radicals were sons and daughters of that establishment) and others. We thought that stuff was only for the Vietnamese, American blacks and uppity third world former colonial countries. The clearest single example of the blow-back that I remember was May Day 1971 when we tried to inadequate forces and under some strange notion that they were going to let us do it to close down the government in Washington if it did not stop the war. Many thousands of arrests and abject defeat is all we got for our efforts.
In those reminisces we rightly talk about how we had done this or that thing differently then maybe we would not have had to spent the last forty or so years fighting a fierce rearguard cultural war to defend the few gains we did make and defend our honor against those who sat on their hands then waiting for the sea change to change again (all those neo-cons, those guys who populated the Reagan, Bush 1 and 2 and the wonkish Clinton administrations).
While the film was characterized as a fictional thriller in the review blurbs because it takes the 1960s political turmoil and its residual aftermath as it subject matter there are some serious observations that can be made almost despite the film.
If as the late journalist David Halberstam opined in his book, The Best and The Brightest, the best and the brightest of the generation of ‘68s parents spent their post-World War II creating a secure cocoon against the ravishes of the red scare Cold War 1950s night their best and brightest children spent their time trying to turn that created world upside up. There is no question, at least no question now, that the huge social and political questions that started the 1960s with the rise of the black liberation struggle and its earnest We Shall Overcome optimism once the established order began its blowback over Vietnam, American foreign policy in general, and its right to order its society for the benefit of a few would come crashing down with a version of armed struggle by the end. That is how tense, that is how stretched the social fabric in this country was by then.
And that change from soft reformism-“work within the system because we are dealing with rational opponents” and with enough pressure they will see the light, or at least the justice of what we are fighting for, to essentially building an armed “second front” in the worldwide struggle against the beast, mainly the American beast, by the end of the decade is what drove the action that the characters in this film in were driven to. Actions, including bombing of governmental targets that later degenerated into off-hand bank robberies once the sea-change set in to finance revolutionary activities. And the number one group, the number one group of white radicals, although not the only group, associated with those types of actions were the Weatherman (and their subsequent monikers Weather People, Underground, etc. but we will stick with that designation for convenience).
For those, like this writer and many other of his generation, the relentless bombing and killing fields of Vietnam and other locales in Southeast Asia by the American government against our vehement but unheeded protest drove us up the wall, drove us to thoughts of more militant actions. It is hard now to tell the young just how bad that was, the closest they could see in their lifetimes were the short momentary protest actions just before the beginning of the second Iraq war. Multiple that by almost a decade of mass youth uprising and you begin to get a sense that something more was needed that never-ending street protests (although that strategy had it advocates until the end-until the North Vietnamese/NLF forces sent the American beast and its South Vietnamese allies running for the helicopters in 1975). And so some of those very people who started out their political careers driven by sweet reason in say the early civil rights struggle down south or the nuclear disarmament movement, were driven to more drastic actions.
In the story line here (based somewhat on real actions that did occur in the 1970s and 1980s as the world that the Weathermen tried to turn upside down turned back again and those who had become “outlaws” became fewer and degenerated into isolated fugitives) Nick (played by an aging, very aging Robert Redford) who has been underground as a lawyer (using the alias Jim Grant) for thirty years has to confront his past as a participant in a bank robbery where a guard was killed. That confrontation was ignited when one underground fugitive Sharon (played by an aging, very aging Susan Sarandon) decided to turn herself in and the FBI went wild to clear its old file of ex-most wanted white radicals. The problem was that Jim really was not involved in the robbery (some righteous bonds of social solidarity and a love interest kept him from being a ‘snitch” inmy old neighborhood the worse sort of heel), had long ago personally renounced his radical past and if you can believe this now had motherless eleven-year old daughter who was clueless about his past and whom he wished to protect at all costs.
So he needed to get to Mimi (played by an aging, very aging Julie Christie, leaving me sighing for Doctor Zhivago days) who was knee-deep in the robbery, who could clear him, but who has kept the radical faith (and who in a sweet twist of fate had a child with Nick when they were on the run which they put up for adoption and has a role in the plot). So most of the film is about our boy Nick, still a resourceful underground operative, eluding said “Feds” (with help from his old pal Donal, played by a youthful, very youthful Nick Nolte. Not really but I was getting kind of depressed saying “aging, very aging.”) finally confronting Mimi and after a lot of talk he/she finally turn themselves in for the sake of- that eleven year old. Yeah, that part is pure Hollywood.
What is not pure Hollywood was/is the way that the various Weathermen-type organizations (one thinks also of the Ohio 7 and some black liberation groups split off from the demise of the Black Panthers) have been portrayed. Here a little sympathically through an eager-beaver young reporter desperate to make a name for himself as a journalist, Ben (played by a truthfully very young Shia LeBeouf), although all the way around the use of violence is roundly condemned. In the real world of political struggle in the late 1960s and early 1970s many, including many on the left condemned the Weathermen strategy of “building the second front (in aid of the Vietnamese and third world struggle under the political influence of Franz Fanon and his classic Wretched Of The Earth)” and “bringing the war” home out of hand.
Would moreover, and this was an act of truth political cowardice by some of those who now write for the major establishment publications, sit in the groves of academia or work like beavers for corporate America, not defend the Weathermen against the governmental onslaught that came raining down on them (although most had no problem justifying the same kinds of political actions by the Panthers and other black radicals, so go figure). I disagreed with their strategy, saw that there random and isolated actions without trying to build a mass base had nowhere to go (although like I said I too was absolutely frustrated with our inability to take the government down most notably as I mentioned previously when I was involved in May Day 1971 when we tried to shut down the federal government on in streets of Washington, D.C. and took nothing but tens of thousands of arrests for our troubles). I did however defend the Weathermen against much resistance from radicals I was working with at the time.
And watching this film brought back that same emotion. As I wrote one time when reviewing a memoir by Bill Ayers one of the leading Weathermen when he was asked if he was sorry for his actions back in the day- I said he/they had nothing to be sorry for against a government that was raining hell and damnation upon many of the peoples of the world as a matter of conscious daily policy. Yeah, that still sounds about right.
“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-Founding Conference of the Fourth International-1938
Markin comment (repost from September 2010 slightly edited):
Several years ago, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call issued during the presidency of the late Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must have been something in the air at the time (maybe caused by these global climatic changes that are hazarding our collective future) because I had also seen a spade of then recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looked very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course in the 21st century, after over one hundred and fifty years of attempts to create adequate international working-class organizations, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) was appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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Founding Conference of the
Fourth International
1938
Resolution On The Tasks Of The French Section
The International Conference considers that the most important problem concerning the situation of the party in France lies in the reenergizing of its activity and in the impulse to be given to an indispensable reorganization of its organizational work. As a matter of fact, Bolshevism’s superiority over Menshevism lies not only in the correctness of its policy but also in its ability to bring an organization to share the revolutionary struggles of the proletariat. Bolshevism is genuinely infused with the Marxian spirit contained in the well known formula: it’s not enough just to explain the world; one must change it.
Now the question which instantly faces us is the following: how does it happen that with a policy that has been in general correct the French section of the Fourth International has been forced into an organizational retreat, which shows itself in the loss of about 15 percent of its active membership? It cannot be explained away solely on the grounds of the objective situation: “sacred union” [of the political parties], war, the failure and disillusionment which produce in the toiling masses a distrust toward attempts at labor organization and the party’s general activity.
A close examination of the POI’s [Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste Internationalist Workers Party] activity during these last two years enables us to point out precisely one of the essential causes for the French section’s present state of disorganization. In every revolutionary organization, responsibility for the state of organizational progress and activity falls predominantly upon the leadership. Now the activity of the POI’s leadership during the period just passed has been essentially characterized by its inadequacy in the field of mobilizing the organization’s members, the absence of a constant coordination of their efforts and of a constant concern with utilizing their special abilities, and as a result, the inability to create within the organization that political, ideological, and moral cohesion and that team spirit without which any organization is in jeopardy and heads for ruin.
The inadequacies of the POI’s leadership are shown by an increasing organizational letdown, with, as sequel, the existence of a certain “revolutionary” amateurism, the lack of a serious party administration, of a normally functioning national treasury, and of a Lutte Ouvriere editorship which is stable and full of the spirit of emulation. Naturally to some extent these inadequacies result from the lack of even a modest organizational apparatus composed of comrades who devote all their time to party work.
But this need for a permanent organizational apparatus does not spare us the necessity of taking note of the fact that the POI leadership has not assimilated, in a factual living way, the idea of what a revolutionary organization really is, and what as a consequence the activity of a leadership should be. Thus this “ paddling one’s own canoe” and “everyone doing what he pleases.” Underestimation of the importance of action, i.e., of the necessity of translating into specific acts the initiatives which the members think up, is a fault in no way confined to the rank and file, but common to both the rank and file and the leadership. The situation is not that of a well functioning leadership, armed with a serious policy, which cannot find among the rank and file the necessary forces for the carrying out of its decisions: but on the contrary a leadership which above all does not know how to lead itself—whence arises the confusion and demoralization of the rank and file where the comrades’ discontent and aspirations find simultaneous expression in these two words addressed to the leadership: “Lead us!”
The failure to apply the essential principles of Bolshevism is evinced not only by revolutionary amateurism but also by the lack of system in organizational work. Bolshevism has in practice produced in the field of organization in addition to the type of professional revolutionary, a whole system of rigorous work.
The POI, and in particular its leadership, have functioned throughout their existence without any serious system of organizational work. The lack of system in the work of the POI is characterized by two features: 1) The lack of agitation, propaganda, and action concentrated on decisive points. (Thus it is that during many months important branches 18th, 19th, 20th found themselves without objectives, while the objectives in the Citroen and Renault plants were left without adequate forces.) 2) Within the party itself, there was no plan for the work, and no rigorous supervision of its execution.
The result of work done anarchically, without objective, without order or system, contributes to the growth of the impression of an activity that gets lost upon a thousand occasions and that ends in nothing, an impression which is fatal to the morale of party members. This failure to produce results also explains the party’s inability to recruit new members.
A certain improvement should however be noted, as shown in the July 1938 internal bulletin and in the decisions of the conference of June, 1938 an improvement which must be amplified in detail, accentuated, and systematized. Once more we proclaim the necessity for the POT to concentrate the essential part of its activity on the principal factories of the Paris region, and, in connection with this, to regard trade union work (treated below) as the principal branch of its activity.
As regards Paris, it may be said by way of a simple general indication that all present and immediately future forces should be centered on Renault Boulogne, Citroen 15th, Citroen 17th, 14th Montrouge, and Suburbs Colombes.
In the provinces, where a certain progress has been made in the building of cadres, there is nevertheless a need for the party to make its efforts effective, because of the remarkable possibilities there, in the important northern region.
It is outstandingly correct to state and constantly to repeat, as all the POI’s conventions have done, that improvement in the POI’s work, and especially improvement in the quality of the leadership, is directly dependent upon its recruiting among the proletariat, i.e., upon its efficiently carrying out the directive already announced a hundred times: “orientation toward the trade unions and the factories.”
In this field, however, the widespread and indeed solemn recognition that this is vitally necessary has not been enough. It is in spite of the fact that U generally recognizes the need of this that the POT stagnates. It is hence absolutely necessary that, with all the strength of which they are capable, the most conscientious militants should force with the greatest administrative rigor the application of the general measures which have been recommended and admitted to be correct in principle, and should require the necessary sacrifices. It is only if the organization receives the shock necessary to this practical accomplishment that U will improve its social makeup and, as a result, the work of its leadership.
It is with the POI’s leadership that genuine organizational reform should begin. It is the leadership itself which must radically change its working methods. Consequently, the International Conference is of the opinion that the most urgent practical measures to be taken in order to obtain good results are:
a) Setting up, within the Political Bureau, a secretariat composed of three comrades who can meet regularly at least one hour a day. This secretariat should take the necessary political initiatives in between meetings of the Politburo and make sure that decisions taken by itself, by the Politburo, and by the Central Committee are carried out.
b) Organizing commissions (organizational work, agitprop, trade union work, factory work, management of the newspaper, finances, etc.) and putting at the head of each a member of the Politburo or the Central Committee. To fill these commissions, call on party comrades according to theft inclinations and abilities. Each member of a commission ought to have one particular task determined on the basis of the commission’s plan of work and according to the needs that may arise between meetings. The leadership of the POT ought not to hesitate to call on new forces, even if they are inexperienced.
c) Drawing up the proper limits of the tasks of Politburo and Central Committee members, thus avoiding overlapping on the jobs of others.
d) Making sure that all comrades in the different party bodies (regional committees, branches) each have their specific job to do from week to week, on the basis of each body’s plan of work.
e) Organizing well prepared meetings of branch functionaries and general membership meetings, all having as their purpose some precise activity to be carried out. (Reports worked out in advance, brief and precise, and with concrete proposals for work to be done.)
f) Publishing a political and organizational weekly circular addressed to the secretaries of all party bodies; a monthly internal bulletin at the service of internal democracy in the organization. The work of getting out these circulars and internal bulletins should be done at the International Secretariat in order to enable U to supervise the activity of the POL.
g) Guaranteeing a special fund for the fulltime functionary. The Financial Situation
The POI’s financial situation has always been very bad. The dues are either not paid at all, or if they are, it is just by luck, without supervision by the leadership. The leadership has as its duty the choosing of a serious national treasurer who will be active and vigilant. In this way all the comrades will form the habit of paying their dues regularly, and the branch treasurers of also paying regularly that part of the dues which goes into the national treasury. The national treasury’s vigilance should be demonstrated by the periodic publication of nonfulfillments in a monthly treasurer’s report sent out to the whole organization. In this way anyone who will not pay his dues regularly should after due warning have his membership in the POI cut off.
The system of pledges provided by each member’s special dues requires the national treasurer’s extremely close attention; this system will be reinforced and added to by the party’s improving its work and activity, a thing that will produce a great resurgence of revolutionary devotion and the spirit of sacrifice. It is equally necessary to organize systematically the collection of funds from sympathizers and friends.
The national treasurer’s task is thus to energize the financial commission, to divide up the various tasks, supervise their execution and point out to the party any failures to carry them out.
The Lutte Quvriere
The Lutte Quvriere, in trying to become a socalled “mass newspaper,” has become too superficial—indeed, even boring. The stupid ideology held on this subject was such that certain party members even objected to publishing Trotsky’s articles sometimes on the grounds that they were too long and incomprehensible for the masses, sometimes that they were too violent against the Stalinists. The editorship, especially at the beginning, was thereby paralyzed by the fear of falling under the blows of such criticisms. A certain improvement in recent months, from this point of view, ought to be noted.
The result has been that there has been an alienation from La Lutte of those vanguard readers who used to find in our organ serious revolutionary news from the national and international point of view as well as an instrument for Marxist education which took daily events as a starting point. Working class readers found no substantial answer to their troubles in its hastily edited articles. Our organ thus abandoned its mission as an educator of the cadres and builder of the Fourth International.
Furthermore it is apparent that the articles in La Lutte were often written without much attention either to form or content. The language is not the result of a conscious effort to adapt the articles to the workers’ concerns; and is on that very account abstract and devoid of straightforwardness. It is important to remedy this state of affairs as quickly as possible, the more so inasmuch as a serious organization of this work would make it possible to obtain fruitful results, in view of the possibilities in this field.
First of all, it is necessary to fight against the stupid and primitive ideology which has crept in under the borrowed label of “mass newspaper.” It is time to learn the lesson of the French experience on this point, in the spirit of the excellent brochure by our lamented Comrade Erwin Wolf. A real mass newspaper is one which tries to take as its starting point daily happenings, to bring explanations of them and slogans about them to the workers, and first of all to the advanced workers, to the vanguard. The basis of the news should be objective events in the factories, on the farms, etc., up-to-date national and international political news, clearly expressed and analyzed. But this aim is above all interrelated with the aim of the party itself: to forge cadres, provide the explanation of the situation, and not to stop at merely agitational slogans which, lacking explanation and political generalization, are powerless to make the best workers understand the Fourth International’s reason for existence, just at the moment when, disgusted with bureaucrats and with the Popular Front, they are looking for a new way out. In the second place, the editing of La Lutte must be completely reorganized to facilitate supervision by the International on the one hand and the rank and file on the other. One means of supervision will be the giving up of anonymity, with the exception of the editorial and of certain party articles. Subjects [departments] will be divided among various members, and the leading articles will be signed, either with names or with pseudonyms. By its supervision the editorship will press for a deeper study of questions and for specialization. It shall be arranged to have one day to intervene between the delivery of the articles to the editors and their delivery to the printer, to allow correction and selection. Failures will be communicated to the entire party. Each local group of the Parisian Region shall be permitted to send a delegate to the plenary meeting of the editorial board. Thus every time that a certain spirit of “ the hell with it” camouflaged itself behind the spirit of collective anonymous communism, recourse was had to the old procedures for supervision and competition. Finally the editorship shall make a deliberate effort to adapt its language to that of the workers and peasants. It is true that only stubborn and fruitful work in the factories and trade unions, involving practical collaboration in the vanguard organ by workers who are actually engaged in the struggle, can produce a really radical change in the paper’s language and tone. Nevertheless, far from merely waiting passively for this change, which is properly the work of the party, the editors in reporting the daily events and the lessons of the struggle should systematically try to obtain the direct participation of those who are taking part in that struggle, with all their interests and language. In a word, the organ of the POI is its material instrument for agitation, information, education, i. e., the building of the Fourth International.
To keep up its regular weekly appearance is an absolute duty.
Newspaper Management
Despite certain individual efforts, it can be said that on the whole the leadership let the whole administrative and financial work of the paper fall on one single administrative functionary, without creating around the commission of management that spirit of “permanent mobilization” of the whole party which would have enabled it to find financial resources and material aid. The result has been that financial stability based on pledges has been progressively endangered, and that on the other hand material aids in administrative tasks failed one by one.
Taking into account the putting into practice of the financial measures recommended above, the leadership of the POT should take the running of the paper in hand as a cardinal task, draw up a plan of reorganization on the occasion of the party convention, have the branches discuss it, appeal to their spirit of emulation and devotion; guarantee the daily supervision of the execution of these tasks, and the public nature of this supervision, throughout the entire party. It is necessary within three months from the date of the convention to undertake a campaign to double the number of subscribers and readers. And this is a matter, not so much of offering prizes, as of having good articles and good documentary investigations.
The Magazine: La Quatrieme Internationale
The progress made in this field consists in the very existence of the magazine. That fact in itself is already a success for the POI. The magazine, the theoretical arm of the Fourth International, must also apply itself to the task of carrying contents adapted to the problems of union struggles, the problems of recent events, and to specifically workers’ union problems. Thus it will become not only an arm of theoretical and ideological clarification, but also a fighting weapon that can be used by the present cadres of the labor movement.
To reach this goal, a serious editorial committee should function with regularity, and be under the supervision of the Central Committee.
Trade Union Work This is the part of the party’s activity that deserves the greatest care and the maximum concentration and specialization of those forces which the party has at its disposal, without withdrawing them from the performance of those other important organizational tasks which may not have a direct connection with their specific trade union work. While one notes fragmentary and episodic efforts in this direction, the fact must nevertheless be noted that it is today this branch of the party’s activity which has been the most abandoned and left to itself without directives. The trade union work of the POT requires a total reorganization of the party’s activity, beginning with the leadership. It is here that we shall have the greatest success if the work is properly organized. This shall be the task of the Trade Union Commission.
Factory Work Since June 1936 the POT has felt the need of directing its forces towards work in the factories. Together with the straight trade union work, it is there that the party should stand forth as a fighting weapon of the working class.
The accomplishments already made in this work allow it to be noted in the activity of the POI branches as the principal task. But the lack of directed trade union work has failed to make the development of the workers’ struggles and the exact understanding of their demands really living subjects in the party. Thus it comes about that, with its weak forces, the POI has weak connections in the factories work insufficiently tied up with the workers’ day-to-day lives.
The Struggle Against Provocateurs
The honesty of the present leadership of the POI has enabled it to fight back against various provocations that might have cost the party its life.
In estimating the’weaknesses of the POI one must also take into account the fact that it has been the party most aimed at by the enemy; but that is only an additional reason for requiring it to have a rigorous and serious organization, which is the best weapon in the fight against provocateurs. In the second place the POT must see to the creation of special bodies for vigilance against the enemy as well as for the protection of militants, especially leading functionaries and the entire party.
Conclusions
The International Conference expresses its confidence in the possibilities of a radical rectification of the activity and the organization of the Fourth International’s French section. It has paid particular attention to the French organization’s situation because it considers that it is in this country that the interest of the socialist revolution has at the moment principally concentrated. It notes the resolution of the POI leadership tending to put into practice one of the essential bases of Bolshevism, revolutionary professionalism (the choosing of full-time functionaries), and to reorganize the whole party in accordance with a system of rigorous work.
By an enthusiastic application of the conference’s directives, the POI will go forward. It will draw a rigorous line of demarcation between its ranks and fair-weather revolutionary amateurs. Centrist political and trade union organizations will thus witness the disappearance of one of the principal causes for their development: the organizational weakness of the French section of the Fourth International. But if, in spite of the most favorable symptoms and possibilities which justify a strong hope of successful rectification, the POI does not succeed in surmounting its grave organizational deficiencies, then a policy, however abstractly correct, will not succeed in wiping out the temporary successes of political and trade union centrism.
Lastly, the conference, putting internationalism into practical effect, decides to guarantee regular financial aid to the POI from those sections which are in a position to cooperate,
in order that the French section may get its paper out with regularity and assure the functioning of its activities and its organizational work according to the general measures herein recommended. The International Conference asks the Central Committee of the POI while taking into account previous experience and concrete facts, to take these general measures as bases in working out a detailed plan of reorganization, and to concentrate thereupon the attention and the discussion of its national convention.
Factory Work Since June 1936 the POT has felt the need of directing its forces towards work in the factories. Together with the straight trade union work, it is there that the party should stand forth as a fighting weapon of the working class.
The accomplishments already made in this work allow it to be noted in the activity of the POI branches as the principal task. But the lack of directed trade union work has failed to make the development of the workers’ struggles and the exact understanding of their demands really living subjects in the party. Thus it comes about that, with its weak forces, the POI has weak connections in the factories work insufficiently tied up with the workers’ day-to-day lives.
The Struggle Against Provocateurs
The honesty of the present leadership of the POI has enabled it to fight back against various provocations that might have cost the party its life.In estimating the’weaknesses of the POI one must also take into account the fact that it has been the party most aimed at by the enemy; but that is only an additional reason for requiring it to have a rigorous and serious organization, which is the best weapon in the fight against provocateurs. In the second place the POT must see to the creation of special bodies for vigilance against the enemy as well as for the protection of militants, especially leading functionaries and the entire party.
Conclusions
The International Conference expresses its confidence in the possibilities of a radical rectification of the activity and the organization of the Fourth International’s French section. It has paid particular attention to the French organization’s situation because it considers that it is in this country that the interest of the socialist revolution has at the moment principally concentrated. It notes the resolution of the POI leadership tending to put into practice one of the essential bases of Bolshevism, revolutionary professionalism (the choosing of full-time functionaries), and to reorganize the whole party in accordance with a system of rigorous work.By an enthusiastic application of the conference’s directives, the POI will go forward. It will draw a rigorous line of demarcation between its ranks and fair-weather revolutionary amateurs. Centrist political and trade union organizations will thus witness the disappearance of one of the principal causes for their development: the organizational weakness of the French section of the Fourth International. But if, in spite of the most favorable symptoms and possibilities which justify a strong hope of successful rectification, the POI does not succeed in surmounting its grave organizational deficiencies, then a policy, however abstractly correct, will not succeed in wiping out the temporary successes of political and trade union centrism.
Lastly, the conference, putting internationalism into practical effect, decides to guarantee regular financial aid to the POI from those sections which are in a position to cooperate,
in order that the French section may get its paper out with regularity and assure the functioning of its activities and its organizational work according to the general measures herein recommended. The International Conference asks the Central Committee of the POI while taking into account previous experience and concrete facts, to take these general measures as bases in working out a detailed plan of reorganization, and to concentrate thereupon the attention and the discussion of its national convention.
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