From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-When Tito was a Revolutionary, according to Pierre Frank and Gérard Bloch

 

 

Markin comment:
Every once in a while it is beneficial to go back to the archives to see what our political forebears were up to. And since we are very much in a period where the study of Marxist classics, and socialist concepts in general, is on the order of the day Trotsky, a central leader of world socialism in the first half of the 20th century, has something to tell us about how to organize those inquiries.
********
Alfred Rosmer

THE PARIS MILITANT
Published: Fourth International, Autumn 1959
Trotsky stayed in France at various periods, but it was only during the two years he spent in Paris during the First World War that he could operate as a militant free to move about as well as to speak and write. That freedom was only relative, because it was that of the state of siege and censorship, but in that he was in the same boat as the French themselves, and what may here seem paradoxical is easily explained by reference to what the situation then was. In Vienna, where he had been living at that period, Russia’s entry into war had made him an enemy alien, whereas in France the “alliance” protected him, while at the same time Paris would be for him the best combat post in the hard struggle for the defense of socialism. Experience showed that this reasoning was correct: for nearly two years he was able to battle just as much among the French workers as in the emigré circles. If it all ended badly – by expulsion – there also Trotsky shared the fate of his French comrades at a time when the growth of opposition to war worried the government and led it to take open measures of repression. In his case, Petrograd was giving orders to Paris, for the expulsion, several times requested already, was finally demanded – in which Stalin was later to repeat Czarist policy, and on two occasions.

On his way toward France, Trotsky’s first stop-over was Zurich. He lingered there, staying three months, so warm and encouraging was the welcome he received from the section of the Socialist Party. In those first days of August, the Swiss socialists were, like those of all countries, overwhelmed by the collapse of the International; but, not being involved in mobilization, they were all there, especially the youth, discussing, trying to understand the meaning of the war amid the confusion created and maintained by rival propaganda. Trotsky brought them the stimulant they needed to keep clear heads. Like them he had gone through the German school of socialism: its Social-Democracy was not a party of the International but the party par excellence – one more reason for fighting mercilessly against the betrayal of its chiefs. Their collapse was a tragedy and, at first glance, the outlook was very sombre; that might lead to erroneous conclusions. But what was this war? A clash of imperialisms, of two great formations of antagonists. Of course, but there was a deeper and general meaning: the war marked the revolt of the forces of production against the outdated political form of the nation and the state; and, as the Socialist Parties were in fact national parties, they collapsed with it. Conclusion: all efforts to save the Second International would be useless; it was not socialism, however, that had collapsed, but its temporary external historic form.

An eyewitness, a member of the section and a participant in these discussions, Fritz Brupbacher, wrote later that, with Trotsky’s arrival at Zurich, life was renewed in the workers’ movement, and that his influence had such a power of attraction that they wanted to give him the mandate to represent the section at the next congress of the party. Though Switzerland. would have afforded him a less exposed place of refuge, it was in the heart of a France at war that Trotsky wanted to settle: he wrote in haste a pamphlet in which, under the title Der Krieg und die Internationale, he assembled and developed the ideas that he had just been setting forth to the Zurich socialists, a pamphlet that was so substantial and still so timely that in 1918 an enterprising American publisher made a whole book out of its translation into English.

In Paris there was another paradox: it was through the Vie Ouvière, a revolutionary syndicalist organ, that Trotsky’s liaison, neither ephemeral nor accidental, with the workers’ movement, functioned. Yet there was a Socialist Party there that persisted in calling itself the “French Section of the Workers’ International” but when Trotsky, for a specific purpose, went to the offices of the party’s daily newspaper, he there found its leaders, Cachin among others, going along with the current as usual, therefore ultra-chauvinist; after a few useless attempts at discussion, they made it clear to him that he was an undesirable: they expelled him from l’Humanité before rejoicing to see him later expelled from France by Briand.

As soon as he had found a possible boarding-house – in the Pare Montsouris neighborhood, one of the emigré quarters of Paris – he sent for his family, Natalia and the two sons Leon and Sergei, to join him; from then on he could organize his activity in such a way as to be able to carry out successfully what was going to be his triple task. The articles that he was sending to the Kievskaia Mysl obliged him to follow closely both French politics and military operations: he was a skilled newspaper-reader, and quickly understood what each represented and what must be expected of it. As for parliamentary life, it was then so limited, so non-existent, that the government had to be sought out rather at Chantilly (General Headquarters) than at Paris. But his articles also gave him the opportunity of making research field trips throughout France, of meeting socialist and trade-union militants, of sounding out the state of mind of the average Frenchman: conversations with a Liège anarchist had enabled him to learn about and give an exact description of the resistance movement that had set a notable part of the population – and even the anarchists – against the German troops.

The main work of the day was, naturally, Nashé Slovo, the newspaper, and the group that gravitated round it. The editors met every morning at the printshop in the rue des Feuillantines to discuss that day’s issue and prepare tomorrow’s, on the basis of information that came in, and of discussions about the conceptions defended by the various tendencies of Russian socialism, of polemics with the “defensists” and also with Lenin, who, from Geneva, was defending his own position with vigor and even brutality. Martov, right from the beginning, had been, before Trotsky’s arrival, a sort of editor-in-chief; his anti-war attitude had helped to bring him close to the other sectors of the opposition. It did not correspond however, to that of the majority of the Mensheviks whose representative to the International Socialist Bureau he was; he was embarrassed thereby, to the extent of being unable to accept having certain questions even raised and discussed such as that of a new International. The clashes with Trotsky grew gradually more frequent and sharp, and as it was evident that Trotsky better expressed the conceptions of the paper’s editorship, Martov resigned and left for Switzerland.

It was through him that the first contact had been made between the Russian socialists in Paris and the centre of opposition, then numerically tiny, represented by the Vie Ouvière; a letter he had written to Gustave Hervé, which the latter had published, had been the occasion for their meeting. And it was he also who announced to us the forthcoming arrival of Trotsky and who brought him around as soon as he did arrive. We used to meet in the evening, once a week, and when our little group was reinforced by these new allies, our horizon, until then sombre, lightened up. With Trotsky and Martov there came Dridzo-Losovsky, long settled in Paris, and a Polish socialist, Lapinsky. When, one evening, the Swiss socialist, Grimm, accompanied them, there could be conceived a rebirth of proletarian internationalism, and we already began arrangements which ensured us serious international liaisons, since, through the Swiss, it would he possible for us to remain in contact with the German opposition.

Of these meetings Raymond Lefebvre painted a faithful picture in the preface to L’Eponge de vinaigre. They were kept up all winter, but were abruptly ended when the government profited by a revision of draft exemptions to call up all known oppositionals who had escaped conscription and send them to the armies. At that moment the idea of an international conference had already taken sufficiently specific form so that practical preparations for holding it were being thought out. It was known that inside the French Socialist Party discontent was growing against the nationalist and pro-government policy which the leadership was integrally imposing on the party; a manifestation of this discontent and its importance was the position taken by one of the best provincial federations, that of the Haute-Vienne, and rendered public by a report signed by all the federations’ elected office-holders. The socialists of Nashé Slovo hastened to make contact with some of them who happened to be in Paris. Meetings were held at Dridzo’s place: they were not very encouraging, for the Limousins, though very firm in their criticism of the betrayal of socialism, shied away when we talked about the action that must be taken, obsessed by fear of a split, which they absolutely refused to face. The arrival in Paris of the Italian socialist Morgari, in search of participants in the future international conference, brought about the last meeting. Trotsky has amusingly described in My Life how, when Morgari suddenly spoke of underground activity, the worthy Limousins hastened to disappear. It was impossible to think of adding to the French delegation: Merrheim and Bourderon remained alone to represent the opposition, though, for that period, they represented it very well, even if they refused, despite Trotsky’s friendly insistence, to go further than their resolution at the confederal conference, which had, however, become insufficient, for it no longer corresponded to a situation that events were changing every day.

At Zimmerwald, the already known tendencies became specific. Lenin wanted acts: refusal of war credits by the Socialist parliamentarians; preparation of the new International; appeals to the workers for anti-war demonstrations. As against this clearly defined programme, the Italians set up a waiting policy: they refused to consider that the Second International was dead already; they wished for a rapprochement with the German centre (Kautsky-Bernstein) ; that was also the position of the Mensheviks. Trotsky was in agreement with Lenin (except on the question of defeatism), but he was in a position to understand better than Lenin what it was possible to ask of the conference at that stage: his Paris activity had permitted him to measure the strength of the opposition; in the same way, through his contacts with Grimm and Morgari, he knew exactly the current conceptions of the Swiss and Italian leaderships, of whom it could not be said that they did not represent the feelings of the rank and file. His speeches seemed so convincing that, at the end of the discussions, he was entrusted with the task of drafting the manifesto, which all the delegates approved. Lenin was not entirely satisfied, but that did not prevent him from considering that it was “a step forward,” and that one could be satisfied with that much for the moment.

This fortunate outcome of the conference was going to permit Trotsky to find in France a base for his activity. The manifesto restored confidence, and the opposition, till then skeletonic and dispersed, penetrated into the workers’ movement. A committee had been created for the revival of international relations; its plenary meetings brought together a growing number of militants; one of its most active members was Trotsky, who soon dominated it. Its secretary was Merrheim; with the Metal-Workers’ Federation behind him, he had, right from the beginning, courageously carried on the fight against the confederation’s leadership; now he became too prudent, already disturbed at seeing the committee drive further than he had decided to go. And so he opposed all proposals made by Trotsky to carry the activity of the committee out into public, taking up again at every session his suggestion for creating a Bulletin, indispensable for the committee’s own life, for circulating information verbally communicated during the meetings which it was important to take down and make known to all those who, in the trade unions and in the Socialist sections, were beginning to break away from the lies and illusions by which they had been lulled in order to drag them into the war. Merrheim resisted, grew impatient when he saw the ascendancy that Trotsky was winning over the assembly, but he could do nothing against his clear comments on events, fed by an exceptional experience, against a well-reasoned revolutionary optimism that carried conviction. At the end of the meetings, militants of all tendencies, socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, approached Trotsky, questioning him about points which were not yet clear to them; dates were arranged to permit continuing such fruitful conversations. One of them, F. Loriot, a member of the Socialist Party, definitively won over to the opposition, whose leadership he was to take within the party, wrote a pamphlet whose contents he had studied out with Trotsky, Les socialistes de Zimmerwald et la guerre, which took its place among the clandestine publications of the committee.

The Czarist government could not understand how an ally could allow a newspaper like Nashé Slovo to he published on its territory. On several occasions it had asked that the paper be suppressed and its editors imprisoned. The operation was difficult, being contrary to the policy of the French government at that period, when the Socialist ministers were explaining that persecution of the opposition could only aid it by making it better known – much better to stifle it by censorship. A grave incident that took place among the Russian detachments brought to France at the request of the French government was to he the occasion of an intervention that was this time decisive. The soldiers of this detachment were subjected, in France, to a regime that the surroundings rendered unbearable; the officers treated them like brute beasts. A soldier, slapped in the face by a colonel, retorted with such ardour that death ensued. Nashé Slovo, declared responsible, was immediately prohibited, and an order of expulsion announced to Trotsky. Different interventions enabled him to gain a little time and to try to choose the place to which he was to be deported. All was in vain. The family was then living in the Gobelins quarter, quite close to the hall of the Reine-Blanche, where there had taken place the deeply moving August 1914 meeting at which the various Russian parties tore one another apart, the “defensists” signing enlistment papers in the French army. It was here that two policemen came to take him and conduct him to the Spanish border. But even from Cadiz, where he was stopping temporarily, Trotsky found the means of participating once more in the committee for the revival of international relations, and precisely on the occasion of the pamphlet that he had prepared with Loriot. The growing influence of Zimmerwald had led the minorityites in the Socialist Party to organize themselves on an extremely moderate basis, their position not being essentially differenciable from that of the chauvinists of the leadership, of which they denounced only the “excesses.” This semiopposition represented a danger; there was a risk that it would get some Zimmerwaldists to make a bloc with it against the leadership – which the pamphlet had foreseen. And so complaints arose from the minorityite members, accusing the Zimmerwaldists of “dividing” the opposition. One of these criticisms was communicated to Trotsky, who replied immediately: “Political forces are not ‘divided’ by clarity any more than they are added together by confusion. Three viewpoints, three motions: clarity is political honesty.” And so ended, in an exceptional prolongation, his career as a Paris militant.

 

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. 
********

When Tito was a Revolutionary, according to Pierre Frank and Gérard Bloch

The following piece was published in the French weekly Lutte Ouvrière, no.149, 6-12 July 1971, and appears in English translation for the first time, with their kind permission. It illustrates the lack of comprehension by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International of the phenomenon of the spread of Stalinism in the post-war world, as well as the illusions it entertained with regard to it. A much more critical view was to be found among the British Section, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which in 1948 published a pamphlet by Ted Grant and Jock Haston, Behind the Stalin-Tito Clash, (cf. Al Richardson and Sam Bornstein, War and the International, London 1986, pp.212, 218-21, 232-3, and Ted Grant, The Unbroken Thread, London 1989, pp.251-5).
It was this political orientation that impelled Natalia Trotsky to break from the International Secretariat in a letter she published in Max Shachtman’s Labor Action on 11 June 1951, of which the most accessible copy is to be found in Natalia Trotsky and the Fourth International, London, 1972, which also includes the reply of Michel Pablo, Ernest Mandel and Pierre Frank of the International Secretariat, which first appeared in Quatrième Internationale, Volume 9, nos.5-7, May-July 1951. It was reprinted along with other documents on the occasion of Natalia’s funeral, by Grandizo Munis in Aujourd’hui comme Hier, in Paris in 1962.
Other useful background reading to the events alluded to here includes Ian Birchall, Workers Against the Monolith, London 1974, chapter 4, The Stalin-Tito Split, pp.48-52; Milovan Djilas, Tito: the Story from the Inside, London 1981; Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, London 1975, chapter 7, The Yugoslav Breach, pp.480-548, and Adam Westoby, Communism Since World War II, Brighton, 1981, pp.69-72. Still good for a laugh are James Klugmann’s From Trotsky to Tito, London 1951, and Derek Kartun’s Tito’s Plot Against Europe, London, 1949.

In the years 1948-50 the comrades of the official Trotskyist organisations assigned to Tito the part they did not hesitate to ascribe to others afterwards: Castro, Che Guevara or Ho Chi Minh. Thus it was that the official Fourth International, the international organisation whose heritage in France today is shared between the Ligue Communiste, the OCI and the AMR [1] put out at this time the most adulatory material about so-called ‘Yugoslav Socialism’. The following few extracts from the magazine Quatrième Internationale will convey a slight impression of the passing infatuation of these comrades for Tito and his associates.
Although the attitude of the Fourth International was favourable towards Tito in 1948 (Quatrième Internationale, August-September 1948) it was prudent, nonetheless:

The class struggle is continuing in Yugoslavia, and it is organically connected to the international class struggle. Until now the Yugoslav leadership represented the bureaucratic deformation of a plebeian current that was anti-capitalist and revolutionary. But in conditions of isolation, of inevitable internal difficulties, and of increased pressure from imperialism, tomorrow this bonapartist apparatus can become the mouthpiece of reactionary forces without knowing it. There is only one way forward against the fate of elimination by the direct agents of the Kremlin or capitulation in the face of imperialism: to place its confidence in the hands of the Yugoslav and world masses; to rely entirely upon them; to install real democracy in both party and country; to break with Stalinism and denounce it; to call for a real Socialist revolution by and for the masses in the Buffer Zone [2], in Europe, and the world.

But despite all, the militants of the PCI thought it necessary to offer advice to the leading Yugoslav ‘comrades’:

Your duty as well as your self-interest is to lift the analysis of your dispute with the Cominform to the level of real ideological reasons, which are linked to the nature of Stalinism. In this way alone can you equip your party and the Yugoslav masses to resist the formidable assault unleashed against you by the Kremlin, which is now seeking to destroy you. Bureaucrats rely for their defence only upon the police apparatus. Revolutionaries above all rely upon the political and ideological mobilisation of the masses. Which of these ways will you choose?

Yugoslav Communists!

It is necessary to advance. It is necessary to confront Stalin with the real face of revolutionary Marxism!

An article of the same date by Pierre Frank on the “ideological evolution” of the YCP [3]:

In fact the Stalinist system has cracked in the face of the development of the revolution in Yugoslavia ... the theoretical progress accomplished in so short a time by the Yugoslav Communist Party is proof at one and the same time of the power of the revolutionary movement in Yugoslavia and one of the best defences of the Communists of that country against the dual pressure of imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy.

The tone becomes even more warm from the pen of Gérard Bloch (one of the present leaders of OCI) in the issue for March/April 1950:

The greatest merit of the Fourth International for the historian of the future will be that, alone among all trends of world public opinion, from the open rupture of the Cominform with Tito it understood the profound significance – the class content – of the event, and more than a year in advance of any other working class tendency resolutely pronounced in favour of unconditional support to the Peoples’ Federal Republic of Yugslavia, and of the YCP, against the Cominform.

And yet more, from the pen of Gérard Bloch:

With good reason we can perceive in the Yugoslav revolution the distant echo of the Bolshevik October of Lenin and Trotsky, deafened and deformed by 20 years of Stalinist counter-revolution. As for passing judgement upon revolutionary organisations, the attitude taken towards Yugoslavia could become a crucial test, as was the attitude taken up towards the October Revolution for the last 30 years ... The Russian Revolution was the springboard from which the Third International launched itself into history. The Yugoslav Revolution could become the springboard from which the Fourth International leaps forward to the conquest of the masses.

Infatuation for the Yugoslavia of Tito was such in the official Trotskyist milieu that ‘youth brigades’ were created on the spot and sent to help Tito construct Socialism! Quatrième Internationale magazine for May/July 1950 mentions “the success encountered in France and several other European countries by the campaign of the Committees for sending youth brigades to Yugoslavia, a step that can be weighty with consequences. That is the most striking indication of what the Yugoslav revolution has contributed to assisting the formation of a mass movement that will help to shift the most extensive mass currents from the path of Stalinism into the path of the revolution.”
And yet again in the same issue:

From the standpoint of the revolutionary programme, the Yugoslav revolution – whatever paths it may follow in future – has supplied incontestable proof of the programme elaborated by the Bolshevik-Leninists under the leadership of Trotsky ... Now there is an entire party and an entire state breaking with Stalinism and carrying on the revolutionary struggle, which far from rediscovering in reaction to Stalinism what might be many revisionist concepts created by theoreticians bereft of any responsibility in the class struggle, has recreated whole chunks of the Trotskyist programme ... And that is why this 28 June 1948, from which the Yugoslav revolution has begun its onward march by breaking with the Kremlin, will remain an unforgettable date in the history of the international working class movement.

And once more, in an account of the eighth session of the Executive Committee of the Fourth International in the same issue of May/July 1950:

By completely distancing itself in its understanding of the crisis of Stalinism from all other currents which, lacking any serious theoretical basis, have shown proof of confusionism and the greatest sectarianism in this instance, our movement has factually demonstrated that it is the most sensitive to the really revolutionary tendencies that arise from the different experiences in the mass movement, and that it is capable at the same time of understanding them and adopting a proper attitude towards them in order to assist their progress towards the basic positions of revolutionary Marxism.

When the Korean War broke out on 25 June 1950, and immediately Tito’s Yugoslavia wholeheartedly sided in the UNO with the USA and supported the United Nations’ military intervention, the comrades of the PCI altered their attitude towards Yugoslavia. Any serious theoretical justification? None.
All that we find instead of a political explanation are lamentations of this type in a succession of articles in the magazine Quatrième Internationale (November 1950/January 1951);

One of the basic hallmarks of the Imperialist Epoch is sudden changes in a situation that is in perpetual and rapid evolution. It is more difficult than ever for human knowledge and understanding to follow the rhythm of objective evolution and adapt itself to its requirements and lessons, and this flows from this feature inherent in the nature of contemporary reality. The evolution of Yugoslavia is a significant example of this proposition.

Notes

1. AMR ’ Alliance Marxiste Revolutionnaire ’ the French section of the international grouping led by Michel Pablo.
2. This was the term used by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International for the countries of Eastern Europe dominated by the Soviet Union. In 1948 it still maintained that they were capitalist states.
3. Yugoslav Communist Party.