A Constant Opportunism

8/22/2019 A Constant Opportunism

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A Constant Opportunism

The Fourth International in

France:from the POI to the PC1

We reprint the following excerpt as a contrast to

the summary of the activity of the French

Trotskyists during the War provided by the account

by Rodolphe Prager. It represents the view of the

largest of the French Trotskyist organisations

today, but which only consisted of some sevenmembers during thefirst partof the Second World

War.

After some years on the Central Committee of the

POI, the official section of the Fourth International

in France, the Romanian militant Barta (David

Korner) decided that the French Trotskyist

movement was incapable of breaking with its petit-bourgeois class composition and practices and of

building an organisation of disciplined

revolutionaries within the working class, and set up

a new organisation in October 1939, which later

became the Union Communiste. It turned its entire

energies to the factories, where it distributed its

bulletin,La Lutte des Classes regularly from

October 1942 onwards. By April 1947 it was so well

established that it led an important strike in

Renault, which resulted in the expulsion of the

Communist Party from the government when it

failed to control it. By the 1960s it was distributing

regular bulletins in dozens of factories as well as

publishing a weekly newspaper, Voix

Ouvrire (laterLutte Ouvrire). It played a

most important part in the leadership of the strike

of theFrench railway workers in 1987.


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The extract below is translated from Les

problemes du parti mondial de la Rvolution et la

Reconstruction de la IVe Internationale,Expos du

Cercle Leon Trotsky, 28 February 1966, pp.5-11,

thefull textof which was first published in English

by Richard Stephenson inDocuments on the

History of the Fourth International No.1,

Problems of the World Party of the

Revolution and the Reconstruction of the

Fourth International, London 1977. The full text

ofLa Verit from which these extracts are taken

can be consulted inLa Verit 1940-1944.

Journal trotskyste clandestin souslOccupation nazie, edited by J.M. Brabant, M.

Dreyfus and J. Pluet, Paris, 1978, and, by contrast,

the bulletin of the Union Communiste during the

same period inLa Lutte des Classes: Numros

clandestins de lOccupation, Paris 1971.

But it is not for pleasure that we remain outside

this organisation and that we had refused, at the

unification of the French Trotskyist groups in

February 1944, to place ourselves within the PCI that

had just been born, nor was it, as these comrades

accused us of at the time, a case of manufacturing

divergences to justify our autonomy. It was for

precise political reasons that we will return to today.

First of all, some comrades may be amazed that we

should go back so far. This refers simply to the factthat our analysis begins from the foundation of the

Fourth International and ends towards the 1950s,

whereas other comrades take the period 1952-53 as a

basis for analysis. For us, at that time the Fourth

International had ceased to exist for some years as an

organisation of the revolutionary vanguard.

When our comrades left the POI (French section of

the Fourth International) in 1939, they wanted to


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distinguish themselves from an opportunist

organisation. As far as they were concerned it was a

matter of cutting themselves off from a petit

bourgeois milieu whose practices were Social

Democrat and not Communist. But at the time it was

a matter of a critique of the French section and not of

the totality of the organisations of the Fourth

International.

The declaration of war saw the complete collapse

of the French organisation of the Fourth

International. Little prepared for clandestinity, a

large number of militants found themselves inprison. The organisation dismantled itself.

In June 1940 the great majority of the elements of

the Fourth International, grouped in the Comits

francais pour une IVe Internationalecompletely

abandoned the internationalist position in favour of

a common front with all the French-thinking

elements and projected the creation of committees

of national vigilance. In the Bulletin du Comit

pour la IVe Internationale No.2 (20 September

1940) these comrades brought out the report

adopted unanimously by the Central Committee of

the Comit pour la IVe Internationale. Here are

some extracts from it:

The French bourgeoisie has rushed

into a blind alley. To save itself fromrevolution, it threw itself into Hitlers

arms. To save itself from this hold, it has

only to throw itself into the arms of the

revolution. We are not saying that it will

do so cheerfully, nor that the faction of

the bourgeoisie capable of playing this

game is the most important: the

majority of the bourgeoisie secretly

awaits its salvation from England, a


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large minority awaits it from Hitler. It is

to the French faction of the

bourgeoisie that we hold out our hand

*******

However our policy on this plane

must above all be orientated to that

faction of the bourgeoisie that above all

wants to be French, whichfeels that it

can only look for its salvation from the

popular masses, that is capable of giving

rise to a petit bourgeois nationalist

movement, capable of playing the card

of the revolution (from right or from

left, or eventually from right and from

left).

*******

We must be the defenders of the

wealth accumulated by generations ofthe peasants and workers of France. We

must also be the defenders of the

magnificent contribution of French

writers and scholars to the intellectual

heritage of humanity, defenders of the

great revolutionary and Socialist

traditions of France.

*******

Committees of National Vigilance

It is necessary to create organs of

national struggle. The Committees of

National Vigilance could either be

permanent organisms or and this

form corresponds more to thenecessities of the national struggle at


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the present necessarily illegal stage

could be temporary organisms

Some slogans: the number of national

slogans is infinite. We will only try hereto highlight some of them:

'Down with the pillage of French

wealth!

The corn that French peasants have

raised, the milk of the cows they reared;

the machines without which our

workers will be without work and

without bread; the laboratory apparatus

created by the genius of our scholars, all

this wealth must remain in France

Withdraw the German money! The

French people wishes to create by its

work real wealth, and not to be cast into

the misery of inflation

And during the war, La Verit, which successively

entitled itself a Bolshevik-Leninist organ, a

revolutionary Communist organ, the Central Organ

of the French Committees for the Fourth

International and the Organ of the POI, poured out

nationalist prose in the name of Trotskyism, took up

the slogans of the Committees of National Vigilance,

and proposed an alliance of all the parties that

wanted to defend the masses. Here, taking as

examples, are some extracts from La Verit:

La Verit No.2 (15 September 1940)

The Grain Office forecasts that 60 per

cent of the French cereal harvest will go

off to Germany.And the governmentsays nothing. Is this in agreement with


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Hitler to starve the French? Brother

peasant, oppose passive resistance to

requisitions, sell your corn only to make

bread for the women and children of

France.

La Verit No.8 (1 January 1941)

All those who struggle against the

oppressor and who are not workers

must understand that the support of

working class forces is necessary for the

success of the national liberation

struggle; that they must be assured of a

labour law that will interest them in the

defence and rebirth of the fatherland of

which they make up the strength.

What must the National Union be?

500,000 English engineers are asking

for the linking of their wages to the costof living. They are pointing out that the

price of food products has doubled

without a corresponding increase in

wages. In satisfying this just demand

the English government is beginning to

realise a real national solidarity against

German imperialism, by dividing the

weight equally between the differentclasses of the country and by defending

the interests of the English workers.

La Verit No. 11 (1 April 1941 )

We know like our predecessors of

1871 that we had to take up arms for the

national independence that was

betrayed by the bourgeoisie


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These are no longer internationalist positions, this

is nothing to do with Trotskyism.

The unification of the different Trotskyist groups

(POI, CCI, October Group) took place at thebeginning of 1944. The sponge was lightly passed

over the chauvinist positions of 1940; all was

forgotten; even better, they had always been right. In

a common POI-CCI bulletin of July 1943, it is

possible to read substantially that the POI had only

committed the fault of using certain dangerous

expressions in La Verit; the fundamental position

was not only correct but perspicacious, for the POIhad foreseen from 1940 the transformation of the

national movement into a class movement.

Thus complete betrayal of internationalism is

qualified as dangerous expressions. This is a

delicate euphemism that unfortunately conceals

something far more, for these comrades wrote in the

unity declaration that appeared in La Verit on 25

March 1944 that since the beginning of the war:

These organisations had developed in consequence

an international policy and activity and

furthermore; At this decisive moment the Fourth

International is regrouping its forces and correcting

its faults by means of a Bolshevik critique. The text

simply makes allusion to some episodic faults of this

or that grouping.

When in 1944 the French section of the Fourth

International not only refused to recognise its errors

but pretended that it had followed a correct line, it

was evident that this section had nothing Trotskyist

about it. As it was often to do later, the French

section invented a whole theoretical arsenal to justify

an opportunist practice: a national movement was

spoken about in 1940-in the twentieth century in an

imperialist country in which two distinct


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resistances were discovered, one bourgeois and the

other worker. This is what was written by our

comrades in February 1944:

To be able in a text explaining theofficial position to transform the

betrayal of the Fourth International

movement into a fairy, tale of Bolshevik

foresight (apart from some errors) the

ideological level of the POI must be

pretty low.

The pretexts invoked in a Stalinist

manner by the POI must be rejected

with disgust, whereby they blame their

own faults on the masses. From this

point of view it is typical that the POI-

CCM organisations should attribute the

collapse of the organisations of the

Fourth International in France to the

outbreak of the war, which

had isolatedthe vanguard from the

masses. Any revolutionary who did his

job during the Phoney War knows that

this is pure fantasy; on the contrary,

never had contact with the working

masses been more easy (and not only

with the working masses), never had the

masses been more disposed to accept

revolutionary propaganda

This attitude of the French section shows that in

the political sphere (the events of 1939) as well as in

that of principles (refusal of self-criticism, and self-

justification at any price), opportunism reigned as

master in its own house. For as far as we are

concerned, it is not a case of refusing to unite under

the pretext that the French section had made

mistakes and grave faults. But a certain number of


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the militants of this Section recognised these errors

but refused to admit to them in order not to injure

the fusion. This attitude showed that this

organisation had nothing Bolshevik about it, and that

it was no longer the vanguard that Trotsky had

wished to forge. And when after the war the Fourth

International approved of the policy of the French

section it was clear that it also was opportunist.

When the war ended, the French section was going

to continue its politics. It was characterised on the

domestic plane by tail-ending vis vis the PCF. In

the referendum of 21 October 1945 the PCI appealedfor a YES vote so that the Assembly would be a

Constituent one. It launched an appeal to the

Socialist Party and the Communist Party to form

committees to defend the Constituent Assembly, and

it demanded that the delegates should he elected and

revocable at any time. It wanted to sovietise more or

less the bourgeois Constituent. Then it practised a

policy of a left critique of the PCF, but absolutely not

a revolutionary critique. From the most notorious

nationalism, the PCI fell into the most vapid

electoralism. This, incidentally, didn't prevent these

comrades from regretting some months later the

persistence of parliamentary prejudices amongst the

masses.

And in the constitutional referendum of May 1946,

the PC1 once again made a bloc with the so-calledworkers parties in voting YES to the constitution.

And their argument was, to say the least, strange.

In fact, you could read in La Verit of 28 April

1946:

The Constituent sanctified

compensation of big businessmen for

firms nationalised and maintained


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imperialist exploitation of the colonial

peoples. It recognised as inviolable the

private property of the exploiters.

But it was necessary to vote YES to prevent thetriumph of reaction:

La Verit No. 120 (May 1946):

Since the MRP has made a bloc with

the bourgeois parties against the

workers parties by calling for a NO

vote in the referendum, it is necessary to

form a bloc with the latter to call for a

YES vote to prevent the plebiscite for

or against the PCF-PS from turning to

their advantage.

In the foreign sphere the same phenomenon of

tail-ending Stalinism can be witnessed not only on

the part of the French section but of the whole

International. The International as a whole wasseized with it, and the image of the French section

was only a faithful reflection of other sections.

If the April 1946 Conference of the Fourth

International called for the immediate withdrawal

of the forces of occupation (USA-France-Britain, as

regards Germany), it also refused the amendment of

the British section asking for the withdrawal of

Russian troops from the territories that they

occupied (IVe Internationale, December 1946).