The 21 June Socialist Worker, an issue geared for the SWP’s anti-BNP demo in London, was full of establishment anti-fascism, claiming that the BNP are not a “respectable” party and calling for an apolitical cross-class front against fascism. To this end, the paper included an article about the “hidden story” of West Indian people fighting for the Allies in World War II, as “revealed” by a new Imperial War Museum exhibition.
Simon Assaf tells us that “Over 10,000 West Indians volunteered to defend Britain against the Nazis”, neglecting to mention the imperialist character of the war on both sides. He makes no reference whatsoever to colonial exploitation in the British Empire, and in this vein uses the word "flowed" rather oddly in the sentence "Many people in the British empire took part in raising money to help the war effort – in addition to the extra taxes, raw materials and food that flowed from the colonies to support the war." Surely he means “were forcibly taken”.
Socialist Worker makes great play of the digging-deep the “war effort” required: but the fact that the West Indians were poor doesn't mean that when they got shipped off to Egypt to defend the British Empire from the Germans they were fighting the good fight. They had absolutely no control over the character, strategy and organisation of any aspect of the Allies’ "war effort". They were just cannon fodder for Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and de Gaulle. One could equally say that German soldiers were working-class and fought bravely: should we honour their "contribution"?
There is no mention of the 1934-39 strike wave in the British West Indies, the lack of free elections in such territories or indeed those peoples' demand for independence. West Indians are just portrayed as useful troops for Churchill, and the article is nothing but a long advertisement for an Imperial War Museum exhibition, i.e. an exhibition staged by a museum celebrating British imperialism. It is social-patriotism, pure and simple, and further evidence of the SWP’s complete lack of working-class political bearings.
Showing posts with label fascism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fascism. Show all posts
Monday, June 23, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Trotskyism in occupied France
I have translated the complete surviving collection of Arbeiter und Soldat, the clandestine paper produced by the French Trotskyists (Comités de la IVe Internationale) for Wehrmacht soldiers in 1943-44. It has been published as a supplement to the latest issue of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty paper Solidarity.
Click here to access the files. My introduction appears below.
By summer 1943 the Axis war machine was suffering heavy setbacks. Although Hitler had completed a full occupation of France in November 1942, and still held on to his conquests in the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and parts of western Russia, the Axis powers no longer looked able to win the war. The German defeat at Stalingrad, after months of exaggeration of Wehrmacht success in the Nazi media, and the subsequent loss of much of south-western Russia; the incompetence of the Italian army; the Allies’ conquest of North African and threatened landings in southern Italy; Japan’s defeats at the hands of the United States in the Pacific; Tito’s Yugoslav partisan movement which had taken control of much of Macedonia, southern Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of Slovenia; and the mounting French Resistance, led by Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party, were all bad omens for the Nazi leaders and their satraps.
Indeed, with increasing privations, bombings of cities and military disasters, there were significant stirrings of discontent in the Axis powers. Not only did high-up German officers initiate plots to remove Hitler in order to better manage the war effort (the closest-run, and final such attempt to do so was the well-known 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life by Claus von Stauffenberg), but in Rome the Fascist Grand Council actually voted 19-7 on 24 July 1943 to no-confidence Benito Mussolini, who was summoned to the King Victor Emmanuel III, arrested and taken to jail in an ambulance. This manoeuvre on the part of the King and the Marshal Pietro Badoglio was an attempted ‘revolution from above’ mounted to save the ruling class from the threat of working-class uprisings, after the huge strike waves in the industrial north starting in March 1943 including stoppages in major armaments plants in Milan and Turin to secure more evacuation allowances – the first big strikes since 1925. As the Partito Comunista Internazionalista commented in August:
“The bourgeoisie, the monarchy and the Church, who created and supported Fascism, who today are throwing Mussolini to the people to avoid going down with him, and who don democratic and populist clothes in order to continue the exploitation and oppression of the working class, have no right to say anything in today’s crisis. This right exclusively belongs to the working class, the peasants and the soldiers, the eternal victims of the imperialist octopus.”
The late World War II period is usually compared unfavourably to the wave of revolutionary struggles provoked by World War I (the February and October revolutions in the Russian empire; large anti-war demonstrations in Germany; and after the war the Bavarian soviet republic; the Hungarian soviet republic; and a series of revolutionary opportunities in Germany until 1923), contrary to Trotsky’s prediction that it would cause an even greater revolutionary crisis. However, during this period there were signs significant working-class struggles in several belligerent countries, including the efforts of the resurgent Italian workers’ movement; miners’ strikes in Britain and the United States; strikes tens of thousands strong against forced deportations in France and Belgium; the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; and small-scale mutinies in the German armed forces.
But for the most part working-class mobilisation was co-opted into the Allied war effort. Hundreds of thousands of workers who supported the Communist Parties of Europe, loyal as they were to Stalin’s Soviet Union, courageously devoted themselves to anti-occupation “resistance” armies led by bourgeois nationalists in the belief that it was the best way of fighting fascism. The hollowness of Stalin’s “anti-fascist” credentials was however made clear by his keenness for CPs to work alongside the same nationalists, generals and bankers who had helped the fascists crush the workers’ movements of Europe to start with. For example, he created in Moscow a “Committee for a Free Germany” mostly composed of ex-Nazi generals; along with the other Allies supposedly liberating Europe from fascism he left Franco in power in Spain and Salazar in Portugal; he betrayed his own supporters in Greece, who were then butchered by the monarchists’ allies, the British Army, at the end of that country’s Civil War; and he ordered the Italian CP to support the monarchy and lay down its weapons. Although this was in a sense nothing new – before the war the French CP leader Maurice Thorez had called on “patriotic” French fascists to join a “national front” against the Nazis – Stalin’s leading role in the stabilisation of European capitalism in the 1943-1945 period was a shock to some, with a 2,500-strong Stalinist formation Movimento Comunista d’Italia even breaking from the Italian CP under the impression that they were implementing Stalin’s “real” policies and that the local CP leader Palmiro Togliatti was being disloyal to Moscow!
The Communist Parties and Moscow, who still had enormous prestige among much of the world working class, were hostile to all strikes and any independent working-class action which might undermine the Allied war effort. The British Stalinist leader Harry Pollitt even proclaimed “today it is the class conscious worker who will cross the picket line”. Despite the USSR’s August 1939-June 1941 pact with Hitler to carve up Eastern Europe, Stalin’s imperialist ambitions were now completely intertwined with the war aims of the Allies – indeed, the “Soviet” empire would be a leading, if not the leading, beneficiary of the Allied victory, extending its grip over almost all of Eastern and Central Europe and seizing tens of billions of pounds worth of war reparations. The nationalist and anti-German chauvinist hysteria promoted by Moscow, which portrayed the war to the Russian people as just another chapter in the Slavs’ struggle against the Germans, must be seen as largely responsible for the vengeance exacted on the German people at the end of the war with hundreds of thousands of rapes of women and girls, the murder and leaving to starve of millions of civilians as well as organising huge population transfers. In France the Communist Party raised the slogans “everyone, united against the Krauts” and “everyone kill a Kraut”, refusing to draw any distinction between Nazi-led German imperialism and the working-class German conscripts in the Wehrmacht.
This monumental error was only replicated in part by the Trotskyist Fourth International, which had no truck whatsoever with the idea that workers in the Allied countries should cross picket lines to aid the USSR’s war effort or that the war was a war between ‘democratic nations’ and ‘fascist nations’. However, the Fourth International press did foster illusions in the progressive character of the USSR’s war effort, claiming that as a “degenerated workers’ state” with a nationalised economy it deserved support against the Axis, and furthermore in some of its sections’ press hailed the progress of “Trotsky’s Red Army” in fighting back the Wehrmacht. American Trotskyist James Cannon said that Trotskyists would “fight in the front rank” of the Soviet army to defend the USSR. Of course, the Fourth International’s enthusiastic claims that the USSR’s successes in the war were the result of continuing “Leninist planning” or Trotsky’s role in establishing the Red Army were nonsensical; the Russian economy had experienced complete counter-revolution, with an atomised working-class unable to act independently with its own unions, soviets or party, never mind plan the economy for itself; the Communist Party had been completely gutted, with almost all the leading actors in the revolution executed by Stalin; the Red Army high command had itself been purged repeatedly, while rank, titles and saluting had been reintroduced as well as orders and military academies named after Tsarist war heroes like Aleksandr Suvorov; early setbacks in the war at the hands of Germany (whose own war economy was almost entirely state-run) ran counter to claims of the superiority of the Russian economy over the capitalist countries; and indeed throughout the war the Russians relied heavily on food supplies and military equipment from the United States, including thousands of Studebaker trucks.
However, despite this misunderstanding of the role of the USSR in the war, the Fourth International and its member organisations did mount a heroic struggle against national chauvinism and illusions in the democratic aspirations of Britain and the United States. French Trotskyists were sharply critical of the Gaullist “French Resistance”, characterising it as an instrument of Allied imperialism and a movement which aspired not simply to liberate France but also to let it hold onto its colonial empire. Rather than calling on the working class to act as a supporting cast for the Allied war effort, these internationalists called for fraternisation between soldiers, working-class struggle against the participating governments and a “revolutionary defeatist” attitude towards both sides, hoping to transform the imperialist war into international class war. As Jean Rous had explained in a motion to the centrist Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan’s congress in 1939:
“The party will not be put off the belief that the main enemy is in our own country by the possibility that mass revolutionary agitation in time of war may contribute to the military defeat of our country. Accepting this possibility does not mean encouraging or wanting victory for Hitler, but on the contrary will encourage the total defeat of Hitler and worldwide fascism. Indeed:
“1. Revolutionary agitation led by workers in our country will exercise a powerful contagious influence on workers in the fascist countries; will provoke the break up of the rival capitalist armies, fraternisation between soldiers of both sides and the collapse of the dictatorships; and will light the flame of world revolution, the only means of defeating war and fascism, across the globe.
“2. Besides, a revolutionary seizure of power by the working class in our country will turn the imperialist war into a civil war and create the conditions for meaningful national defence: only a proletariat in control of its own destiny and defending a socialist order will be able to mount an invincible resistance to foreign fascism…”
It was with this aim of winning over German troops to a common struggle against the belligerent imperialists that in summer 1943 the French Trotskyists turned to organising among the German troops occupying France. Given the strict discipline of the Wehrmacht and the murderous anti-communism of the Gestapo (and their French accomplices, the Milice) this was incredibly dangerous, but important both in terms of teaching the French workers to repudiate the chauvinist attitudes promoted by the Communist Party and in terms of encouraging dissent among the German ranks, as had been manifested earlier in 1943 by a submarine mutiny in Brest, north-western France. The French Comités de la IVe Internationale (Fourth International Committees) produced German-language leaflets for Wehrmacht troops as well as a monthly German-language newspaper, Arbeiter und Soldat (i.e. Worker and Soldier) and built links with German troops.
This was not the only such initiative. The paper of the group associated with Pierre Frank and Raymond Molinier, formerly known as la Commune but from September 1943 as le Soviet, had a German-language back page, and the group also had contacts in Germany. But more important for the Fourth International group were the efforts arising from the German troops themselves. German Trotskyist produced a paper Zeitung für Arbeiter und Soldat im Westen (i.e. News for the Worker[s] and Soldier[s] in the West) and furthermore a previously unorganised group of soldiers in Brittany produced Der Arbeiter (i.e. The Worker). The latter journal encouraged dissent amongst the ranks but also called on conscripted workers to “throw down your weapons and go home”, a slogan opposed by the Fourth International Committees, who wanted the workers to hang on to their weapons and carefully organise for an uprising to overthrow the Nazis before the Allied “liberators” plundered Germany. The Fourth International Committees therefore held discussions with revolutionary soldiers and tried to carry out joint agitation.
Yvan Craipeau’s book Contre vents et marées quotes the electrics worker Roland Filiâtre, one of the comrades responsible for this work (under the alias Dupont): “The French comrades started discussions with German soldiers and got them talking and giving hints of their past politics. Once they had shown themselves trustworthy, after screening they were put in touch with the German soldiers who produced Der Arbeiter and then taken care of by their organisation. The Paris region was organised as two branches. But the heart of the organisation was in Brittany, both around Nantes and in particular around Brest where the soldiers provided the party with Ausweis [identity cards] and weapons. In Brest the organisation had about fifty soldiers on average despite some people being posted elsewhere. Contacts were established in Toulon, Valence, La Rochelle and at Conches aerodrome. There was also an organisation in Belgium. Links were established with the German Trotskyist organisation, most importantly in the port of Hamburg, in Lübeck and in Rostock. Victor [a German Trotskyist, whose real name was Widelin] was responsible for these contacts. Arbeiter und Soldat was also distributed in garrisons in Italy.”
These brave efforts brought down harsh repression on the heads of the French Trotskyists, many of whom such as Yvan Craipeau had repeatedly raised the alarm in the group about certain comrades’ lack of care in evading detection. Realising these fears, young Fourth International activists imprudently but enthusiastically joined in a demonstration staged by Der Arbeiter activists through the streets of Kerhoun, singing the Internationale and thus attracted the attention of the fascist police. Not much later, in early October 1943 a meeting of Trotskyist activists and German soldiers held in Brest was found out by the Gestapo, who arrested all the participants. 17 German soldiers as well as Robert Cruau, who organised fraternisation in the region, were executed on 6 October. Once the Gestapo were on the trail, the Trotskyists were doomed. On 7 October 18 Fourth International Committees activists in Brittany were arrested, along with much of the Paris organisation. In total around fifty French activists were rounded up, and many of them were tortured, executed or sent to concentration camps. Similarly, as many as fifty Der Arbeiter soldier comrades were put to death, and their paper never reappeared. Arbeiter und Soldat was itself out of action until May 1944, such were the losses suffered by the Fourth International Committees.
For these courageous activists the class struggle never stopped: even having been arrested and taken to the Compiègne transit camp Marcel Beaufrère told his comrades that: “We are going to be deported to Buchenwald. Before leaving I want to say: we are going to meet up with German revolutionaries and make the revolution with them.” Indeed, the French Trotskyists set up a cell at the Buchenwald concentration camp and in April 1944 it managed to release a manifesto calling for: “revolutionary fraternisation with the workers in the armies of occupation. For a Germany of workers’ councils in a Europe of workers’ councils! For the world workers’ revolution!”. But the sad fact was that many of these activists would soon be murdered by the Nazis. In reality the task with which the Trotskyist movement was confronted, lifting the world working class from the abyss of imperialist war, fascism and Stalinism, was far beyond their extremely modest numbers and means. Not only the crushing of the German workers’ movement by fascism but also Stalinist misleadership and the ensuing co-option of working-class and democratic struggle by the Allied imperialists meant that working-class revolution as had been seen at the end of the war twenty-five years previously was nigh-on impossible. Despite all these difficulties the Trotskyists fought to promote the internationalist Marxist tradition, and here we reproduce the surviving propaganda distributed among German troops occupying France in 1943-44, both the collection of Arbeiter und Soldat and the sole extant fragment of Zeitung für Arbeiter und Soldat im Westen.
Click here to access the files. My introduction appears below.
By summer 1943 the Axis war machine was suffering heavy setbacks. Although Hitler had completed a full occupation of France in November 1942, and still held on to his conquests in the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and parts of western Russia, the Axis powers no longer looked able to win the war. The German defeat at Stalingrad, after months of exaggeration of Wehrmacht success in the Nazi media, and the subsequent loss of much of south-western Russia; the incompetence of the Italian army; the Allies’ conquest of North African and threatened landings in southern Italy; Japan’s defeats at the hands of the United States in the Pacific; Tito’s Yugoslav partisan movement which had taken control of much of Macedonia, southern Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of Slovenia; and the mounting French Resistance, led by Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party, were all bad omens for the Nazi leaders and their satraps.
Indeed, with increasing privations, bombings of cities and military disasters, there were significant stirrings of discontent in the Axis powers. Not only did high-up German officers initiate plots to remove Hitler in order to better manage the war effort (the closest-run, and final such attempt to do so was the well-known 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life by Claus von Stauffenberg), but in Rome the Fascist Grand Council actually voted 19-7 on 24 July 1943 to no-confidence Benito Mussolini, who was summoned to the King Victor Emmanuel III, arrested and taken to jail in an ambulance. This manoeuvre on the part of the King and the Marshal Pietro Badoglio was an attempted ‘revolution from above’ mounted to save the ruling class from the threat of working-class uprisings, after the huge strike waves in the industrial north starting in March 1943 including stoppages in major armaments plants in Milan and Turin to secure more evacuation allowances – the first big strikes since 1925. As the Partito Comunista Internazionalista commented in August:
“The bourgeoisie, the monarchy and the Church, who created and supported Fascism, who today are throwing Mussolini to the people to avoid going down with him, and who don democratic and populist clothes in order to continue the exploitation and oppression of the working class, have no right to say anything in today’s crisis. This right exclusively belongs to the working class, the peasants and the soldiers, the eternal victims of the imperialist octopus.”
The late World War II period is usually compared unfavourably to the wave of revolutionary struggles provoked by World War I (the February and October revolutions in the Russian empire; large anti-war demonstrations in Germany; and after the war the Bavarian soviet republic; the Hungarian soviet republic; and a series of revolutionary opportunities in Germany until 1923), contrary to Trotsky’s prediction that it would cause an even greater revolutionary crisis. However, during this period there were signs significant working-class struggles in several belligerent countries, including the efforts of the resurgent Italian workers’ movement; miners’ strikes in Britain and the United States; strikes tens of thousands strong against forced deportations in France and Belgium; the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; and small-scale mutinies in the German armed forces.
But for the most part working-class mobilisation was co-opted into the Allied war effort. Hundreds of thousands of workers who supported the Communist Parties of Europe, loyal as they were to Stalin’s Soviet Union, courageously devoted themselves to anti-occupation “resistance” armies led by bourgeois nationalists in the belief that it was the best way of fighting fascism. The hollowness of Stalin’s “anti-fascist” credentials was however made clear by his keenness for CPs to work alongside the same nationalists, generals and bankers who had helped the fascists crush the workers’ movements of Europe to start with. For example, he created in Moscow a “Committee for a Free Germany” mostly composed of ex-Nazi generals; along with the other Allies supposedly liberating Europe from fascism he left Franco in power in Spain and Salazar in Portugal; he betrayed his own supporters in Greece, who were then butchered by the monarchists’ allies, the British Army, at the end of that country’s Civil War; and he ordered the Italian CP to support the monarchy and lay down its weapons. Although this was in a sense nothing new – before the war the French CP leader Maurice Thorez had called on “patriotic” French fascists to join a “national front” against the Nazis – Stalin’s leading role in the stabilisation of European capitalism in the 1943-1945 period was a shock to some, with a 2,500-strong Stalinist formation Movimento Comunista d’Italia even breaking from the Italian CP under the impression that they were implementing Stalin’s “real” policies and that the local CP leader Palmiro Togliatti was being disloyal to Moscow!
The Communist Parties and Moscow, who still had enormous prestige among much of the world working class, were hostile to all strikes and any independent working-class action which might undermine the Allied war effort. The British Stalinist leader Harry Pollitt even proclaimed “today it is the class conscious worker who will cross the picket line”. Despite the USSR’s August 1939-June 1941 pact with Hitler to carve up Eastern Europe, Stalin’s imperialist ambitions were now completely intertwined with the war aims of the Allies – indeed, the “Soviet” empire would be a leading, if not the leading, beneficiary of the Allied victory, extending its grip over almost all of Eastern and Central Europe and seizing tens of billions of pounds worth of war reparations. The nationalist and anti-German chauvinist hysteria promoted by Moscow, which portrayed the war to the Russian people as just another chapter in the Slavs’ struggle against the Germans, must be seen as largely responsible for the vengeance exacted on the German people at the end of the war with hundreds of thousands of rapes of women and girls, the murder and leaving to starve of millions of civilians as well as organising huge population transfers. In France the Communist Party raised the slogans “everyone, united against the Krauts” and “everyone kill a Kraut”, refusing to draw any distinction between Nazi-led German imperialism and the working-class German conscripts in the Wehrmacht.
This monumental error was only replicated in part by the Trotskyist Fourth International, which had no truck whatsoever with the idea that workers in the Allied countries should cross picket lines to aid the USSR’s war effort or that the war was a war between ‘democratic nations’ and ‘fascist nations’. However, the Fourth International press did foster illusions in the progressive character of the USSR’s war effort, claiming that as a “degenerated workers’ state” with a nationalised economy it deserved support against the Axis, and furthermore in some of its sections’ press hailed the progress of “Trotsky’s Red Army” in fighting back the Wehrmacht. American Trotskyist James Cannon said that Trotskyists would “fight in the front rank” of the Soviet army to defend the USSR. Of course, the Fourth International’s enthusiastic claims that the USSR’s successes in the war were the result of continuing “Leninist planning” or Trotsky’s role in establishing the Red Army were nonsensical; the Russian economy had experienced complete counter-revolution, with an atomised working-class unable to act independently with its own unions, soviets or party, never mind plan the economy for itself; the Communist Party had been completely gutted, with almost all the leading actors in the revolution executed by Stalin; the Red Army high command had itself been purged repeatedly, while rank, titles and saluting had been reintroduced as well as orders and military academies named after Tsarist war heroes like Aleksandr Suvorov; early setbacks in the war at the hands of Germany (whose own war economy was almost entirely state-run) ran counter to claims of the superiority of the Russian economy over the capitalist countries; and indeed throughout the war the Russians relied heavily on food supplies and military equipment from the United States, including thousands of Studebaker trucks.
However, despite this misunderstanding of the role of the USSR in the war, the Fourth International and its member organisations did mount a heroic struggle against national chauvinism and illusions in the democratic aspirations of Britain and the United States. French Trotskyists were sharply critical of the Gaullist “French Resistance”, characterising it as an instrument of Allied imperialism and a movement which aspired not simply to liberate France but also to let it hold onto its colonial empire. Rather than calling on the working class to act as a supporting cast for the Allied war effort, these internationalists called for fraternisation between soldiers, working-class struggle against the participating governments and a “revolutionary defeatist” attitude towards both sides, hoping to transform the imperialist war into international class war. As Jean Rous had explained in a motion to the centrist Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan’s congress in 1939:
“The party will not be put off the belief that the main enemy is in our own country by the possibility that mass revolutionary agitation in time of war may contribute to the military defeat of our country. Accepting this possibility does not mean encouraging or wanting victory for Hitler, but on the contrary will encourage the total defeat of Hitler and worldwide fascism. Indeed:
“1. Revolutionary agitation led by workers in our country will exercise a powerful contagious influence on workers in the fascist countries; will provoke the break up of the rival capitalist armies, fraternisation between soldiers of both sides and the collapse of the dictatorships; and will light the flame of world revolution, the only means of defeating war and fascism, across the globe.
“2. Besides, a revolutionary seizure of power by the working class in our country will turn the imperialist war into a civil war and create the conditions for meaningful national defence: only a proletariat in control of its own destiny and defending a socialist order will be able to mount an invincible resistance to foreign fascism…”
It was with this aim of winning over German troops to a common struggle against the belligerent imperialists that in summer 1943 the French Trotskyists turned to organising among the German troops occupying France. Given the strict discipline of the Wehrmacht and the murderous anti-communism of the Gestapo (and their French accomplices, the Milice) this was incredibly dangerous, but important both in terms of teaching the French workers to repudiate the chauvinist attitudes promoted by the Communist Party and in terms of encouraging dissent among the German ranks, as had been manifested earlier in 1943 by a submarine mutiny in Brest, north-western France. The French Comités de la IVe Internationale (Fourth International Committees) produced German-language leaflets for Wehrmacht troops as well as a monthly German-language newspaper, Arbeiter und Soldat (i.e. Worker and Soldier) and built links with German troops.
This was not the only such initiative. The paper of the group associated with Pierre Frank and Raymond Molinier, formerly known as la Commune but from September 1943 as le Soviet, had a German-language back page, and the group also had contacts in Germany. But more important for the Fourth International group were the efforts arising from the German troops themselves. German Trotskyist produced a paper Zeitung für Arbeiter und Soldat im Westen (i.e. News for the Worker[s] and Soldier[s] in the West) and furthermore a previously unorganised group of soldiers in Brittany produced Der Arbeiter (i.e. The Worker). The latter journal encouraged dissent amongst the ranks but also called on conscripted workers to “throw down your weapons and go home”, a slogan opposed by the Fourth International Committees, who wanted the workers to hang on to their weapons and carefully organise for an uprising to overthrow the Nazis before the Allied “liberators” plundered Germany. The Fourth International Committees therefore held discussions with revolutionary soldiers and tried to carry out joint agitation.
Yvan Craipeau’s book Contre vents et marées quotes the electrics worker Roland Filiâtre, one of the comrades responsible for this work (under the alias Dupont): “The French comrades started discussions with German soldiers and got them talking and giving hints of their past politics. Once they had shown themselves trustworthy, after screening they were put in touch with the German soldiers who produced Der Arbeiter and then taken care of by their organisation. The Paris region was organised as two branches. But the heart of the organisation was in Brittany, both around Nantes and in particular around Brest where the soldiers provided the party with Ausweis [identity cards] and weapons. In Brest the organisation had about fifty soldiers on average despite some people being posted elsewhere. Contacts were established in Toulon, Valence, La Rochelle and at Conches aerodrome. There was also an organisation in Belgium. Links were established with the German Trotskyist organisation, most importantly in the port of Hamburg, in Lübeck and in Rostock. Victor [a German Trotskyist, whose real name was Widelin] was responsible for these contacts. Arbeiter und Soldat was also distributed in garrisons in Italy.”
These brave efforts brought down harsh repression on the heads of the French Trotskyists, many of whom such as Yvan Craipeau had repeatedly raised the alarm in the group about certain comrades’ lack of care in evading detection. Realising these fears, young Fourth International activists imprudently but enthusiastically joined in a demonstration staged by Der Arbeiter activists through the streets of Kerhoun, singing the Internationale and thus attracted the attention of the fascist police. Not much later, in early October 1943 a meeting of Trotskyist activists and German soldiers held in Brest was found out by the Gestapo, who arrested all the participants. 17 German soldiers as well as Robert Cruau, who organised fraternisation in the region, were executed on 6 October. Once the Gestapo were on the trail, the Trotskyists were doomed. On 7 October 18 Fourth International Committees activists in Brittany were arrested, along with much of the Paris organisation. In total around fifty French activists were rounded up, and many of them were tortured, executed or sent to concentration camps. Similarly, as many as fifty Der Arbeiter soldier comrades were put to death, and their paper never reappeared. Arbeiter und Soldat was itself out of action until May 1944, such were the losses suffered by the Fourth International Committees.
For these courageous activists the class struggle never stopped: even having been arrested and taken to the Compiègne transit camp Marcel Beaufrère told his comrades that: “We are going to be deported to Buchenwald. Before leaving I want to say: we are going to meet up with German revolutionaries and make the revolution with them.” Indeed, the French Trotskyists set up a cell at the Buchenwald concentration camp and in April 1944 it managed to release a manifesto calling for: “revolutionary fraternisation with the workers in the armies of occupation. For a Germany of workers’ councils in a Europe of workers’ councils! For the world workers’ revolution!”. But the sad fact was that many of these activists would soon be murdered by the Nazis. In reality the task with which the Trotskyist movement was confronted, lifting the world working class from the abyss of imperialist war, fascism and Stalinism, was far beyond their extremely modest numbers and means. Not only the crushing of the German workers’ movement by fascism but also Stalinist misleadership and the ensuing co-option of working-class and democratic struggle by the Allied imperialists meant that working-class revolution as had been seen at the end of the war twenty-five years previously was nigh-on impossible. Despite all these difficulties the Trotskyists fought to promote the internationalist Marxist tradition, and here we reproduce the surviving propaganda distributed among German troops occupying France in 1943-44, both the collection of Arbeiter und Soldat and the sole extant fragment of Zeitung für Arbeiter und Soldat im Westen.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Leon Trotsky's ideas today
A series of discussions from the North London branch of Workers’ Liberty, open to all.
All meetings held on Tuesdays from 7:30pm at the Red Rose Club, 129 Seven Sisters Road, N7. Nearest tube is Finsbury Park.
Week 3 (26th February): The Soviet Union after the Revolution: The New Course.
“The struggle against the bureaucratism of the state apparatus is an exceptionally important but prolonged task, one that runs more or less parallel to our other fundamental tasks: economic reconstruction and the elevation of the cultural level of the masses. The most important historical instrument for the accomplishment of all these tasks is the party. Naturally, not even the party can tear itself away from the social and cultural conditions of the country. But as the voluntary organization of the vanguard, of the best, the most active and the most conscious elements of the working class, it is able to preserve itself much better than can the state apparatus from the tendencies of bureaucratism. For that, it must see the danger clearly and combat it without let up.”
Reading: The New Course (1923) - http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/newcourse/index.htm. Short Reading: Chapter 1: the question of party generations.
Week 4 (4th March): Trotsky on Art and Literature.
“Before the proletariat will have passed out of the stage of cultural apprenticeship, it will have ceased to be a proletariat. Let us also not forget that the upper layer of the bourgeoisie passed its cultural apprenticeship under the roof of feudal society; that while still within the womb of feudal society it surpassed the old ruling estates culturally and became the instigator of culture before it came into power. It is different with the proletariat in general and with the Russian proletariat in particular. The proletariat is forced to take power before it has appropriated the fundamental elements of bourgeois culture; it is forced to overthrow bourgeois society by revolutionary violence for the very reason that society does not allow it access to culture. The working-class strives to transform the state apparatus into a powerful pump for quenching the cultural thirst of the masses. This is a task of immeasurable historic importance. But, if one is not to use words lightly, it is not as yet a creation of a special proletarian culture.”
Reading: Literature and Revolution (1924) - http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/index.htm. Short reading: Chapter 6: Proletarian culture and proletarian art.
Week 5 (11th March): Stalinism and the defeat of the workers.
Trotsky argues that Stalinism was not the logical product of Bolshevism, but represented a bureaucratic counter-revolution against the Russian working class - separated from Bolshevism by "a river of blood"
Reading: The Revolution Betrayed (1936) - http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm. Short reading: chapter 11: Whither the Soviet Union?
Week 6 (18th March): The Struggle against Fascism
In the 1930s, as the Kremlin-backed German Communist Party ignored the Nazi threat, claiming that fascists were no worse than Social Democrats, Trotsky highlighted the danger fascism posed to all democratic and workers’ organisations and made the case for working-class forces to form a united front against the Nazis.
Reading: The Struggle against Fascism in Germany (or the Bookmarks collection: Racism, Stalinism and the United Front) (1930-1934). Alternatively all of Trotsky’s writings on Germany of this period are collected at http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/index.htm
Short Reading: The United Front for Defense: A Letter to a Social Democratic Worker (1933)
Week 7 (25th March): The Fourth International and the Transitional Programme.
Leon Trotsky’s “transitional programme” was a method by which to relate immediate struggles in the here and now to the ultimate goal of revolution, by posing demands which implicitly raised questions about power in society and the rule of capitalism.
Reading: The Transitional Programme (the Pathfinder edition with associated articles and transcripts of discussions is particularly useful). http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm. Short reading: the programme itself, the first seven sections up to and including “‘Business secrets’ and workers’ control of industry”
All meetings will also include a section on organisation + political work. Ring David on 07828 844695 for further details or email davidthetrot@googlemail.com.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Communist Students conference
On Saturday 16th I attended the conference of Communist Students, the autonomous student organisation connected to the CPGB/Weekly Worker group. Around 25 people attended, of whom only around a quarter were actual CPGB members (as far as I could tell). Most of those attending were members of CS, but there were also a few of their contacts who I hadn't met before, as well as Bill Jefferies of Permanent Revolution.
The first significant discussion was on how we should fight against the British National Party, a debate which has recently had significant coverage in the Weekly Worker. While Ben Lewis, who led off the session, believes that we should be flexible in our tactics as regards the BNP, and although not necessarily seeking to organise meetings with the far right we should sometimes be prepared to debate them, others such as the Permanent Revolution group think that any debate legitimises the ideas of 'fascists' (there was a subordinate debate as to whether the BNP are actually fascists).
Ben talked about the way in which the SWP and the Unite Against Fascism campaign subscribe to liberal anti-fascism, seeking to defend 'normal' establishment political discourse against fascists, whose ideas are 'beyond the pale'. While the BNP has filled a political space vacated by Labour - claiming to have all the answers to some very real concerns of (white!) working class voters such as jobs and housing - and indeed won 800,000 votes in the European election, UAF just go round telling people not to 'vote Nazi', reminding them that Nazis are 'really, really bad'. In doing this they ignore the reasons why people vote BNP rather than Labour, Lib Dem or Tory - one SWPer he quoted even referred to BNP voters as 'the scum on the estates'.
Bill Jefferies' response was correct insofar as it stressed the need for working-class and minority community self-defence against fascists, and furthermore said that, unlike the SWP, he would not call on the bourgeois state to ban fascists, since any anti-free speech laws would just as easily be used against the far left. It is important that anti-fascism is a working-class cause, not an exercise in liberal moral condemnation of BNP voters. However, I think his argument that we should always refuse to debate fascists was wrong-headed, based as it was on the idea that since fascists are 'really, really bad', we should not give them legitimacy by sharing a platform with them. A couple of others, including James Turley, added that if you debate fascists and sweep the floor with their absurd ideas, they will still have won even if they pick up a couple of contacts by doing the meeting.
This was disingenous - the debate was not really about "should we write to the BNP and ask if they'd do a joint public meeting", but whether it was appropriate to boycott election hustings etc. in which they would also participate. Bill Jefferies said that a couple of years ago a Workers' Power comrade at a student union hustings debated a BNP candidate, but now he thinks she should just have "mobilised the audience against him". Ben Lewis made the obvious retort that a revolutionary standing in an election should seek to mobilise the audience against all of the other bourgeois candidates.
For my part, I said that if you made a principle out of refusing to share a platform with the BNP, then why not boycott the Tories too? Or the Liberal Democrats? Of course, in reality, tearing someone's ideas to shreds at a hustings is not 'legitimising' their politics. I furthermore pointed out that not only do the UAF refuse to debate the BNP, but they also refuse to engage with any of their ideas at all, telling people "don't vote Nazi, vote for anyone else" rather than saying "yes, housing, jobs and public services really are concerns, but black workers are not the problem". Lining up with the bourgeois parties and telling alienated Labour voters who vote BNP that they are just Nazi morons is no good - we should seek to win over their voters. Many of those who turn to the BNP would not do so if the left and workers' movement had more coherence and could ourselves promote a real alternative.
After a debate over whether CS should support the IWW union and an interesting discussion on student politics, and whether it is possible to build mass student campaigns on issues like fees - or indeed on international politics - the focus of the conference turned to imperialism and the Middle East. This was staged as a debate between the chair of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign, the CPGB's Tina Becker and myself (i.e. an AWL member with a "troops out now" position).
I found the politics of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign somewhat bizarre - while the speaker was strongly opposed to the Iranian regime and its various satellite organisations (he mentioned in particular the homophobia of the Mehdi Army), he did not have any particular focus on the working class as an anti-imperialist force, and lauded the home-grown Iraqi resistance groups. While Islamist forces are undoubtedly even more vicious, I was surprised that to this he counterposed secular Arab nationalism, and indeed the Ba'ath Party, claiming that Saddam Hussein remained the "legitimate" president of Iraq under "international law".
This was an unusual position, invoking laws created by the imperialist powers themselves in order to guarantee self-determination.
Indeed, he appeared to think that whatever happens in Iraq is fine, as long as there's no interference from the USA, UK or Iran. But while I opposed the war which provoked Saddam Hussein's downfall, I cannot stomach the idea that Saddam Hussein is "legitimate" - why has he any more right to rule than the dictator he overthrew, or the guy before him, and so on? Tina Becker took the Iraq Solidarity Campaign speaker to task on all of these points.
In my lead off I stressed the idea that no force in the Middle East other than the working class can introduce democracy, and no force other than the working class is, or even could be, anti-imperialist. Imperialism is the logic of modern capitalism, not something which exists in the abstract, and local bourgeoisies cannot be trusted to oppose it. Look at the Tehran theocracy - it spouts anti-imperialist rhetoric and yet supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq, supports the occupation of Afghanistan and has willingly introduced all sorts of IMF plans to liberalise its economy. Similarly, parties in Iraq like Dawa, SCIRI and even the forces led by Moqtada al-Sadr are not even sufficiently anti-imperialist as to refuse to participate in the occupation government.
Yet the SWP instead exaggerate the "progressive" character of the forces which it sees as anti-imperialist - for example, claiming that Iran is the most democratic country in the Middle East, and endorsing the welfare programme and "women's participation" in Hamas. They would rather look to "reform" elements within the Iranian bourgeoisie to effect change than encourage the working class to overthrow it. They seem to want to see this decade as the 1960s in slow motion, with Hamas substituting for the Vietcong and the Iranian government for Cuba.
I did however address the complexities of the kind of solidarity we need with workers in the Middle East. I expressed my disagreement with the majority position of the AWL which, while explicitly focused on the "third camp" of the working class, can collapse into acquiescence to imperialism when the workers appear too weak to act on their own. The AWL's refusal to call for troops out now, and indeed its support for Fatah against Hamas, are both predicated on the idea that the workers will be crushed without their imperialist guardians - yet how is the "third camp" ever to grow as an independent force if in the "here and now" (i.e. all the time) it does not cut itself sharply against both imperialism and Islamist reaction?
Our support for the working class in the Middle East must be linked to our tactics at home. Workers' action to undermine our armed forces and strikes against the war are vital in showing the power of the working class to stand on its own two feet as a force which can intervene in the "war on terror" conflict. "Troops out now" is not a magic wand to make the troops disappear, but a slogan for the working class to organise around, to try and realise that demand itself. I support the slogan not because it is unrealisable so doesn't matter what the consequences would be if it played out, but precisely because if it is workers in the US and UK or workers in Iraq whose efforts force the troops out, then the balance of forces will turn in favour of the workers' movement.
Actions like those of the train crew in Scotland who refused to move weapons are inextricably linked to the strikes of oil workers in Basra, and must be both encouraged and advertised. Rather than writing articles about geopolitical developments which we cannot influence with analyses cropped from the comment pages of the Guardian, our primary task is to talk about what the workers' movement can do itself.
I then briefly turned to the question of engaging with left groups in the Middle East, and said that as well as teaching ourselves about workers', women's, LGBT and student struggles in the region (which the SWP deny the existence of), we should critically engage with the ideas of our comrades there. Giving money to organisations in the Middle Eastern left is useful - particularly given their pressing need for self-defence - but we must also learn from the comrades and argue with their positions.
In the discussion that followed I broadly agreed with much of what was said by CS comrades, although I feel that they are too willing to defend those who raise the slogan "troops out now" from an abstract perspective with no reference to class. My whole point was that we should take a strict class standpoint against imperialism and Islamism, and discussion about which of the two heads of reaction is worse than the other or whether "the main enemy is at home" does not give us much tactical direction.
Equally, I have no doubt that neither the "bring the troops home" line of Barack Obama nor the Stalinist-Islamist use of "troops out now" by Galloway and his ilk is better than the position of Sean Matgamna. Nevertheless, my criticisms here should be qualified by a positive attitude towards Communist Students' and the CPGB's Hands Off the People of Iran campaign, although I do think they should make more of an effort to foster these ideas in the labour movement rather than just in the anti-war and student milieux.
The first significant discussion was on how we should fight against the British National Party, a debate which has recently had significant coverage in the Weekly Worker. While Ben Lewis, who led off the session, believes that we should be flexible in our tactics as regards the BNP, and although not necessarily seeking to organise meetings with the far right we should sometimes be prepared to debate them, others such as the Permanent Revolution group think that any debate legitimises the ideas of 'fascists' (there was a subordinate debate as to whether the BNP are actually fascists).
Ben talked about the way in which the SWP and the Unite Against Fascism campaign subscribe to liberal anti-fascism, seeking to defend 'normal' establishment political discourse against fascists, whose ideas are 'beyond the pale'. While the BNP has filled a political space vacated by Labour - claiming to have all the answers to some very real concerns of (white!) working class voters such as jobs and housing - and indeed won 800,000 votes in the European election, UAF just go round telling people not to 'vote Nazi', reminding them that Nazis are 'really, really bad'. In doing this they ignore the reasons why people vote BNP rather than Labour, Lib Dem or Tory - one SWPer he quoted even referred to BNP voters as 'the scum on the estates'.
Bill Jefferies' response was correct insofar as it stressed the need for working-class and minority community self-defence against fascists, and furthermore said that, unlike the SWP, he would not call on the bourgeois state to ban fascists, since any anti-free speech laws would just as easily be used against the far left. It is important that anti-fascism is a working-class cause, not an exercise in liberal moral condemnation of BNP voters. However, I think his argument that we should always refuse to debate fascists was wrong-headed, based as it was on the idea that since fascists are 'really, really bad', we should not give them legitimacy by sharing a platform with them. A couple of others, including James Turley, added that if you debate fascists and sweep the floor with their absurd ideas, they will still have won even if they pick up a couple of contacts by doing the meeting.
This was disingenous - the debate was not really about "should we write to the BNP and ask if they'd do a joint public meeting", but whether it was appropriate to boycott election hustings etc. in which they would also participate. Bill Jefferies said that a couple of years ago a Workers' Power comrade at a student union hustings debated a BNP candidate, but now he thinks she should just have "mobilised the audience against him". Ben Lewis made the obvious retort that a revolutionary standing in an election should seek to mobilise the audience against all of the other bourgeois candidates.
For my part, I said that if you made a principle out of refusing to share a platform with the BNP, then why not boycott the Tories too? Or the Liberal Democrats? Of course, in reality, tearing someone's ideas to shreds at a hustings is not 'legitimising' their politics. I furthermore pointed out that not only do the UAF refuse to debate the BNP, but they also refuse to engage with any of their ideas at all, telling people "don't vote Nazi, vote for anyone else" rather than saying "yes, housing, jobs and public services really are concerns, but black workers are not the problem". Lining up with the bourgeois parties and telling alienated Labour voters who vote BNP that they are just Nazi morons is no good - we should seek to win over their voters. Many of those who turn to the BNP would not do so if the left and workers' movement had more coherence and could ourselves promote a real alternative.
After a debate over whether CS should support the IWW union and an interesting discussion on student politics, and whether it is possible to build mass student campaigns on issues like fees - or indeed on international politics - the focus of the conference turned to imperialism and the Middle East. This was staged as a debate between the chair of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign, the CPGB's Tina Becker and myself (i.e. an AWL member with a "troops out now" position).
I found the politics of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign somewhat bizarre - while the speaker was strongly opposed to the Iranian regime and its various satellite organisations (he mentioned in particular the homophobia of the Mehdi Army), he did not have any particular focus on the working class as an anti-imperialist force, and lauded the home-grown Iraqi resistance groups. While Islamist forces are undoubtedly even more vicious, I was surprised that to this he counterposed secular Arab nationalism, and indeed the Ba'ath Party, claiming that Saddam Hussein remained the "legitimate" president of Iraq under "international law".
This was an unusual position, invoking laws created by the imperialist powers themselves in order to guarantee self-determination.
Indeed, he appeared to think that whatever happens in Iraq is fine, as long as there's no interference from the USA, UK or Iran. But while I opposed the war which provoked Saddam Hussein's downfall, I cannot stomach the idea that Saddam Hussein is "legitimate" - why has he any more right to rule than the dictator he overthrew, or the guy before him, and so on? Tina Becker took the Iraq Solidarity Campaign speaker to task on all of these points.
In my lead off I stressed the idea that no force in the Middle East other than the working class can introduce democracy, and no force other than the working class is, or even could be, anti-imperialist. Imperialism is the logic of modern capitalism, not something which exists in the abstract, and local bourgeoisies cannot be trusted to oppose it. Look at the Tehran theocracy - it spouts anti-imperialist rhetoric and yet supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq, supports the occupation of Afghanistan and has willingly introduced all sorts of IMF plans to liberalise its economy. Similarly, parties in Iraq like Dawa, SCIRI and even the forces led by Moqtada al-Sadr are not even sufficiently anti-imperialist as to refuse to participate in the occupation government.
Yet the SWP instead exaggerate the "progressive" character of the forces which it sees as anti-imperialist - for example, claiming that Iran is the most democratic country in the Middle East, and endorsing the welfare programme and "women's participation" in Hamas. They would rather look to "reform" elements within the Iranian bourgeoisie to effect change than encourage the working class to overthrow it. They seem to want to see this decade as the 1960s in slow motion, with Hamas substituting for the Vietcong and the Iranian government for Cuba.
I did however address the complexities of the kind of solidarity we need with workers in the Middle East. I expressed my disagreement with the majority position of the AWL which, while explicitly focused on the "third camp" of the working class, can collapse into acquiescence to imperialism when the workers appear too weak to act on their own. The AWL's refusal to call for troops out now, and indeed its support for Fatah against Hamas, are both predicated on the idea that the workers will be crushed without their imperialist guardians - yet how is the "third camp" ever to grow as an independent force if in the "here and now" (i.e. all the time) it does not cut itself sharply against both imperialism and Islamist reaction?
Our support for the working class in the Middle East must be linked to our tactics at home. Workers' action to undermine our armed forces and strikes against the war are vital in showing the power of the working class to stand on its own two feet as a force which can intervene in the "war on terror" conflict. "Troops out now" is not a magic wand to make the troops disappear, but a slogan for the working class to organise around, to try and realise that demand itself. I support the slogan not because it is unrealisable so doesn't matter what the consequences would be if it played out, but precisely because if it is workers in the US and UK or workers in Iraq whose efforts force the troops out, then the balance of forces will turn in favour of the workers' movement.
Actions like those of the train crew in Scotland who refused to move weapons are inextricably linked to the strikes of oil workers in Basra, and must be both encouraged and advertised. Rather than writing articles about geopolitical developments which we cannot influence with analyses cropped from the comment pages of the Guardian, our primary task is to talk about what the workers' movement can do itself.
I then briefly turned to the question of engaging with left groups in the Middle East, and said that as well as teaching ourselves about workers', women's, LGBT and student struggles in the region (which the SWP deny the existence of), we should critically engage with the ideas of our comrades there. Giving money to organisations in the Middle Eastern left is useful - particularly given their pressing need for self-defence - but we must also learn from the comrades and argue with their positions.
In the discussion that followed I broadly agreed with much of what was said by CS comrades, although I feel that they are too willing to defend those who raise the slogan "troops out now" from an abstract perspective with no reference to class. My whole point was that we should take a strict class standpoint against imperialism and Islamism, and discussion about which of the two heads of reaction is worse than the other or whether "the main enemy is at home" does not give us much tactical direction.
Equally, I have no doubt that neither the "bring the troops home" line of Barack Obama nor the Stalinist-Islamist use of "troops out now" by Galloway and his ilk is better than the position of Sean Matgamna. Nevertheless, my criticisms here should be qualified by a positive attitude towards Communist Students' and the CPGB's Hands Off the People of Iran campaign, although I do think they should make more of an effort to foster these ideas in the labour movement rather than just in the anti-war and student milieux.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
The tragedy of the German proletariat
Today marks the 75th anniversary of Hitler's seizure of power in Germany. While in today's Socialist Worker Chris Bambery's article on the Nazi coup pathetically muses that fascism ought to be "taken seriously", without making a single reference to Stalin's disastrous "Third Period", Trotsky's March 1933 article The tragedy of the German proletariat exposed the double-dealings of the Soviet bureaucracy.
The most powerful proletariat of Europe, measured by its place in production, its social weight, and the strength of its organizations, has manifested no resistance since Hitler’s coming to power and his first violent attacks against the workers’ organizations. This is the fact from which to proceed in subsequent strategic calculations.
It would be patently stupid to believe that the future evolution of Germany will follow the Italian road; that Hitler will strengthen his domination step by step without serious resistance; that German fascism will enjoy long years of domination. No, the further fate of National Socialism will have to be deduced from an analysis of the German and international conditions, and not from purely historical analogies. But this much is already evident: if from September 1930 onwards we demanded of the Communist International a short-range policy in Germany, then it is necessary now to work out a long-range policy. Before decisive battles will become possible, the proletarian vanguard will have to reorient itself; that is to say, it will have to understand what has happened, assign the responsibility for the great historical defeat, trace out the new road, and thus regain confidence in itself
The criminal role of the Social Democracy requires no commentary: the Comintern was created fourteen years ago precisely in order to snatch the proletariat from the demoralizing influence of the Social Democracy. If it has not succeeded up to now, if the German proletariat found itself impotent disarmed, and paralyzed at the moment of its greatest historic test the direct and immediate blame falls upon the leadership of the post-Leninist Comintern. That is the first conclusion which ought to be drawn immediately.
Under the treacherous blows of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Left Opposition maintained its fidelity to the official party to the very end. The Bolshevik-Leninists now share the fate of all the other Communist organizations: the militants of our cadres are arrested, our publications forbidden, our literature confiscated. Hitler even hurried to suspend the Bulletin of the Opposition appearing in the Russian language. But if, together with the whole proletarian vanguard, the Bolshevik-Leninists bear the consequences of the first serious victory of fascism, they cannot and will not bear even a shadow of the responsibility for the official policy of the Comintern.
Since 1923, that is, since the beginning of the struggle against the Left Opposition, the Stalinist leadership, although indirectly, assisted the Social Democracy with all its strength to derail, to befuddle, to enfeeble the German proletariat: it restrained and hindered the workers when the conditions dictated a courageous revolutionary offensive; it proclaimed the approach of the revolutionary situation when it had already passed; it worked up agreements with petty-bourgeois phrasemongers and windbags; it limped impotently at the tail of the Social Democracy under cover of the policy of the united front; it proclaimed the “third period” and the struggle for the conquest of the streets under conditions of political ebb and the weakness of the Communist Party; it replaced the serious struggle by leaps, adventures or parades; it isolated the Communists from the mass trade unions; it identified the Social Democracy with fascism and rejected the united front with the mass workers’ organizations in face of the aggressive bands of the National Socialists; it sabotaged the slightest initiative for the united front for local defense, at the same time it systematically deceived the workers as to the real relationship of forces, distorted the facts, passed off friends as enemies and enemies as friends – and drew the noose tighter and tighter around the neck of the party, not permitting it to breathe freely any longer, nor to speak, nor to think.
Out of the vast literature devoted to the question of fascism it is enough to refer to the speech of Thälmann, official leader of the German Communist Party, who, at the plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in April 1931, denounced the “pessimists,” that is, those who knew how to foresee, in the following terms: “We have not allowed the moods of panic to rout us ... We have soberly and firmly established the fact that September 14 [1930] was in a certain sense Hitler’s best day, and that afterwards will come not better days but worse. This evaluation which we made of the development of this party is confirmed by the events ... Today, the fascists have no reasons for laughing.” Referring to the creation of defense groups by the Social Democracy, Thälmann demonstrated in the same speech that these groups differ in no respect from the shock troops of the National Socialists and that both of them are likewise preparing to annihilate Communism.
Today, Thälmann is under arrest. Faced with triumphant reaction, the Bolshevik-Leninists are in the same ranks as Thälmann. But the policy of Thälmann is the policy of Stalin, that is, the official policy of the Comintern. It is precisely this policy which is the cause of the complete demoralization of the party at the moment of danger, when the leaders lose their heads, when the party members, unaccustomed to thinking, fall prostrate, when the principal historic positions are surrendered without a fight. A false political theory bears within itself its own punishment. The strength and the obstinacy of the apparatus only augment the dimensions of the catastrophe.
Having surrendered to the enemy everything that could be surrendered in such a short space of time, the Stalinists are trying to rectify the past by means of convulsive acts, which only more brightly illuminate the whole chain of crimes committed by them. Now that the press of the Communist Party is stifled, now the apparatus is destroyed, now the bloody pennant of fascism waves with impunity over the Karl Liebknecht House [1], the Executive Committee of the Comintern is starting out on the road of the united front not only from below but also from above. The new zigzag, sharper than all that preceded it, has not, however, been effected on the impulse of the ECCI itself, the Stalinist bureaucracy has abandoned the initiative to the Second International. The latter has succeeded in taking hold of the weapon of the united front of which it has been in mortal dread until now. To the extent that it is possible to speak of political advantages under the conditions of a panicky retreat, they are to be found exclusively on the side of reformism. Forced to reply to a direct question, the Stalinist bureaucracy chose the worst way: it does not reject an entente of the two Internationals, but neither does it accept it; it plays hide and seek. It has come to such a lack of self-confidence, to such degradation, that it no longer dares to show itself to the world proletariat face to face with the leaders of the Second International, the branded agents of the bourgeoisie, the electors of Hindenburg who blazed the trail of fascism.
In a special appeal of the ECCI on March 5, To the Workers of All Countries, the Stalinists do not say a word about social fascism as the main enemy. They no longer speak about the great discovery of their leader: “The Social Democracy and fascism are not antipodes but twins.” They no longer insist on saying that the struggle against fascism demands as a preliminary the defeat of the Social Democracy. They do not breathe a word about the inadmissibility of the united front from above. On the contrary, they carefully enumerate those cases in the past where the Stalinist bureaucracy, unexpectedly for the workers and for itself, found itself forced to improvise proposals for the united front to the reformist summits. Thus do artificial, false, and charlatanesque theories founder in the fury of the historical tempest
“Taking into account the peculiarities of each country” and the impossibility, which allegedly flows from them, of organizing the united front on an international scale (the struggle against “exceptionalism,” that is, the theory of the right-wingers on national peculiarities, is suddenly forgotten), the Stalinist bureaucracy recommends to the national Communist parties that they address proposals for a united front to the “Central Committees of the Social Democratic parties.” Only yesterday this was proclaimed a capitulation to social fascism! Thus do all the great lessons of Stalinism for the last four years fly under the table into the wastebasket Thus is a whole political system reduced to dust.
Matters do not rest there: having just declared the impossibility of generating the conditions for a united front on the international arena, the ECCI immediately forgets it and no more than twenty lines further on formulates the conditions under which the united front is admissible and acceptable in all countries, in spite of the difference in national conditions. The retreat before fascism is followed by a panic-stricken retreat from the theoretical commandments of Stalinism. Chips and fragments of ideas and principles are thrown out along the road like so much ballast.
The conditions for the united front put forward by the Comintern for all the countries committees of action against fascism, demonstrations and strikes against wage reductions) present nothing new. On the contrary, they are the schematized and bureaucratized reproduction of the slogans that the Left Opposition formulated much more clearly and concretely two and a half years ago, for which it was registered in the camp of social fascism. The united front on such a basis could have yielded decisive results in Germany; but for that, it would have had to be carried out in time. Time is an important factor in politics.
What is therefore the practical value now of the proposals of the ECCI? For Germany, it is minimal. The policy of the united front assumes a ␄front,” that is, stabilized positions and a centralized leadership. The Left Opposition put forward the conditions for the united front back then as conditions for an active defense, with the perspective of passing over to the offensive. Now, the German proletariat has been reduced to a state of disorderly retreat, without even rearguard battles. In this situation, voluntary unions of Communist and Social Democratic workers can and will be realized for various episodic tasks, but the systematic construction of the united front is inevitably thrust back for the indefinite future. There must be no illusions on this score.
About eighteen months ago, we wrote that the key to the situation is in the hands of the German Communist Party. The Stalinist bureaucracy has now let this key fail from its hands. Great events outside of the will of the party will be necessary to give the workers the possibility of drawing up short, of fortifying themselves, of rebuilding their ranks and of passing over to an active defense. We have no way of knowing with precision when this will occur. Perhaps much quicker than the triumphant counterrevolution hopes. But in any case, it is not those who issued the manifesto of the ECCI who will direct the policy of the united front in Germany.
If the central position has been surrendered, one must fortify the approaches; one must prepare bases for a future assault from all sides. In Germany, this preparation implies the critical elucidation of the past, maintaining the spirits of the vanguard fighters, rallying them, and organizing rearguard combats wherever possible – in anticipation of the moment when the various fighting groups will draw together into a great army. This preparation implies at the same time defending the proletarian positions in the countries closely connected with Germany or located near it: in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic countries, Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, France, and Switzerland. Fascist Germany must be surrounded by a powerful circle of proletarian fortifications. Without ceasing for an instant the attempts to halt the disorderly retreat of the German workers, it is necessary to create fortified proletarian positions around the frontiers of Germany for the struggle against fascism.
In the first place comes Austria, which is immediately threatened by the fascist cataclysm. One can say with confidence that if the Austrian proletariat were to seize power now and transform its country into a revolutionary battleground, Austria would become for the revolution of the German proletariat what Piedmont [2] was for the revolution of the Italian bourgeoisie. It cannot be predicted how far the Austrian proletarian pushed forward by the events but paralyzed by the reformist bureaucracy, will advance along this road. The task of Communism is to help the events, overcoming Austro-Marxism. The policy of the united front is one of the means. The conditions which the manifesto of the ECCI takes over so tardily from the Left Opposition thus retain all their force.
However, the policy of the united front contains not only advantages but also dangers. It easily gives birth to combinations between leaders behind the back of the masses, to a passive adaptation to the ally, to opportunist vacillations. It is possible to ward off these dangers only if there exist two express guarantees: the maintenance of full freedom of criticism of the ally and the reestablishment of full freedom of criticism within the ranks of one’s own party. To refuse to criticize one’s allies leads directly and immediately to capitulation to reformism. The policy of the united front in the absence of party democracy, that is, without control of the apparatus by the party, leaves the leaders a free hand for opportunist experiments, the inevitable complements of adventurist experiments.
How has the ECCI acted in this case? Dozens of times the Left Opposition predicted that under the blows of events, the Stalinists would be forced to repudiate their ultraleftism and that, placing themselves on the road of the united front they would begin to commit all the opportunist treasons which they attributed to us only yesterday. This time, too, the prediction has been realized literally.
In making a dizzying swing towards the position of the united front the ECCI tramples on the fundamental guarantees which alone can assure a revolutionary content to the policy of the united front. The Stalinists take into consideration and accept the hypocritical-diplomatic demands of the reformists for so-called mutual non-aggression. Breaking with all the traditions of Marxism and of Bolshevism, they recommend to the Communist parties, in case a united front is realized, that they “abandon all attacks against the Social Democratic organizations during the joint action.” That’s just what it says. “To abandon all attacks [!] upon the Social Democracy” (what a shameful formula!) means to abandon the freedom of political criticism, that is, a basic function of the revolutionary party.
The capitulation is called for not by practical necessity but by a panicky state of mind. The reformists come and will come to an agreement to the extent that the pressure of events and the pressure of the masses force them to do so. The demand for “nonaggression” is blackmail, that is, the attempt of the reformist leaders to extort an auxiliary advantage. To submit to blackmail means to build the united front upon rotten foundations and to give the reformist businessmen the possibility of blowing it up under some arbitrary pretext or other.
Criticism in general, all the more so under the conditions of a united front should of course correspond to the real relations and observe the necessary proportions. The absurdities about “social fascism” must be refuted. That is a concession not to the Social Democracy, but to Marxism. It is not for the treachery of 1918 but for its evil work in 1933 that the ally must be criticized. But criticism, like political life itself, of which criticism is the voice, cannot be halted for an hour. If the Communists’ disclosures correspond to reality, they serve the purposes of the united front pushing forward the temporary ally and, what is more important giving a revolutionary education to the whole proletariat. To abandon this fundamental duty is the first stage in that shameful and criminal policy which Stalin foisted upon the Chinese Communists with regard to the Kuomintang.
Matters stand no better with regard to the second guarantee. Having renounced criticism of the Social Democracy, the Stalinist apparatus does not even think of giving the right of criticism to the members of its own party. The turn itself is accomplished, as usual, by way of a bureaucratic revelation. Not a single national congress, no international congress, nor even a plenum of the ECCI; no preparation in the press of the party, no analysis of the policy of the past. And there is nothing astounding in this. At the very first steps in the discussion in the party, each thinking worker would ask the functionaries: Why have the Bolshevik-Leninists been expelled from all the sections and why are they subjected in the Soviet Union to arrests, to deportation, and to firing squads? Is it only because they dig deeper and see further? The Stalinist bureaucracy cannot permit such a conclusion. It is capable of any flip-flops or somersaults, but to present itself honestly before the workers face to face with the Bolshevik-Leninists – that’s something it cannot and does not dare to do. Thus in the struggle for self-preservation, the Stalinist apparatus vitiates its new turn by making it suspect beforehand in the view not only of the Social Democratic workers but also of the Communists.
The publication of the manifesto of the ECCI is accompanied by yet another circumstance, extraneous to the question we are examining, but which throws an exceedingly glaring light on the present position of the Comintern and on the attitude of the leading Stalinist groups towards it. In Pravda of March 6, the manifesto is published not as a direct and open appeal of the ECCI situated in Moscow – as was always the case – but as the translation of a document from l’Humanité, transmitted from Paris by the telegraphic agency TASS.
What a stupid and humiliating ruse! After all the successes, after the realization of the first Five Year Plan, after the “disappearance of the classes,” after the “entry into socialism,” the Stalinist bureaucracy no longer dares to publish in its own name the manifesto of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. That is its real relationship to the Comintern and that is how confident it is on the international arena.
The manifesto is not the sole reply to the initiative of the Second International. Through the intermediary of paper organizations – the revolutionary trade union oppositions (RGOs) of Germany and Poland, the Anti-fascist Alliance, and the so- called Italian General Confederation of Labor – the Comintern is convening for the month of April a “Pan-European Workers’ Anti-fascist Congress.” The list of those invited, as is proper, is confused and vast: factories (they say “factories,” although by the efforts of Stalin-Lozovsky the Communists have been ousted from practically all the factories in the world), local labor organizations, revolutionary, reformist, Catholic, belonging to a party or not, sports, anti-fascist, and peasant organizations. And more: “We wish also to invite all those individuals who are really [!] fighting for the cause of the workers.” Having compromised for a long time the cause of the masses, the strategists appeal to the “individuals,” to those hermits who have found no place in the ranks of the masses but who, just the same, “are really fighting for the cause of the workers.” Barbusse and General Schönaich [3] will once more be mobilized to save Europe from Hitler.
Here we have a ready-made libretto for one of those charlatan presentations with which the Stalinists are in the habit of masking their impotence. What has the Amsterdam bloc of centrists and the pacifists accomplished in the struggle against the aggression of the Japanese bandits in China? Nothing. Out of respect for Stalinist “neutrality,” the pacifists have not even issued a manifesto of protest. Now a new edition of the Amsterdam Congress is being prepared, not against war but against fascism. What will the anti-fascist bloc of vacated “factories” and impotent “individuals” do? Nothing. It will issue a hollow manifesto, if, as a matter of fact things go as far this time as the holding of a congress.
The propensity for individuals has two faces: opportunistic and adventurist. The Russian Social Revolutionaries in the old days extended the right hand to the liberals and held a bomb in the left hand. The experience of the last ten years attests that after every great defeat provoked or at least aggravated by the policy of the Comintern, the Stalinist bureaucracy invariably sought to refurbish its reputation with the aid of some grandiose adventure or other (Estonia, Bulgaria, Canton). Doesn’t this danger exist now too? In any case, we deem it necessary to raise a voice of warning. Adventures that aim to replace the action of the paralyzed masses disorganize the masses still more and aggravate the catastrophe.
The conditions of the present world situation, as well as the conditions of each country in particular, are just as deadly for the Social Democracy as they are favorable for the revolutionary party. But the Stalinist bureaucracy has succeeded in converting the crisis of capitalism and of reformism into a crisis of Communism. That is the sum total of ten years of uncontrolled command by the epigones.
Hypocrites will be found to say: the Opposition is criticizing a party which has fallen into the hands of the executioner. Blackguards will add: the Opposition is helping the executioner. By combining a specious sentimentalism with venomous falsehood, the Stalinists will endeavor to hide the Central Committee behind the apparatus, the apparatus behind the party, to eliminate the question of responsibility for the catastrophe, for the false strategy, for the disastrous regime, for the criminal leadership: that means helping the executioners of today and tomorrow.
The policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy in China was no less disastrous than it is now in Germany. But there, the affair took place behind the back of the world proletariat, under conditions which were incomprehensible to it. The critical voice of the Opposition hardly reached beyond the Soviet Union to the workers of the other countries. The Stalinist apparatus went practically unpunished for the Chinese experience. In Germany, it is entirely different All the stages of the drama developed before the world proletariat At each stage, the Opposition raised its voice. The whole course of development was announced in advance. The Stalinist bureaucracy slandered the Opposition, imputed to it ideas and plans alien to it; expelled all those who dared to speak of the united front; helped the Social Democratic bureaucracy demolish the united local defense committees; cut the workers off from the slightest possibility of setting out on the road of the mass struggle; disorganized the vanguard; paralyzed the proletariat. Thus, by opposing a united front of defense with the Social Democracy, the Stalinists found themselves with the latter in a united front of panic and of capitulation.
And now, already standing just short of ruin, the leadership of the Comintern fears light and criticism more than anything else. Let the world revolution perish, but long live vain prestige! The bankrupts sow confusion, bury the evidence, and cover their tracks. The fact that the Communist Party of Germany lost “only” 1,200,000 votes at the first blow – with a general rise in the number of voters of three to four millions – is proclaimed by Pravda as an “enormous political victory.” In the same way, in 1924, Stalin proclaimed as an “enormous victory” the fact that the workers in Germany, who were retreating without battle, had still given the Communist Party 3,600,000 votes. If the proletariat deceived and disarmed by both apparatuses, has this time given the Communist Party almost five million votes, this signifies only that they would have given it twice or three times that number had they trusted its leadership. They would have raised it to power had it shown itself capable of taking and holding power. But it gave the proletariat nothing save confusion, zigzags, defeats, and calamities.
Yes, five million Communists still succeeded in reaching the ballot box, one by one. But in the factories and on the streets, there are none. They are disconcerted, dispersed, demoralized. They have been broken away from independence under the yoke of the apparatus. The bureaucratic terror of Stalinism paralyzed their willpower before the turn came for the terror of the fascist bands.
It must be said clearly, plainly, openly: Stalinism in Germany has had its August 4. Henceforth, the advanced workers will only speak of the period of the domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy with a burning sense of shame, with words of hatred and curses. The official German Communist Party is doomed. From now on it will only decompose, crumble, and melt into the void. German Communism can be reborn only on a new basis and with a new leadership.
The law of uneven development acts also upon the fate of Stalinism. In the various countries, it finds itself in different stages of decomposition. To what degree the tragic experience of Germany will serve as a stimulus to the rebirth of the other sections of the Comintern, the future will show. In Germany in any case the swan song of the Stalinist bureaucracy has been sung. The German proletariat will rise again, Stalinism – never. Under the terrible blows of the enemy, the advanced German workers will have to build up a new party. The Bolshevik-Leninists will give all their forces to this work.
The most powerful proletariat of Europe, measured by its place in production, its social weight, and the strength of its organizations, has manifested no resistance since Hitler’s coming to power and his first violent attacks against the workers’ organizations. This is the fact from which to proceed in subsequent strategic calculations.
It would be patently stupid to believe that the future evolution of Germany will follow the Italian road; that Hitler will strengthen his domination step by step without serious resistance; that German fascism will enjoy long years of domination. No, the further fate of National Socialism will have to be deduced from an analysis of the German and international conditions, and not from purely historical analogies. But this much is already evident: if from September 1930 onwards we demanded of the Communist International a short-range policy in Germany, then it is necessary now to work out a long-range policy. Before decisive battles will become possible, the proletarian vanguard will have to reorient itself; that is to say, it will have to understand what has happened, assign the responsibility for the great historical defeat, trace out the new road, and thus regain confidence in itself
The criminal role of the Social Democracy requires no commentary: the Comintern was created fourteen years ago precisely in order to snatch the proletariat from the demoralizing influence of the Social Democracy. If it has not succeeded up to now, if the German proletariat found itself impotent disarmed, and paralyzed at the moment of its greatest historic test the direct and immediate blame falls upon the leadership of the post-Leninist Comintern. That is the first conclusion which ought to be drawn immediately.
Under the treacherous blows of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Left Opposition maintained its fidelity to the official party to the very end. The Bolshevik-Leninists now share the fate of all the other Communist organizations: the militants of our cadres are arrested, our publications forbidden, our literature confiscated. Hitler even hurried to suspend the Bulletin of the Opposition appearing in the Russian language. But if, together with the whole proletarian vanguard, the Bolshevik-Leninists bear the consequences of the first serious victory of fascism, they cannot and will not bear even a shadow of the responsibility for the official policy of the Comintern.
Since 1923, that is, since the beginning of the struggle against the Left Opposition, the Stalinist leadership, although indirectly, assisted the Social Democracy with all its strength to derail, to befuddle, to enfeeble the German proletariat: it restrained and hindered the workers when the conditions dictated a courageous revolutionary offensive; it proclaimed the approach of the revolutionary situation when it had already passed; it worked up agreements with petty-bourgeois phrasemongers and windbags; it limped impotently at the tail of the Social Democracy under cover of the policy of the united front; it proclaimed the “third period” and the struggle for the conquest of the streets under conditions of political ebb and the weakness of the Communist Party; it replaced the serious struggle by leaps, adventures or parades; it isolated the Communists from the mass trade unions; it identified the Social Democracy with fascism and rejected the united front with the mass workers’ organizations in face of the aggressive bands of the National Socialists; it sabotaged the slightest initiative for the united front for local defense, at the same time it systematically deceived the workers as to the real relationship of forces, distorted the facts, passed off friends as enemies and enemies as friends – and drew the noose tighter and tighter around the neck of the party, not permitting it to breathe freely any longer, nor to speak, nor to think.
Out of the vast literature devoted to the question of fascism it is enough to refer to the speech of Thälmann, official leader of the German Communist Party, who, at the plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in April 1931, denounced the “pessimists,” that is, those who knew how to foresee, in the following terms: “We have not allowed the moods of panic to rout us ... We have soberly and firmly established the fact that September 14 [1930] was in a certain sense Hitler’s best day, and that afterwards will come not better days but worse. This evaluation which we made of the development of this party is confirmed by the events ... Today, the fascists have no reasons for laughing.” Referring to the creation of defense groups by the Social Democracy, Thälmann demonstrated in the same speech that these groups differ in no respect from the shock troops of the National Socialists and that both of them are likewise preparing to annihilate Communism.
Today, Thälmann is under arrest. Faced with triumphant reaction, the Bolshevik-Leninists are in the same ranks as Thälmann. But the policy of Thälmann is the policy of Stalin, that is, the official policy of the Comintern. It is precisely this policy which is the cause of the complete demoralization of the party at the moment of danger, when the leaders lose their heads, when the party members, unaccustomed to thinking, fall prostrate, when the principal historic positions are surrendered without a fight. A false political theory bears within itself its own punishment. The strength and the obstinacy of the apparatus only augment the dimensions of the catastrophe.
Having surrendered to the enemy everything that could be surrendered in such a short space of time, the Stalinists are trying to rectify the past by means of convulsive acts, which only more brightly illuminate the whole chain of crimes committed by them. Now that the press of the Communist Party is stifled, now the apparatus is destroyed, now the bloody pennant of fascism waves with impunity over the Karl Liebknecht House [1], the Executive Committee of the Comintern is starting out on the road of the united front not only from below but also from above. The new zigzag, sharper than all that preceded it, has not, however, been effected on the impulse of the ECCI itself, the Stalinist bureaucracy has abandoned the initiative to the Second International. The latter has succeeded in taking hold of the weapon of the united front of which it has been in mortal dread until now. To the extent that it is possible to speak of political advantages under the conditions of a panicky retreat, they are to be found exclusively on the side of reformism. Forced to reply to a direct question, the Stalinist bureaucracy chose the worst way: it does not reject an entente of the two Internationals, but neither does it accept it; it plays hide and seek. It has come to such a lack of self-confidence, to such degradation, that it no longer dares to show itself to the world proletariat face to face with the leaders of the Second International, the branded agents of the bourgeoisie, the electors of Hindenburg who blazed the trail of fascism.
In a special appeal of the ECCI on March 5, To the Workers of All Countries, the Stalinists do not say a word about social fascism as the main enemy. They no longer speak about the great discovery of their leader: “The Social Democracy and fascism are not antipodes but twins.” They no longer insist on saying that the struggle against fascism demands as a preliminary the defeat of the Social Democracy. They do not breathe a word about the inadmissibility of the united front from above. On the contrary, they carefully enumerate those cases in the past where the Stalinist bureaucracy, unexpectedly for the workers and for itself, found itself forced to improvise proposals for the united front to the reformist summits. Thus do artificial, false, and charlatanesque theories founder in the fury of the historical tempest
“Taking into account the peculiarities of each country” and the impossibility, which allegedly flows from them, of organizing the united front on an international scale (the struggle against “exceptionalism,” that is, the theory of the right-wingers on national peculiarities, is suddenly forgotten), the Stalinist bureaucracy recommends to the national Communist parties that they address proposals for a united front to the “Central Committees of the Social Democratic parties.” Only yesterday this was proclaimed a capitulation to social fascism! Thus do all the great lessons of Stalinism for the last four years fly under the table into the wastebasket Thus is a whole political system reduced to dust.
Matters do not rest there: having just declared the impossibility of generating the conditions for a united front on the international arena, the ECCI immediately forgets it and no more than twenty lines further on formulates the conditions under which the united front is admissible and acceptable in all countries, in spite of the difference in national conditions. The retreat before fascism is followed by a panic-stricken retreat from the theoretical commandments of Stalinism. Chips and fragments of ideas and principles are thrown out along the road like so much ballast.
The conditions for the united front put forward by the Comintern for all the countries committees of action against fascism, demonstrations and strikes against wage reductions) present nothing new. On the contrary, they are the schematized and bureaucratized reproduction of the slogans that the Left Opposition formulated much more clearly and concretely two and a half years ago, for which it was registered in the camp of social fascism. The united front on such a basis could have yielded decisive results in Germany; but for that, it would have had to be carried out in time. Time is an important factor in politics.
What is therefore the practical value now of the proposals of the ECCI? For Germany, it is minimal. The policy of the united front assumes a ␄front,” that is, stabilized positions and a centralized leadership. The Left Opposition put forward the conditions for the united front back then as conditions for an active defense, with the perspective of passing over to the offensive. Now, the German proletariat has been reduced to a state of disorderly retreat, without even rearguard battles. In this situation, voluntary unions of Communist and Social Democratic workers can and will be realized for various episodic tasks, but the systematic construction of the united front is inevitably thrust back for the indefinite future. There must be no illusions on this score.
About eighteen months ago, we wrote that the key to the situation is in the hands of the German Communist Party. The Stalinist bureaucracy has now let this key fail from its hands. Great events outside of the will of the party will be necessary to give the workers the possibility of drawing up short, of fortifying themselves, of rebuilding their ranks and of passing over to an active defense. We have no way of knowing with precision when this will occur. Perhaps much quicker than the triumphant counterrevolution hopes. But in any case, it is not those who issued the manifesto of the ECCI who will direct the policy of the united front in Germany.
If the central position has been surrendered, one must fortify the approaches; one must prepare bases for a future assault from all sides. In Germany, this preparation implies the critical elucidation of the past, maintaining the spirits of the vanguard fighters, rallying them, and organizing rearguard combats wherever possible – in anticipation of the moment when the various fighting groups will draw together into a great army. This preparation implies at the same time defending the proletarian positions in the countries closely connected with Germany or located near it: in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic countries, Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, France, and Switzerland. Fascist Germany must be surrounded by a powerful circle of proletarian fortifications. Without ceasing for an instant the attempts to halt the disorderly retreat of the German workers, it is necessary to create fortified proletarian positions around the frontiers of Germany for the struggle against fascism.
In the first place comes Austria, which is immediately threatened by the fascist cataclysm. One can say with confidence that if the Austrian proletariat were to seize power now and transform its country into a revolutionary battleground, Austria would become for the revolution of the German proletariat what Piedmont [2] was for the revolution of the Italian bourgeoisie. It cannot be predicted how far the Austrian proletarian pushed forward by the events but paralyzed by the reformist bureaucracy, will advance along this road. The task of Communism is to help the events, overcoming Austro-Marxism. The policy of the united front is one of the means. The conditions which the manifesto of the ECCI takes over so tardily from the Left Opposition thus retain all their force.
However, the policy of the united front contains not only advantages but also dangers. It easily gives birth to combinations between leaders behind the back of the masses, to a passive adaptation to the ally, to opportunist vacillations. It is possible to ward off these dangers only if there exist two express guarantees: the maintenance of full freedom of criticism of the ally and the reestablishment of full freedom of criticism within the ranks of one’s own party. To refuse to criticize one’s allies leads directly and immediately to capitulation to reformism. The policy of the united front in the absence of party democracy, that is, without control of the apparatus by the party, leaves the leaders a free hand for opportunist experiments, the inevitable complements of adventurist experiments.
How has the ECCI acted in this case? Dozens of times the Left Opposition predicted that under the blows of events, the Stalinists would be forced to repudiate their ultraleftism and that, placing themselves on the road of the united front they would begin to commit all the opportunist treasons which they attributed to us only yesterday. This time, too, the prediction has been realized literally.
In making a dizzying swing towards the position of the united front the ECCI tramples on the fundamental guarantees which alone can assure a revolutionary content to the policy of the united front. The Stalinists take into consideration and accept the hypocritical-diplomatic demands of the reformists for so-called mutual non-aggression. Breaking with all the traditions of Marxism and of Bolshevism, they recommend to the Communist parties, in case a united front is realized, that they “abandon all attacks against the Social Democratic organizations during the joint action.” That’s just what it says. “To abandon all attacks [!] upon the Social Democracy” (what a shameful formula!) means to abandon the freedom of political criticism, that is, a basic function of the revolutionary party.
The capitulation is called for not by practical necessity but by a panicky state of mind. The reformists come and will come to an agreement to the extent that the pressure of events and the pressure of the masses force them to do so. The demand for “nonaggression” is blackmail, that is, the attempt of the reformist leaders to extort an auxiliary advantage. To submit to blackmail means to build the united front upon rotten foundations and to give the reformist businessmen the possibility of blowing it up under some arbitrary pretext or other.
Criticism in general, all the more so under the conditions of a united front should of course correspond to the real relations and observe the necessary proportions. The absurdities about “social fascism” must be refuted. That is a concession not to the Social Democracy, but to Marxism. It is not for the treachery of 1918 but for its evil work in 1933 that the ally must be criticized. But criticism, like political life itself, of which criticism is the voice, cannot be halted for an hour. If the Communists’ disclosures correspond to reality, they serve the purposes of the united front pushing forward the temporary ally and, what is more important giving a revolutionary education to the whole proletariat. To abandon this fundamental duty is the first stage in that shameful and criminal policy which Stalin foisted upon the Chinese Communists with regard to the Kuomintang.
Matters stand no better with regard to the second guarantee. Having renounced criticism of the Social Democracy, the Stalinist apparatus does not even think of giving the right of criticism to the members of its own party. The turn itself is accomplished, as usual, by way of a bureaucratic revelation. Not a single national congress, no international congress, nor even a plenum of the ECCI; no preparation in the press of the party, no analysis of the policy of the past. And there is nothing astounding in this. At the very first steps in the discussion in the party, each thinking worker would ask the functionaries: Why have the Bolshevik-Leninists been expelled from all the sections and why are they subjected in the Soviet Union to arrests, to deportation, and to firing squads? Is it only because they dig deeper and see further? The Stalinist bureaucracy cannot permit such a conclusion. It is capable of any flip-flops or somersaults, but to present itself honestly before the workers face to face with the Bolshevik-Leninists – that’s something it cannot and does not dare to do. Thus in the struggle for self-preservation, the Stalinist apparatus vitiates its new turn by making it suspect beforehand in the view not only of the Social Democratic workers but also of the Communists.
The publication of the manifesto of the ECCI is accompanied by yet another circumstance, extraneous to the question we are examining, but which throws an exceedingly glaring light on the present position of the Comintern and on the attitude of the leading Stalinist groups towards it. In Pravda of March 6, the manifesto is published not as a direct and open appeal of the ECCI situated in Moscow – as was always the case – but as the translation of a document from l’Humanité, transmitted from Paris by the telegraphic agency TASS.
What a stupid and humiliating ruse! After all the successes, after the realization of the first Five Year Plan, after the “disappearance of the classes,” after the “entry into socialism,” the Stalinist bureaucracy no longer dares to publish in its own name the manifesto of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. That is its real relationship to the Comintern and that is how confident it is on the international arena.
The manifesto is not the sole reply to the initiative of the Second International. Through the intermediary of paper organizations – the revolutionary trade union oppositions (RGOs) of Germany and Poland, the Anti-fascist Alliance, and the so- called Italian General Confederation of Labor – the Comintern is convening for the month of April a “Pan-European Workers’ Anti-fascist Congress.” The list of those invited, as is proper, is confused and vast: factories (they say “factories,” although by the efforts of Stalin-Lozovsky the Communists have been ousted from practically all the factories in the world), local labor organizations, revolutionary, reformist, Catholic, belonging to a party or not, sports, anti-fascist, and peasant organizations. And more: “We wish also to invite all those individuals who are really [!] fighting for the cause of the workers.” Having compromised for a long time the cause of the masses, the strategists appeal to the “individuals,” to those hermits who have found no place in the ranks of the masses but who, just the same, “are really fighting for the cause of the workers.” Barbusse and General Schönaich [3] will once more be mobilized to save Europe from Hitler.
Here we have a ready-made libretto for one of those charlatan presentations with which the Stalinists are in the habit of masking their impotence. What has the Amsterdam bloc of centrists and the pacifists accomplished in the struggle against the aggression of the Japanese bandits in China? Nothing. Out of respect for Stalinist “neutrality,” the pacifists have not even issued a manifesto of protest. Now a new edition of the Amsterdam Congress is being prepared, not against war but against fascism. What will the anti-fascist bloc of vacated “factories” and impotent “individuals” do? Nothing. It will issue a hollow manifesto, if, as a matter of fact things go as far this time as the holding of a congress.
The propensity for individuals has two faces: opportunistic and adventurist. The Russian Social Revolutionaries in the old days extended the right hand to the liberals and held a bomb in the left hand. The experience of the last ten years attests that after every great defeat provoked or at least aggravated by the policy of the Comintern, the Stalinist bureaucracy invariably sought to refurbish its reputation with the aid of some grandiose adventure or other (Estonia, Bulgaria, Canton). Doesn’t this danger exist now too? In any case, we deem it necessary to raise a voice of warning. Adventures that aim to replace the action of the paralyzed masses disorganize the masses still more and aggravate the catastrophe.
The conditions of the present world situation, as well as the conditions of each country in particular, are just as deadly for the Social Democracy as they are favorable for the revolutionary party. But the Stalinist bureaucracy has succeeded in converting the crisis of capitalism and of reformism into a crisis of Communism. That is the sum total of ten years of uncontrolled command by the epigones.
Hypocrites will be found to say: the Opposition is criticizing a party which has fallen into the hands of the executioner. Blackguards will add: the Opposition is helping the executioner. By combining a specious sentimentalism with venomous falsehood, the Stalinists will endeavor to hide the Central Committee behind the apparatus, the apparatus behind the party, to eliminate the question of responsibility for the catastrophe, for the false strategy, for the disastrous regime, for the criminal leadership: that means helping the executioners of today and tomorrow.
The policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy in China was no less disastrous than it is now in Germany. But there, the affair took place behind the back of the world proletariat, under conditions which were incomprehensible to it. The critical voice of the Opposition hardly reached beyond the Soviet Union to the workers of the other countries. The Stalinist apparatus went practically unpunished for the Chinese experience. In Germany, it is entirely different All the stages of the drama developed before the world proletariat At each stage, the Opposition raised its voice. The whole course of development was announced in advance. The Stalinist bureaucracy slandered the Opposition, imputed to it ideas and plans alien to it; expelled all those who dared to speak of the united front; helped the Social Democratic bureaucracy demolish the united local defense committees; cut the workers off from the slightest possibility of setting out on the road of the mass struggle; disorganized the vanguard; paralyzed the proletariat. Thus, by opposing a united front of defense with the Social Democracy, the Stalinists found themselves with the latter in a united front of panic and of capitulation.
And now, already standing just short of ruin, the leadership of the Comintern fears light and criticism more than anything else. Let the world revolution perish, but long live vain prestige! The bankrupts sow confusion, bury the evidence, and cover their tracks. The fact that the Communist Party of Germany lost “only” 1,200,000 votes at the first blow – with a general rise in the number of voters of three to four millions – is proclaimed by Pravda as an “enormous political victory.” In the same way, in 1924, Stalin proclaimed as an “enormous victory” the fact that the workers in Germany, who were retreating without battle, had still given the Communist Party 3,600,000 votes. If the proletariat deceived and disarmed by both apparatuses, has this time given the Communist Party almost five million votes, this signifies only that they would have given it twice or three times that number had they trusted its leadership. They would have raised it to power had it shown itself capable of taking and holding power. But it gave the proletariat nothing save confusion, zigzags, defeats, and calamities.
Yes, five million Communists still succeeded in reaching the ballot box, one by one. But in the factories and on the streets, there are none. They are disconcerted, dispersed, demoralized. They have been broken away from independence under the yoke of the apparatus. The bureaucratic terror of Stalinism paralyzed their willpower before the turn came for the terror of the fascist bands.
It must be said clearly, plainly, openly: Stalinism in Germany has had its August 4. Henceforth, the advanced workers will only speak of the period of the domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy with a burning sense of shame, with words of hatred and curses. The official German Communist Party is doomed. From now on it will only decompose, crumble, and melt into the void. German Communism can be reborn only on a new basis and with a new leadership.
The law of uneven development acts also upon the fate of Stalinism. In the various countries, it finds itself in different stages of decomposition. To what degree the tragic experience of Germany will serve as a stimulus to the rebirth of the other sections of the Comintern, the future will show. In Germany in any case the swan song of the Stalinist bureaucracy has been sung. The German proletariat will rise again, Stalinism – never. Under the terrible blows of the enemy, the advanced German workers will have to build up a new party. The Bolshevik-Leninists will give all their forces to this work.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
