A Declaration of La Vérité

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Our publication is meant for the vanguard workers. Our only task is the liberation of the working class. To achieve this aim, we see no other road than the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The contemporary democratic state is the instrument of bourgeois rule. The democratic system aims to assure the rule of capital. The less this domination is ensured by normal democratic means, the more it requires the use of violence.

The French socialists continue to repeat that they will reach socialism by democratic means. But we have seen and we see the social democrats in power. Last May Day in Germany they shot down twenty-seven workers because the vanguard of the Berlin proletariat wanted to come out in the streets on the date fixed by the founding convention of the Second International as the day of great proletarian demonstrations. In England the Labourites crawl not only before capital but before the monarchy, and they begin the “democratization” of the country, not by liquidating the House of Lords, but by elevating among the farcical dignitaries that old Fabian, Webb.

The Marxist position on democracy is completely vindicated by experience. Social democracy in power does not even mean that reforms will be achieved. When the bourgeoisie feels forced to agree to a social reform, it carries it out itself, without handing over the honor to the social democrats. When the bourgeoisie allows the socialists to serve it, it deprives them even of the pocket money needed to cover the cost of their reform activity.

The difference between our epoch and the prewar epoch is reflected politically in the sharpest way by the fate of the social democracy. Up until the war, it was in opposition to the bourgeois state. But now it is its firmest support. In England and in Germany, the persistence of capitalist rule would not be possible without the social democracy. If it is absurd to equate the social democracy with fascism as the present leadership of the Communist International often does, nevertheless it is indisputable that social democracy and fascism represent instruments, distinct and in opposition on certain points, which, in the final analysis, serve in different periods the same end: the maintenance of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist epoch.

The revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois domination was accomplished by the Bolshevik Party. The October Revolution is the grandest achievement of the world working-class movement, and it will remain one of the greatest events of human history in general. We stand resolutely and without reservations on the basis of the October Revolution: it is our revolution.

The February revolution had shown that democracy which the revolution had only just created, heaps pitiless reprisals on the workers as soon as they start to threaten private property. On the other hand, the October Revolution showed that, even in a backward country where the peasant population is an overwhelming majority, the proletariat can seize power by gathering around itself the oppressed masses. This historic lesson was taught to the international proletariat by the Bolshevik Party under Lenin’s leadership. The policy of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution is the supreme application of the Marxist method. It marks the new starting point of the working class in its march forward.

Postwar Dreams and Reality

Step by step, France comes out of the drunkenness of victory. The ghosts flee. The fantastic hopes vanish. The harsh reality remains. The haughty dream of French capital, domination of Europe, and, through Europe, the world, is crushed.

During the early postwar years, the governments of England and America still thought it necessary to flatter the national pride of the French bourgeoisie in giving it, from time to time, an ornamental satisfaction. But this time has passed. The American bourgeoisie has since measured the depth of Europe’s downfall and has ceased bothering itself about it. The British bourgeoisie which the Americans treat bluntly passes off its anger onto the French. The situation of the British bourgeoisie is characterized by the contradiction between its traditions of world domination and the decline in its place in the world economy. The French bourgeoisie does not have such a tradition of power. The Versailles peace is the delirious fantasy of an upstart petty bourgeois. France’s material base is absolutely inadequate by contemporary (that is, American) standards for it to have a world role.

The serious growth of French industry is an incontestable fact, as is the rationalization of industrial procedures. But it is precisely this growth that faces the French bourgeoisie with the problem of the world market in a more and more urgent way. It is no longer a question of occupying the Saar or the Ruhr, but of the place of French imperialism in the world. At the first important test, the insufficiency of French imperialism will be clearly shown: too small a population, too restricted a territory, too heavy a dependence on her neighbors, too heavy a burden of debt, and an even heavier burden of militarism. We will, not attempt to predict here the dates of the future inevitable failures, retreats, and defeats of French imperialism. But we foresee them and we do not doubt that they will provoke internal crises and shakeups. In touching speeches one can operate with fictitious quantities, but in the real political world the sophisms of Poincaré, the pathos of Franklin-Bouillon, or the eloquence of Briand rings like pitiful yelping. America says “Pay!” England says “Pay!” Snowden, the Labour Party interpreter for the City, finds in his vocabulary the most vulgar expressions about France.

The Communist International foresaw this outcome in the period when it had a leadership able to comprehend the meaning of the development of things and able to foresee their results. As far back as 1920, when the hegemony of victorious France appeared to be indisputable, the manifesto of the Second Congress of the Communist International stated: “Intoxicated by chauvinist fumes of a victory which she won for others, bourgeois France considers herself the commandress of Europe. In reality, never before has France and the very foundations of her existence been so slavishly dependent upon the more powerful states — England and North America — as she is today. For Belgium, France prescribes a specific economic and military program, transforming her weaker ally into an enslaved province, but in relation to England, France herself plays the role of Belgium, only on a somewhat larger scale.”

The postwar decade in France was more peaceful than in most of the other countries in Europe. But that was only a moratorium based on inflation. Inflation reigned everywhere: in the monetary exchanges, in budgets, in military systems, in diplomatic plans, and in imperialist appetites. The big monetary reform of Poincare only revealed this secret: the wine of the French bourgeoisie contains four-fifths water. The moratorium expires. The American stocks must be paid for, the friendship of the world powers must be paid for, the corpses of the French workers and peasants must be paid for. France enters the age of settling of accounts. But the biggest bill will be presented by the French proletariat.

The Crisis of the Communist Party

The crisis of the French bourgeoisie in facing the world, and, therefore, its internal crisis that is now beginning, coincide with a profound crisis in the French Communist Party. The first steps of the party had been full of promise. At that time the leadership of the Communist International combined revolutionary perspicacity and audacity with the deepest attention to the concrete particularities of each country. Only on that road was success possible in general. The changes in leadership in the Soviet Union that occurred under the pressure of class forces reverberated injuriously throughout the life of the whole Communist International, including the French party. The continuity of development and experience was automatically broken. Those who led the French Communist Party and the Communist International in Lenin’s era were not only pushed out of the leadership, but expelled from the party. Only those who follow quickly enough all the zigzags of the Moscow leaders are allowed to lead the party. The ultraleft course of Zinoviev in 1924-25 meant replacing Marxist analysis with the noisy phrase, the accumulation of mistakes, and the transformation of democratic centralism into its police-like caricature. After the failure of the ultraleft leadership, it was replaced by docile employees without individuality. It was they who oriented toward Chiang Kai-shek and Purcell, while they trailed after the reformists in internal affairs. And when the Stalinist leadership, under the pressure of both the growing danger of the Right and the whip of the criticisms made by the Opposition, was forced to carry out its left turn, there was no need even to change the French leadership team: the men whose only actions had been to follow the halfway social democratic policies of 1926-27 became adventurist politicians with the same facility. August 1 shows this strikingly. In China, in Germany, in other countries, the adventurist policy has already led to bloody catastrophes. In France to date, it has only been marked by grotesque fiascoes. But if ridicule can kill anyone, it is above all a revolutionary party.

A Great Danger

The danger, as we have said, is that a new crisis of French capitalism could catch the vanguard of the French proletariat unawares. The danger is that favorable situations can be allowed to slip by, one after another, as has been seen to occur in different countries after the war. Our task is to prevent this danger by an urgent and repeated appeal to the class consciousness and the revolutionary will of the proletarian vanguard.

We are not at all thinking of minimizing the fact that there is an enormous distance between what the party should be and what it is. There is even, on some points, a complete opposition. We have already given a brief appraisal of the French Communist Party. The deplorable results of its policy are striking: a drop in prestige, a decline in membership, a reduction in activity. But we are still far from erecting a cross over the party and going beyond it.

The official party now contains some twenty or thirty thousand members. It controls — in a sorry way — the CGTU, which has about three hundred thousand members. In the last elections the party obtained more than a million votes. These figures give a picture not of the growth of the party but of its decline. At the same time they testify to the fact that the party, formed in the eddies of the war, under the influence of the October Revolution, still contains a commanding part of the proletarian vanguard despite the unbelievable faults of its leadership. We see in this fact above all an indisputable expression of the imperious need felt by the proletariat for a revolutionary leadership.

We are neither hostile nor indifferent toward the Communist Party. Not of course out of sympathy for its functionaries. But there are courageous workers in the party, who are ready for any sacrifice: they are the ones that we want to help develop a correct political line and establish a healthy internal regime and a good communist leadership. Furthermore, around the party are some tens of thousands of communists or simply revolutionary workers who are ready to become communists but who are blocked by this policy of impotence, convulsions, somersaults, clique struggles, and palace revolutions. One of the essential tasks of the Communist Opposition is to stop the justified indignation against a pernicious leadership from becoming a disillusionment about communism and the revolution in general. This can only be done by developing a Marxist understanding of the facts and by determining the correct tactics according to the facts of the situation itself.

Party and Unions

It is stupid and criminal to transform the unions into a slightly larger second edition of the party, or to make them an appendage of the party. It is completely legitimate for a revolutionary workers’ party to try to win influence in the unions. Otherwise, it would condemn itself to vain, pseudo-revolutionary chattering. But it must do this by methods that flow from the very nature of the unions and that reinforce them: that attract new elements, increase the number of members, and contribute to the development of correct means of struggle against the bosses. Workers see in the unions first of all a means of defending themselves against exploitation by the boss. In order to bring them into the unions, to hold them, and then to take them further, developing their class consciousness, it is first necessary for the union leadership to show that it can defend them well in immediate issues: wages, eight-hour day, harassment or brutality by the bosses or their assistants, various forms of capitalist rationalization. Trying" to sustain striking workers by repeatedly giving them boring speeches on the “imminence” of war can only have disastrous consequences in all domains and for all workers, for the party and the CGTU, It shows an absolute incomprehension of the work to be done and an illusion that one can immediately reach a goal which can only be attained through long and tenacious effort.

The result is the picture that we see before us. To the degree that the Communist Party extends its influence over organization, that organization loses strength. The Communist Party took over the ARAC.¹⁹² But by the time it had taken it over, the group was moribund. It is the same with the CGTU. Certainly the latter is more resistant, fortunately it is hard to kill; a bad policy is not enough to destroy it. But it is possible to reduce its membership, demoralize the rank and file, and make them wary of a leadership which is always making mistakes and always starting over again. This is precisely what the Communist Party has done in recent years.

The consequences of all these zigzags is that the clearest and most correct ideas are now obscured. There has been no advance toward the solution of a single important question. Much ground has even been lost. But the problem remains. To resolve it without recalling the basic mistakes of the Commune and without taking into account the immense experience of the Russian Revolution is to be deprived of the surest data and to prepare new disasters.

Three Tendencies in the International

Our attitude to the Communist International is based on the same principles as our attitude to the French Communist Party.

Since the end of 1923, the Communist International has lived and lives under the barrel of a revolver held successively by the apparatus of Zinoviev and then of Stalin. Everyone was forced to think, speak, and, above all, vote “monolithically.” This destruction of ideological life takes severe vengeance now with the growth of factions and groups. As for the fundamental tendencies, we believe that they can be characterized as follows:

The Communist Left expresses the historic interests of the proletariat. Following defeats of the proletariat and the revolutionary ebb, the stabilization of the bourgeoisie and the bureaucratic “victories,” the Left is once again only a minority fighting against the current, as it was during the war.

The Right tendency within communism tends, consciously or not, to take the place that the social democracy occupied before the war, that is, the place of reformist opposition to capitalist society, while the social democracy itself has become, not by accident, one of the leading parties of the bourgeoisie. It is certain that the Right will not be able to hold this position for long. In our imperialist epoch, which poses all questions sharply, the Right will accomplish its evolution toward the bourgeoisie incomparably more rapidly than the social democracy did.

The third current, centrism, holds an intermediate position and is characterized by a policy of vacillation between the proletarian revolutionary line and the national reformist petty-bourgeois line. Centrism is now the leading tendency in official communism.

This is explained by historical reasons such as the character of the period in which we live. Centrism in the USSR represents the most natural form of Bolshevism’s sliding toward national reformism. The reign of centrism is a political symptom for, while Thermidor has seriously cut into the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is far from having destroyed it. Power in the USSR has not passed into the hands of the bourgeoisie, and it cannot do so without violent class battles. The ultralefts who write lightly that Thermidor is consummated only aid the bourgeoisie to disarm the proletariat.

The position that we hold on the October Revolution and the state that came out of it flows clearly from all the above. We will not allow the bureaucrats to deliver sermons to us on the need to defend the USSR against imperialism. Communist defense of the Soviet Union also implies above all defense of the dictatorship of the proletariat against the radically false policies of the Stalinist leadership. To the question of the defense of the Soviet Union, we reply, with our Russian comrades: “For the Soviet republic? Yes! For the Soviet bureaucracy? No!”

Socialism in One Country

We are internationalists. That is not for us a conventional phrase, it is the very meaning of our convictions. The liberation of the proletariat is possible only through the international revolution, into which the national revolutions will enter like successive rings. The organization of production and exchange already has an international character. National socialism is economically and politically impossible.

We reject Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country as a reactionary petty-bourgeois utopia which incontestably leads to petty-bourgeois patriotism.

We radically reject the program of the Communist International adopted by the Sixth Congress. It is contradictory and eclectic. We reject it mainly because it adopts the principle of socialism in one country which is fundamentally opposed to internationalism.

From now on the Communist Left is an international current. Our next goal is to group ourselves together into an international faction on the basis of a community of ideas, methods, and tactics.

We consider the Russian Opposition to be the direct continuator of the Bolshevik Party and the heir of the October Revolution. We are in solidarity with the main ideas of the Russian Opposition as expressed in its documents and its actions. We are tied by an indestructible solidarity to the comrades of the Opposition who have been exiled, deported, or jailed by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

However, solidarity with the Russian Opposition does not mean copying everything it does. On French soil, in the context of a capitalist republic, we want to serve the same cause that the Russian Opposition serves on Soviet soil. Still, the method of bureaucratic command is neither tolerable nor workable within the Opposition. We are for centralism, the elementary condition for revolutionary action. But centralism has to respond to the real situation of the movement. It must be based on the real independence and full political responsibility of each Communist organization, and, even more so, of each national section.

Appeal to the Youth

The work before us is not the work of a month or of a year. A new revolutionary generation has to be educated and tempered. We will not lack internal or external problems. In the eyes of many, the road toward developing a real proletarian revolutionary cadre will seem too long. There will be hesitations and desertions. To ensure revolutionary continuity in advance, one must start by addressing the youth. The weakening of the official organizations of the Communist youth is the most dangerous sign for the future of the party. The Communist Opposition will break its way through to the proletarian youth, that is, to victory.

To choose the correct path, it is not enough to have a compass. Knowledge of the region or a good map are needed. Without them, even with a compass, one can get caught in an impassable swamp. To put forward a correct policy, it is not enough to have some general principles. It is necessary to know the situation, that is, the conditions, the facts, and the relations between them. They have to be studied attentively and honestly, and their variations followed. We cannot do it from day to day — we do not yet have a daily paper. We will do it from week to week. Only cowards can shut their eyes to the facts, whether or not they are pleasant. It is no accident that we have called our weekly La Vérité.

In France the Communist Left is divided into different groups. This is due to the fact — and we do not exclude ourselves from this criticism — that the French Opposition has spent too much time on the preparatory stage before beginning political action among the workers. We must clearly state that should this situation persist, the Opposition would be threatened with becoming a sect, or, more precisely, several sects.

We want to make our weekly the organ of the whole Left Opposition. The orientation of the paper is sufficiently spelled out, we hope, by this declaration. That will not stop the editors from opening the columns of the paper to the expression of differing nuances of thought within the Communist Left. Bias toward this or that group is completely foreign to us. We want to ensure the possibility of a collective effort on a wider basis than has been done up to now. We are solidly counting on the support of the real proletarian revolutionaries, whatever group they belonged to yesterday or belong to today.

Our basic hope is in the conscious workers who are directly linked to the masses. It is for them that we produce this paper. We say to them:

“La Vérité is your organ.”