A Plenum is Needed to Deal with the Paris Conference

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The entire worldwide workers’ movement has reached a critical stage. The old, powerful organizations of the proletariat have been destroyed. It is completely clear that this objective historic turn cannot fail to affect the policies of the Left Opposition. To be sure, it is not a question of our programmatic and strategic principles, which remain unshakeable, but of our tactics and organizational methods, and above all our attitude toward the Comintern.

Our situation as a “faction” expelled from the Comintern could not continue indefinitely. We have always been fully aware of this. Either a change in the policies and regime of the Comintern had to open up the possibility of our rejoining the ranks of its national sections; or, on the other hand, the further degeneration of the Comintern would confront us with the task of creating new parties and a new International.

We have always placed this question in the context of great historic events which would inevitably subject the Stalinist Comintern to a decisive test. Examples of such events have been alluded to more than once in our literature — a new international war, which would measure the vigor and combativity of the Comintern; an attempted counterrevolution in the USSR; an overt fascist attempt to seize power in Germany, etc. Of course, no one could predict which of these events would occur first, what the dimensions of the bankruptcy of this or that section would be, or what influence that bankruptcy would exert upon other sections and upon the Comintern as a whole, etc., etc. That is why our prognosis could have only a conditional, provisional, and non-categorical character.

To be sure, no one can doubt that if the counterrevolution should succeed in overthrowing Soviet power, the Stalinist bureaucracy would disintegrate completely throughout the world within twenty-four hours. Fortunately, that is still a long way off. The resilience of the Soviet regime, despite the disastrous policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy, is very great. And today, as yesterday, it would be criminal to abandon in advance the hope that the Soviet regime will survive despite all difficulties until the advent of the proletarian revolution in the West. In any case, it is in this direction that we must, as before, bend all of our efforts.

As things turned out, the Comintern has been subjected to the decisive test not on the question of the Soviet Union or on the war question but on the question of its capacity to resist fascism. This test took place in Germany, the country with the largest proletariat and the strongest Communist Party. Before the event there could not be the slightest doubt that the result of this test would be of decisive importance — and moreover not only for the German Communist Party, but for the Comintern as a whole. In the first place, the German Communist Party acted under the immediate leadership of the Comintern; secondly, the fascist danger has an international character, and thus the fate of the other sections, as well as of the Comintern as a whole, depends in an immediate sense upon the conclusions they are capable of drawing from the German events.

At first, our German comrades opposed launching the call for a new party. But the situation inside the official party, its attitude toward the catastrophe, its political slogans, its internal regime, have already shown very rapidly that despite the revolutionary devotion of many of the lower echelon functionaries, the party is moving inevitably toward an utter catastrophe; because, as the example of Italy shows, the conditions of illegal work punish a false policy ruthlessly and quite rapidly.

Having recognized the necessity and the timeliness of the call for a new party in Germany, our German section, through Comrade Bauer, has posed first and foremost the question of revising our attitude toward the Comintern as a whole. In any case, Comrade Bauer’s voice was not an isolated one. Ever since the moment when the presidium of the Comintern responded to the German catastrophe with the disgraceful resolution of April 5 and with the masquerade congress [against fascism] of Münzenberg-Barbusse, the comrades in many sections — if not in all — have begun, with redoubled urgency, to pose the question of the necessity of revising our attitude toward the Comintern as a whole. Naturally, the fate of the Stalinist parties in Austria and Bulgaria has removed from the agenda the question of “reforming” these parties. Certain Swiss comrades have predicted that the Swiss Communist Party will disappear from the scene along with the German Communist Party. The political bureau of our Greek section has posed the question of the need for calling for an independent party.

It can be said with certainty that the time for revising our attitude toward the Comintern is ripe not only objectively, but subjectively as well. Nevertheless, the stumbling block for many comrades remains the question of the USSR. Since we have closely linked the fate of the Comintern to the fate of the USSR in all of our previous propaganda, our adversaries could attempt to interpret our organizational break with the Comintern as a kind of break with the Soviet state. It has already been explained above why such an interpretation is completely false. The fact is that the Soviet state, despite all its bureaucratic perversions and its false economic policy, remains even today the state where land, industry, and factories are socialized, and where the peasant economy is collectivized. At the same time, the Comintern has lost all of its revolutionary strength and has revealed its complete inability to regenerate itself. It is not that the collapse of the Soviet state has pulled the Comintern down with it; on the contrary, the collapse of the Comintern threatens to drag the Soviet state down after it. Thus, the formation of new communist parties and of a new communist International becomes ever more pressing, not only from the point of view of the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat in the capitalist countries, but also from the point of view of the welfare, preservation, and regeneration of the USSR. This manner of posing the question is not a figment of the imagination. It flows from the actual course of events, which in reality never coincides and cannot coincide with theoretical prognostications.

The more rapidly our sections examine the question with all its implications, the more decisively they will proclaim the necessity for a break with the bureaucratic Comintern and the more fully will we be able to develop our work. The consequences of a great catastrophe unfold very quickly, raise new questions, and demand a clear response. Above all, this applies to the development of the left Socialist organizations. They are also under the pressure both of the most recent events and of the masses, which impels them to seek the road toward political clarity. We can and must play an important part in this process and assist the left Socialist organizations in finding the truly Bolshevik path.

On August 27 in Paris there will be a conference of left Socialist organizations at which our voice too must make itself heard. It would be hopeless and reactionary sectarianism to demand of these organizations that they declare themselves a faction of the doomed Stalinist Comintern. Presenting the matter in that way would only give the most conservative leaders of these organizations the opportunity to compromise us in the eyes of their followers as hopeless sectarians. Our policy must have a totally different character. In complete conformity with the overall situation, we must state that the differences over the Comintern are now settled. The necessity for a new international organization is absolutely evident. We are fully prepared to collaborate in a comradely way and even to unite with all organizations and groups that really want to construct an International on the foundations laid by Marx and Lenin. By removing past differences in this manner, we shall be able to place the principles of the Left Opposition with all of their implications before the left Socialist organizations. This will undoubtedly permit us to take a great stride forward.

In view of the exceptional weight of the decisions that will have to be made, the Secretariat considers it imperative to convene the plenum with the least possible delay in order to elaborate detailed instructions for the direction of our delegation at the conference of left Socialist and Communist organizations. Obviously, the instructions of the plenum will have only a preliminary character in view of the fact that our entire international organization will not have had the opportunity to express itself in the short time remaining. The final decision on our new orientation will have to be made by our international conference.