Conversation with a Dissident from Saint-Denis

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If one is to believe I'Humanité, you are following us into "the camp of the counterrevolution." In that case, when are you scheduled for expulsion from the Communist Party? And what do you think of doing?

As to our expulsion, the Central Committee will not be long in pronouncing it, for the Saint-Denis district decided by over 350 votes against just a handful to break off relations from now on with the party leadership. What will we do? Give life to our Vigilance Committee and help the workers to establish more of them throughout the whole country to resist fascism.

To realize the unity of action of the workers is very fine; we support you on this point for which we have been fighting for a number of years (you recall the German events). To fight, the working class needs unity despite all its political divisions: reformists and revolutionists must close ranks. But if you break with the Communist Party because it tramples the teachings of Lenin on the united front, I do not believe that you want to trample the teachings of Lenin on the question of the party. If a party that calls itself Communist, the Third International, is no longer the organization of the Marxist vanguard of the proletariat, it is necessary to build a new party and a Fourth International. Will your district harness itself to this task?

We do not want to trample the teachings of Lenin, but we refuse to follow you in the building of a party and of an International. These organizations cannot be set up arbitrarily.

I agree with you that it is harmful to set up organizations arbitrarily; that is why we, the Communist League, have combated the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, which was an apparatus contrived for evading unity of action with Socialist organizations by utilizing the cover of literary and artistic personalities, of whose talents I cannot judge, but who are absolutely devoid of responsibility before the organizations of the working class.

You have recognized in action that Amsterdam-Pleyel did not permit the safeguarding of real unity of action of the workers. Others (Autonomous Federation of Employees, Action Socialiste, etc.) have come to the same conclusions. It is necessary to come to an understanding to do away with this arbitrary combination that can only stage a few meetings where a Thorez can parade, but that, as a consequence, can create obstacles to unity of action in every community, in every quarter, by opposing itself to all committees of real organizations that may exist.

Let us do away with artificially set up organizations. But the working class needs a party, a Communist International. If none exists now, we must work to build it; we must pose the problem clearly. This does not mean that we can solve it in a couple of days.

Of course, it is not arbitrary to say that the working class needs a Communist Party, but to build it you need definite conditions. It would be premature today, the masses would not follow it They will follow the Vigilance Committees', they are for unity of action. To pose, as you do, the question of creating a new party is to appear as a splitter and to isolate oneself from the masses.

I cannot entertain the argument of "splitters”; you are a Communist, and consequently you know well that to gather the vanguard of the proletariat means not only not to split it but to create the basic condition for rallying it in struggle. But I will take up your other arguments: it is too soon, we are too few. You advance arguments of opportuneness but not of principles. Is it too soon because the masses are not there? For one, I am certain that we are more numerous than Lenin was at the end of 1914 when he proclaimed "Long live the Third International"; he knew the masses well and, at certain moments, was not afraid of being almost alone Secondly, how can we lead the masses to an idea, to a conception, without explaining it to them clearly? It cannot be too soon for laying down a clear political basis, and this is the surest means of becoming more numerous.

You forget the principal task of the present hour: to bar the road to fascism and for that to develop committees of vigilance, to bind them to the masses. A new organization of the proletarian vanguard can crystallize itself in action and not in struggles over theses.

I am far from forgetting reaction and fascism, and it is precisely in order to combat them that I pose the question of the party, without counterposing it but, on the contrary, by tying it to the work of the united front To bar the road to fascism, to bar it once and for all, it does not suffice that workers oppose it physically at demonstrations; it does not suffice to denounce its infamies in Germany and Italy. Today we defend ourselves against the rise of reaction, but — and you have stated it in your "Open Letter to the Comintern" — to be efficacious this resistance must transform itself into a struggle for power. The Vigilance Committee — you wrote correctly — must be a step towards the soviets. But tell me from whom can we expect the proper slogans for the struggle of the Vigilance Committee, a program of action around which the slow process of gathering the masses should proceed? Not from the Socialist Party, I am sure; an antifascist committee is not a fountain of youth where the decrepit Social Democracy can rejuvenate itself. Nor from the masses as a whole; the masses undergo their own experiences that permit them to choose and to progress along the revolutionary road, but on condition that they find a vanguard that, at every stage of the struggle, explains the situation to them, shows them the objectives to be attained, the methods to use and the ultimate perspectives. It is only by means of an initial nucleus, which acts in an independent and disciplined manner, that the selection can proceed inside the Vigilance Committee. Without that, even the most numerous aggregation of workers would have no future.

The Vigilance Committee is not a sufficient base to assure the life of the Saint-Denis district To limit oneself to that is to condemn oneself to disintegration. None of the local nuclei "that detached themselves from the Communist Party escaped that: Municipalism, PUPism — the Social Democracy eats into them.

One more word. Your committees of vigilance without a Communist Party, they remind me of the slogan of… Mensheviks and counterrevolutionaries; by this I do not mean to call you a Menshevik or a counterrevolutionist When the October Revolution found itself at loggerheads with its worst difficulties, when civil war and famine raged, the enemies of proletarian power advanced the slogan: "Soviets without Communists.” The counterrevolution understood instinctively that even the soviet form is not immune against its influence and that were there no Communists in the soviets to introduce into them class intransigence, the counterrevolution could make use of the soviets against the revolution. And if this is true after the soviets have conquered power, how much more true is it with regard to Vigilance Committees, which are not soviets; one may be sure that Vigilance Committees without Communists (that is, without a party, since there is no communist action outside of an organization) could never become soviets and would never take power.

And then, one other question intrudes itself into the question of the struggle against fascism and for power, that is, the question of the struggle against war. Who will lead this struggle? Strictly speaking, the committees of vigilance could organize actions against the preparations of war, against the two-years' service, etc. But who will lead the antifascist work; who will launch defeatism? In the united front, you have Socialists imbued with patriotism or pacifists, defenders of the League of Nations. Soon you will find the latter even within the official Communist Party due to the Soviet Union's entry into this association of brigands.

I warn you openly that we will never approve of your attacks against the USSR; we will never join you in that.

And I will answer you no less openly: we have never attacked the USSR. Consequently, you do not have to join that which does not exist What we have done is to combat a policy that we consider false, harmful to the October Revolution and to the world revolution. You struggle against the policy of the Comintern in France; do you believe that it is independent of the general policy of the Comintern and also of the policy of the USSR? When Lenin and Trotsky led the Comintern and the Soviet Union, they did not practice two contradictory policies, one a good, the other a bad one; the policy of the Comintern and that of the Soviet Union complemented each other in serving the needs of the international proletarian revolution. When the revolutionary wave receded, when the workers' state had to make concessions, its leaders explained this openly to all the workers. While today, what do you read in l'Humanité? First, that the revolutionary movement in all countries does not stop growing, that it goes from success to success, that, at the same time, the USSR marches at a rapid pace to socialism and, finally, that the USSR is about to join the League of Nations. Do you believe that this act is a manifestation of strength, of power?

The USSR is encircled by a hostile world; it must know how to utilize the differences in the capitalist class and how to make compromises with certain of the states to break up the bloc of its enemies.

Obviously, no Communist could reproach the Soviet government for making compromises, although there are compromises and compromises. But what is impermissible is to present them as victories over the bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and, on the other, to base all its activity on the quality of its diplomacy instead of building the defense of the USSR on the forces of the revolutionary movement Why did the foreign policy of the Soviet Union suffer such a sharp turn to the right if not because of the defeat of the German proletariat? And do you believe that if reaction should triumph in France that the talents of Litvinov would suffice to preserve the achievements of the five-year plan against the fascist tide? A policy hostile to unity of action and a policy that presents the entry of the USSR into the League of Nations as a victory is one and the same policy, that of the ruling bureaucracy of the USSR, whose horizon is limited to the Soviet Union and that neglects and even fears the revolutionary struggles in other countries.

Thus to defend the USSR not only by hollow phrases, but also in reality, that is, to develop a revolutionary struggle, in face of and against an apparatus of good-for-nothings, it is necessary to do what we do, what the Communist League does, to work towards the rebuilding of a revolutionary party of the proletariat This is the road that you, the region of Saint-Denis, must follow to be true to yourselves; this is "the road of Trotsky” that I'Humanité wants to frighten you with.

We want to follow the road of revolution.

That is the same thing.