Remarks on the French League’s Theses

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Dear Comrades:

I want to address a few remarks to you on the first part of your theses for the coming national convention.

The theses assign the French League the task of “communist leadership of the proletariat,” at the beginning of the first paragraph, and the last sentence of the last paragraph of the same part states that the League shoulders “heavy responsibilities in organizing the great party … of the proletariat.” This is the road for the new party, but between these two very important and quite clear statements are to be found a certain number of repetitions of the reform formula. This means that on this essential point the theses are contradictory: while opening the way to a new stage of our development, they still contain a good quantity of reminiscence of the past. I think the latter ought to be eliminated, with the necessary explanations.

The question is posed in this way: given the lessons the French CP has drawn from the German debacle, is it capable of playing a revolutionary role against the threat of fascism in France? On the contrary, shouldn’t we take it as already proven that the French Stalinist party will paralyze and demoralize the proletarian vanguard in France in an even more miserable way than the German section did in Germany?

The theses say (at the end of the second column) that it is necessary not to “jump over” the party, and this is correct, but what this means is that as long as the party exists and carries out a certain number of activities, we should always take it into account as well as orienting ourselves in practice in relation to this activity. This implies above all the application of the united front in every appropriate situation, but it in no way obliges us — after the German catastrophe and the reaction of the French party — to decide that the latter could be reformed.

And even if one could admit that the French CP could be regenerated, there remains the weighty question of the Communist International itself — and not as an arithmetical sum of its national sections. Do we have any right at all, after the German experience, to say that it is possible to regenerate this ossified apparatus with all its errors and crimes? This decisive question, because it is not concerned with national sections, is not answered in your theses.

As regards the national sections, your theses say that the question of the new party “is now posed in Germany,” in Austria, and in Bulgaria, but I think that it is posed, in varying forms and with varying sharpness, in all countries, and that “the nub of this question is the Hotel Lux in Moscow.”

Your theses condemn the idea of a new Communist party as presented by democrats, independents, etc., because these are only “left Social Democrats.” “Our only concern is the great party necessary for the revolutionary leadership of the proletariat,” as the theses quite correctly say; in them, you condemn — and I join you — the sterile projects of Souvarine and Company, not because of the slogan itself but because of the reformist content of their projects.

I do not think that we have differences of principle or method on this question. The underlying ideas you express are the same. You want to open the door to meet the same needs, but you make concessions to our past and to the inevitable conservatism of political thought, like that of all human thought. Such concessions, even if they are only of the purest kind, can become quite dangerous when we need to concentrate all our forces for a decisive turn.

The necessary changes which I am proposing follow from what is said above.