Reply to the Jewish Group in the Communist League of France

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

Your declaration is an anti-Communist document and shows to what a fatal path the present leaders of your organization have led the group of Jewish workers.

1. You have recalled Comrades Felix and Foucs from the Executive Committee of the League in order to withdraw your "responsibility" for the direction of the League; this constitutes an act of sabotage. The conference elected a definite leadership. You are placing yourselves above the conference, above the League, and you are sabotaging the leading body of the League.

Basically this is an action of splitting the organization. For the leaders of your group, this is a demonstration, a "vote of no confidence," in a word, a parliamentary game. This is not the way proletarian revolutionists act; it is the way of petty-bourgeois anarchists, who scoff at parliamentarism in words but imitate it in deeds.

2. What reason have you given for leaving the Executive Committee? My circular letter. But is the Executive Committee responsible for that? There is absolutely no relation whatsoever between your action and its motive. I can't even for a minute assume that all the members of the Jewish group could have approved of such a disruptive act. I don't know Comrade Foucs and I cannot judge his motives. But Comrade Felix, in this case, has remained true to his past.

3. The situation becomes even more complicated by the fact that you recall Felix and Foucs not in the name of any faction, or any local organization, but in the name of a national group. You thereby transform the League into a federation of national groups. This is the structure the Bund attempted to introduce into the Russian party. As far back as 1903, not only the Bolsheviks but even the Mensheviks considered such an arrangement incompatible with the fundamentals of revolutionary-proletarian organization. You are introducing Bundism into the ranks of the Left Opposition. The Left Opposition would only be preparing its own destruction if it were to tolerate such a state of affairs for even a day.

4. By creating such a Jewish factional organization, by separating it in this way from the League, by opposing it to the League, Comrades Mill and Felix are attempting to dictate to the League. At the same time Comrade Felix has misled the Jewish group by greatly exaggerating the differences, by seeking artificial pretexts for differences, by making a caricature of the differences. Because of their sterile and scholastic character, these discussions have not been able to contribute anything to the League in an ideological sense. In a political sense, they paralyzed the League by repelling the French workers. In this manner the Jewish group, instead of being an instrument to attract Jewish workers, has become, thanks to its present leaders, an instrument for the repulsion of French workers.

5. You state that my evaluation of the leaders of the Jewish group (Mill and Felix), that they sabotage the League and lead the Jewish group to its destruction, is based on one-sided and false information given by Comrade Molinier. This again shows how light-mindedly your leaders make unfounded accusations. To evaluate information, to understand what information should or should not be believed, to show prudence about information furnished in the course of internal conflicts — all these rules and essentials are elementary, the ABC of healthy political thinking. To accuse anyone of forming an opinion on the basis of one-sided and false information actually amounts to a charge of political bankruptcy. We understand things differently, you and I, as to what the Left Opposition is, as to what a revolutionary organization should be, etc. But why mix into this the question of false information by anyone? It is not so long ago that Comrade Mill explained the utter impermissibility of this argument to Naville. My circular letter condemning the policy of the present leadership of the Jewish group was written before I had any discussion at all with Comrade Molinier.

6. What finally determined my evaluation of the present leadership of the Jewish group? It was your letter to Rosmer.I consider this document perfectly scandalous; and, through the mistakes of the leadership, it seriously compromises the group.

The struggle against Landau, Naville, and Rosmer has up to now been the most important and significant event in the internal life of the International Left Opposition, which in this manner purged itself of alien elements. This struggle has led to splits, amputations, and desertions. In the process of your struggle against the new leadership of the League, you suddenly declared your solidarity with Rosmer. That shows that the leaders of your group have understood nothing at all of the preceding struggle, or, what is worse, that they in general are incapable of really taking principled differences seriously. From the point of view of ideological loyalty and revolutionary discipline, the letter to Rosmer was a direct act of treachery. It's understandable that several Jewish workers might be led into error; but the leaders of this affair knew what they were doing. For my part, I withhold any confidence in people who impose such a perfidious act on the Jewish group as an attempt of a bloc with deserters against the International Left Opposition.

7. You accuse me of not having taken a position on your differences with Comrade Treint and others on the question of the "faction," "party," etc. I have arrived at my opinion not through isolated incidents in the constant internal struggle, but on the experience of the last two to three years as a whole Of what political importance can the views of Comrades Felix and Mill be on the question of a faction, if within the faction to which I belong they, without giving it a second thought, are turning somersaults into the Rosmer-Landau faction? What if Felix and Mill do subscribe even today to the very best definition of a faction? All this in my eyes is only empty talk. By attempting to transform the League into a federation of independent national groups, Mill and Felix are rejecting the meaning of a revolutionary faction. What importance therefore can their exercises around the word "faction" have in my estimation? Our ideological struggle does not have a character all of its own but is an instrument of action and of control by means of action. I keep in mind the activity of Felix and Mill as a whole and the new episode in the discussion cannot change my judgment

8. Paz, as is well known, subscribed 100 percent to all the formulas which he considered to be Bolshevik-Leninist. When some futile differences arose between himself and Delfosse,he demanded that I pronounce myself immediately on those differences. And I demanded that the Paz group go over from bombast to serious work and refused to occupy myself with the differences, which had no actual relationship to genuine work. The Paz group condemned me for this, probably believing that I did not sufficiently understand the depth and importance of the differences that arose within it.

In that discussion Comrade Felix was with Paz against me. As soon as it became clear to Paz that I would not support him, he immediately discovered principled differences between himself and the Russian Opposition; it seems that Rakovsky did not quite reach the revolutionary magnitude of Paz. Felix and Mill are only imitating Paz by demanding of me that I occupy myself with their verbal rubbish instead of judging their activity as a whole.

9. If you are interested in the real source of my information, I will not conceal it from you. My principal informer all this time has been Comrade Mill. I have exchanged dozens upon dozens of letters with him. My conclusion regarding the policy of Mill I have drawn especially on the basis of his own letters. In these letters not a little has been said about Comrade Felix. But in this case I would not for the world have trusted to the impartiality of Comrade Mill. I attempted to judge Comrade Felix by his own actions; his support of Paz against La Vérité, his discussion articles in Vérité, his role in the attempt of a bloc with Rosmer, his letter to the Greek Opposition — all this sufficed for me. Add to this the minutes of the Executive Committee and the internal bulletins of the League The present departure of Comrade Felix from the Executive Committee as a sort of parliamentary game only completes the picture.

10. You propose the creation of an international control commission to examine my "accusations." In this regard I can only express my astonishment. _ On my part it is a question of a political evaluation of the methods and measures by Comrades Mill and Felix. My evaluation may be correct or incorrect, but what can a control commission do about it?

When certain former and present members of the League made use of personal insinuations against their opponents in the course of their political struggles, I proposed that a control commission be created. But nevertheless none of the accusers dared to make a formal accusation. In this way the accusers definitively disqualified themselves, showing that they were directed not by revolutionary zeal but by lack of scruples, typical of the impotent petty bourgeoisie. In such a case, a control commission is entirely in place in order to clear the atmosphere. But in our case it is not a matter of accusations of a moral character. Nor can a commission make a judgment on the correctness or incorrectness of a political evaluation; the entire membership of the organization, not a special control commission, must declare itself.

11. Your declaration says that I condemn the activity of the Jewish group as a whole. That's not true. Insofar as the members of your group under the leadership of the League are conducting propaganda work among the Jewish workers, are spreading the ideas of Bolshevism among them, I certainly can only salute their work and aid them as I have aided them in the past, according to my resources, from the first period of the group's existence to the time it was drawn onto the unprincipled path of petty-bourgeois politics by Felix and Mill. Precisely now, when the crisis strikes the foreign workers in France above all others, when the Socialist Party betrays them completely and the Communist Party in part (see the vote of the parliamentary fraction), the Left Opposition can and must develop energetic work among the foreign workers, including the Jewish workers. But for that the Jewish group must cease to be a national Jewish faction within the League and become the organ of the League for propaganda in the Jewish language. What must be done for this? The Jewish group must be freed from the leadership of Felix and Mill, who can bring it nothing but harm.

With communist greetings,

L. Trotsky