Debate and discussion: Marxists and the workers' party 16 April, 2004 Reformism has not collapsed As far as I know, the catchphrase "Build the

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1 Debate and discussion: Marxists and the workers' party 16 April, 2004 Reformism has not collapsed As far as I know, the catchphrase "Build the revolutionary party!" or "Build the party!" was first used as a regular slogan, directed at the general public, by French Trotskyists in the mid-1940s. Similar phrases will have been used by Marxists before then, as exhortations to their own activists or sympathisers, or as occasional rhetoric; but that was, I think, the first time the slogan "build the party" was offered to the public at large as instruction on what they should do to better their lot. In the 1970s the catchphrase was revived by Gerry Healy's Workers' Revolutionary Party (now defunct, but until 1975 the biggest group on the activist left) and then by the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP have continued to use it, with variants such as "Build the socialist alternative", until recently. Today, "build the party" agitation is being revived, as "build a new workers' party", or "campaign for a workers' party". In a strange twist, these slogans are pushed mostly not by the organisations which do work to "build a party" - as the AWL, the SWP, and so on, do, in different ways because we have different ideas of the politics needed - but by activists who once were members of "party-building" organisations, but quit for various reasons, and now operate through looser or ad hoc groupings. The non-party-builders tell the party-builders that we should should "build the party"! What party? At least it was clear what the WRP and SWP meant: "Join our organisation". The problem was that the slogan covered up absence or poverty of wider political perspectives. But now what? A broad party! The Scottish Socialist Party, we are told, is one good model of how to do it; Rifondazione in Italy is another. The AWL, the SWP, and so on, are all just factions. Something much broader is needed, and possible. It is possible because the crisis of capitalism has extinguished the possibilities of reformism, and the consequent reformist collapse has left a vacuum in working-class politics, waiting to be filled. The old arguments - reform and revolution, and so on - should not detain us. Now, neither the SSP nor Rifondazione was created by people distributing leaflets broadcast, in Scotland or in Italy, to "campaign for a workers' party". Each was launched by a core of activists - the Scottish Militant, or the left of the old Italian Communist Party - building up a position sufficiently "hegemonic" on the left that it could take an initiative to reach out. How do we get the strong core? Or do we rely on someone else (the SWP?) becoming strong enough, and then kindly agreeing to form a new party catholic enough for the smaller groups and the scattered activists to join? Does it not matter what the politics of the core are? There is no magic leapfrog over the difficulties and battles of the existing activist left factions. Where there really is a "vacuum on the left", at present - and it is a difficulty, not an opportunity - is in theoretical and political life. The last decade or so has created an intellectual demoralisation. Debate, education, sharp exchange of ideas - too much of the left regards that as "sectarianism", something that might have been necessary when there were confident reformists and Stalinists to contend with, but is surplus to requirements now. The SWP, in its debates with the SSP, appeals to the need for clarity... but only in the abstract form of debating "reform or revolution?" As if occasional use of the nonsense slogan "one solution, revolution" makes such SWP policies as support for George Galloway "revolutionary"! In fact, in a revolutionary situation any halfway radical party will call itself "revolutionary". The very mild and middle-class Portuguese Socialist Party did that in Outside a revolutionary situation, every sane policy is by definition one for partial measures and means to win them, and how do you judge which such policy is "revolutionary" and which is not? Only by mapping out the arguments, testing them against the logic of class struggle, uniting in 1

2 action as widely as possible when there is agreement, and debating when there is not. There is no collapse of reformism that will save us the trouble of doing that. Blair's New Labour is still in office, and still looks likely to win the next election. The Social Democrats are in office in Germany. The Socialist Party has just made a big comeback in France's regional elections. The Olive Tree in Italy is at 40% in the opinion polls. Those parties have moved to the right; their leaderships have weakened whatever ties they had with working-class organisation and become even more markedly bureaucratic outfits of professional politicians, relating to the populace through the media; active and lively reformism has been extinguished in favour of passive "lesser-evil" reformism. But that passive "lesserevil" reformism, and the political machines based on it, are still strong forces. And capitalist crises do not kill active and lively reformism. Often they stir it up. Mass revolutionary movements often emerge out of a rise of active reformism. In 1917 in Russia, the Bolsheviks won majority support only through a big political struggle within Soviets which were, at first, dominated by Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, effectively a reformist mass movement. The German Social Democracy grew rapidly in the crisis years after World War One, from 250,000 members in 1918 to 1,450,000 in In the years of chaos and poverty after World War Two, it grew rapidly again to 850,000 members (in the West alone), gently declining again once the Marshall Plan and the Korean War boom reinvigorated German capitalism. The British Labour Party had its biggest individual membership, and pushed through its biggest reforms, in the years after World War Two when the British economy was reeling from war damage and the loss of much of its empire, and food was rationed. In the "Golden Age" of Western capitalism, all those parties rotted quietly in opposition. The Tories ruled Britain from 1951 to The Christian Democrats ruled Germany from the founding of the Federal Republic until 1969, and Italy from World War 2 to The Gaullists ruled France from 1958 to The political convulsions of 1968, and the economic convulsions of , , and , revived activity. The German Social Democracy's membership rose to over a million again. The French Communist Party and Socialist Party grew drastically. The Italian Communist Party had its best-ever electoral score, 34%, in 1976, while in the boom years it had got between 20 and 25%. British Labour's revival culminated in the rank and file rebellion of A perspective whereby reformism gradually vacates the working class, leaving an open space for Marxists to capture so long as we keep our message "broad" and bland enough, is unrealistic. The growth of new Marxist parties will come with a growth of active and lively struggles for reforms, and through a struggle of ideas within them. At present, the most lively renewed active reformism is in the "anti-capitalist" and environmentalist milieus. There will be other forms. They will certainly involve the trade unions. They may or may not involve revival of the old "reformist parties", or sections of them. We would be wrong to look primarily to "the crisis" to provide the spur to struggle. With European labour movements battered by the huge global-capitalist restructurings of the last twenty years and by long-term mass unemployment, and still reeling ideologically from the collapse of Stalinism, crises can just as well turn passive reformism more pessimistic. We should look instead to another engine of struggle within capitalism: the gradual growth of confidence and maturing of contradictions among new sections of the working class generated by capitalist growth. Passive reformism is not a vacuum. Today's capitalist societies, with their vast media barrage, are the least likely of all to leave working-class minds disillusioned with old parties as blank slates. Marxist organisations can grow - but only by actively convincing people, working on the contradictions and diverging impulses in their thinking, not by regarding them as vacuumheads who can be instantly corralled into a "broad" party if only we deliberately make our message ambiguous enough. In the revival of the world labour movement from its drastic shaking-up over the last twenty 2

3 years, which is bound to be a tortuous process, the advice that Engels gave for Marxists in the first emergence of labour movements holds good again: "Our theory is a theory of evolution, not a dogma to be learned by heart and to be repeated mechanically... All our practice has shown that it is possible to work along with the general movement of the working class at every one of its stages without giving up or hiding our own distinct position and even organisation..." Reviving radicalism will need space and time to experiment with ideas and debate them out. The model of a "party" as a tightly-controlled machine, inherited from Stalinism by all too many Marxists, will not suit. We will need the openness in debate practised at present by the AWL, the French LCR, and by very few other currents on the left. The "broadness" of studied ambiguity or blandness is quite a different matter. Engels also argued that it was "necessary... to form within this still quite plastic mass a core of people who understand the movement and its aims... thoroughly versed in theory and well-tested tactics... whose minds are theoretically clear". And that core can be built only by working at it. Martin Thomas Italian left: the end of an era 20 May, 2007 By Cath Fletcher The Rifondazione project has failed, and the Italian left now needs to rebuild. More than a year on from the narrow victory of Romano Prodi s coalition L Unione, which includes the Rifondazione majority, both major left currents in the party are looking to alternatives. The trade unions, meanwhile, have announced public sector strikes for early June as negotiations over a new national contract falter. The Rifondazione majority have enthusiastically embraced joint government with Prodi s motley collection of Catholic social-democrats and Blairite ex-cpers. Former party leader Fausto Bertinotti has become speaker of the lower house of Parliament, and the party has a minister in the government, responsible for social solidarity. They are, in practice, indistinguishable from the rest of the coalition. The left of the party has had to decide how to respond. In May 2006 the Progetto Comunista group, whose leading members had already been excluded by the Rifondazione leadership from standing as party candidates, resigned from the PRC. They have now set up the Movement for a Communist Workers Party (movimento costituivo per il Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori: PCL). In contrast, the Sinistra Critica (Critical Left) current, Italy s Fourth International grouping, stayed in Rifondazione. They had members in both the Senate and House of Deputies having, presumably, given the PRC majority sufficient promises of loyalty in advance of the elections. In February, however, Franco Turigliatto, a Sinistra Critica senator, abstained on a vote to back Prodi s foreign policy including the maintenance of Italian troops in Afghanistan and permission for a US base at Vicenza in northern Italy. Prodi lost by two votes and resigned. His government was saved by a new deal between the parties to which the Rifondazione leadership signed up including an agreement that they would vote for Italian troops in Afghanistan. Turigliatto was suspended from Rifondazione for two years, and said he regarded that as expulsion. There was not universal agreement in the party about the decision: on the national committee responsible, the vote was 14 to 6 with 5 abstentions. Having initially offered his resignation as a senator, Turigliatto then took it back, on the basis that he had had so much encouragement to stay on in politics and represent the anti-capitalist alternative that he felt it was his duty to do so. He now sits as a Sinistra Critica senator, although non-expelled Sinistra Critica deputy Salvatore Cannavò is still listed as a member of the Rifondazione Comunista parliamentary group. The Sinistra Critica says it will maintain an policy of technical loyalty to the Prodi government; in practice it seems that will mean voting against bits of legislation (like the troops for Afghanistan) that they object to, but voting 3

4 confidence in the government where necessary to avoid the greater evil of a comeback for Berlusconi. This recognition on the part of the Rifondazione left of the problems with the party s approach is welcome. The PCL is already gaining significant votes (around 7%) in some local elections and demonstrating that there is potential support for an alternative to Rifondazione s capitulation. Whether the Sinistra Critica decision to keep Prodi in power is really compatible with building a left alternative is, however, very dubious. With Italian workers facing a massive squeeze in terms of pay, conditions and pension rights, it is hard to see how an honest left can maintain in power the government which is forcing through an austerity budget. The next few weeks in Italy will be important. A huge dispute is brewing over public service pay and conditions. The trade union federations are threatening strikes in the civil service and schools if negotiations over the next few days do not come up with an acceptable deal. It has already set strike dates. A national strike of school workers (teachers, administrators and facilities staff) is due on 4 June. They have not had a new contract for 17 months: teachers salaries have not risen since 2005 and are currently less than 1300 ( 900) a month, despite soaring inflation. Cuts in the education budget mean that schools cannot afford supply teachers and some have had to shorten the school day, while parents are asked to pay ever-increasing contributions to the cost of textbooks and materials. Civil servants are also due to strike over their contract, on 1 June. Plans to raise the state pension age from 57 to 62, possibly by 2014, are also a point of contention, and the union leaderships are now in new negotiations with ministers. The union leaderships, closely linked to the governing parties, will not want to bring down the Prodi government, but the extent to which they can hold back their membership is yet to be seen. In a recent article in International Viewpoint, Turigliatto and Cannavò describe the end of the Rifondazione era and say that as Prodi builds his new Democratic Party and the Rifondazione mainstream aim for a new Left Party, effectively a reconstitution of the old CP: We will devote ourselves to the rebuilding of an Alternative Left: alternative to the right, but also to the governmental centre-left, which is moderate and pledged to social compromise. The alternative left is above all an alternative to what exists at the moment, therefore to the war and to neo-liberalism. This means voting against the war. And against the pensions counter-reforms or against the large scale projects that will wreck the environment; and likewise it means not sinking to the level of making compromises with the blackmailing tactics used by the Vatican gerontocracy. The alternative left will operate without ifs and buts. This is how we have tried to act as representatives in Parliament during the last few months, by trying to stimulate a huge debate, and being subjected to disciplinary measures like the expulsion of Franco from Rifondazione, and doing our best to stimulate a clarifying discussion within Rifondazione. The Alternative Left will only be an alternative left insofar as it starts from the class struggle and the social movements and on this basis plans to restart a project of social recomposition and even of political recomposition. In the immediate future, to talk about an alternative left means to build the social opposition to the Prodi government. The decision to remain technically loyal to the government as implemented in the Senate (while in the Second Chamber we did not vote) does not diminish but in fact reinforces this position. The Italian left lives in a state of paranoia about the return of the right and another victory by Berlusconi, but a consistent left cannot turn into the lightning conductor for this situation, and is entitled to choose when to oppose the government without having to make concessions. This is the guideline which led to the announcement of external support for the government, while making clear that the government will be judged on the basis of every single one of its measures and plans, starting with the vote against more money for the war in Afghanistan. So today a new phase is opening which we will try to approach constructively, starting with the consolidation of the Associazone Sinistra Critica (Critical Left Association) as an instrument for launching a process of recomposition and rebuilding an alternative anti-capitalist left and one to the left of the present organisations. 4

5 Section on "Left social democracy" from AWL conference, November 2012 The most hopeful political shift in Europe since our last AWL conference has been the rise of Syriza in Greece. At the time of our last conference it stood around 5% in the opinion polls, not significantly higher than at Greece's 2009 general election, before Greece itself went into acute crisis. By 17 June 2012 it had risen to 27% of the vote, reflecting a sustained class struggle and Syriza's serious fight against neo-liberalism. There are other examples of successes for left social democracy in recent years: the SP in the Netherlands has for most of 2012 been the leading party in opinion polls there, at 30% or better. Jean-Luc Melenchon's vote in France's presidential election was, in the end, not that far ahead of previous (more left-wing) left-of-sp challengers, but it was ahead. There is also recent history instructing us that these left social-democratic flurries can be shortlived. Rifondazione Comunista in Italy had 8.6% of the country's votes in 1996, 6.1% in 2004, 5.8% in 2006; but has since suffered the departure of its militant left, and more-or-less electoral extinction. In Germany, Die Linke won 11.9% in the 2009 Bundestag elections, but is now down to 6% or 7% in the polls, having been outstripped by the Pirate Party. The Scottish Socialist Party for a while had a solid 10% of the vote in Glasgow, but by 2007 had declined to less than one-tenth of the support that it had in The United Left (Izquierda Unida) in Spain had an improved result in 2011 (7%), but that was after a long period of decline from a peak of 11% electoral support in That all said, we recognise there is a fresher, more radical social impulse behind Syriza's rise (and in the medium term could be with other left social-democratic formations). They are likely to confront many more class struggles and soon. We solidarise with Syriza's battles and argue for revolutionaries to make a serious political orientation to Syriza's ranks. However, we should reject the scheme proposed by some people in the "Mandelite" Fourth International, that the great next strategic step everywhere (in Europe) at least is the creation of "broad left parties to the left of social democracy". "For almost ten years, the Fourth International has worked with other currents of the non-sectarian radical left, for a broad and pluralist anti-capitalist regrouping in order to beat the hegemony of the social-liberal left" (Francois Vercammen, 2003: more background at bit.ly/pfskqq). Of course, the emergence of lively and open left social-democratic formations, in political landscapes dominated by neo-liberalism, is welcome. A patient, non-sectarian attitude is called for. Revolutionary socialists in Greece should be working in Syriza; they should have been, and many Italian revolutionary socialists were, working in Rifondazione Comunista in its best days; we worked in SSP for a while. Our dispute is with making such possibilities a dogmatic scheme, not with recognising them when they exist. By some advocates, the "broad left party" scheme is bolstered by an argument that the current regime of capitalism abolishes the political space for social-democratic reformism. It is deduced that if the "broad left parties" stay to the left of mainstream official social democracy, which has rallied to neo-liberalism, then they have no alternative but to become revolutionary. Then it is added that the collapse of Stalinism in , allegedly closing an epoch which started with the Russian revolution in 1917, poses the need for "new epoch, new programme, new party". I.e. in any case there is no clearer revolutionary socialist programme in existence than the rough makeshift one towards which the "broad left parties" will be pushed by events anyway. This outlook makes its advocates politically passive and pollyanna-ish if they are within an actual left social-democratic party. It makes them even more politically passive if they operate in a country where no left social-democratic party exists. In that case, the outlook pushes them towards vapid pleas for someone to create such a broad party, or noxious pretences that some gimcrack formation like TUSC (or, much worse, Respect) is the hoped-for broad party. That left social-democratic formations have recently and fairly often emerged or advanced 5

6 rapidly in fact shows that social democracy in general is not at all automatically made defunct or squeezed out of existence by the current regime of capitalism. That such formations have emerged as new parties, rather than as currents within the established mainstream social-democratic parties, shows that those established parties have become heavily bureaucratised and had their grass-root activist element decline, so that they have a more rigid inertia in face of leftish impulses from below. Whether larger impulses from below, in future, will also all be expressed in the growth of new separate left social-democratic formations, and only in that way, remains to be seen. On the whole that seems doubtful: old-established bureaucratised social-democratic formations with some remaining links to a working-class base respond slowly to impulses from below, and may not respond at all when the impulse is of only moderate size; but their basic role in the bourgeois political balance gives them cause to allow space within themselves for a bit more leftism when there is stronger pressure from below. (The question then becomes whether the impulse can be neutralised by an allowance for tame leftism, or whether Marxists, active towards and if appropriate within the left currents, can develop the impulse further). Most of the "new" left social-democratic formations owe at least part of their lift-off to strands from the old official Communist Parties, which were large activist and electoral alternatives to mainstream social democracy for decades and indeed in some countries were in activist or even electoral terms stronger than mainstream social democracy. (The main exceptions are the SSP, which drew its seed-capital from the Militant faction in the Labour Party, which was at its peak stronger around Glasgow than the SSP ever became, and the Netherlands SP, which has evolved from the Maoist strand of "official Communism"). That constituencies originating from the old official Communist Parties are reconfigured into new left social-democratic formations - livelier, much more open, and more genuinely left-wing than the old CPs, and drawing in large numbers of new or young activists with no CP background - is important and advantageous for revolutionary socialists. But it does not define a grand wave of the future. The weakness of the old official Communist Party in Britain, and the fact that its remnants have long been largely dispersed, make it unlikely (though not impossible) that the emergence of a new left social-democratic formation will define the next step of political evolution in Britain. Between 1998 and maybe 2005 there may have been a possibility of a serious chunk of the trade-union movement and of the Labour Party base (which in 1997, with 400,000 members, was still much stronger than now) being broken off in battle against the Blair-Brown New Labour clique and forming a new working-class party, inevitably of some left social-democratic colouring or another. But it didn't happen. The subsequent attempts to concoct a left socialdemocratic formation - Respect, No2EU, TUSC - have had no effect other than to convert the electoral activity of would-be revolutionary socialist groups (SWP, SP) into the promotion of minimal and pallid social-democratic politics with very poor results in terms of vote-catching. In the case of TUSC, the political basis has been reduced to little more than "no to cuts", troops out of Afghanistan, and generic sympathy for trade unions. These failed attempts have also fouled the pitch for further such efforts, making it more difficult for them to succeed without large new momentum behind them. The consequence is that it is likely that any big left-wing groundswell in Britain in the coming period - if it develops, when it develops - will probably be expressed at least in part through some left stirrings in the Labour Party, rather than through the emergence of a new left socialdemocratic formation. (There is certainly no existing left social-democratic formation with even that initial base which Syriza or the Front de Gauche had in their countries, which enabled them to advance very fast in crisis). A groundswell may of course simultaneously find other expressions: growth of the revolutionary socialist groups, a rise of "syndicalist" militancy, and so on An article by Trotsky relevant to the LCR's debates 26 January, 2008 By Martin Thomas 6

7 This article by Leon Trotsky, "On the theses, Unity and Youth" (summer 1934) gives us, I think, the essential indications of what is wrong with the LCR Platform B's use of the idea "workingclass political representation" to justify a search for a reformist combination with the Communist Party and fragments of the Socialist Party. In February 1934 the French Stalinist party had dropped its "third period" line of the previous five years - rejecting all united action with the Socialist Party and damning it as "social-fascist" - to join with the SP on the streets of Paris to drive back fascist bands. The united action stirred up great enthusiasm in the working class. In the end the unityenthusiasm would be channelled into the miserable betrayal of the Popular Front. Earlier, however, there was talk of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party uniting into a single party based on the working class ("organic unity"). That never happened, though the two main union confederations of the day - the reformist-syndicalist CGT and the CP-led CGTU - did merge. The French Trotskyists, then working in the Socialist Party, supported "organic unity". But when one French Trotskyist proposed to suggest a "minimum of principles" on which the SP and CP might realistically unite, Trotsky fell upon the idea with vigorous polemic The aim of this text is to correct the slogan of organic unity, which is not our slogan. The formula of organic unity without a program, without concretization is hollow. And as physical nature abhors a vacuum, this formula fills itself with an increasingly ambiguous and even reactionary content. All the leaders of the Socialist Party, beginning with Just and Marceau Pivert and ending with Frossard, declare themselves partisans of organic unity. The most fervent protagonist of this slogan is Lebas, whose anti-revolutionary tendencies are well enough known. The Communist Party leaders are manipulating the same slogan with increasing willingness. Is it our task to help them amuse the workers by an enticing and hollow formula? The exchange of open letters of the two leaderships on the program of action is the promising beginning of a discussion on the aims and the methods of the workers' party. It is here that we should intervene vigorously. Unity and split are two methods subordinated to program and political tasks. Since the discussion has happily begun, we should tactfully destroy the illusory hopes in organic unity as a panacea. Our thesis is that the unity of the working class can be realized only on a revolutionary basis. This basis is our own program. If fusion takes place tomorrow between the two parties, we place ourselves on the basis of the united party in order to continue our work. In this case the fusion may have a progressive significance. But if we continue to sow the illusion that organic unity is of value as such and it is thus that the masses understand this slogan and not as a more ample and more convenient audience for the Leninist agitators we shall be doing nothing but making it easier for the two conjoined bureaucracies to present us, Bolshevik-Leninists, to the masses as the great obstacle on the road of organic unity. In these conditions, unity might well take place on our backs and become a reactionary factor. We must never play with slogans that are not revolutionary by their own content but that can play a quite different role according to the political conjuncture, the relationship of forces, etc. We are not afraid of organic unity. We state openly that the fusion may play a progressive role. But our own role is to point out to the masses the conditions under which this role would be genuinely progressive. In sum, we do not set ourselves against the current toward organic unity, which the two bureaucracies have already cornered. But while supporting ourselves on this current, which is honest among the masses, we introduce into it the critical note, the criterion of demarcation, programmatic definitions, etc. "Nothing would be more dangerous," say the theses of Comrades Craipeau-Kamoun, "than to get hypnotized over this single perspective and to consider all work useless so long as unity is not accomplished." This is right, but it is not sufficient. It is necessary to understand clearly that this perspective of organic unity detached from the revolutionary tasks can serve for nothing else than to hypnotize the workers by reconciling them with the passivity of the two parties. In order to parry the sterilizing hypnotism of the slogan of organic unity, the theses propose a "minimum of elementary Marxist principles as the charter of this unity." The formula is almost 7

8 classic as the beginning of a downsliding on the opportunist incline. One begins by dosing up the Marxist principles for the delicate stomachs of the Social Democrats and the Stalinists. If it is a question only of enlarging the audience and of opening up to oneself an access to the Communist workers, why put conditions in the guise of "elementary principles" ( very elementary, alas! )? And if it is a question of something else, that is to say, of the party and the proletariat, how could a minimum of principles and, what is more, of "elementary principles" suffice? Immediately after this, the theses demand that it be explained to the workers "that there cannot be a genuine revolutionary unity except that which makes out of the Marxist party a coherent and disciplined organism." So? So? So? We do not know if the very next stage of development will be an attempt at fusion or, on the contrary, a series of new splits in the two parties. We do not engage ourselves on the road of abstract formulas. Since February 6, La Verite has spent its time repeating the formula of the united front ( which was moreover much richer in content at that epoch than the formula of organic unity is today ). We criticized Naville for not concretizing the revolutionary content of the united front, thus permitting the two bureaucracies to seize upon this slogan without great risk. The same mistake must not be repeated under aggravated circumstances. And for the youth? The same thing. There are not two policies: one for the youth, the other for the adults. Insofar as the youth carry on politics and that is their duty their policy must be adult. There are too many factors that are driving the revolutionary and inexperienced youth towards the Stalinists. The formula of unity facilitates this tendency and augments the dangers. Our weapon, which coincides with the superior interests of the proletarian vanguard, is the content of the unity. While basing ourselves on the currents toward unity, we develop the discussion; we deepen it; we group the best elements of the two camps around the "maximum" of our not-at-all-"elementary" principles; we reinforce our tendency. And then, come what may, the revolutionary vanguard will profit whether there is a fusion or a split. Let us look at the theses: "The united youth ( Jeunesse Unique ) cannot have the Leninist principles as its basis." Who says that? The reformists? The Stalinists? No, it is the Leninists of the generous type themselves. Every worker who reflects and who takes things in their totality will reply: "If your principles are not good for making the revolutionary unity, they are good for nothing." "We will retreat," continue our generous Leninists, "on certain points if the agreement is impossible otherwise." Precisely why do the Leninists need to retreat on certain of their principles, of which they already possess only a minimum? It's absolutely incomprehensible. We will be told: "But we are only a small minority!" Good. Then the two majorities or better yet, the two bureaucracies supporting themselves on the two majorities will make ( or will not make ) their fusion without our retreat. They have no need of it since they are the majority. The authors of the theses stand up not as propagandists of Leninism but as benefactors of the human race. They want to reconcile the reformists with the Stalinists, even at their own expense. Still worse, they say so in advance, before being compelled to do so by the situation. They capitulate in anticipation. They retreat out of platonic generosity. All this contradictory reasoning, in which the authors feel themselves simultaneously the representatives of a small minority and the inspectors general of history, is the unhappy result of the trap that they set for themselves with the slogan of organic unity detached from all content or charged with a "minimum" content. The authors of the theses obligate themselves, even in case the Socialists should not want to accept the soviet form of power, to intervene among the Stalinists ( in the given case, the Leninists are the most logical intermediaries! ) in order to persuade them to withdraw the slogan that the Leninists themselves find correct. Isn't that absurd, dear comrades? If you defend before the Socialists the slogan of soviets ( with our interpretation ), you can win over a part of the Socialists and the sympathy of a part of the Stalinists. At the same time, you remain faithful to yourselves, meanwhile assuring your future. But that does not suffice for you, because you are the courtiers of unity. If this unity is realized thanks to your mediating intervention, the Stalinists will treat you like traitors and this time not without reason whereas the revolutionary socialists will pass over to the left by the Stalinist path. Nobody will take kindly to you. That's the fate of all political courtiers. 8

9 I want to draw the attention of the comrades to paragraph 2, which speaks of the necessity of reconstructing the revolutionary party "over the innumerable obstacles produced by the ruins of the Third International and the attraction still exercised by the Soviet Union." This formula must be characterized as criminal. The attraction "still exercised" by the Soviet Union is treated as an obstacle to the creation of the revolutionary party. Wherein consists this attraction for the broad masses, who receive neither a subsidy from the bureaucracy nor free tickets for trips to anniversary celebrations, nor any of the other gratuities well known by several "friends of the USSR"? The masses say to themselves: It is the only state that has come out of the workers' revolution. This sentiment is profoundly revolutionary. It is now reinforced all over again thanks to the fascist danger. To appraise this attachment to the proletarian revolution and its acquisitions as an obstacle is criminal towards the Soviet Union, as well as to the workers of the West. It may be objected: "It's only a question of an unhappy expression; the authors mean to speak of the injurious result of the Soviet bureaucracy's imprint upon a part of the world proletariat." If it were only a question of a poorly chosen formula, it would not be worth discussing. Unfortunately this is not the case. In the ranks of the youth, and especially the nonproletarian, a display of cheap radicalism is often made by sowing doubts about the proletarian character of the Soviet state, by identifying the Comintern with the Soviet bureaucracy and, above all, the latter with the entire workers' state. This mistake is ten times more grievous than, for example, to identify Jouhaux with the trade-union organizations, or Blum with the entire SFIO. Whoever does not have a clear and clean-cut point of view on this fundamental question does not have the right to speak before the workers because he can only sow confusion and skepticism, repulsing the young workers towards Stalinism. Whence come these artificial and even ambiguous constructions? They proceed from the bad social composition of the Socialist youth. Too many students. Too few workers. The students are occupied too much with themselves, too little with the workers' movement. A workerenvironment disciplines a young intellectual. The worker wants to learn the fundamental and solid things. He asks for clear-cut replies. He does not like these factitious witticisms. Salvation for the Seine district lies in mobilizing the students for the hard labor of recruiting workers. Whoever does not want to occupy himself with that has nothing to look for in the socialist organization. The proletarian organization needs intellectuals, but only as aids for the rise of the working masses. On the other hand, the sincerely revolutionary and socialist intellectuals must learn a good deal from the workers. The internal regime of the youth must be adapted to this task; a division of labor must be organized; their exact tasks must be given to the students or groups of students in the workers' quarters, etc. Ideological oscillations will become all the less frequent, the solider the proletarian base of the organization will become Also useful, I think, is 9