The Fraction's Letter to the International Secretariat
1. The promoters of the conference have specified that its aim was to prepare for unification of the opposition groups on an international scale. With this aim and acting in this capacity a Secretariat has been formed.
The importance of these events doesn’t reside in the importance or strength of the groups represented at the convocation; rather it is the fact that the formation of a Secretariat to unify the opposition groups marks an important stage in the communist crisis, so an initial plan of work, from the programmatic, general and organisational point of view, a plan which doesn’t assure against further confusion and dispersal, may lead to the unfortunate consequence of aggravating the communist crisis (although the intention of the promoters is obviously to the contrary).
In fact there is only one safeguard against precipitation of the communist crisis, that provided by projecting onto the horizon of proletarian struggles the force of reaction sustained by the Left against the ever more widespread swindles, manoeuvres, imbroglios and murders of opportunism which have taken hold of the Communist International.
To mark the difficult course of development of the communist left – on a national and international scale – by calling a conference based on false premises, means to prepare the grounds on which the vision of the communist movement being saved by a polarisation around the left fractions would be obscured. Their eventual unification, being subject to profound crises as a result of these initial errors, will lead – after an initial moment of relief and even of enthusiasm on the part of the proletarian vanguard – to a major dispersal which, far from moving things forward, will cause us to delay fulfilling our mission of service to the revolutionary cause.
2. The activity of vanguard proletarian groups is conditioned by the examination of relations of force between classes, by the level to which opportunism has fulfilled its function of corrupting the proletarian vanguard, of causing dispersion and degeneration of the proletarian movement in general.
The defence of the communist character of the Communist International has certainly been – for the proletariat – a question that presents enormous difficulties, much greater than that presented, say, by the defence of the proletarian character of the parties in the 2nd International. The revolutionary victory in Russia represented, and represents still, the point of rupture with the historical regime of capitalist domination, and not only in Russia, but in the entire world. Such an important function was bound to give rise to corresponding difficulties and perils of equal importance.
The march of events in the class struggle, on the global level, has marked the course and progression of non-communist solutions within Russia and the International.
Following the triumphant task of constituting the communist parties, in the feverish atmosphere of the immediate post-war period, we witnessed a subsequent halt during a period of slight attenuation of the capitalist crisis. During this period the process of concentration of non-communist elements and ideologies, and the struggle between proletarian and communist currents got underway. And then the German defeat took place. The batteries were charged for the struggle against „trotskism”, and the Italian Left was put in the position of having to renounce the leadership of the revolutionary struggle in Italy, despite the vast majority of the party calling on it not to do so. The subsequent sharpening of the capitalist crisis in Europe and the colonies found the process of concentration of the conflicting forces, inside Russia and the communist parties, reaching a point of consolidation, above all as far as the forces of opportunism were concerned.
Events in England, China and in Russia were marked by an impetuous advance of the masses in England and China, and of an intensifying of the opportunist campaign; against the left of the Russian party, in the Italian party and against all groups and elements in other parties that dared raise their voice in support of the head of the Russian left, comrade Trotski.
The fact that in England and in China no left fraction existed – or at least no current capable of transforming itself, under the impulse of events, into a fraction, and taking the lead of the mass movements – resulted in success, at the same time both for capitalism and opportunism, and defeat for the masses and of the activity of the Left within the International.
During this period, there is a corresponding activity of the left within the parties aimed at obstructing the successes of opportunism and working towards a regroupment of proletarian and communist forces, within the framework of tendencies acting within the internal discipline of the party.
The 15th Congress of the Russian party, the subsequent Enlarged Executive of the International, and the events that preceded these consultations would oblige the left tendencies to transform themselves into fractions having as their objective the regroupment of the healthiest part of the proletarian vanguard, in order that the latter might resist the floodtide of opportunism, and – making interventions on autonomous political and organisational positions in all aspects of the activity of the communist parties – also might be integrated into a revived revolutionary movement to form the basis on which to rapidly form the indispensable revolutionary leadership.
The successes of capitalism up to 1927, most important of all being the triumph of opportunism inside the International, made it extremely difficult for this work of enucleation to be carried out by the left fractions. On the other hand the material circumstances, having put into an extremely difficult situation as regards international contacts, the Russian Left, such objective difficulties would be sensibly aggravated by the fact that some groups, with objectives which differed from those of a fraction, and which were based on extremely confused politics (Ruth Fischer, Contre le Courant, Redressemente Communiste), had taken on the task of international liaison centre. The Italian Left kept totally apart from all these events, despite Piatakov’s writings against it in 1927.
After the Right’s victory, inside the International, had been replaced by a victory of centrism, which was obliged to base its entire activity around a ruthless and bloody attack against the Left; after the zig-zag course of utopian anti-communism had been installed, at this point the fractions would see that it was necessary to establish a set of autonomous political positions in order to be able to intervene in all aspects of centrist politics; no longer bound to it, it could then intervene directly in the process of the class struggle rather than getting bogged down in the activity of the official communist parties.
If not, the Fractions would have been submerged in the deluge of centrist Utopian catastrophes, and the masses would have confused the politics of centrism with that of communism, deviating as a consequence towards anarchism and social-democracy.
In the present phase, which is marked by a hardening of the capitalist counter-offensive, an extreme sharpening of the crises in the communist parties, and the criminal evolution of centrist politics, the essential problems for the communist fractions are these: „To delineate their own activity. To circumscribe their own political positions. To make direct appeals to the proletariat. To present the policy of fractions as the only possible way to channel the communist solution to the crisis”.
3. There is incontestable evidence that such a function can be absolved only as the result of a coordination of the fractions on an international scale. Much has been said on the point and we refer to our indication that objective conditions favour the constitution of a International Secretariat of the Oppositions.
It remains to be established, what are the tasks, on what programmatic basis, and with what organisational systems should such an office work in order to achieve unification of the oppositions given the present state of the groups in the various countries.
In this field, as in others, experience has a great deal to teach us.
The most suggestive factor in this field arises through an examination of the activity of the left within the old socialist parties and within the 2nd International.
In this regard, what needs to be emphatically underlined is the fact that the betrayal of 1914 had established in a brutal and direct way the objective conditions for the construction of the 3rd International.
The fact that Lenin had waited some years before issuing the call to build the communist parties, is to be explained solely in terms of relations between the classes during the war. But for what concerns the relations between the proletarian reactions in the various countries to the betrayal of 1914, this experience must be considered whilst holding well to the fore that the final deathknell of the 2nd International had already sounded.
The fact that the bolsheviks were at Zimmerwald and at Kienthal alongside opportunists of the worst variety, and the fact that this hadn’t had serious repercussions on the bolsheviks themselves (and Lenin had taken organisational and political precautions of the first order) is explained, by the consideration we made earlier, that the 2nd international had collapsed, and that the proletarian movement – as far as organisation was concerned – had been razed to the ground. The issue wasn’t that of an immediate reconstruction of the new international, but of supporting internationalist action against the imperialist war.
The present situation is instead characterised by the fact that the 3rd International hasn’t collapsed, that the communist movement hasn’t been razed to the ground. Naturally all these [situations] must be seriously considered as prospective situations of the future, and the fractions should be prepared for them. Today it is a matter of avoiding these catastrophes, and especially of not getting ourselves – the left fractions – sucked into these catastrophes. And that could happen now, both through an erroneous conception of the political bankruptcy of centrism, and through misconceptions about the national and international problems of the left fractions.
In fact, rather than it being ruled out, everything makes us predict that the mass movements will recover, despite their being overwhelmed by centrist opportunism (and in large measure because of action taken by the fractions), and that therefore before the catastrophe has happened, the left fractions could recover the leadership of the proletarian movements. One false step by the international leadership and the possibility of the fractions getting to the head of the movement again would be seriously threatened.
4. The tasks of a proletarian vanguard, within the confines of each nation and on the international scale, is, in our conception, to apply international proletarian policies to the political situation of the country within which each is active. Consciousness of these international policies is acquired by the vanguard of each country as the result of actual experience of the class struggle, through an assimilation of this experience, through establishing a set of general political rules, applied with the Marxist system of investigation of social and economic phenomenon. It is quite understandable that those vanguard groups which live and act in social environments where class conflict is more acute, make the greatest contribution to other groups in terms of theory and programme. What is inconceivable is that there is any substitute for the investigation of political conditions by groups acting in a social environment where the class struggle is more intense, any substitute for the indispensable effort of assimilation of living class experience, or of class experiences undergone by the proletariat of a given country.
At the present moment we conceive the International Secretariat as performing useful work in the sense in which it is the result of a confluence on a path that is well marked out from the programmatic point of view of the experiences of each vanguard in the difficult work of establishing a communist political line against capitalism and the spread of centrist opportunism.
We do not conceive of it as performing useful work at all when it considers itself as a mechanical extension of the political positions of the Russian opposition, sponsored by disparate elements that previously had navigated in different directions, and which are regrouping with the evident intention of saving the communist movement, and which, despite these good intentions, won’t be preserved from the subsequent, inevitable crises, or from the subsequent loss of direction.
In order to reduce to a minimum the perils of future crises from now on, or – at least – to circumscribe future crises from now on, within the limits set by inevitable disagreements on tactics, it is necessary, henceforth, to specify and establish programmatic boundaries not accepted because one or more people defend them, but because a re-examination of past, and above all, of recent events, prove that the non-adoption of the theses of the Russian opposition has brought about the present crisis. This, translated, is a request for a platform, the sole means capable of creating the framework for a communist organisation. This platform may be lacking and the movements may exist all the same; but then these movements are bound to suffer from internal stresses and strains, thereby disappointing proletarians who had rallied to the call to struggle for a solution to the crisis, and leading them towards further disappointments, for which the Fraction would clearly be heavily responsible. The experiences in Belgium and Germany prove this. The existence of the Contre le Courant group, which in a formal sense was employed in the work of elaborating the communist movement in France, doesn’t prove otherwise. In actual fact this group had no other relation with the proletarian movement than that of a club employed essentially in issuing important documents of the Russian Opposition in the French language. The La Verité group should be orientated – in our opinion – towards the elaboration of these documents, if one wishes to avoid prejudicing precious proletarian energies and compromising the work of the left in France.
5. The present situation can be characterised thus: the conditions exist for an international link-up of the oppositions; but formations don’t exist in every country capable of ensuring that action taken by an international centre of the oppositions would be effective.
In the present situation, therefore, we cannot but approve the preliminary work directed towards the formation of the international centre, a preliminary work which involves forming fractions in the most important centres, above all in Europe, but also in the colonies and in America. This preliminary work must be carried out on an international scale, in the sense that each group must be able to receive support from the International Secretariat, and see it as a source of comparisons and examination of experience. But in order to fulfil this aim it has to:
1) To decide on a first programmatic document (our fraction had expressed the wish to know about the programme presented by comrade Trotski to the 6th World Congress, which might be a basis for a theoretical marshalling of the Opposition).
2) Constitution of a Centre which will provide a guarantee that all organisational problems will be resolved according to the principles of a real collaboration of the responsible formations of groups which make up the Secretariat, and absolutely never through manoeuvres amongst particular elements, above all if these are extraneous to the responsible formations.
Having resolved the main lines of the programmatic and organisational question, it will be necessary to establish that adhesion on an individual basis will be the only way of adhering to the fractions.
To attribute to the International Secretariat, that essential function of being alert to the formation of groups in all countries and assisting these groups to elaborate a system of political norms inferred from the re-examination of living class experience, in the light of fundamental norms adopted in the guiding theoretical document of the International Secretariat.
These are the proposals which the Left Fraction proposes to defend in the present international situation. Given the disagreements which the Left Fraction have with the currently prevailing approach, and whilst awaiting the response from the organs elected at the preliminary conference, the fraction will maintain its organisational position. That is: it adheres to the Secretariat because it recognises the need for it, and therefore of participation by sending of documents to the Bulletin which will be created. Of not participating in the directing work of the Secretariat because of the reasons which we have explained and expounded on above.