["The minority tendency of the Ligue Communiste (Communist League, the French section of the Fourth International), the Trotskyist organization led by Alain Krivine, has announced its decision to leave this organization," the Paris daily Le Monde reported February 21-22. "The minority took with them between 200 and 300 members (primarily students from Censier and high-school students from the schools in the south of Paris) out of the membership of 1,200 that this party claims in the capital city."
[Le Monde noted that the splitting group had existed as a minority in the Ligue Communiste since the founding congress of the organization in April 1969, when the faction had opposed the new formation adhering to the Fourth International. "This tendency has persisted more or less continuously," the Paris daily continued. "Some of its leaders are attracted today by certain features of the 'spontanéist' current."
[The minority made their intention to split clear, Le Monde indicated, at a February 13 meeting of the Ligue Communiste Central Committee, where the majority accused them of preparing to set up a new organization. The Groupe 66 in Marseilles and the current around the publication La Voie had reportedly joined with the Ligue Communiste minority in planning to create a new formation.
[At a general assembly of the Paris cells of the Ligue Communiste February 13, "the minority walked out, singing the 'International,'" according to Le Monde. "They have announced that they will bring out a journal next week and form a new revolutionary organization 'with the aim of continuing the struggle to build a revolutionary party.'"
[On February 24, Henri Maller and Isaac Joshua, leaders of the former minority, held a press conference at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. They announced that they had just established a new movement called "Révolution" and a monthly journal of the same name.
[In their press conference, according to Le Monde of February 26, the leaders of the split-off group raised two criticisms of the Ligue Communiste. They accused the organization's leaders of using "bureaucratic methods" and taking an "abstentionist attitude" toward the February 9 demonstration of Secours Rouge [Red Aid, a far-left united front against repression] in the Place Clichy. The ex-minority leaders also expressed opposition to the Ligue Communiste position of recommending a vote for Communist party candidates in the runoff balloting to follow the upcoming municipal elections. "There is no freedom of expression for the revolutionary movements in Communist party-run municipalities," the Révolution spokesman declared.
[The ex-minority leaders expressed rather vague and ambiguous support for Trotskyist ideas in general, Le Monde wrote, as well a predilection for the rhetoric of Maoism. "The members of Révolution claim to base themselves on Trotskyism as the first manifestation of revolt against Stalinism but consider the analyses of the Fourth International 'outdated.'
["While they do not believe that Mao Tsetung Thought offers an overall strategy, they support the Chinese cultural revolution."
[We have translated the following article, which comments on the split, from the March 1 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste.]
The Central Committee of the Ligue Communiste has found itself in possession of documents reporting contacts between the leadership of the minority tendency and other groups with the aim of forming a new organization in the fall. The documents also noted that the minority tendency has held joint educational conferences with other European groups.
This is splitting activity and a violation of the discipline of the Fourth International. It is an attempt to prepare a split inasmuch as its objective is not helping to formulate the line of the organization but to destroy this organization to found another. It is a violation of discipline inasmuch as these comrades chose to collaborate on a preferential basis with certain European groups behind the backs of the sections of the Fourth International that now exist or are being built in these same countries. They showed no concern for the work of these sections or their future. That is, the minority chose to consider it more profitable to work with forces rival or in open political opposition to comrades collaborating with us in the same international organization. This is a strange kind of internationalism, to say the least, where revolutionary loyalty has no place.
The Central Committee of the Ligue Communiste scrupulously avoided using any police-type procedures. It did not try to find out which comrades wrote the incriminating documents or which comrades participated in the factional schools and conferences. It simply asked all members of the organization to declare their opposition to the split perspective implied by the documents and thus to affirm their desire to participate in collective debate to solve the problems and perfect the orientation of one organization, the Ligue Communiste, the French section of the Fourth International.
Thus, the Central Committee did not ask any comrades to renounce their differences, their criticisms, or their opposition on any question. It asked only that members of the organization declare their position as to the conditions and framework of democratic discussion among activists. This is what the minority comrades refused to do by walking out of the general assembly and resuming their previous splitting activity.
We have no intention of making any moralizing criticism of the attitude of comrades, of accusing them of any dishonesty in their actions. If they are convinced that they are right, that they are acting for the good of the revolution, and if, on the other hand, they are convinced that the Ligue Communiste has become an obstacle to the revolution, or at best a useless, spoiled instrument, any means would be justified to free the best energies of revolutionists from this dead shell. However, this would be true only if in this struggle they educated the militants following them.
When constructing a new organization is projected it means that the old one is considered definitively and irremediably corrupt and degenerated That is, the process of degeneration has culminated in final collapse. This was the position Lenin took on the Second International after the vote on war credits in 1914; it was Trotsky's position on the Third International after the advent of Nazism in Germany and the defeat of the German CP.
If the minority comrades thought that the Ligue Communiste had gone over the brink, they should not have concealed this from the membership. They should not have rested content for more than a year with conducting a skirmishing campaign, using buttoned foils. They should not have sidestepped debates on fundamental questions like the PCF [Parti Communiste Français- French Communist Party]. To the contrary, they should have raised loud protests, said where, when, and why the Ligue Communiste became hopelessly degenerated. They should have roused the entire organization when the question was acute. But maneuvering in a hopelessly corrupt organization in the midst of a period when the vanguard is reconstituting itself, when entryism even in mass workers parties is violently denounced by the minority comrades, is inexplicable behavior.
The fact is that in any case their arguments are insufficient. Even if the leadership of the Ligue Communiste were right-wing and bureaucratized, the minority would have to explain why, in a period when the revolution is on the rise internationally, a sound, revolutionary leadership could not be established. Internal documents are circulating, and speakers as well. Are the rank and file masochists, or do they have a preference for bureaucracy? None of the factors that explain the existence of bureaucracy in workers parties (mutually isolated cells, lack of time on the part of members, a low political level) operate in a small organization that meets in frequent national conferences and general assemblies. Or did the minority feel incapable of conducting a real political debate to persuade the organization to accept its line, and incapable of competing for leadership?
It is true that the central nucleus of the minority did not participate in the formation of the left faction in the UEC [Union des Etudiants Communistes -- Union of Communist Students, the CP campus organization] nor in the initial work of building the JCR [Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire- Revolutionary Communist Youth, the organization that emerged when the left faction was expelled from the UEC], nor in the leadership of the Ligue Communiste itself at the time when it devoted itself almost entirely to tendency debate. As a result the leading nucleus of the minority has neither much experience nor much credit in the matter of building an organization.
Finally, the minority would still have to explain why the hopelessly degenerated Ligue Communiste finds itself raised to the top of the wave in real mass mobilizations. Why was it the Ligue Communiste that gave impetus to the Burgos campaign inside Secours Rouge, thereby giving this agitation its mass character? Why, moreover, was it the Ligue Communiste that inspired the student strike, that threw all its forces against every other far-left organization in organizing the demonstration at the Lycée Chaptal? Why has the Ligue Communiste for several months conducted the most effective struggle against fascism? ...
These are the things that should have been explained to the membership. But instead the minority concealed its views in debate. It appealed to outside forces, principally student groups, to put pressure on the organization. It presented a list of nit-picking criticisms which at most could have demonstrated the failure of the present leaders but not of the entire organization. It would have been more profitable for the minority comrades destined to form a new organization to address themselves to these questions... and more profitable as well for those supporters of the majority who, according to the minority itself, are still salvageable.
For our part, we do not regard this paltry and pathetic split, without verve or spirit, as a mere youthful error or indiscretion.
At the first congress of the Ligue, the leaders of the minority showed their reluctance to draw a firm revolutionary line against student pressures and the post-May spontanéist euphoria, as well as its loathness to take up the Trotskyist tradition of struggle against Stalinism.
Subsequently, as our activity shifted toward the factories, the minority leaders more and more clearly expressed their fear of throwing themselves into the organized working-class movement, of fighting to win the masses of workers away from the reformist leaderships, their fear of getting their hands dirty and compromising themselves in this battle. Parallel to this, they declared their preference for autonomous working-class groups," "committees of the unionized and nonunionized," which were not conceived as possible transitional groupings but as permanent instruments of industrial work.
Timidity in organizing the vanguard, hesitation in the face of mass work - these are the two faces of centrism in our time.
Today, the minority comrades have chosen the discipline of Secours Rouge, a vanguard grouping and not a mass working-class organization, against the discipline of the revolutionary organization. And they have done this when the "representativeness" of the Comité d'Initiative [Steering Committee, the leading body of the Secours Rouge] is known to all ...
In our view, this wavering political attitude, without sinews or firmness, neither fish nor fowl, half hound and half hare, is the result of the pressure exerted by the mass of new intellectual and technical middle layers on a vanguard not yet emerged from the student ideology.
It does no good to affirm abstractly the decisive and leading role of the proletariat in the socialist revolution, if the purpose of this in practice is better to submerge the working class in an antimonopoly alliance, a new historic bloc, or a people's revolt, depending on which school you belong to. To prefer the discipline of Secours Rouge to that of the revolutionary organization and at the same time refuse to wage a resolute fight in the organized workers movement means blithely setting out on the road of petty-bourgeois centrism.
The fact that after the first congress a good part of the minority were able to find a place in the organization without difficulty and the fact that discussion is continuing after the split indicate that tendency debate remains possible in the Ligue Communiste. In our opinion this reality represents a stunning refutation of the Stalinist arguments that tendencies are harmful as well as a rebuke to Social Democratic practice of debate without discipline.
As for those who have left, two roads are open to them besides "Trotsko-spontanéist" degeneration. They may become a critical satellite of the Ligue, or some (we hope) may return to the organization. They are facing a crossroads. History will decide.