ONE IS MISSING FROM THE NINETEEN
By Pierre Frank
A very restrained communiqué in Pravda November 25 informed the world that eighteen Communist and workers parties which took part in the “consultative gathering in Moscow in March 1965" have decided "to convoke, in February 1968, a consultative gathering for a collective exchange of opinions on the problems relating to convoking an international conference of Communist and workers parties."
The objective of the latter conference would be to "consolidate the unity of the Communist parties, as well as... the cohesion of all the socialist and democratic forces, in the struggle against imperialism, for the national and social liberation of the peoples, for peace in the world."
One could say that the formulation includes solidarity with the Vietnamese people. But shouldn't that be made the central point in order to decide what international actions to undertake and how to conduct them?
let us, however, leave this aside, no matter how essential it may be, and examine the question in its general aspects. The last international conference, of the 18, was held in 1960. It found no solution to the Sino-Soviet conflict.
Five years passed before, in March 1965, a first "consultative meeting" could be held; and, after that, it will have taken a good deal of time for it to meet again, three years later, to hold another “consultative meeting" which will discuss the possibility of convoking an international conference.
Now, as everyone knows, the "unity of the Communist parties" is far from growing stronger with the passage of time. Thus the communiqué was careful to avoid mentioning that at the "consultative gathering of March 1965" there were 19, and not 18 parties, that the Cuban Communist party was thus not included in the convocation for February 1968.
This is not too surprising in view of the hostility to Cuban policies and the conference of the Organization of Latin-American Solidarity shown by the Soviet leadership via articles by Latin- American bureaucrats published in Pravda.
The restraint in the communiqué, too, doesn't this indicate that the signers have few illusions as to the results to be expected from the March 1968 gathering? But in face of the attacks they have been subjected to by the Chinese, they could not remain completely passive.
It is probable that the March 1968 gathering will in its turn give birth to something quite insignificant. Stalinist monolithism is indeed dead; the bureaucratized parties will not be able to create the unity, the cohesion about which they talk so profusely.
Unity, international cohesion is not being prepared in the "consultative gatherings" of the Stalinist bureaucrats grown tired and gray in the harness. It is being prepared in the actions for Vietnam like the one organized October 21, in which hundreds of thousands of persons, particularly the youth, mobilized, not for "peace" but for the victory of Vietnam.
Such actions, and the participants in them, are converging toward and will finally fuse politically with the program of the October 1917 revolution which the Fourth International has carried on since the Communist International passed away.