Pole of Communist Revival in France (France) | Yannick Duterte
Communism orphaned by a great international movement
The Communist International was dissolved on 15 May 1943 as a concession to the Allies in the context of the Second World War. However, it was not reconstituted following the outbreak of the Cold War, an important mistake or limitation of the International Communist Movement (ICM) and the Soviet leadership at the time. Its existence allowed the member parties to remain united despite their many differences and defined unambiguously what it meant to be a communist.
For almost 80 years now, the world proletariat has no longer had an International (CI) and its member organisations have become increasingly divided. Attempts have been made to rebuild the ICM, the first step towards a real International, and these initiatives have been widely supported by the PRCF, which has been associated in particular with the European Initiative of Communist and Workers’ Parties and which has long participated in this space, which is today increasingly emptied of its substance and seems to be reaching a dead end.
An MCI divided and weakened by a sectarian drift
The current situation of systemic crisis of capitalism and imperialist war on a global scale has further aggravated these divisions, polarising around several main lines which seem less and less reconcilable. There are those who are no longer communist in name only and who have become relays of the Western socio-democrats such as the Eurocommunists associated with the P” C “F- PGE, which did not hesitate on 30 November to vote for NATO’s war credits in the French National Assembly.
In recent years a dangerous concept has emerged among the attempts to rebuild the ICM, which we shall call lineageism. The International is the party of all the working classes, and the communist parties are its members. They share fundamental principles, notably that of democratic centralism, which makes it possible to build a common line through debate. Lignism consists in denying this necessity by positing a given political line before any debate, and then trying to rebuild the International only with the parties following this line.
This conception of internationalism – which runs counter to history, in particular that of the Third, which was able to adapt its line on several occasions according to the world context – would amount, on a national scale, to building the party of the working class on a fixed line, between a handful of militants all in agreement, without ever allowing internal debate.
What’s more, the founding of the CI was based on the support of a powerful Communist Party that ran the world’s first socialist state, the CPSU. Today there is no CP that can claim to impose its line or to have the necessary weight to do so: the only result can only be to divide the ICM even further at a time when it would be imperative to be more united than ever around the great questions of our century – notably the opposition to the imperialist war unleashed by the US-NATO bloc which could well devolve into nuclear war of annihilation! And we are told that this is not a priority? What will be the possibilities of emancipation of the proletariat if the planet is destroyed? When will socialism be possible if we are sent back to the stone age, as the great socialist scientist Einstein warned over 80 years ago?
This sectarian drift is particularly harmful for communist reconstruction. In most European countries, where some historical parties have tilted towards Eurocommunism and then inevitably towards social democracy, the question of rebuilding strong parties is still open. In this context, the idea of accepting only a fixed line as a principle is more conducive to the proliferation of small groups than to the gathering of the proletariat. The support of a foreign CP to a quasi-non-existent organisation has only ever advanced its virtual presence in militant circles, and never its implantation in the working class. These divisionary and sectarian practices seem closer to leftism as defined by Lenin than to Marxist-Leninist revolutionary praxis.
Lignism tends to lump all those who disagree with it together, whether they are social democrats, leftists or communists on a different line. This confusion is irresponsible because it completely ignores the differences in context that can exist between different countries by simply talking about a “global stage of capitalism” that would be the same everywhere. While erasing in front of a sacred line the principles that have united communists for more than a century, it forbids any compromise in a struggle that would not be carried by them, that is to say any front strategy. Should the communists thus abandon support for the Palestinian people, on the pretext that its current leadership is not socialist? Should we remain silent in the face of the neo-colonialism to which too many African countries are still subjected today, since their liberation movements no longer claim to be Marxist-Leninist? Should we stop supporting the just struggle of the peoples of America who are constantly attacked by imperialism?
The global anti-imperialist platform
The need to revive a Communist International should not make us forget the concrete analysis of the concrete situation. Today, world peace is threatened more than it has been for several decades, and the absolute urgency is to stop the military escalation launched by the main threat, namely the EU-NATO bloc, to which the “Franco-European” capitalist class totally subscribes, towards a possible war of systematic destruction. It is hard to see how communist parties and organisations in Europe, such as the PRCF, would support “their bourgeoisie” in opposing imperialist war and NATO. This accusation can only be directed against the Russian communists and other communist parties who have decided to support their state in an anti-imperialist or at least anti-hegemonic perspective and it is up to them to respond to its attacks.
It is in this framework that the participation of the PRCF in the World Anti-Imperialist Platform from the Paris declaration to the last conference held in Caracas, Venezuela in March this year. The platform lays the foundations for a strong global anti-imperialist front against the spread of war and points the finger at its main perpetrators, the US-NATO imperialist bloc. Within this anti-imperialist front, there are organisations and parties that do not claim to be communist. Could we speak of an anti-imperialist front if there were only communists? In that case it would be a mere duplicate of the ICM. The essence of a front is to bring together broad forces to defend the same objective which serves the interests of the working class and the peoples of the world, in this case the opposition to the imperialist war and the need to impose a defeat on the most dangerous and decadent imperialist bloc, that of the US-NATO. This was the same strategy employed by the USSR and the CI in joining forces with the Anglo-Saxon imperialists against the fascist Axis bloc, without ever idealising or underestimating them. From this strategic choice came the Great Victory against Fascism and the greatest known extension of socialism on the planet, which some countries still claim to be their own.
It is difficult to compare and even equate Putin’s capitalist Russia, whose GDP is equivalent to that of Spain and which is fighting on its own borders, with the US-NATO, which has the largest military budget on the planet and in history and more than 800 military bases, while illegally occupying dozens of countries such as Syria, where more than 80% of the oil is plundered by the US army and its mercenaries, as The Guardian newspaper recently acknowledged. It is difficult to compare the revival of fascism by the US and the European bourgeoisies in Ukraine and the rest of the continent with the occasional presence of reactionary elements in some capitalist states such as Russia, although this should not be denied.
Leftism always shuns concrete analysis and takes refuge in generalities. Sectarianism denies the working class the use of tactics and strategy. Everything must be on the same level without nuances, without compromises, without alliances, in short without any real revolutionary movement. We should therefore sit back and only hope that the working class will make the revolution right away, all by itself, because it has no allies, we are told. These conceptions have been defended before by a certain Leon Trotsky during the great October revolution. And we know how that ended up… Similarly, it is wrong to base our analysis on a simple copy and paste of the situation in 1914-18. Our analysis must start from the present concrete situation and seek ways to advance the revolutionary process on the basis of the material and not the platonic conditions of the present moment. All this will have to be clarified by a consequent theoretical work.
The internationalist positioning of the PRCF
The PRCF is engaged in the world anti-imperialist platform with many communist parties, some of which are very close to our positions, such as the CPEC, the Yugoslav NPC (NKPJ), the People’s Democratic Party of Korea and many others.
The initiative for the platform came from our comrades in the Democratic People’s Party of the Republic of Korea, a massive sister party in South Korea, whose character could not be doubted in view of the hard struggle they are waging at home for the liberation and reunification of their homeland against capitalism/imperialism.
At a time when the ICM is divided, the platform has also provided a space for direct exchanges and meetings between communist parties which is therefore very important for consolidating the international strategy of communists.
The PRCF will participate in all the spaces it considers relevant to the progress of the reconstruction of the ICM and of a Communist International worthy of the name, as well as in the fronts necessary to defend the vital interests of the working class and our people, against capitalism-imperialism, without ever seeking to impose its views or to divide as some do.
But it is necessary to carry out a theoretical clarification of the concept of imperialism and the danger of leftist drift in historical moments for the world history of the working class, in the face of the prevarications of Marxist-Leninist theory, of which we lay claim.
