French Communist Left

In 2007 the ICC held its 17th International Congress. For the first time since 1979, the Congress was able to welcome delegates of other internationalist groups coming literally from the four corners of the earth (from Brazil to Korea). As we have pointed out in the article on the work of the Congress, this was no innovation on our part: the ICC did nothing other than adopt the same approach that had led to its own creation in 1975, and which it had itself inherited - as we will see - from the Communist Left and particularly from the French Communist Left (Gauche Communiste de France, GCF). Whence the interest of the article which we are publishing below, and which is the report originally published in Internationalisme n°23, of a conference of internationalists held in May 1947, just 60 years before our own 17th Congress.

The first part of this tribute to our comrade Marc, who died in December 1990, was published in the previous issue of the International Review, and dealt with the period from 1917 to World War II... In this second part, we will follow our comrade’s activity, first in the French Communist Left (“Gauche Communiste de France”, GCF), then during the last period of his life, when his contribution was decisive in the foundation and development of the ICC.

As readers of our territorial press will know already, our comrade Marc is dead. In the December issue of our French territorial press, we published, as usual, the list of donations; one was accompanied with these words: “In reply to many letters which have touched me deeply, and for a first combat fought and won, this donation for the ICC’s press...” As always, our comrade fought against his disease with lucidity and courage. But in the end, it was the disease - one of the most virulent forms of cancer - that had the upper hand, the 20th December 1990. With Marc’s death, not only has our organisation lost its most experienced militant, and its most fertile mind; the whole world proletariat has lost one of its best fighters.

Our comrade Clara died at Tenon hospital in Paris on Saturday 15 April, at the age of 88... Clara gives us the example of a woman who, throughout her life, fought alongside the working class and showed more than ordinary courage in doing so, notably by risking her life during the years of the counter-revolution. A woman who remained loyal to her revolutionary commitment and ideas to the end.

In a number of countries, and particularly in France, the bourgeoisie is using the theme of “Negationism” against the development of working class struggle and consciousness (“Negationism” being the term used to describe the calling into question by certain writers, of the existence of the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps)...

Twenty-five years ago, in May 1980, the cycle of international conferences of the communist left, initiated by the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt, Battaglia Comunista) some four years earlier, ended in disarray and confusion. A brief glance at the sorry state of the proletarian political milieu today shows that we are still living with the consequences of this failure to create an organised framework for fraternal debate and political clarification among the groups of the left communist tradition.

The commemoration of the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp is providing the bourgeoisie with a new opportunity to obscure the responsibility of the "democratic camp" in the atrocities of World War II, by bludgeoning us with horrifying images and testimonies, bearing witness to the appalling and all too real horrors of fascism.

It will soon be five years that imperialist war has raged in Europe, with all its misery, massacres and devastation.

On the Russian, French and Italian fronts tens of millions of workers and peasants are slaughtering each other for the exclusive interests of a sordid and bloody capitalism, which obeys only these laws: profit, accumulation.

In the first part of this article we tried to bring out just how ignominious were the commemorations of the 1944 landings which in no way represented a “social” liberation for the working class. On the contrary they represented an unprecedented massacre in the final years of the war; misery and terror throughout the years of reconstruction. All the members of the different capitalist camps that fought one another were responsible for the war and it resulted in a redivision of the world between the great powers.

We are publishing here a leaflet by the French Fraction of the Communist Left put out in August 1944 to oppose the general mobilisation launched by the Free French on 18th August, as well as the lead article of L’Etincelle, newspaper of the same group, also from August 1944. The French Fraction of the Communist Left was formed in Marseille at the beginning of that same year.

Around the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left (see our book The Italian Communist Left), reconstituted in Marseille in 1942, there formed a nucleus of about ten French elements: some of them had just broken with Trotskyism and others, still young, had only just moved towards revolutionary positions.

The text we are reproducing here appeared in Internationalisme, n°46 in summer 1952. This was the last issue of the review, and this text was