80 years ago: the founding of the Gauche Communiste de France: Keeping alive the spark of revolutionary organisation (Part II)

In the first part of this series [1][1], we showed that the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF - Communist Left of France) was formed in the continuity of the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party and the International Communist Left. In the midst of the counter-revolution, it remained the only organisation capable of defending the organisational principles of the Communist Left in a coherent and uncompromising manner. But this group was not merely a continuation of the Italian Fraction; it did not content itself with preserving the acquisistions and the political contribution produced by Bilan. Without neglecting its responsibilities regarding intervention in the immediate struggles of the working class, the GCF devoted a great deal of its energy to the work of political and theoretical clarification. On numerous questions raised by the experience of the defeat of the revolutionary wave and the degeneration of the Communist International, this organisation was able to provide clearer and more profound answers, thereby enriching the theoretical and programmatic framework upon which the ICC was founded and on which it still relies today.

I – In the aftermath of the war, understanding the historical course: the defence of the marxist method

The outbreak of workers’ struggles against the war in Italy during 1943, followed a year later by strikes in Germany, posed the following question to the revolutionary vanguard: did the workers’ reactions in these two countries hold the prospect of the emergence of a revolutionary process similar to that which had emerged from 1917 onwards in Russia? Such was, initially, the hypothesis of the various groups and organisations of the Communist Left. In August 1943 in Marseille, the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left held a conference, attended by the French Nucleus of the Communist Left[2], during which the analysis was put forward that events in Italy had opened up a pre-revolutionary phase. However, subsequent events were to contradict this approach. The struggles of 1943 had not forced the Italian bourgeoisie to end the war, as had been the case in Russia in 1917 or in Germany in 1918. Nor did they constitute the first ripples that were to provoke a new international revolutionary wave. The terrible massacres perpetrated in the various workers’ strongholds by both the Allied and Nazi armies, as well as the powerful anti-fascist and democratic campaign following the ‘liberation’ of Europe, demonstrated the global bourgeoisie’s ability to learn the lessons of the previous revolutionary wave by crushing any attempt to extend the struggle and workers’ solidarity beyond borders[3]. By firmly grounding itself in the foundations of the marxist method and the political acquisitions of the Communist International and the International Communist Left, the French Fraction was able to draw the implications of the evolving situation. The report on the international situation adopted at the July 1945 conference (just two months after the end of the war in Europe and when the conflict had not yet ended on a global scale) revised the organisation’s initial position by clearly demonstrating that the balance of forces in the aftermath of the Second World War was not favourable to the proletariat: “Unlike the first imperialist war, where the proletariat, once it had engaged in the course towards revolution, retained the initiative and forced global capitalism to end the war, in this war, from the very first sign of revolution in Italy in July 1943, it was capitalism that seized the initiative and relentlessly pursued a civil war against the proletariat, forcibly preventing any concentration of proletarian forces, and refusing to end the war, even after the collapse and disappearance of the Hitler government and Germany’s insistent demand for an armistice, in order to safeguard itself, through a monstrous bloodbath and a merciless pre-emptive massacre, against any hint of a revolutionary threat from the German proletariat”.  Realising that the working class’s reactions against the war had not brought the period of counter-revolution to an end, the GCF concluded that the time was absolutely not ripe for the formation of a party. This was in clear contrast to the position defended by the Italian Left, grouped within the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCint), which, unable to grasp the significance of the situation and obsessed with seeking immediate influence within the class, persisted in repeating the old schema inherited from the past in order to better justify the wholly mistaken path of party formation[4]. In the series of articles entitled ‘Current Problems of the Workers’ Movement’, published in the journal Internationalisme during 1947, the GCF engaged in a fraternal yet uncompromising polemic to criticise the sterile and deleterious course on which the Italian Left had embarked: “The absence of any serious analysis of the events of recent years and of the forces which, through their presence or absence, have determined the course of events in a profoundly reactionary direction, is currently the striking feature of revolutionary militants and of groups which consider themselves to be in the vanguard. The habit of applying schema drawn from the past to new, real-life situations that arise has, in a sense, freed militants from the concern of having to engage in studies that seem tedious and tiring to them. What is the point, they ask themselves, of analysing and studying the present situation, when, according to their schema, they know what it ought to be. All that remains for them is to know how to apply the appropriate tactics… and to organise the agitation effectively.”[5] The schematism and superficiality of the PCI’s analysis were in reality a reflection of the poverty of political life and the absence of debates and discussions within the ‘party’ itself: ‘The PCI [of Italy] is currently the organisation where theoretical and political discussion is least prevalent. The war and the post-war period have raised a host of new problems. None of these problems has been or is being addressed within the ranks of the Italian Party. One need only read the party’s writings and newspapers to realise their extreme theoretical poverty. When one reads the minutes of the Party’s founding conference, one wonders whether this conference took place in 1946 or 1926. »[6]. Yet, as the GCF asserted, “no period in the history of the workers’ movement has so thoroughly overturned established assumptions and raised so many new problems as this relatively short 20-year period between 1927 and 1947, not even the period from 1905 to 1925, however turbulent it may have been. Most of the fundamental theses that formed the basis of the CI have become outdated and obsolete.”[7]

Ultimately, the political approach of the “Partito” openly turned its back on the basic responsibilities that the vanguard of revolutionaries must assume, as defined in the Communist Manifesto of 1848:

“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement”.

For the GCF, whilst revolutionary organisations were duty-bound to defend the still-valid political gains inherited from a century of experience within the workers’ movement, this did not mean reciting lessons well learnt from history books whilst assuming that history repeats itself in an unchanging manner. On the contrary, by adopting the method of critical analysis established by Marx and Engels as early as the mid-19th century, the GCF intended to tackle the new questions posed by the post-war situation with the same spirit as the International Communist Left in the 1930s, “without taboos or ostracism”:

“Against the idea that militants can only act on the basis of certainties, even if they are founded on false positions, we insist that there are no cert­ainties but only a continual process of going beyond what were formerly truths. Only an activity based on the most recent developments, on foundations that are constantly being enriched, is really revolutionary. In contrast, activity based on yesterday’s truths that have already lost their currency is sterile, harmful and reactionary. One might try to feed the members with absolute certainties and truths, but only relative truths which contain an antithesis or doubt can give rise to a revolutionary synthesis.

If doubt and ideological controversy are likely to disturb the activity of militants, one can’t see why this should only be valid today. At each stage in the struggle, the necessity arises to go beyond the old positions. At each moment acquired ideas and positions that have been taken up have to be verified and thrown into doubt. We are thus in a vicious circle: either we think and don’t act, or we act without knowing whether our action is based on adequate reasoning”[8]. 

II– The GCF’s contribution to understanding the decline of capitalism

Many of the fundamental issues raised by the defeat of the revolutionary wave and the experience of the Third International had been only sketched out by the Italian Fraction. The latter had left them largely as open questions rather than conclusions capable of being unequivocally integrated into the programme of the communists. By engaging in genuine collective work, through internal debates (or with other groups) and the profound contributions of its militants, the GCF achieved significant advances, particularly in deepening the understanding of the decadence of capitalism. Building on the analytical framework established by the Communist International as early as 1919 (“the era of wars and revolutions”), the GCF was able to extend and enrich the thinking developed by the Italian Fraction during the 1930s. The 1945 report on the international situation, to which we have already referred, provided an extremely profound clarification of two fundamental questions: the nature of imperialist war and that of state capitalism.

From the very beginning of the 20th century, the revolutionary movement had highlighted that militarism and imperialist war constituted the most significant manifestation of the capitalist mode of production entering its phase of historical decline. This change of historical period entailed a fundamental shift in the causes of war, to which the GCF made a decisive contribution:

“In the epoch of ascendant capitalism, wars (whether national, colonial or of imperial con­quest) represented an upward movement that ripened, strengthened and enlarged the capital­ist economic system. Capitalist production used war as a continuation by other means of its po­litical economy. Each war was justified and paid its way by the opening up of a new field for greater expansion, assuring further capitalist development.

In the epoch of decadent capital, war, like peace, expresses this decadence and greatly ac­celerates it.

It would be wrong to see war as negative by definition, as a destructive shackle on the de­velopment of society, as opposed to peace, which would then appear as the normal and positive course of development of production and soci­ety. This would be to introduce a moral concept into an objective, economically determined pro­cess.

War was the indispensable means by which capital opened up the possibilities for its fur­ther development, at a time when such possibil­ities existed and could only be opened up through violence. In the same way, the capitalist world, having historically exhausted all possibil­ity of development, finds in modern imperialist war the expression of its collapse. War today can only engulf the productive forces in an abyss, and accumulate ruin upon ruin, in an ever-accelerating rhythm, without opening up any possibility for the external development of production.

Under capitalism, there exists no fundamental opposition between war and peace, but there is a difference between the ascendant and deca­dent phases of capitalist society (and in the relation of war to peace), in the respective phases. While in the first phase, war had the function of assuring an expansion of the market, and so of the production of the means of con­sumption, in the second phase, production is es­sentially geared to the means of destruction, ie to war. The decadence of capitalist society is expressed most strikingly in the fact that, while in the ascendant period, wars had the function of stimulating economic development, in the decadent period economic activity is essentially restricted to the pursuit of war.

This does not mean that war has become the aim of capitalist production, since this remains the production of surplus value, but that war becomes the permanent way of life in decadent capitalism”[9]. 

This analysis has proved entirely valid: since that time the world has witnessed over a hundred armed conflicts causing at least as many deaths as the Second World War. This spiral of war has even intensified considerably over the last four decades, as evidenced by the current bloodshed in both Ukraine and across the Middle East.

In March 1946, the GCF adopted the ‘Theses on the Nature of the State and the Proletarian Revolution’[10]; this document constituted a further significant contribution, particularly regarding the role of the state in the period of decadence and the proletariat’s position towards it. The Communist International had already recognised the omnipresent role of the state in all spheres of society, and particularly in the economic sphere. The Manifesto of the First Congress of the CI in March 1919 clearly argued that “the nationalisation of economic life, against which capitalist liberalism protested so vehemently, is a fait accompli. A return, not to free competition, but even to the dominance of trusts, syndicates and other capitalist octopuses, is now impossible”. This prediction was fully borne out in the following decades, and especially after the crisis of 1929, which reminded the bourgeoisie that the state’s takeover of the management of national capital had become an unavoidable and permanent necessity. The preparations for war during the 1930s and, even more so, the ruin of almost all the world’s major industrial centres by 1945, further accelerated this general trend towards state capitalism. It was therefore through a rigorous examination of the dynamics of capitalism since the First World War that the GCF was able to demonstrate that “State capitalism is not an attempt to resolve the essential contradictions of capitalism as a system of exploitation of labour power, it is the express­ion of these contradictions. Each group of capital­ist interests attempts to push the effects of the crisis of the system onto a rival group, by taking it over as a market and as a field of exploitation. State capitalism is born out of the necessity for a given group of capital to concentrate itself and take hold of external markets. The economy is thus transformed into a war economy”.[11]

Here again, the GCF’s analysis and predictions have been fully confirmed, since the ever-increasing role of state capitalism over the last 80 years has in no way counteracted the deepening of capitalism’s historic crisis. On the contrary, it has been a powerful factor in exacerbating the system’s contradictions[12].

Thus, armed with a much clearer and deeper understanding of the general and permanent characteristics of the period of capitalism’s historical decline, the GCF was also able to resolve key questions for the revolutionary struggle, the main ones being as follows:

• During the period of capitalism’s ascendancy, trade unions were organisations that enabled the development of the struggle on the economic front. In the period of decline, they constitute organs fully integrated into the bourgeois state, which the workers have to oppose in their struggles.
• Whilst during the 19th century, national liberation struggles and colonial independence could form part of the proletariat’s tactics, in the period of capitalist decline such demands can only push the working class to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie.
• On the question of the state in the transitional period, the GCF continued the line of thought of Bilan by defending the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be exercised through its specific organs (the councils), distinct from those of the state. This is a crucial position subsequently defended and developed by the ICC.

It was with the same rigour that the GCF continued to defend to the very end the only credible alternative facing the working class in the aftermath of the Second World War: “Under the current conditions of capital, generalised war is inevitable. But this does not mean that revolution is inevitable, and even less so its triumph. The revolution represents only one branch of the alternative that its historical development now imposes upon humanity. If the proletariat fails to attain a socialist consciousness, this will open the way to a course towards barbarism, some aspects of which can already be discerned today.” Here too, the GCF guarded against all dogmatism. Unlike Bordiga, who, during the same period, declared that “the revolution is as certain as if it had already taken place”, the GCF argued, on the contrary, that the path to communism would still be very long, strewn with gigantic obstacles, and would require immense efforts on the part of the working class.

In the third part, we shall discuss the GCF’s contribution to the question of the party and its relations with the class, as well as the reasons that led to its dissolution in 1952.

Vincent, 13 April 202

[1] 80 years ago, the founding of the Gauche Communiste de France (Part 1) [2], World Revolution 405