Swimming Against the Tide: Trotskyists in German Occupied France

383 Pages·2013·6.815 MB·English

by  Yvan Craipeau

Swimming against
.de
the TI
TROTSKYISTS IN GERMAN
OCCUPIED FRANCE
Yvan Craipeau
translated by David Broder
MERLIN PRESS
in association with
SOCIALIST PLATFORM
Published in 2013 by
Merlin Press Ltd
6 Crane Street Chambers
Crane Street
Pontypool
NP46ND
Wales
www.merlinpress.co. uk
in association with
Socialist Platform Ltd
www.revolutionaryhistory.co. uk
First published in French in 1977 by Savelli, Paris as
Cantre vents et mantes
© Sylvie and Jean-Loup Craipeau
© this translation, David Broder, 2013
ISBN. 978-0-85036-658-7
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publisher.
Printed in the UK by Imprint Digital, Exeter
CONTENTS
Translator's introduction 7
Introduction 23
Chapter 1: Before the war 27
Chapter 2: The phoney war 55
Chapter 3: A time of confusion 82
Chapter 4: Hitler attacks the USSR 113
Chapter 5: 1943 - The turning point 172
Chapter 6: Working-class struggles and the armed struggle 199
Chapter 7: The first cracks in Europe 231
Chapter 8: Towards 'Liberation' 257
Afterword: What kind ofliberation? 291
Appendix: The surviving collection of Arbeiter und Soldat,
and a fragment of Der Arbeiter 293
Notes 343
Index 379

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
David Broder
Class struggle in the Second World War
Four years after France's capitulation to Nazi Germany, a general strike
broke out in Marseille, the country's second city. The Vichy regime of
Marshal Philippe Petain was hated for its collaboration with Hitler, but
the spark for the eruption of protest on 24 May 1944 was the cutting of
the bread ration to 150 grams a day. Factories went silent; shops did not
open; there were no cars on the streets. The movement was so strong that
the Wehrmacht troops dared not open fire on the strikers. But things did
not go on like this. An American bombing-raid on the morning of 27 May
flattened large parts of the city, killing 1,7521 people and destroying ten
thousand homes. The protests ceased.
These events point to the twin political challenges that revolutionaries
faced in the Second World War. On the one hand there was the immense
human tragedy of war, the blind, senseless killing of millions of working
class people by rival war machines. On the other hand, there was the
dilemma of how to fight fascism without simply handing power to Winston
Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Franklin Roosevelt-or Joseph Stalin.
In recent times, the Great Depression had brought poverty for millions;
fascists, supported by captains of industry, had come to power and crushed
the workers' movement from Berlin to Milan and Barcelona; and a
resumption of hostilities between the great powers again dragged the world
into conflict, barely twenty years after the First World War, the so-called
'war to end all wars'. However, for many, the only visible alternative to the
dominant capitalist system was Stalin's Soviet Union.
Trotskyists, those who opposed both the Stalinists and the British
and French colonial empires alike, were, certainly, few in number. They
struggled to make themselves heard. But despite their limited numbers, their
u~ty~~oo~~~~~~~~~w~~ff~~
and conventional memory of the conflict largely focuses on revering the
8 SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE
generals who changed history and mourning the innocents passively taken
to their terrible fate in the camps, some working-class people were more
than victims of events, more than mere cannon-fodder. From the February
1941 general strike in Amsterdam to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising,
the French and Belgian workers' strikes against deportations to Germany
and the huge workers' movements in northern Italy which helped to bring
down Mussolini, hundreds of thousands of people were prepared to take
action in spite of severe repression.
These struggles lent some credibility to Trotskyists' hopes that the
conclusion of the Second World War would coincide with a revolutionary
upheaval as great, or even greater than that which had greeted the end of the
1914-18 conflict. Many of the articles and pamphlets quoted in Craipeau's
book may sound incongruously over-optimistic, predicting great feats
achieved by mass movements which did not yet exist.
But to condemn them for this would be to ignore their recent history.
Twenty-five years previously there had only been tiny pockets of resistance
to the outbreak of the First World War, with almost all of Europe's socialist
parties supporting their own governments. The historic anti-war congress
at Zimmerwald in September 1915 had welcomed only 38 delegates, only
some of whom had a revolutionary agenda. Yet within three years, the
German masses had forced their government to capit~late, the Russian
working class had seized power and soviets (workers' councils) spread like
wildfire across Europe. As war resumed in 1939, this experience showed
revolutionaries the importance of patient organisation and developing a
principled political programme even with small numbers and in what may
have seemed a hopeless situation.
Yvan Craipeau's Cantre vents et marees begins with the preparations for
war heralded by the coming to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933. However,
English-speaking readers may benefit from understanding the earlier
history of the workers' movement and the left in France, which informed
their activity in this period.
The early years of the Parti communiste fran~ais
France emerged victorious from the First World War, yet with heavy
human and material losses. 1,322,000 soldiers were killed and three million
wounded in the course of the war; ten eastern departements2 laid waste; and
the national debt soared to 175 billion francs, a five-fold increase on 1913.
There were widespread mutinies on the Western Front in summer 1917,
involving as many as fifty of France's 113 infantry divisions. However,
this rebellion against bloody and fruitless offensives did not translate into
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 9
the same mass working-class movements against militarism and wartime
privations such as emerged in Germany and Russia.
Nonetheless, the war years created a strong pacifist3 current in society,
while millions were also inspired by the revolutionary upheavals elsewhere
in Europe. 1918-19 saw a reawakening of the pre-war revolutionary
syndicalist current in the trade unions, and in 1920 the mainstream socialist
movement split. At the Tours Congress of the SFI04, the social-democratic
party which had supported the French government during the war, the left
wing and centre factions broke away to form the Parti communiste frarn;ais
(PCP).
Much like the Communist Parties established elsewhere in Europe in this
period, the PCP was founded on the 21 conditions of membership of the
Communist International (Comintern)5• These principles included support
for workers' councils and the Leninist 'democratic centralist' means of or
ganisation,6 as well as opposition to imperialist war. Some leading members
of the new party from the old centre faction such as Marcel Cachin and
Ludovic-Oscar rrossard had in fact initially been supporters of the war ef
fort7, but nonetheless joined the PCP having been impressed by Bolshevik
successes in Russia. Moreover, the Comintern was keen to avoid a repeat of
the split in the German Social Democrats, which had left the Communists
in the minority.
Indeed, the French Communists assumed ownership of the SFIO
newspaper L'Humanite as well as three-quarters of its membership - some
120,000 people - as the party's right-wing were cast aside. However, the
PCF's large numbers masked an unstable alliance of Bolsheviks, reformists
and pacifists, and syndicalist trade unionists.
These differences soon led to fragmentation. At the 1922 PCP congress
the centre faction led by Cachin and Frossard won most votes (1698, as
against 1516 for the left and 814 for the right). The centre refused to negotiate
with the left, assuming control of all the party's leadership positions. The
Comintern condemned this attitude, and further alienated Frossard by
proclaiming a ban on freemasons. He resigned from the party on 1st January
1923, protesting Russian interference.
The real blows against political pluralism in the PCP were still to come,
as the party was 'Bolshevised' in tandem with the monolithic Soviet
Communist Party and the leaders of the left were forced out. First Boris
Souvarine was expelled in July 1924 for publishing Leon Trotsky's New
Course, a polemic against bureaucratisation in the USSR. Three months
later he was followed by Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte, after Rosmer
circulated Lenin's Testament, which criticised Stalin in strong terms8• The
IO SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE
pair were expelled at an extraordinary party conference in October 1924,
accused of 'gross Frossardism, individualist anarchism and barely refined
Trotskyism'. They had fallen victim to a bloc between open sympathisers
of Stalin and his allies Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, and the centrist
wing of the party which had a decade previously supported the French war
effort. Soon the Zinovievites, including the party's general secretary Albert
Treint, were themselves purged, and the Stalinist Maurice Thorez emerged
as PCF leader under Moscow's direct command.
Three Periods
At the sixth plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist
International in 1926, the Italian Communist Amadeo Bordiga challenged
Stalin face-to-face. He argued that the direct collaboration of the whole
International in governing Russian domestic policy was 'absolutely
essential', drawing a link between internationalism and the need to resist
bureaucratisation.9 This suggestion was rejected out of hand, but served
to highlight the question of whether the Comintern was an international
alliance of communists, or merely a conveyor belt for Moscow to pass down
policy to the national Communist Parties.
Under the fully Stalinised Comintern, member parties like the PCF
had to serve the interests of the 'bastion of socialism', the USSR, and thus
change its positions in line with the strategic demands of the Russian state.
Indeed, Stalin systematised a theory by which to understand the evolving
geo-political situation and thus the strategies which the Communist Parties
should follow. It was a series of three distinct historical periods.
The 'First Period' was the revolutionary wave which coincided with the
end of the First World War, including the February and October revolutions
in the Russian Empire and the creation of workers' councils in Germany,
Hungary and northern Italy. Communist Parties were established across
Europe as an alternative to the social-democratic parties who had supported
their own governments in the First World War and had opposed workers'
councils in favour of parliamentarism.
The 'Second Period' was the period of capitalist consolidation, and retreat
for the USSR as it was left isolated by the defeat of the revolutions in western
and central Europe. This entailed the widespread reintroduction of the
capitalist market within the USSR following the 1921 New Economic Policy
(NEP); rapprochement with states unhappy with the post-war settlement
such as Germany and Turkey; and greater Communist participation
in reformist trade unions in the capitalist countries. Moreover, the
Communist leadership in the USSR banned opposition parties and factions
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 11
and emasculated the soviets and trade unions, assuming sole power.
However, there were struggles within the party, made all the more acute
by Lenin's failing health and ultimate death in 1924. First the troika (three
man-committee) of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev warded off the Left
Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, which critiqued the rise of a bureaucratic
caste as well as the kulaks (wealthy peasantry); with Trotsky marginalised,
Stalin then attacked Kamenev and Zinoviev in alliance with Nikolai
Bukharin, who had theorised an autarchic 'Socialism in One Country'
approach; and finally he rounded on Bukharin, whose continuing support
ofNEP became unpopular in the party.
Thus by 1928 Stalin had defeated his main rivals in the party and secured
a measure of peace and diplomatic recognition. This strengthened position
allowed for a more aggressive domestic and international policy: the 'Third
Period'. The Soviet leadership suppressed the new bourgeoisie which had
emerged under the NEP, with the state taking direct control of almost
the entire economy under the 'collectivisation' and 'industrialisation'
programmes. Although this in fact represented the fulfilment ofa spects oft he
Left Opposition's programme, it was enforced violently, the mass slaughter
of farm animals by dispossessed peasants leading to harsh repression in
which Stalin promised to 'liquidate the kulaks as a class'. Meanwhile the
onset of the Great Depression in 1929 reinforced the Comintern's belief
that capitalism was entering its final collapse. In preparation for revolution
the Communist Parties made a sharp break with reformist parties and trade
unions in the capitalist countries.
The fascist threat
These orders from Russia forced the PCF to take a more 'revolutionist'
stance in line with the 'Third Period' perspective10, which it implemented by
attacking the reformist social democrats as the main obstacle to revolution.
They continually denounced the SFIO as 'social fascists', supposedly no
better than the actual fascists, if not worse because their true counter
revolutionary character was hidden. The PCF confidently heralded the
militancy of the masses and the imminence of revolutionary outcomes from
the scattered and defensive strike movements of 1929-30.
The PCF membership, which had already slid in the mid-1920s thanks
to the ebbing of the post-war revolutionary wave and the parliamentary
advance of the rival SFIO, sank from 50,000-strong in 1928 to 32,000 in
1932. This was in spite of the potentially radicalising effects of the Great
Depression. Faced with crisis-era attacks on living standards, the PCF
proposed collaboration with rank-and-file social-democratic workers