ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From International Socialism, No.45, November/December 1970, pp.2-3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Following the expulsion of Roger Garaudy from the French Communist Party a further crisis has been produced by Charles Tillon’s violent attacks on the Party leadership. The PCF has survived a number of similar affairs over the last 20 years, with the expulsions of Marty (1953), Lecoeur (1954), Herve (1956) and the disgrace of Servin and Casanove (1961). The issues raised by Tillon are sensational rather than fundamental. His main attack is directed on Georges Marchais, in effect party leader since Waldeck Rochet is totally incapacitated, and the most virulent critic of students and leftists. Tillon points out that Marchais did ‘compulsory’ labour service in Germany during the war (in fact about half those required for this service refused or evaded it), and claims Marchais was appointed by Brezhnev personally. PCF veteran Jacques Duclos has maintained the level of dialectical argument by calling Tillon a ‘megalomaniac’.
But if personal antagonisms motivate much of the conflict, the fact of their open expression reveals a deeper malaise. The PCF, which has long been aiming at integration into French political life is reduced to encouraging a ghetto mentality among its members, smearing all critics as part of the same reactionary mass. For a generation the PCF has used the fact that it was, in a certain sense, the only mass organisation of the working-class, to isolate dissidents. Rebels might make an outcry, but they could offer no remotely plausible alternative. Since May 1968, when it was seen that the class could, if only briefly, act without and even against the PCF, the mystique has lost some of its power.
One of the strengths of Pompidou’s regime is that there is no plausible opposition except the Communists. The centre of the spectrum is occupied by a variety of bureaucratic apparatuses, Socialist, Radical and progressive pro-European liberals, with murky pasts and a total lack of political cohesion. Since May 1968 the regime has given up its attempt to integrate the PCF (cf. Divide and Rule, IS 42), and the centre has become the battle ground in the struggle for political alliances. The Gaullists want help from the centre to win control of the many municipalities in Communist hands. But the dream of uniting the centre in order to isolate the PCF and split away a sizeable chunk of the Gaullists to form a new majority is still alive. Despite the failures of Defferre and Poher, Servan-Schreiber is now trying his hand at the same game, The CFDT trade union may very well line up with him in this attempt.
Servan-Schreiber has a long way to go. Many deputies of the left – notably the CIR (Mitterand’s group) feel that Communist electoral support is healthier for their political careers. But if he (or others) succeed, then real problems face the PCF. Although its electoral support may actually be increasing, it can make no headway along the parliamentary road without an alliance with the Socialists and Radicals. But the PCF has much less hope of entering the Government than the Italian Party which many of its members admire ; though the bourgeoisie might trust it in crisis, it fears that such success for the PCF might arouse uncontrollable action by the working-class (as the Popular Front election victory did in 1936). Though the Soviet Union may be putting some pressure on the Party, foreign Communist Parties are no longer important to Russian interests, and a mass party has no future as an appendage of the Russian Embassy.
Faced with this dead-end, a number of PCF members, of which the most prominent are Garaudy and Tillon, have taken drastic action. The split cannot be seen as either ‘left’ or ‘right’. [1] Both of them use leftist language from time to time. If Garaudy’s criticism of the USSR in Czechoslovakia is essentially liberal, he has also criticised Russian policy towards Greece and Spain. Tillon has said that ‘if an extreme left is being formed, it is because the Party is no longer playing its role’, and, perhaps out of nostalgia for the twenties and thirties, he has joined Sartre to form a Red Aid to help victims of police repression.
But neither Garaudy nor Tillon makes a clean break with the PCF’S traditions. Garaudy was for many years a devoted hack, defending orthodoxy against any trace of original thought, doing hatchet jobs on Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc. When the Party felt it necessary to demonstrate that Marxism was not "dogmatic’, Garaudy led ‘the way with dialogues with Jesuits, criticisms of ‘socialist realism’, and tributes to Teilhard de Chardin. Garaudy’s aim is a social-democratic party; his audience the intellectuals and the new middle-classes. Realising the importance of detaching the Party from its Russian links, he has criticised the Soviet Union increasingly since 1964. But he still praises Maurice Thorez as a great anti-dogmatist.
Tillon is a representative of an even more fundamental current in the PCF. He was a genuine rebel, who entered politics, like André Marty, in the mutinies which tried to prevent the French navy being used against the Bolshevik Revolution. Tillon was one of the great Resistance leaders, launching the struggle against ‘Hitlerite fascism’ when the Party as such still had a very ambiguous attitude towards Nazism because of the Hitler-Stalin pact. While the PCF owes much of its popular support to its Resistance role, the Party has often found its Resistance leaders, men proved in action, hard to control.
After the war, Tillon served in five Governments, and de Gaulle in his Memoirs praises his work in rebuilding the French Air Force. While it is claimed that Marty and Tillon in private opposed the PCF’S policy of disarming the popular militias, the presence of a leader like Tillon in the Government in fact had the opposite effect.
A member of the Political Bureau from 1945 to 1952, Tillon together with Marty was accused in 1953 of various ‘Titoist’ deviations. While Marty fought back and was expelled, Tillon withdrew into relative obscurity.
Despite their differences, Garaudy and Tillon both stand for a ‘national’ Communist Party, independent of Moscow, and filling the vacuum left by the virtual collapse of the French Socialist Party. Their rebellion differs from previous ones in that the PCF leadership has failed to isolate them: a number of second-rank figures from the PCF have joined Tillon in issuing a statement pledging continued opposition to Russia in Czechoslovakia, an issue on which the Party leadership is very cool.
The gamble is a regroupment outside the PCF. Garaudy can attract social democrats, frustrated careerists bitter at the Marchais ‘clique’ and even some leftists. His aim would then be to merge with the PSU and possibly the CIR, attracting on the way a number of PCF rank-and-filers, This would be a long way from a mass party, but it would be a very significant card in the electoral game.
Two factors will determine success or failure. One is the continued drawing power of the PCF, the mystique of the revolutionary tradition and the one party of the working-class. This should not be underestimated. The other is the revolutionary left. Since May 1968 this has been hopelessly divided. If, however, a united grouping with (i) serious work in the factories and (ii) genuine internal democracy were established, it would be a powerful pole of attraction for the revolutionary wing of the PSU and for the best – rather than the most nationalistic – militants of the PCF, and could leave Garaudy high and dry. In this context the recent unity proposals by Lutte Ouvrière to the Ligue Communiste, stressing the above two points, acquire an importance far greater than that normally possessed by interfactional relations.
1. Despite the article in Rouge, organ of the Ligue Communiste, (July 6th), which hails Tillon’s revolutionary past and the fact that he can now address meetings of leftists without fearing Stalinist thugs or being taken over by the bourgeoisie. A strange attitude to one who once denounced Tito for Trotskyism. Yet not so strange. Tillon’s associate, Andre Marty, Comintern agent and pathological anti-Trotskyist in Spain, signatory of the dissolution of the Third International, entered into ‘fraternal contacts’ with the Fourth International after his expulsion from the PCF in 1953.
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 24.1.2008