Thorez on home policy¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter digest, the text presents a searing polemic against Maurice Thorez, the leader of the French Communist Party (PCF), for his post-war electoral strategy and governmental participation. The core argument is that Thorez’s policy represents a complete betrayal of Marxism-Leninism, amounting to “Stalinist treachery” dressed in democratic garb. The chapter’s narrative thrust is to expose the PCF’s abandonment of revolutionary socialism in favour of a reformist programme indistinguishable from bourgeois liberalism.
Thorez’s own words are quoted to demonstrate his explicit renunciation of a “strictly Communist programme” based on the “radical transformation of the present regime of property.” Instead, he advocates a “programme of national reconstruction” acceptable to “all democrats,” including support for small and medium enterprises and the defence of property against trusts. Crucially, Thorez argues that “the progress of democracy throughout the world… permits the choice of other paths to socialism than the one taken by the Russian Communists.” The chapter’s author seizes on this as the “distilled essence” of the betrayal, arguing that even Liberals and Tories would not disagree with such a platform.
The key claims are that this policy is a “terrible deception” of the French workers and peasants who voted for communism, and that the promised reforms cannot be sustained when French capitalism inevitably enters crisis. Evidence is drawn from the contemporary economic context: soaring capitalist profits from inflation and the black market, while French workers’ living standards remain “far lower than the British workers.” The chapter further accuses the PCF of acting as “ruthless agents of the capitalists” by breaking strikes, specifically citing the postal workers and civil servants strikes.
The theoretical context is classical Marxism, invoking Lenin’s lifelong struggle against the “reformist lie” of multiple paths to socialism. The text recalls Lenin’s insistence that the state is “always an instrument for the suppression of one class by another” and that peace, bread, and freedom can only be won through “relentless struggle against capitalism.” The Paris Commune is held up as the foundational lesson Marx taught on the necessity of smashing the bourgeois state. The polemic is directed squarely at Thorez and the Stalinist leadership of the PCF, accusing them of violating the traditions of the Commune’s martyrs in the very land where it occurred. The chapter thus functions as a Trotskyist critique of the Popular Front and post-war Stalinist strategy, arguing that participation in bourgeois government and the pursuit of parliamentary reformism is not a tactical variation but a fundamental repudiation of socialist revolution.