From the ECCI to the Central Committee of the French Communist Party¶
Core Argument¶
The Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) addresses the French Communist Party directly in this letter of June 1921, diagnosing a series of acute political and organisational failures that threaten the party’s revolutionary character. The core argument is that the French party’s parliamentary fraction, its press, its trade-union work, and its internal structures remain permeated by bourgeois and centrist habits inherited from the pre-war Socialist Party, and that without a decisive rupture the party will be unable to lead the working class.
The most sustained polemic concerns parliamentary tactics. The ECCI seizes on a recent speech by comrade Cachin during the Franco-German crisis, accusing the fraction of effectively endorsing the Anglo-French alliance as a guarantor of peace, when in reality it is a “factor of pillage, robbery and new wars.” The fraction compounded this error by introducing a resolution that merely demanded the release of the 1919 draftees, thereby tacitly accepting the government’s dilatory course. The ECCI insists that the duty of a Communist fraction is to expose the brigandage behind diplomatic manoeuvres, not to seek minor concessions within the framework of bourgeois policy. The letter warns that the Dissidents—the centrist followers of Longuet—will always outperform Communists in parliamentary manoeuvring and oratorical effect, precisely because they are a party of lawyers and deputies. The only antidote is to pose questions flatly, counterpose oneself directly, and formulate sharp, precise slogans comprehensible to the broadest layers.
On trade-union work, the ECCI attacks the “tacit agreement” whereby revolutionary syndicalists like Monatte and Monmousseau have been allowed an ideological monopoly over trade-union questions, while the party refrains from criticising their syndicalist prejudices. The letter draws a devastating parallel: the syndicalists’ invocation of the Charter of Amiens, their refusal to join the Red Trade-Union International, and their calls for a “broader” International replicate exactly the trajectory of the Longuetists, who ended in the tiny Two-and-a-Half International. The ECCI demands that Communists in the unions remain party members subject to party discipline, and that a permanent trade-union commission be established under the Central Committee.
Organisationally, the letter calls for a thoroughgoing restructuring of the Central Committee itself: at least one-third should be professional party workers on the payroll, another third drawn from trade-union functionaries, leaving no more than one-third for parliamentarians and private workers. Local committees must be created as permanent functioning bodies, and the old-type functionaries inherited from the pre-war party must be replaced by a new selection from the workers and the Communist Youth. The party press, especially l’Humanité, must mirror internal life, criticise shortcomings openly, and establish a network of factory correspondents so that the working masses see themselves reflected. Finally, the ECCI demands an end to the situation where party members publish newspapers hostile to the party under cover of their Communist connections, citing La Vague as a pernicious example.
The letter closes by summoning Frossard and Cachin to Moscow for urgent discussions ahead of the party convention. The tone is fraternal but unyielding: the ECCI presents its criticism as a “profound and sincere attempt to render every possible assistance,” but the demands are categorical.