French Communism and the Position of Comrade Rappoport¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, a resolution of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) from May 1922, constitutes a sharp polemical intervention into the internal crisis of the French Communist Party. Its core argument is that the objective conditions for revolution in France are ripe, but the subjective preparation of the party is dangerously lagging, a lag embodied in the party leadership’s tolerance of opportunist elements. The text directly refutes the notion that France’s status as a victorious power precludes a revolutionary situation. Instead, it argues the opposite: France’s international position is “extremely unstable and packed with contradictions,” its financial condition catastrophic, and its post-war militarist state regime fundamentally at odds with its economic base. The National Bloc is disintegrating, and the working masses are disillusioned. The objective and subjective premises for revolutionary policy are present; the failing element is the party’s internal evolution.
The central evidence for this failure is the case of Fabre, a journalist who maintained a newspaper within the Communist Party that served as a platform for reformists, nationalists, and pacifists united only by their hostility to the Communist International. The ECCI accuses the most influential members of the party’s Central Committee of collaborating with Fabre’s paper and resisting the International’s demands to break with him. The ECCI’s expulsion of Fabre is presented not as a harsh measure but as a belated and necessary act of hygiene. The polemic is directed squarely at Comrade Rappoport, a member of the French Central Committee, who had published an article in Izvestia calling for a “prudent attitude” toward the French movement. The ECCI excoriates Rappoport for using “hints and circumlocutions” rather than open criticism. It charges that his vague defence of the party’s “independence” and the health of the “revolutionary masses” serves to obscure the specific responsibility of the Central Committee for its own mistaken policy of tolerance toward Fabre’s clique. The text argues that Rappoport’s position, by seeking to preserve the status quo among the leadership, reveals a deeply pessimistic attitude toward the party’s rank and file. The ECCI insists that the necessary line of policy must pass not to Rappoport’s right but “considerably, very considerably to his left,” through harmonious collaboration with the left wing rather than adaptation to the right. The chapter draws on the theoretical context of the Comintern’s struggle against centrist and opportunist currents within its national sections, asserting the International’s right and duty, under Article Nine of its statutes, to expel those who are “out-and-out enemies.” The entire text is a defence of the International’s authority to enforce a clear class line against what it sees as the debilitating caution and factional manoeuvring of the French party’s centrist leadership.