To Comrade Ker¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 6 June 1922, Trotsky delivers a sharp and unsparing assessment of the French Communist Party’s internal crisis, directly rebutting the more conciliatory appraisal offered by Comrade Ker. The core argument is that the party’s lack of ideological and organisational clarity does not originate from the working-class base, but from the leadership above — from editors, journalists, and deputies whose ties are rooted in the pre-war reformist past. Trotsky insists that the French proletariat actively seeks definiteness and resoluteness, and that the leadership’s failure to provide it risks driving workers back into revolutionary syndicalism, a relapse in which the positive features of pre-war syndicalism would vanish while its negative aspects intensify.
Trotsky substantiates this with two key cases. First, the Fabre affair: the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) had resolved to expel Fabre and place his newspaper, Journal du Peuple, outside the party. The French delegation, having assumed responsibility for carrying this out within four weeks, instead diluted the resolution — changing the phrase to “outside the control of the party” — and then delayed implementation. Trotsky notes with alarm that no articles appeared in the party press, including none by Ker himself, to explain the political meaning of the expulsion to French workers. He contrasts this with the formalism of Modigliani, the Italian centrist who treated Comintern affiliation as a matter of sending picture postcards, and warns that such conduct reduces discipline to a mere formality.
Second, on the trade-union question, Trotsky discerns an uninterrupted retreat. Figures like Verdier and Quinton have used party authority to entrench themselves in the union movement only to then cast the party aside. Trotsky accuses l’Humanité of defending a Jaurèsist tendency directly counter to Comintern policy, and warns that the party is evacuating positions just as the masses seek leadership, allowing syndicalists and libertarians to fill the vacuum. He calls for principled articles and the expulsion of those who violate fundamental decisions, lest the party breed adventurers.
Trotsky also rejects Ker’s charge that Rosmer is too pessimistic, turning the accusation back: it is Ker who displays pessimism by treating the party as a gravely sick person requiring whispers and tiptoeing. Trotsky insists the proletarian core is healthy and revolutionary. On the united front, he argues that the hue and cry over international negotiations with the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals distracts from the real internal dangers — the Fabre clique, the Verdier-Quinton elements — which are actually undermining the party while receiving no rebuff.
The letter concludes by posing two possible paths: a firm internal course that ejects the right-wing strike-breakers and enforces discipline, or a continuation of indefinite centrist policy that would isolate the left wing and repeat the Italian experience — a split in which the centre remains with the right. Trotsky warns that events demand maximum resoluteness, and that the Comintern’s decisions are meant to help the French party attain these qualities in the shortest possible time.