The current issue of L <https://lanticapitaliste.org/arguments/1939-1944-resister-loccupation-fasci ste> Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of Frances Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, has a two-page feature on the resistance to fascist occupation in WWII, and the role of the French Trotskyists. The author, Laurent Ripart, mentions that Trotsky, writing in June 1940 after the German victory, explained that France is becoming transformed into an oppressed nation, adding that Of all the forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable. Trotskys text is here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/06/course.htm.
The French Marxist historian Pierre Broué, in an article entitled How Trotsky and the Trotskyists confronted the Second World War <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol3/no4/brouww2.html > , refers to the concept of revolutionary defeatism (without naming it as such) and notes that Trotsky was no longer prepared merely to pose the revolution as the means to escape the war. He developed what he regarded as a difference of development, quantitative and qualitative, between the policies of revolutionaries in the First and Second World Wars, says Broué. He quotes Trotsky: During the last war, not only the proletariat as a whole, but also its vanguard, and, in a certain sense, the vanguard of the vanguard, were caught unawares. The elaboration of the principles of revolutionary policy towards the war began at a time when the war was already in full blaze and when the military machine exercised unlimited rule. [5] During the First World War the perspective of revolution seemed remote even to Lenin. He wrote that only future generations would see it. Trotsky recalled: Prior to the February Revolution and even afterwards, the revolutionary elements felt themselves to be not so much contenders for power as the extreme left opposition. [6] Therefore, the struggle for the independence of the proletariat, the rejection of civil peace, and the necessity for the class struggle of the proletariat, were the primary tasks in 1914-18, as defensive measures: The attention of the revolutionary wing was centred on the question of the defence of the fatherland. The revolutionaries naturally replied in the negative to this question. This was entirely correct. This purely negative reply served as the basis for propaganda and for training the cadres. But it could not win the masses, who did not want a foreign conqueror. [7] Trotsky recalled that the Bolsheviks succeeded in Russia in winning the proletariat and the majority of the people, in the space of eight months, and that this success was not in response to a negative refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland, but to the aspirations of the masses, to which the Bolsheviks knew how to give positive answers: The decisive rôle in this conquest was played, not by the refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland, but by the slogan All power to the soviets. And only by this revolutionary slogan! The criticism of imperialism and of its militarism, like the renunciation of defence of bourgeois democracy and so on, could never have won the overwhelming majority of the people to the side of the Bolsheviks. [8] Elsewhere in his essay, Broué notes that in 1940 the French Trotskyists were divided into two tendencies over perspectives which were ultimately as far away from each other as they both were from that of Trotsky. Beginning from the conception that the defeat of French imperialism and the occupation of French territory were leading, not only to national oppression, but to the rebirth of a genuine national question in which all classes were interested, as in a colonial country, the majority of the POI, organised around the committees which published La Verité, outlined a strategy according to which the bourgeoisie of an occupied country becomes the natural ally of the workers movement, and the latter devotes itself completely to national resistance. Conversely, the La Seule Voie (The Only Road) group, which had emerged from the PCI, and subsequently became the CCI, denied that an imperialist nation could ever become an oppressed nation following a military defeat, and considered that national demands were the importation of bourgeois ideology into the proletariat in order to demoralise it. These two positions, remote from each other, were both in a way the result of isolation, writes Broué. Under the pressure of the European Secretariat [of the Fourth International], they were gradually abandoned. But the participation by the revolutionary Marxists in the French Resistance was limited by their disperson and persecution but also by the support to De Gaulle and his English allies on the part of the dominant Stalinists in much of the organized Resistance. Many of these contradictions are excellently portrayed in the popular French TV narrative Un Village Français (A French Village), its hundred episodes in eight series (!) created in large part by Frédéric Krivine, a scion of the Krivine family (Alain, Hubert and Jean-Michel, the last his father) famous in French Trotskyism since the Sixties. Available for viewing on MHz. Richard -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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