Those who have followed the development of our movement will know that until the formation of the CCL(ML), En Lutte! maintained a reputation as the leading battler for ideological demarcation, for the clarification of differences among the young Marxist-Leninist forces as a prerequisite to organizational unity. At a time when the MREQ was labelling ideological struggle as an “endless series of debates” and called for the formation of an organization with “all those who were ready to move ahead”, En Lutte! could be found saying such things as “...real unity demands above all that we clarify differences...” (CR #1 p.18). The League groups always maintained political line as key, but did not concern themselves with struggle before unification. Thus the only ’political line’ they in fact considered essential for ’unity’ was their own sectarian evaluation of who was ’fit’ for the ’vanguard organization’. En Lutte!, on the other hand, assumed a more ’sober’ posture, issued its pronouncements with a measured cautiousness, and continued to lay emphasis on ideological struggle as a precondition. That En Lutte! was viewed as a proponent of firm ideological struggle, even by its opponents, is testified to by the criticism of En Lutte!’s method of building unity as being “all struggle, no unity” (Struggle for the CCL(ML) p.13); and by the May 1st Collective’s recent rejection of a bogus ’unity’ plan, based on their adherence to En Lutte!’s conception of the importance of ideological struggle. And yet now it seems, what with the ’two-line’ struggle having got underway, that the tables have been turned. It is now the CCL(ML) which presents itself as the champion of ideological and political struggle, while the En Lutte! organization is accused of putting ’unity’ above all else and of showing “scorn for political line” (The Forge #16 p.6). What could have happened to cause this ’dialectical’ reversal? In fact, nothing at all.
Having already ’moved ahead’, the League no longer needs to bother itself with attacks on “endless series of debates”. On the contrary, it can now use the cry of ’ideological struggle’ as a means to fit others into its notion of the ’party’, forcing them to ’repudiate’ their peculiar formulations and adopt the League’s wholesale. En Lutte!, on the other hand, is now faced with the threat of isolation by the declaration of the League. If the League should successfully absorb a major portion of the movement’s unaffiliated groups, there would be little left for En Lutte! to ’win over’ to its own ’party’ effort. The En Lutte! organization must therefore continue to pose itself as a separate entity, as a definite political trend with its own prerequisites for ’unity’, while at the same time it must not allow its political line to interfere with its efforts to build ’unity’ in opposition to the League. When we examine En Lutte!’s ’unity’ plan, it becomes obvious that ideological struggle has as little to do with the En Lutte!’s intentions as it does with the League’s. The motive force is not at all ideological clarity and organization based upon it, but simply factional competition. And it also becomes clear that En Lutte!, despite all its profound remarks on the importance of ideological struggle, has always maintained this factional outlook, and that what appears now in an openly Centrist form has all along been En Lutte!’s ’fundamental line’.
En Lutte!’s ’modest’ view of itself is a perfect match for the League’s. We are told that it is perfectly “normal” that “some Marxist-Leninist groups and militants have come to expect leadership from us” even though “we do not say we are the ’leading centre’ of the movement at this time...” (Proletarian Unity p.25). However, En Lutte! “...undertook the initiative of an open and vigorous struggle against right-wing opportunism” from its inception (En Lutte! Vol.3 #19 p.4); and “in the sense” of “trying” to be good Marxist-Leninists, it has “...always defended a line based on principle, an ideological line that was fundamentally correct...” (Ibid); and, in addition, the “fundamental” and obviously ’correct’ line “of our group on the question” of unity “has not changed since our beginnings” (Proletarian Unity p.23).
But alongside these ’principled’ assertions of En Lutte!’s long-standing faithful adherence to Marxism-Leninism, it is at the same time forced to admit that its ’unity programme’ for the first two years of its existence was characterized by the most blatant opportunism. That is, its call of November 1972 to May 1973 for unity around its newspaper did not, and actually could not, consider the question of line in the least. This slight ’oversight’ was continued in a modified form between the Spring of 1973 and the end of summer 1974 through various plans which, in En Lutte!’s words, “...led to a liquidation of ideological struggle and demarcation, it led us to conceive the organization as a federation, with In Struggle! as the main or leading group” (PU #1 p.24). Now, of course, all this is ancient history to the En Lutte!, and had occurred prior to its “new victory over opportunism” in December 1974, prior to its “rejection of its previous spontaneism in matters of organization” (PU #1 p.24). En Lutte! has, after all, ’self-criticised’ for such seamy behavior, and has set things on the ’right’ track. But it is important to study such history, if only so that we can reach ’unity’ with En Lutte! over its admission that its “fundamental line” on the question of unity ’has not changed since its beginnings’. This is about as close as we will come to a statement of objective fact in all of En Lutte!’s work. En Lutte! would like to have things both ways. It would like, on the one hand, to show that it has maintained continuity in principle all along, has always sworn by and upheld Marxism-Leninism. It would like, on the other hand, to be excused for failing to uphold Marxism-Leninism, for failing to break with “spontaneism in matters of organization”, would like us to believe, in short, that it did in fact win a “new victory over opportunism”. But we are as ready to accept such a contradictory and opportunist formula as we are ready to believe in the League’s ’self-criticism’. In fact, all that En Lutte! has accomplished is a simple assertion that its vacillation and side-stepping “conforms to Marxist-Leninist teachings” (PU #1 p.25). All that it in reality conforms to is persistent opportunism.
The specific form in which this opportunism has been expressed has been shaped by En Lutte!’s initially very spontaneous, and now very consolidated, effort to seek a common ground with all self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists, to accommodate all shades of opportunism within the movement, and assert itself in a leading role. En Lutte! has thus become the major exponent of Centrism as a definite trend. Its entire orientation towards and emphasis on ’unity’ is the logical striving of this tendency. It does not, like the League, simply set its own opportunist standards and attempt to pressure all and sundry into accepting them. On the contrary, it shapes its criteria for ’unity’ according to what already exists within the movement, according to what is most accessible to the largest number of groups and individuals at any given time. And by thus pleasing the most diverse currents and shades of views, by making a conscious effort to avoid giving offense, it is able to set itself as the coordinating ’centre’, and therefore leader, of its innumerable ’regroupements’. Given the genuine desire for coherence and unity in our movement, En Lutte!’s Centrist appeal is not without its effects.
In En Lutte!’s first two years, when ’line struggle’ was as non-existent as line itself, its emphasis was ’naturally’ placed on unity around projects, ad hoc committees and the like. After it became apparent that this method was a miserable failure, and the question of political line as the basis for any organizational unity had begun to be raised throughout the movement, En Lutte! began to shift its emphasis. This ’shift’ was precisely that. It was not a break with petty bourgeois opportunism that had stamped the movement at its birth; it was not a rejection of vague and spontaneously opportunist ’unity’ in favour of the principles of Marxism-Leninism. If En Lutte! had been able to make such a break, our movement would not be in the poor straits we find it in today. What the En Lutte! in fact ’upheld’ was a notion of ’unity’ around that line which was shared by the largest mass of ’Marxist-Leninists’, a line which would group together Marxist-Leninists and opportunists alike.
Having such a ’broad’ perspective on what constitutes ’unity’ it is only natural that En Lutte!, while calling for the “reinforcement” and “development” of “the factors that unite” (PU #1 p.20), should also condemn anyone who questioned the basis of such ’unity’. Such elements are, in En Lutte!’s view, sectarian, regardless of the reasons they may have. While it is true that ’unity’ schemes put forward by ’authentic’ sectarians, such as the CPC{ML) and CCL(ML), objectively split the movement by laying a narrow and unprincipled criteria for ’unity’, it should be clear that En Lutte!’s criteria accomplishes the same thing. It simply replaces a narrow and opportunist ’unity’ with a broad and opportunist ’unity’. But for En Lutte!, it would make little difference whether we criticized its ’unity’ plan from a sectarian standpoint or from Marxist-Leninist principles. It is bound and determined to build the ’greatest possible unity’, sees its generous ’plan’ as the only means to ’unite’ the most diverse views while reserving the role of ultra-organizer for itself, and so does not distinguish between those who reject such ’unity’ on the grounds of their own factional interests and those who reject it on the grounds that such opportunist ’unity’ is an abandonment of Marxism-Leninism. En Lutte! thus hopes to ’buffer’ itself on all sides, reserving the accusation of ’sectarianism’ for its opposition. In the process it fails to see that its own ’plan’ is itself a form of sectarianism, since while it generously includes all shades of opportunism within its conception of the movement, it in practice liquidates the participation of Marxist-Leninists.
Communists always strive for the greatest possible unity. But communists also have a strict definition of what constitutes a principled unity, of what lines must be drawn and what trends must be broken with. One cannot, especially in a movement as unformulated and permeated by opportunism as ours, simply strive to create the ’greatest possible unity’ with the various viewpoints that already exist. Nor can we determine which major line in the movement is ’relatively more correct’ simply by comparing all the existing views. Given the present state of our movement, to make the movement itself, or the complex of lines within it, the criteria for ’unity’ amounts to a complete rejection of the objective criteria of Marxism-Leninism, to a substitution of opportunist criteria for principle. It is not enough to simply ’demarcate’ between the existing views, since none of those views have proven to have the wherewithall to provide principled leadership. And this will continue to be the case so long as our movement is dominated by opportunism, so long as a leading principled trend has not emerged. En Lutte!, on the other hand, chooses to be more ’optimistic’. It is quite willing to take the various one-sided viewpoints expressed in our movement as a suitable criteria for what constitutes ’unity’ and thus simply consolidate the status quo. It refuses to recognize, or is incapable of recognizing, that such a narrow and opportunist view of ’unity’ can only lead to the consolidation of our movement as a petty bourgeois movement, to the consolidation of the existing opportunism on a ’broad’ scale. What En Lutte! chooses to “reinforce” and “develop” is not unity around firm and definite principles, but only ’unity’ for its own sake. What the CCL(ML) proposed for ’its own’, for the circles it would ’pick and choose’ as being ’fit’ for its ’vanguard organization’, En Lutte! proposes for the entire movement. Thus while the CCL(ML) poses an immediate threat, by its attempt to break off a part of the movement for its ’party’, the En Lutte! poses a more long-tern threat, by its attempt to divert the movement as a whole.
How does En Lutte! attempt to do this? Its Centrism does not ’allow’ it to deal with the content of its ’unity’, since that would immediately expose its opportunist basis. En Lutte! therefore appeals to form, to the ’Marxist-Leninist principles of organization’, by which it means the strict application of ’democratic centralism’. It proposes, in effect, to ’solve’ the problem it itself has created – the attempt to merge conflicting class interests – by ’enforcing’ unity through disciplinary measures. But this is not at all a new concept. En Lutte!’s ’unity’ plan amounts to nothing more than a call to return to the period of the Second International prior to the split in socialism, a return to the party of the Social-Democratic type. These parties too had fully developed ’Marxist’ programmes, unlike the Social-Democratic parties we are familiar with today. They encompassed some of the greatest socialist thinkers of the day, Plekhanov, Kautsky, Bebel, and so on. But their fundamental basis was that of a bloc between the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, as Stalin noted, the accommodation of contending class trends within one organizational framework. They too exercised ’democratic centralism’, in which the minority submitted, at least officially, to the majority. And having bound together completely antagonistic class interests under one organizational form, the preservation of their ’unity’ was entirely dependent on the various middle-of-the-roaders who ’healed’ the rifts between the overt opportunists and the Lefts. Thus, “With them (the Social-Democrats) Centrism was a natural phenomenon, because the party of a bloc of heterogenous interests cannot get along without Centrists...” (J.V. Stalin Industrialisation and the Right Deviation Works Vol.11 p.295)
This is precisely the content of En Lutte!’s ’unity’ programme. It cannot wage a decisive struggle against all shades of opportunism and thus build a true and consistent communist unity. It cannot do this because it has not itself broken with petty bourgeois interests, has not itself broken with opportunism. On the other hand, it is far too ambitious to settle for being a small sect or to ’submit’ to the demands of the CCL(ML). So it is driven, by its own lack of principle and its own opportunist designs to seek some ’third’ way, some ’compromise solution’ between Marxism-Leninism and open opportunism. It wages a struggle on two fronts: against the sectarians a la CCL(ML), whom it urges not to be so hasty in their factional declarations; and against the Marxist-Leninists, whom it urges to go soft on the opportunists and submit to ’democratic centralism’ for the sake of ’unity’.
Such, in broad outline, is the “fundamental line” of En Lutte!’s ’unity programme’ Since its first articulation in December 1974, this ’plan’ has passed through three general phases of ’clarification’. It is in tracing out this elaboration that the full development of En Lutte!’s opportunism becomes apparent in detail.