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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 16, 17 April 1950, pp. 4–5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A discussion of considerable interest and significance has been going on in the French and European press since November of last year. It relates to the question of slave labor in Russia, and – except for a fulf-page fund-raising advertisement in the New York Times of February 28, 1950 – little or no attention has been paid in America to a dispute which has raised violent emotions and called forth hundreds of articles in the European press.
David Rousset, well-known author of studies of Nazi concentration camp life and a former Trotskyist who has moved steadily to the right, politically speaking, is the instigator of a proposed international commission of inquiry to investigate charges of slave labor in Russia and in other countries where it may exist. The French national committee of this commission, which finds a parallel in a similar committee set up in the United States by the Workers Defense League, has been completed and has requested permission to conduct its investigation in Russia, Greece, Yugoslavia and Spain.
To be sure, the work of the commission is concentrated upon the question and issue of slave labor in Russia where the most sober reports estimate that between 10 million and 15 million people occupy the camps created by Stalinism. It is doubtful if the sum total of political and slave-labor prisoners in the rest of the world is equal to 5 per cent of that in Russia; not to ignore the now well-known charge that Stalinist slave labor constitutes an organic part of Russian society and is a basic element in the very form and structure of Russian society.
What kind of commission of inquiry has been proposed? In the words of Rousset:
“I now propose the. establishment of a Commission of Inquiry consisting of former political deportees, inmates of the Nazi concentration camps, men who know the world of the concentration camp and cannot be duped. Once established, this commission would formally demand from the Soviet, government the right to conduct an investigation on the spot, within the Russian camps.
“The Soviet government solemnly denies the charge that its system of corrective labor camps constitutes a crime against humanity. Our proposal, that men who have suffered as victims of the Nazis shall freely study the. corrective labor camps, offers the Soviet Union the fairest way to justify its good faith before the world.”
This is, in essence, the purpose of the proposed commission.
As was to be expected, this proposal acted as a violent bombshell when thrown among the various political movements and leaders of France. The same process is now under way in other Western countries, but the reaction has been most characteristic and significant in France, where the nefarious influence of Stalinism upon the general left is still only too powerful.
The Stalinists began their usual campaign against Rousset, calling him a “fascist-Nazi beast,” etc. We spare our readers the familiar epithets. On approximately the same level of vulgar vilification and abuse were the comments of Ernest Germain, a leading theoretical light of the so-called Fourth International who, in the Militant (February 27) tells us that Rousset lives by “exploiting his former captivity.” This common slanderer informs us, in the Stalinist mode, that “All his [Rousset’s] political moves have had the same pretext. Few things are more revolting than such bombastic exploitation of one’s past misfortunes.”
Yes, yes – Rousset is a vile creature, but what of the alleged millions in Stalin’s camps? We are again reminded of what is now rather clear to those who take the trouble to follow the course of the so-called Fourth Internationalists – their increasing adaptation to and adoption of the Stalinist technique. But more on this later.
Les Lettres Françaises, Stalinist literary publication in France, attacked Rousset as a “forger and shameless liar,” but failed to defend itself from his charges in a libel suit which he promptly brought against it. A preliminary hearing in this suit is scheduled for April 22, and should institute a case as lively and revealing as the now famous Kravchenko hearing in Paris last year. Other Stalinist attacks follow the same'line.
More interesting to our readers, of course, are the reactions of the alleged anti-Stalinist and left socialist intellectuals of various shades in France. Claude Bourdet,. a former editor of the popular Resistance movement paper Combat, protested against the fact, that Rousset had first put forward his proposal in the conservative Catholic newspaper Figaro Littéraire (we seriously wonder whether the so-called radical and socialist paper Franc-Tireur would have been willing to publish it, so hypnotized and disoriented are its editors by their confusion over the issue of Stalinism), and demanded to know why no mention was made of “Greece, Spain, etc.”, as well as terror systems in the French colonies.
As we now understand matters, although Rousset’s original proposal contained the serious error of not insisting upon a worldwide investigation – such as the original Workers Defense League conference in New York had done – this has now been corrected,to include all nations, accused of harboring slave-labor in any shape or form.
But the demagogic vulgarity of this attack is clear enough if we consider that its author, Bourdet, proposes nothing that goes beyond his criticism of Rousset. A well-known figure in French political circles of the left, why does he not set about organizing a better commission, without the faults of that of Rousset?
The latter, replying to Bourdet in Franc-Tireur, denied the accusation that he wished to confine the inquiry to Russia, while affirming that this would be the point of first concentration. “Shall we therefore undertake nothing so long as our own doorstep has not been swept?”
Most significant of all has been the rejection of the Rousset proposal, accompanied by a political breakup of former relations, by Jean-Paul Sartre and his close associate, M. Merleau-Ponty. In a statement published in their magazine, Les Temps Modernes (January 1950), they turn thumbs down on the proposed commission, accusing its author of selling at a “cheap price the detenues [prisoners] of Spain, and the deportees of Greece.”
But Sartre and Merleau-Ponty go far beyond the reasons given by Bourdet, tragically beyond them. For this they are hailed by the above-mentioned Ernest Germain as having performed “a highly importanfcand progressive act.” Instead of “playing the game” of the American State Department, as does “renegade” Rousset, Jean-Paul Sartre “symbolizes the progressive evolution of bourgeois intellectuals who are sincerely trying to break with their class and to go over into the camp of the proletariat.”
Lest our readers be somewhat confused as to the nature of this “progressive act,” we remind them that it refers to their rejection of the proposal to set up a “Commission of Inquiry consisting of former political deportees, inmates of the Nazi concentration camps, etc.” For what purpose? To investigate the charge that there are 10 million or more slave laborers in Russia.
(Concluded next week, discussing the criticism by Jean Paul Sartre)
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