MUST READ: For a Democratic and Secular Palestine, the Only Real Solution! – Tributes to François de Massot

Posted on October 22, 2023

IN THIS POSTING:

• MUST READ: For a Democratic and Secular Palestine, the Only Real Solution! – by François de Massot

• Tribute to François de Massot by Indian Comrades (sent to October 12 Memorial Meeting in Paris)

• Tribute to François de Massot by Alan Benjamin (sent to October 12 Memorial Meeting in Paris)

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MUST READ: For a Democratic and Secular Palestine, the Only Real Solution!

By François de Massot

[NOTE: The author, François de Massot, passed away on October 2. He was an historic leader, a pillar of the Fourth International and its French section, having joined the FI in 1950 at the age of 18. During his 73 years of political activity, he held high the banner of proletarian internationalism, with special attention to party-building in the Far East, Palestine, and the United States. We are publishing below – following his article on Palestine – two of many tributes to comrade François, one from the United States, the other from India. Future issues of The Organizer will include some of comrade François’s many writings. In the interim, we publish a MUST-READ article that he wrote on the Palestinian question and the struggle for a Democratic and Secular Palestine. – The Editors]

What is the main argument repeated time and again by the defenders of the state of Israel? Its starting point is the false identification between the Jewish people and the state of Israel, along with the affirmation that the state of Israel is not a state like all the others. Israel is portrayed as the end product of the concerted action of a people with profound democratic traditions who established the state of Israel as the last possible recourse in the face of barbarism and the extermination of the Jews.

The democratic traditions of the Jewish people that were forged in the age-old struggles against oppression are, indeed, genuine. But it is these very traditions that are being trampled upon every time an Israeli soldier breaks the wrists of a Palestinian child, every time Israeli bullets and grenades kill Palestinian civilians. These traditions, in fact, have been trampled upon every day since the state of Israel was constituted in 1948.

It is not a question of forgetting for one single moment — much less of relegating to a distant past — the massacre of 6 million Jews, all of whom were victims of imperialist barbarism. Nor is it a question of ignoring the cause that led hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors to consider that the founding of the state of Israel was the only solution available to them. Remembering these points is all the more important given that today, in the period of deepening imperialist decay, myriad forms of barbarism are raising their ugly head, including the view according to which the Holocaust never took place.

It should not be difficult to understand that the Palestinian people, who in Palestine struggled against imperialist domination, can in no way be held responsible for the massacres perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews, and that nothing whatsoever could justify driving the Palestinians from their homeland in an attempt to reduce them to the condition of a pariah people.

As our comrade Pierre Lambert wrote in an article published in The Truth/La Verité nearly 20 years ago (No. 548, June 1970):

“There is no argument that can justify or otherwise rationalize the fate of the Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homeland in 1948. The belly swollen by the hunger of a Jewish child in the Warsaw Ghetto is neither more nor less significant than the belly swollen by the hunger of a child in Gaza.”

True history of Zionist movement

During the period of ascending capitalism, the Jewish problem tended to resolve itself through the growing integration of Jews in the advanced capitalist countries. But imperialism today, in the epoch of its growing decay, has placed the Jewish question on the front burner once again, this time with even greater acuity.

“Socialism or barbarism” — that is the alternative facing all of humanity. It is an alternative that had an immediate significance for the Jewish population, particularly those in Eastern Europe, in the years preceding World War II. All possible solutions, all doors toward integration or emigration, had been closed to the Jews at the very same time that the most heinous forms of anti-Semitism were being unleashed across Europe. This is what led Leon Trotsky to insist that the resolution of the “Jewish question was inextricably bound up with the full emancipation of humanity as a whole.”

But the starting point of the Zionist ideology, as Ralph Schoenman points out in his “Hidden History of Zionism,” was diametrically opposed to such a resolution. On the contrary, the Zionists sought to separate and counterpose the “Jews” to all the social and political forces involved in every country in the struggle against exploitation and oppression, particularly the workers’ organizations.

Schoenman notes, for example, that Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of Zionism, approached none other than the Interior Minister of Czar Nicholas II, Count Von Phleve, the organizer of the worst pogroms in Russia, with the following proposition: “Help me reach the land [Palestine] sooner and the revolt [against Czarist rule] will end.” Count Von Phleve agreed and undertook to finance the Zionist movement, though he complained to Herzl that “the Jews have been joining the revolutionary parties. We [are] sympathetic to your Zionist movement so long as it work[s] toward emigration.” (“Hidden History of Zionism,” Veritas Press, 1987)

The particular oppression facing the Jewish people throughout the Russian Empire — an empire often described as the “prison house of nations” — was responsible for the fact that a significant number of Jewish militants played a prominent role in the constitution and development of the workers’ and revolutionary movements in Russia, Poland and across Eastern Europe. The usefulness that Count Von Phleve discerns in the Zionist movement is dictated by his anti-Semitism and his fear of the growing revolutionary parties. Hence, his willingness to help rid the Russian Empire of the Jews.

As Schoenman points out, “[t]he founders of Zionism despaired of combating anti-Semitism and, paradoxically, regarded the anti-Semites themselves as allies, because of a shared desire to remove the Jews from the countries in which they lived.”

What must be underlined, moreover, is that Zionism remained since its inception a minority political current within the Jewish population, particularly among the Jewish working class. Even during the Second World War, it was the Jewish organizations opposed to Zionism, such as the Bund, that organized the resistance.

A simple review of the facts is sufficient to demonstrate the inconsistency of the argument that seeks to equate opposition to Zionism and anti-Semitism. This would mean that the majority of organized Jews up till the eve of World War II would have to be characterized as “anti-Semitic” because they not only opposed, but strongly condemned Zionism. Such a claim, of course, is absurd.

It is clear that specific historical circumstances (and not the return to the sources of the Jewish religion) were responsible for the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine. These circumstances were first and foremost the plans decided by imperialism in the face of the uprising of colonized peoples in the Near East and Middle East.

Indeed, it was in accordance with the age-old tactic of “divide and rule” that British imperialism first encouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine in the aftermath of World War I.

Before World War I, there were 60,000 Jews in Palestine. From 1920 to 1931, an additional 110,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine. From 1932 to 1939, the number of emigrants to Palestine rose to 214,000. By the end of the British mandate in 1948, following the arrival of an additional 120,000 Jewish immigrants, the people of Jewish origin represented roughly 30 percent of the total population — that is, 600,000 Jews, compared to 1.3 million Arabs.

These figures alone should suffice to dispel the myth of a land without people. To this, of course, we must add the political function assigned by imperialism to this Zionist emigration scheme.

In 1936, a powerful mass movement of the Palestinian masses rose up against British imperialist domination. To break the general strike of the Palestinian workers, and to crush their growing mass demonstrations, British imperialism did not hesitate to call upon the armed Zionist gangs to do the strikebreaking.

Hence, as early as 1936 the broad contours of what Trotsky called “a Palestinian death trap for the Jews” was beginning to take shape. And this was at a time when the most deadly and barbarous forms of anti-Semitism were providing the Zionist movement with a new appeal — what Trotsky would call the “Zionist mirage.”

The genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II — i.e., the assassination of 6 million men, women and children by the most frightening means of modern technology, itself an expression of what the preservation of imperialism signifies for humanity — decimated the Jewish population throughout most of Europe. It destroyed them in the region around Poland, where they were the most concentrated, thereby creating a new situation.

As Pierre Lambert wrote in the article quoted previously:

“It is in these conditions that the Jewish question, which could have and should have been resolved by the proletarian revolution, was led to a dead-end. It was one problem among many created during this period, one that foreshadows the fate of humanity as a whole: The Nazi concentration camps are the face of what awaits society as a whole if the capitalist system is allowed to survive.

“It is just as evident that the mass of millions of people must, in all circumstances, seek solutions to their pressing problems. They cannot simply sit back and wait for the advent of socialism without reacting one way or another to the situation at hand. The delay in the proletarian revolution led 3 million Jews to consider that their settlement in the so-called Promised Land of their ancestors was an avenue to escape the terrible persecutions they had been subjected to only recently.”

The conditions of the creation of the state Israel

The founding of the state of Israel on Palestinian soil cannot be understood in a void. It is necessary to take into account the role of imperialism, the role of the Kremlin bureaucracy, and the world situation in the aftermath of the Second World War.

We first must recall that the genocide undertaken by the Nazi regime was carried out with the indifference, if not silence, of all parties. This includes both the so-called “democratic” imperialisms and the Soviet Union. The massacres of the Jews were surrounded with silence. No one intervened to aid the insurgents in the Warsaw ghetto, no one sought to put an end to the massacre. Moreover, none of the so-called democratic states, least of all the United States, opened their borders to those fleeing persecution.

The Fourth International, before and after the war, was one of the few organizations that campaigned internationally on behalf of the Eastern European Jews, demanding that the borders be opened to Jews leaving Europe. This was particularly the case in the United States and Australia, where mass meetings and demonstrations were organized.

The end of World War II witnessed the development of a massive revolutionary uprising worldwide. The agreements between imperialism (principally U.S. imperialism) and the Kremlin bureaucracy were aimed fundamentally at preserving imperialist domination on a world scale. These agreements were reached against the will of the exploited who, everywhere, rose up in huge numbers in their quest to put an end to a system that had given rise to war and to fascism, to a system that denied them all their basic rights.

These agreements at Yalta and Potsdam legitimized the imperialist domination over the colonial peoples and accentuated all the national problems that existed throughout Europe. The result was massive population displacements. Within this chaos, hundreds of thousands of Jews who had escaped the death camps (most of them coming from Eastern Europe) suddenly found themselves in refugee camps. This is the context in which all the “great powers” added their support for the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine.

Through the creation of the state of Israel, these “great powers” were able to shed the burden of hundreds of thousands of displaced people, at no cost to themselves. Second, they were able to claim to share no blame for the Nazi massacres. And last and most important, they were able to create a rampart against the oppressed workers and peoples of the Middle East.

British imperialism was no longer able to ensure the maintenance of colonial domination in the Middle East. French imperialism was even less capable. The Arab potentates were no longer able to stabilize the situation in this strategic region. Everywhere the resolve of the peoples of the region to put an end to oppression affirmed itself with full force. The preservation of imperialist interests, of the “world order,” therefore required new means.

American imperialism had to come to the rescue and to occupy the position which Britain had been compelled to vacate. For this purpose, Zionism had to be organized, with an army and a state apparatus. It was no longer sufficient to rely on individually armed colonists and Zionist militias to counteract any attempts to question the imperialist “order” in the region.

Therefore, the imperialists had a two-fold task. On the one hand, they had to rely on the Arab bourgeoisies and feudal potentates, for whose benefit they artificially carved out states (all of which, it should be added, were too fragile to stand up to the movement of the masses on their own). In addition, they had to create and back the state of Israel, which was to become a beach-head of imperialism in the Middle East.

The state of Israel, therefore, was not born out of an autonomous, national development resulting in the formation of a state. Rather, it was born out of a decision by the United Nations, under the aegis of the United States and the Kremlin bureaucracy. On November 29, 1947, by a majority of two-thirds, the delegates to the United Nations approved the partition of Palestine and the formation of the state of Israel. Stalin and Truman were both the godfathers of an oppressor settler-state founded upon the massive expulsion from its own territory of the people who had lived and worked there for generations.

The state of Israel was created on the basis of the massive expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homeland. Their lands were stolen from them. The relatively small fraction of Palestinians who remained within the boundaries of the new state were reduced to second-class citizens within their own territory. Furthermore, the entire institutional system of the new state was founded upon religious and ethnic criteria.

The Israeli state, therefore, from its very inception was a colonial and colonizing power, an oppressor power in the strictest sense of the term. It was — and remains — an artificial creation of the big imperialist powers, primarily the United States, without whose continued financial and military support the Israeli state could not exist.

But from the very beginning, the entire imperialist scheme for the Middle East did not rest solely on the state of Israel; it also rested on the bourgeois-comprador regimes and feudal potentates of the region linked to imperialism. Under these conditions, therefore, the struggle of the Palestinian people for their national rights was pitted against all the forces in the region aimed at maintaining the imperialist order.

The entire Middle Eastern situation over the past 40 years, the complex diplomatic alliances that were created only to be torn apart, the succession of conflicts and cease-fires, the apparently contradictory role of U.S. imperialism (which at times supported the expansionist actions of the Israeli state only then to “hold it back” to preserve the stability of the Arab regimes subordinated to imperialism) — all of this can only be understood in the context of the overarching struggle of the Palestinian people for their national rights.

The central axis of the struggle of the oppressed peoples of the Middle East is, in fact, the struggle of the Palestinian people. For them, solidarity with the Palestinian cause is synonymous with the struggle to break with imperialist domination, for national independence, for the expropriation of the large holdings of the feudal-capitalist owners.

For the compradore bourgeoisies and feudal Arab potentates, the “struggle” against Israel was always to remain limited in scope and conceived as a diversionary tactic to steer the masses of the Middle East away from their revolutionary objectives.

For its part, the state of Israel adopted a primary imperative: “security.” A state based upon the absolute and brutal negation of the rights of the Palestinian people requires constant expansion, but this, in turn, tends to undermine the imperialist equilibrium in the entire region. The result is that the Israeli state has been placed atop the powder kegs of the entire Middle East.

The 20 years that followed the military victory of Israel in 1967 and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank did not lead to any stability within the region. On the contrary, within the framework of the development of the international class struggle, this expansion only prompted further revolutionary confrontations and upheavals.

Simultaneously, the Arab states contributed to the attacks against the Palestinian people. It is a fact, quite remarkable when one thinks of it, that no territorial autonomy was ever granted to the Palestinians by their so-called brothers; that is, the Arab states. These Arab states have sought permanently to bring the Palestinian movement under their tight control so as to utilize it as a pawn in their negotiations with the imperialist powers.

Each time that the Palestinian Revolution threatened to engulf the entire region in flames, the Arab states did not hesitate to unleash the most vicious and bloody repression against the Palestinian people. This was the case in 1970 in Jordan during the “Black September,” when King Hussein became the “butcher of the Palestinian people” after killing an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Palestinians.

This was also the case of the massacres at the Tel-al-Zataar refugee camps in August 1976, when thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon were slaughtered at the hands of Syrian forces. This was again the case following the invasion of Lebanon by Israel 1982, an invasion explicitly aimed at destroying the organized presence of the Palestinian people — all with the mercenary assistance of Syrian forces and Shi’ite militia that carried out one atrocity after another in the “war of the camps.”

The policies of the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which today is fully subordinated to the diplomatic process forged by U.S. imperialism, have led this revolutionary movement into a total impasse.

It is the growing understanding of this impasse that fueled the massive wave of revolutionary struggle of November 1987 throughout the West Bank and Gaza, a revolutionary movement that engulfed the entire Palestinian population of Israel and resulted, in turn, in the first demonstrations of Palestinians in Beirut.

Defying the established order

Jim Hoagland, a correspondent with the Washington Post, wrote the following on this matter:

“The Palestinian revolt on the biblical lands of Gaza, Judea and Samaria has provoked a widespread and frontal defiance of the established order throughout the entire region. The Palestinian people are rising up not only against the Israelis who oppress them, but against the Arab leaders who have not responded to their expectations.

“The elites of the Arab world already have to face the growing challenge of Islamic fundamentalism, which is fueled everywhere by the growing confrontations in the Occupied Territories. In the ‘illegal’ mosques of the Arab villages, the Palestinian cause is becoming once again a weapon to be wielded against all these apparently indifferent and inept regimes. This is why the Arab leaders fear and detest the Palestinians almost as much as do the Israelis. And it is why all these Arab leaders insist so heavily on the demand that a piece of territory be granted to the Palestinians under the vigilant eyes, of course, of the Israeli and Jordanian armies.” (International Herald Tribune, February 12, 1988)

What is expressed in this journalist’s report is, in fact, the deep aspiration of the Palestinian people to create a single Palestinian state on the entire territory of Palestine — a demand which is incompatible with the existence of the Israeli state as well as that of the feudal monarchy of Jordan and which implies the dismantling of both.

What the situation calls for is the establishment of a single state through the aegis of a Palestinian Constituent Assembly, elected by direct and secret ballot and guaranteeing equal rights for the Arab and Jewish peoples. [See accompanying article on the Fourth International’s position in 1947 in support of a Constituent Assembly.] Such a perspective, it should be noted, is the only one that can preserve the Jewish masses from the consequences of the inevitable decomposition of the Israeli state.

The establishment of a “mini-state” on the West Bank and Gaza in no way responds to the needs and aspirations of the Palestinian people. It would only tighten the noose around the Palestinians living within the borders of pre-1967 Israel, while creating a vast Palestinian refugee camp, or reservation, under the direct control and military surveillance of both the Israeli and Jordanian states.

Such a “solution” could only be imposed by force of violence. Indeed, such a Palestinian “mini-state” — which is no state at all — could only survive as a Bantustan of the type that exists in South Africa.

The constant pressure exerted by the Soviet bureaucracy, the Arab regimes and U.S. imperialism for the Palestinian movement to accept this “two-state solution” is not only aimed at having it accept being corralled into Palestinian Bantustans; it is also aimed at having it recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli state itself.

A Palestinian Constituent Assembly that guarantees the rights of the Arab and Jewish peoples

Such is the only democratic solution as it expresses the unflinching struggle of the Palestinian people that began with the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Fateh, the main component of the PLO, had taken a stance under the leadership of Yasir Arafat in support of a Democratic and Secular Palestine as far back as 1969.

Ralph Schoenman, in an article published in the April 1988 issue of Socialist Action newspaper under the title, “For a Democratic and Secular Palestine,” explains:

“In May 1948, the settler-colonial state of Israel was established through the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homeland. Through sustained massacres, the Palestinians were dispersed in the neighboring Arab states, where they were consigned to refugee camps.

“Twenty years after the establishment of the Israeli state, the Palestinian resistance movement formulated its demand for self-determination in the call for the replacement of the Israeli state with an independent, unitary Palestine.

“In 1969, the leadership wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Fateh, set forth the program for the establishment of a ‘democratic, secular Palestine.’ This slogan called for the dismantling of the Zionist Israeli state and the establishment of a new state in Palestine in which Jews, Christians, and Arabs would live as equals without discrimination.

“What was notable about this brave proposal was that (1) it categorically rejected any accommodation with or recognition of the Zionist state; and (2) it rejected the proposal of a Palestinian ‘mini-state’ on the West Bank and Gaza.

“PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat described his proposal as follows in a remarkable biography written by journalist Alan Hart:

“‘We were saying “no” to the Zionist state, but we were saying “yes” to the Jewish people of Palestine. To them we were saying: “You are welcome to live in our land, but on one condition. You must be prepared to live among us as equals, not as dominators.”

“‘I myself have always said that there is only one guarantee for the safety and security of the Jewish people in Palestine- and that is the friendship of the Arabs among whom they live’.” (quoted in “Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker,” Sidgwick and Jackson, 1985, p. 275)

“A document submitted by Arafat’s Fateh organization to the Second World Congress on Palestine in September 1970 spells out the profile of a democratic and secular Palestine even more clearly. The 1970 Fateh document states:

“‘Pre-1948 Palestine — as defined during the British mandate — is the territory to be liberated. … It should be quite obvious at this stage that the new Palestine discussed here is not the occupied West Bank or the Gaza strip or both. These are areas occupied by the Israelis since June 1967. The homeland of the Palestinians usurped and colonized in 1948 is no less dear or important than the part occupied in 1967.

“‘Besides, the very existence of the racist oppressor state of Israel, based on the expulsion and forced exile of part of its citizens, even from one tiny village, is unacceptable to the revolution. Any arrangement accommodating the aggressor settler-state is unacceptable. …

“‘All the Jews, Moslems and Christians living in Palestine or forcibly exiled from it will have the right to Palestinian citizenship. … This means that all Jewish Palestinians — at the present Israelis — have the same rights provided, of course, that they reject Zionist racist chauvinism and fully agree to live as Palestinians in the new Palestine. … It is the belief of the revolution that the majority of the present Israeli Jews will change their attitudes and will subscribe to the new Palestine, especially after the oligarchic state machinery, economy and military establishment are destroyed’.”

The realization of such an objective, one based on democracy and the rights of people to self-determination, can only be the work of the masses themselves. Such an objective, moreover, is incompatible with the preservation of imperialist domination throughout the Middle East.

This is the content of the democratic and revolutionary slogan of a Palestinian Constituent Assembly, which is inextricably linked to the right of return of all the Palestinian people dispersed in the Diaspora and forced into exile. The only “realistic” solution is the creation, on the basis of equal rights for all citizens — be they Jews, Muslims or Christians — of a democratic and secular unitary state on all Palestinian territory. It is the formation of a Palestinian Republic, the form and content of which will be decided by the peoples themselves.

MUST READ: For a Democratic and Secular Palestine, the Only Real Solution!

By François de Massot

As our comrade Pierre Lambert wrote in an article published in The Truth/La Verité nearly 20 years ago (No. 548, June 1970):

True history of Zionist movement

Indeed, it was in accordance with the age-old tactic of “divide and rule” that British imperialism first encouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine in the aftermath of World War I.

These figures alone should suffice to dispel the myth of a land without people. To this, of course, we must add the political function assigned by imperialism to this Zionist emigration scheme.

As Pierre Lambert wrote in the article quoted previously:

The conditions of the creation of the state Israel

This was also the case of the massacres at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in August 1976, when thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon were slaughtered at the hands of Syrian forces. This was again the case following the invasion of Lebanon by Israel 1982, an invasion explicitly aimed at destroying the organized presence of the Palestinian people — all with the mercenary assistance of Syrian forces and Shi’ite militia that carried out one atrocity after another in the “war of the camps.”

Defying the established order

Jim Hoagland, a correspondent with the Washington Post, wrote the following on this matter:

A Palestinian Constituent Assembly that guarantees the rights of the Arab and Jewish peoples

Such is the only democratic solution as it expresses the unflinching struggle of the Palestinian people that began with the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Fateh, the main component of the PLO, had taken a stance under the leadership of Yasir Arafat in support of a Democratic and Secular Palestine as far back as 1969.

Ralph Schoenman, in an article published in the April 1988 issue of Socialist Action newspaper under the title, “For a Democratic and Secular Palestine,” explains:

“PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat described his proposal as follows in a remarkable biography written by journalist Alan Hart:

This is the only solution for the Jewish masses. It is the only way forward for all those thousands of Jews who demonstrated on January 23, 1988, against the Israeli repression of the Palestinians, and who, years earlier, had risen up to denounce the massacres at Sabra and Chatila. All of them through their protest actions were finding their way back to the longstanding democratic traditions of the Jewish people. Through their actions — regardless of whether they were conscious of this fact or not — they were standing up in opposition to the very foundations of the Israeli state — a state created on the basis of the oppression of the Palestinian people.

The uprising of the Palestinian masses, primarily the youth, in 1987 — the “Intifada” — has shaken the world. The Palestinian Revolution has taken a new step forward.

But the tragedy of the Palestinian people is far from over. The Palestinian Revolution, against which all forces of international reaction have joined forces, is not at the end of its difficult road. The rhythms of the Palestinian Revolution, linked to the developments of the class struggle on an international scale, will necessarily be slow.

But the Palestinian youth who, stones in hand, have gone head-to-head with the seemingly invincible military apparatus of the state of Israel, have made it clear that no durable solution to the crisis in the Middle East can be imposed against their will, against the profound aspiration of an entire people for its emancipation.

The only “realistic” solution that corresponds to the needs and aspirations of the Palestinian people is one that breaks the chains of exploitation and oppression. That is the meaning of a free Palestinian Republic, democratic and secular, resulting from a Palestinian Constituent Assembly that would guarantee the rights of both the Arab and Jewish components of the Palestinian nation.

. All of them through their protest actions were finding their way back to the longstanding democratic traditions of the Jewish people. Through their actions — regardless of whether they were conscious of this fact or not — they were standing up in opposition to the very foundations of the Israeli state — a state created on the basis of the oppression of the Palestinian people.

The uprising of the Palestinian masses, primarily the youth, in 1987 — the “Intifada” — has shaken the world. The Palestinian Revolution has taken a new step forward.

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François de Massot (1932-2023)

“Red Salute to Comrade François!”

The message from Indian activists reads as follows:

“Through our exchanges, which spanned a period of almost three decades, we gauged just how sharp Comrade François’s intelligence was. He was a political person of great stature. The interests of the working class were always at the forefront of his words and deeds.

His contribution to the organization of Asian conferences in India and world conferences was considerable. His ability to build consensus between comrades of different political orientations united many of us in India. His knowledge of India’s history and political situation was astonishing.

His kind personality and friendly, caring nature attracted people of all ages. His work discipline was admirable. Like his refined appearance, his exemplary qualities will remain fresh in our memories.

The working class has lost another comrade at a crucial time of global turmoil.

We stand with his wife Diana and his party colleagues in this hour of grief. “

Signed/

Nambiath Vasudevan, M. A. Patil, and Milind Ranade

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Tribute from Alan Benjamin: “How and When I Met comrade François”

Dear comrades,

Like everyone else in our movement, I was shocked — and profoundly saddened — to hear of the death of comrade François de Massot. Only a few weeks earlier, he had presented opening remarks to a meeting celebrating the life and legacy of comrade Ralph Schoenman, a founding member of Socialist Organizer.

Yes, he was 91 years old, but François was alert and sharp-thinking — indeed, he was his usual self — until just a few weeks before his death. I thought he had many good years left to help guide us in the fight to reconstitute the Fourth International, and, in the same process, build the World Party of Socialist Revolution. But that was not to be.

I first met François when we were running away from the infamous “rocha-buses” — or water-cannon trucks — in the streets of Lima, Peru — an experience that was life-changing for me.

It was a night in early 1978 when the FOCEP — a coalition of Trotskyist organizations (POMR, PST and PRT) and prominent left-wing intellectuals and human rights leaders — presented the famous “Moción Roja,” or Red Motion, to the inaugural session of the Constituent Assembly.

The motion declared that the Constituent Assembly was henceforth sovereign and not subordinate to the military regime of Gen. Morales Bermudez. The Constituent Assembly, the motion continued, was entrusted to designate a government mandated to implement the demands of the working class and peasantry. [1]

When the majority of the elected delegates to the Constituent Assembly, led by right-wing and populist forces, voted against the Moción Roja, the FOCEP called upon the Peruvian workers and peasants to deepen their mobilizations in support of their demands. In response, the military regime unleashed its repressive apparatus — rubber bullets, water cannons, tear gas — against the thousands of protesters who had gathered in Lima’s central plaza. That is when I met cde. François.

Cde. François helped me, a young activist working at the National Agrarian University, understand the historic significance of the events we were experiencing in Peru. Without his explanations, it is likely that I would not have grasped and assimilated what was taking place. [2]

This experience in Peru, and the numerous discussions with cde. François, confirmed in my mind the relevance and validity of the Transitional Program. And it fostered in me great respect for cde. François, who, for decades, would be my comrade, friend and mentor — a genuine pillar of the Fourth International, to which he devoted the bulk of his adult life.

I am deeply sorry that François will not be among us for the November 3-5 conference in Paris. But the mere fact that this conference is taking place is a testament to the ongoing struggle for the Fourth International that he waged. At every juncture, he upheld the banner of our world party, especially in 2015, when a revisionist current sought to destroy our party in France and internationally — but failed to do so.

Comrade François will be missed sorely. As best as we can, we will attempt to follow in his footsteps.

¡François de Massot, Presente!

ENDNOTES

[1] FOCEP deputies motivated the Moción Roja, arguing that the Constituent Assembly had been elected by the Peruvian people; it was the only rightful representative of the popular will. It must not be a powerless entity whose only role would be to provide cover for the military regime and craft a toothless, bourgeois constitution.

[2] Cde. François helped me understand that the Paris Commune in 1870 and the Russian Revolution of October 1917 in Russia were not abstractions or relics from a distant past. In Peru, the masses had set up their own forms of soviets (local “Asambleas Populares”) to fight the military regime and the rump Constituent Assembly.

The popular assemblies in major cities across Peru had taken control of the repressive apparatus of the State, having disbanded the police and “guardia nacional” and created self-defense committees. In many cities, the popular assemblies called on popular assembly leaders to come together in Lima and convene a National Popular Assembly, an organized form of dual power.

The failure of FOCEP, however, to spearhead the fight for a National Popular Assembly, created a political void that ultimately was filled by reformist currents more interested in playing the game of bourgeois politics than helping to address the pressing needs of “los de abajo” — the downtrodden. An historic opportunity was lost, yet again.

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