An Open Letter to the Bolshevik-Leninists Who Signed the August 22 Declaration, September 25, 1929

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Dear Comrades,

I received your August 22 declaration in Constantinople on September 22.

Although I took no part in drawing up your declaration and consequently can have no responsibility for all its formulations, I append my signature to it since fundamentally it is along the political line of the Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition).

We have always sought to provide for the mass of the party members the possibility of verifying and overcoming the deep differences which had arisen and developed since 1923 inside the framework of a united party. We thought that given sufficiently flexible democracy and a sense of revolutionary responsibility in the leading elements of all currents in the party, it would be possible to provide factual verification and correction of the party’s political line without the shocks which increasingly undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat. Because of these considerations, we dictated the declarations of October 1926, July 1927, at the time of the Fifteenth Party Congress, and finally at the time of the Sixth Comintern Congress. Each of these declarations confirmed our unshakable fidelity to the theoretical and political ideas which constitute the platform of the Bolshevik- Leninists (Opposition), and, at the same time, showed our total readiness to subordinate our struggle for these ideas to the norms of the statutes and to the discipline of a party guided by proletarian democracy.

As is said above, we made these declarations at a time when the centrist and right currents in our party still constituted an indivisible bloc which declared that the platform of the Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition) was an antiparty document.

There is no need to show here that all the main arguments formulated by the official leadership against our platform, if they are taken as a whole, constitute the platform of the present right wing. Nor will I stop here to say to what extent the party regime is characterized by the fact that the split in the leadership and its abrupt change of course took place between two congresses of the party and on the morrow of the Comintern Congress, and to what extent this circumstance not only compromised the stability and continuity of the party’s policy but is heavy with dangerous consequences. Your declaration says it in terms that are measured but in no way equivocal.

The fact of the turn by the official leadership to the left is patent. Since 1926, we predicted more than once the inevitability of such a turn under the blows of the class struggle which have without any difficulty destroyed the framework of the right-center policy. Likewise, there is no need to show here the incontestable fact that, if the struggle against our platform has been conducted with the arguments of the present Right group, the official struggle against the latter is conducted with arguments borrowed completely from our platform. To renounce it in these conditions would mean not only giving evidence of deliberate dishonesty with respect to the ideological obligations imposed on us by Marxist theory and Lenin’s revolutionary school, but it would in addition be throwing more confusion into the mind of the party which is confused and disoriented enough without it.

But it is absolutely clear that if we thought it possible and obligatory for us to maintain our position inside the framework of a united party, in the period when the right-center bloc was indivisible and when the ideas of the Right dominated in fact the whole line, the more so are we able with as much assurance and pertinacity to take upon ourselves the same obligation now, when the problems we posed as political forecasts are openly and imperiously formulated in the very course of the class struggle and have already provoked such considerable regroupments in the party. At the peak of the repression and persecution we declared that our fidelity to Lenin’s party and to the October Revolution remained unshakable.

A Marxist would have to refuse to sign your declaration only were he to come to the conclusion that Thermidor is an accomplished fact, the party is a corpse, and the road to the dictatorship of the proletariat lies through a new revolution. Although this opinion has been attributed to us dozens of times, we have nothing in common with it. That is why the declaration of August 22 shows itself to be a natural stage on the political road of the Opposition.

Although the formal break between the Right and the center, the shift of the official leadership to the left, and the extensive use of the ideas and slogans of our platform in the struggle against the Right should — arguing purely theoretically — facilitate immensely the reconstitution of the unity of the party on a Leninist foundation, the real circumstances, unfortunately, do not give us any reason for adopting optimistic conclusions for the near future. The fact that many of the slogans, ideas, and formulations of our platform have now officially become party property in no way prevents the authors and defenders of that same platform from being in prison and exile. If the present turn of the leadership had removed the basic disagreements, that would have been just as clear to the leadership as to us. In that case, the repression applied to the Opposition would have been absolutely inexplicable unless it were described quite simply as naked bureaucratic banditry. But we were and we remain far from such an appraisal. The leadership maintains and even reinforces repression because the coincidence of the many extremely important practical measures it has taken in its present policy with the slogans and formulations of our platform in no way removes for it the dissimilarity in the theoretical principles from which the leadership and the Opposition set off in examining the problems of the day. To put it in other words, the leadership, even after having absorbed officially a good number of our tactical deductions, still maintains the strategic principles from which yesterday’s right-center tactic emerged. Hence the disquiet and distrust of the two sides about the future.

You think it is possible to undertake to submit to the party’s discipline, since there is no doubt that our theoretical criticism will objectively help to liquidate incorrect strategic principles just as it has already helped to liquidate a good number of incorrect tactical conclusions. But that is precisely why the leadership is opposed, with redoubled efforts, to the reintegration of the Opposition into the ranks of the party.

You are absolutely correct to point out that the five-year plan of socialist construction can become a very important stage in the development of the October Revolution. In terms that are measured but not equivocal, you point out the conditions that would be needed for it but which do not exist as yet. Rejecting, further, the theory of socialism in one country, you say in the same connection that, even if the indispensable internal conditions existed and the five-year plan were realized in fact, the fundamental problem of the October Revolution — the transformation of bourgeois society into a socialist society — cannot in any case be fully resolved without a parallel development of the international revolution, and without its victories in the advanced capitalist countries.

That presupposes that the Comintern has followed a correct line. However, it must be said clearly: despite the sharp tum, the leadership of the Comintern today departs no less, probably, from the Leninist line than it did when it oriented itself toward the Kuomintang and the Anglo-Russian Committee. You write correctly that “the leadership of the Comintern has not emerged from the period of ideological fluctuations.” To that must be added that the combination of ultraleft conclusions with Right principles continues to have fatal results for the daily policies of the main sections of the Comintern, as a result of which, under all the noise that is made in articles and speeches about the “third period” and “new upsurge,” there is being produced in fact a further weakening of the Comintern, in its organization and in its policy. This process has not yet stopped, in any country, and therein lies the chief danger which threatens the October Revolution as well as the world working class.

You have published your declaration at a time when the internal and international situation of the Soviet republic is extremely complicated. Great dangers lie ahead. They can, under specific conditions, arise much more quickly than we might expect. For the October Revolution, under the banner of Lenin, the Oppositionists will fight in every case and in all circumstances. That is a duty higher than organizational norms and formal party membership. In your declaration you say only that the interests of the revolution demand that the Opposition have the possibility of carrying out its duty by normal means within the ranks of the party. I associate myself entirely with this aim. I hope with you that independently of the fate to be reserved in practice for our declaration it will “win the sympathy and support of the overwhelming majority of the ranks of the party and of the working class.”

With communist greetings,

L. Trotsky