Greetings to the Polish Left Opposition, August 31, 1932

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In the ranks of the International Left Opposition in recent years the question has been raised more than once: What accounts for the fact that the Bolshevik-Leninist faction has not yet encountered any significant response from the ranks of the Polish Communist Party? Polish communism has longstanding, serious theoretical traditions, going back to Rosa Luxemburg. Only four organizations formed before the world war — quite a while before it, in fact — entered the Communist International as complete units: Russian Bolshevism, the Polish Social Democracy, the Bulgarian Tesniaki, and the Dutch Left. (We do not include the Latvian Social Democracy, which had developed in direct connection with the Russian, whereas the Polish Social Democracy had its own special origin and independent position.) All other sections of the Comintern first took shape as nuclei either during the war or even after it.

But between the Polish Marxists on the one hand and the Bulgarians and Dutch on the other, there existed an enormous difference. The Tesniaki and the Dutch Left were propaganda organizations. They preached rather radical formulas, but they never went beyond the framework of preaching. The Polish Social Democracy, like Bolshevism, participated for one and a half to two decades before the war in direct revolutionary struggle against czarism and capital. While the party of the Tesniaki was creating at its top two types: the narrow and lifeless dogmatist of the Kabakchiev type and the accomplished bureaucrat of the Kolarov-Dimitrov type, the old Polish Social Democracy developed the type of the genuine revolutionary. The left wing of the PPS, it is true, brought with it a series of thoroughly formed and incorrigible Mensheviks (Walecki, Lapinski, to a large extent Kostrzewa, and others) into the ranks of the united Communist Party. However the best of the left-wing workers, having gone through the school of struggle against czarism, quickly evolved in the direction of Bolshevism.

Here too a turning point came with the year 1923: year of inglorious defeat for the revolution in Germany, and of inglorious victory for the centrist Moscow bureaucracy, which had found support in the Thermidorean wave. To measure how far the Polish epigones have fallen from Luxemburgism, it is enough to recall that Warski, once a close student of Rosa's, in 1924-27 supported the policy of the Stalinists in China and in England, in 1926 welcomed Piłsudski's coup in Poland, and now, by way of Barbusse, fraternizes with the French Freemasons under the banner of pacifism.

It is all the more alarming then that the pernicious and unworthy course of the epigones has not produced a decisive rejection from the Polish Communist ranks, in the form of new Bolshevik-Leninists. The explanation for this fact has its roots to a large extent in the extremely difficult conditions in which the Polish Communist Party has been placed, fighting under illegal conditions and at the same time under the direct observation of the Stalinist general staff. Thus Polish Bolshevik-Leninists must operate in an atmosphere of double illegality: one flows from Piłsudski, the other … from Stalin. In underground conditions expulsion from the party, which is accompanied by vicious hounding and slander, represents a double and even a triple blow for any revolutionary devoted to the cause of communism. Such are the conditions that explain to a certain degree the slowness with which the Polish Left Opposition was formed and the extreme caution of its first steps.

Now these first steps have been taken. In the Polish party a hopeful nucleus has been formed of Opposition workers with combat experience and serious records in the party. They are actively engaged in translating (into Polish and Yiddish) and distributing the literature of the International Left Opposition. They have managed to pass several pamphlets through the needle's eye of the Polish censorship. The first number of the Opposition paper Proletariat, put out in Brussels, contains extensive factual material. Number 2, we hear, is being prepared for the printer. Opposition publications in Russian, German, French, and other foreign languages are also circulating among party members in Poland. We have no doubt that once the ideas of the Left Opposition penetrate the qualified revolutionary milieu of Polish communism, they will meet with a broad and active response.

Warm greetings to our co-thinkers in Poland!

L. T.