Interview by the Osaka Mainichi

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1. You ask about my health. It is more or less satisfactory, with some worse periods. I need medical attention.

2. Yes, I consider the antagonism between America and England basic. The interrelations between the U.S. and Japan in this connection are of secondary significance. In other words: the U.S. will at any given period determine its relations to Japan from its relations with Great Britain. This on the whole means, if you like, a lessening of the contradictions between Washington and Tokyo. But individual periods of sharpening are not excluded, again depending on the relations between Tokyo and London. Do I consider war inevitable? Without making fruitless guesses about timing, I must say that never in human history was the world heading with such blind stubbornness toward a military catastrophe as now, ten years after the Great War, in the epoch of the League of Nations the Kellogg Pact, etc., etc. This is not a hypothesis, not an assumption, but a conviction, or rather an unshakable certainty.

3. The talk of a Fourth International which I am supposed to be founding is utter rubbish. The Social Democratic International and the Communist International both have deep historical roots. No intermediate (Two-and-a-Half) or additional (Fourth) Internationals are required. There is no room for them. The Stalin course of the Comintern is a course in the direction of a Two-and-a-Half International. Centrism stands between the social democracy and communism. But centrism is unstable, even when it rests on the resources of a state apparatus. It will be ground away between the millstones of social democracy and communism. After struggle, friction, splits, etc., there will remain two Internationals: the Social Democratic one and the Communist one. I participated in the foundation of the latter, am fighting for its traditions and for its future, and do not intend to yield it to anyone.

4. You ask why a number of states have closed their doors to me. Probably so as to help Marxists explain to the working masses more clearly what capitalist democracy is. The Norwegian government based its decision on considerations about my safety. I do not find this argument convincing. I am a private individual, and the question of my safety is my personal affair. I have enemies, and I also have friends. My settling in Norway or some other country would in no way put responsibility for my safety on the government of that country. The only government with full knowledge of the situation that deliberately took on itself such responsibility is the government of the Stalin faction which expelled me from the USSR.

5. Citing my words that it is in vain that its enemies await a quick overthrow of the Soviet regime, you ask whether I admit “the possibility of an overthrow of the Soviet regime, if not soon, then not very far off’? I consider that with a correct policy it is possible to ensure the stability of the Soviet regime until the inevitable socialist revolution in Europe and throughout the world, after which the Soviet regime will gradually have to give way to a stateless communist society. But history is accomplished through class struggle. That means that neither absolutely hopeless nor absolutely assured positions exist. In the mechanics of the struggle an enormous role is played by the leadership. If the line of the last five years should continue, the dictatorship would sooner or later be undermined. But under the Opposition’s lash the Stalinist apparatus is tossing from side to side and thus making the party think and make comparisons. Never has policy in the USSR turned to such an extent round the ideas of the Opposition as now, when the leaders of the Opposition are in jail or exiled.

6. On the question of my writing for the bourgeois press, I gave the necessary explanations in my letter to the workers of the Soviet republic. I enclose that letter.

7. Would I carry on the struggle against the Right? Of course. Stalin is fighting the Right under the lash of the Opposition. He is fighting that fight as a centrist, compelled by means of splits on the right and left to ensure his intermediate position both from the proletarian line and from the openly opportunist. This zigzag fight of Stalin in the last analysis only strengthens the Right. The party can be protected from shocks and splits only by a revolutionary position.

8. Mentioning the stabilization of capitalism, you ask where are the perspectives for world revolution? These perspectives are growing from that very stabilization. U.S. capitalism is the most revolutionary factor of world development. We will observe great perturbations of the world market, deep economic conflicts, marketing crises, unemployment and the shocks it brings with it. Add to that the prospect of inevitable military clashes. I would greatly prefer a peaceful transformation of society, without the overhead costs of revolution, but looking around at what is happening I cannot condemn myself to blindness. And only someone hopelessly blind can believe in a peaceful transformation.