Letter to Albert Goldman, February 10, 1940

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

February 10, 1940

Dear Comrade Goldman,

I agree completely with your letter of February 5th. If I published Abern’s remark about the split, it was with the purpose of provoking a clear and unambiguous statement from Comrade Abern and other leaders of the opposition – not about the alleged hidden intentions of the majority leaders in this respect but about their own.

I have already heard the aphorism about the “second-class citizens.” I would ask the leaders of the opposition: when they call the opposing group, “Cannon’s clique” or “conservative bureaucrats” and so you, do they wish to make second class citizens of them? I can only add that extreme sensitiveness is one of the most salient features of every petty bourgeois faction. I don’t know if Shachtman, for example, wishes by his Open Letter to make me a second-class citizen. I am interested only in his ideas, not in his psychoanalytical guessing.

I am a bit under the impression that, unnerved by a series of mistakes, the leaders of the opposition push each other into a hysterical mood and then in order to justify their factional hysteria in their own eyes, they attribute to their adversaries the darkest and most incredible designs. When they say my exchange of letters with Cannon was a camouflage, I can only shrug my shoulders.

The best treatment for petty bourgeois hysteria is Marxist objectivism. We will continue to discuss dialectics, Marxian sociology, the class nature of the Soviet State, the character of the war, not with the absurd and criminal purpose of provoking a split, but with the more reasonable purpose of convincing an important part of the party and of helping it pass over from a petty bourgeois position to a proletarian one.

With warmest comradely greetings,

L. TROTSKY