Letter to Albert Treint, September 22, 1931

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Dear Comrade Treint:

I want here to briefly summarize our exchange of letters and our conversations.

1. As you know, I consider that you have a false estimate of the past. Politically, this is important insofar as the differences over the past can recur in the future. But the question of the past, taken in isolation, has not been raised by me and I do not raise it now. To my knowledge, the leading comrades of the League are not raising this question either. So you have even less reason to raise it yourself. If the League does not demand that you formally recognize your real errors, you have even less reason or right to denounce, in joining the League, the imaginary "errors" of others.

You cannot fail to understand that any declaration by you of that kind will encounter immediate and decisive resistance in the course of which the whole past, from 1923 on, will be taken up. You cannot fail to see that the Zinovievist faction of the left centrists to which you belonged no longer exists and that its disappearance is not accidental.

Next, you cannot fail to understand that the whole French and International Left Opposition will be entirely against you on the disputed questions of the past To make a declaration about the mistakes of our people and not about your own mistakes would be possible only if your political aim was to demonstrate the impossibility of working with us; but you categorically declare that this is not so. In that case, it is essential that you make your actions correspond with your intentions.

2. The question of the permanent revolution: I consider it decisive in the strategic programmatic sense. In my latest pamphlet I tried to show that this question has completely and definitively left the domain of the old Russian quarrels and that it has become the central question of the international proletariat's revolutionary strategy.

I am far from thinking that the theory of the permanent revolution has a ''finished" character or that it is a master key that unlocks all strategic problems. No, this theory does not free us in any way from the necessity of a concrete analysis of each new historic situation in each separate country; quite the contrary, it forces us to make such analyses. To consider the theory of the permanent revolution as a suprahistorical dogma would contradict its very essence.

But this theory gives us a unique and correct starting point in the internal dynamic of each contemporary national revolution and in its uninterrupted connection with the international revolution. In this theory the Bolshevik-Leninists have a fighting formula imbued with the content of the gigantic events of the last thirty years.

On the basis of this formula, the Opposition is combating and will combat the reformists, the centrists, and the national communists in a decisive manner. One of the most precious advantages of this formula is that it slices like a razor through the ideological ties with all kinds of revisionism of the epigones.

It would be ideological suicide for the Opposition to weaken itself by any concession to the viewpoints of the Zinovievists or semi-Zinovievists on this issue. That is out of the question.

Until now you have not studied the essential works of the Left Opposition devoted to the question of the permanent revolution; to a considerable extent your present objections, which I consider entirely false and approaching the boundaries of vulgar republicanism, can be explained by your inadequate knowledge. Therefore I cannot at this time speak categorically about the depth of the differences between us. I will await with great interest your conclusions formulated, if you can, on the basis of two books: The Third International after Lenin and The Permanent Revolution. If on this question of principles there is not a community of ideas, it would be better for you not to hasten joining the Opposition, because it would prove to be purely formal, and would inevitably lead to a rupture at the first serious test

3. If, however, it becomes clear to you and to the others that there is no immediate obstacle to working together, I would personally be pleased — it is obvious that after your formally joining the ranks of the Left Opposition nothing would stop you, in the course of the discussion, from raising these or other questions that are contentious or have not been clarified, or that concern the past, the present, or the future The Left Opposition cannot live without internal discussion, but the recruitment of an isolated comrade cannot cause it to put in doubt its ideological foundations elaborated in the struggle of these eight years.

Those are my conclusions dictated on the one hand by my sincere desire to see you fully within our communist ranks and on the other hand by the wish to safeguard the International Opposition's homogeneity on the fundamental questions of program and strategy, for only on that condition will it be able to fulfill its historic mission.

L. Trotsky