Letter to Boris Souvarine, May 10, 1929. The Basic, Fundamental Question

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Dear Comrade Souvarine,

I want to try once again, even if in a few words, to explain myself in complete frankness — though I must say that your letters disappoint rather than revive my hopes in the possibility or probability of collaboration. One would have to say that you have made it a rule to avoid principled questions, in social as well as in fundamental matters, and that you focus all your attention on psychological and personal aspects. In your first letter you advise me to wait and think things over, while at the same time predicting that I will regret my hastiness. In your second letter you accuse me of having an abstract attitude toward individuals. Your observations permit me to express myself quite frankly in return. You replace, or you propose to replace, the selection of individuals on the basis of strict political criteria with a selection based on personal quality or talent. In all your judgments you make abstractions out of fundamental political tendencies, that is, out of potential social lines, and you replace all that with a qualitative assessment of the persons, groups, ways, and means involved. That does not and cannot lead anywhere. You complain of the error made by the representatives of the Russian Opposition. I admit that incorrect actions were taken. But I am sure that you exaggerate because straying from the political line has the fatal consequence of falsifying one’s sense of proportion. You have in fact drifted from the political line. No one can recover it, least of all you. If nothing serious had happened to you, I would have had to read scarcely ten lines of your letter to determine your politics. Men of politics who are mature and experienced and know what they want understand each other at the drop of a word. They know whether they are on the same side or in enemy camps. But you avoid all the questions it is necessary to begin with. Is it because you instinctively fear your Achilles’ heel will be discovered, that is, that you have no political line? You decline all responsibility for Brandler. Have you taken the uncompromising position against him that his opportunistic line requires? No! You attack those who share my ideas because they are too docile or not independent enough, or for other faults, real or fictitious, but purely personal or psychological. The political line remains outside your field of vision. Even in a personal letter you speak only of Brandler’s “contradictions.” Such and such contradiction can exist in a person who shares your ideas as well as in one you are fighting against. Before speaking of contradictions, it is necessary to get down to the question of determining — on the basis of essential facts — which camp Brandler belongs to: the side of our friends or the side of our enemies. You avoid this basic, fundamental question. Why? Because you have not settled the question of which camp you belong to.

All these indications are most alarming. You are enmeshed in a path that leads to the right.

The extent to which this process has affected you, I do not know, or rather I resolve not to say. Does it have to be considered a lost cause? That is the only reason I am writing you this letter. Without the slightest irony — on the contrary, with all the seriousness the gravity of the situation requires — I return your advice: take your time. Don’t rush to a decision before you examine your thoughts thoroughly. Don’t be too hasty in sending the printer each transitory phase of your current thinking. Don’t be too quick to tie yourself to a small error today only to find yourself backing it up more firmly tomorrow, thus committing a greater error, one that may become irreparable.

I am not sending a copy of this letter to anyone because despite the wretched impression the last letter you wrote made on me, I don’t want to give up the hope of working with you without having tried everything along this line and without adding the above warning, which I address to you very sincerely.