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Special pages :
Letter to Friends in Frankfurt, November 5, 1932
| Author(s) | Leon Trotsky |
|---|---|
| Written | 5 November 1932 |
Thank you for your letter and the clipping from the Frankfurter Nachrichten [Frankfurt News]. There is no need to tell you how I rejoice at your successes and hope that they may increase still more in the near future. They are extremely significant. In the present situation careerists seeking office or journalists looking for a newspaper don't come to the Left Opposition, poor and under attack not only from the ruling class but also from the Stalinist bureaucracy. To us come only people who are deeply devoted to the proletarian revolution, cadre elements. Armed with the correct methods, they advance on the road to the masses.
The article in the Frankfurter Nachrichten, like many other articles in the bourgeois press, clearly shows that the class enemy understands very well the danger which the Left Opposition represents to its policies. Unlike the Stalinists, they do not raise a howl that we are "counterrevolutionaries"; the bourgeoisie apparently puts no stock in the Stalinist labels and considers us — not without reason — their most irreconcilable enemies. The future will show that they are right.
The Frankfurter Nachrichten speaks of Trotsky's political attack on Thälmann's "Hamburg dock workers." The purpose of this counterposition is all too clear: it is to play games with the workers' self-respect and to assign them to the official bureaucratic party, away from the influence of Bolshevik-Leninist criticism. Stalinist tactics today, as we have said, carry very little danger.
Needless to say, my criticism was directed not against Thälmann's "dock workers" but against the very lofty bureaucracy, which stops the arguments of every critical worker with a fist in the mouth. But if Stalin cannot easily succeed with this method in the Soviet Union, still less will Thälmann be able to succeed in stifling Marxist ideas among the proletariat in Germany.
I wish you success in your work in the future.
L. Trotsky