Letter to Jacob Walcher, August 26, 1933

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As It Is” and “As It Should Be

Dear Comrade Walcher:

As far as the NAP is concerned, I believe that you and especially many of your comrades are on a course that cannot lead to winning over the enemy or the opponents, but rather to losing many friends. This is quite often the case when one allows oneself to be guided by conjunctural moods and considerations of a purely organizational nature rather than by fundamental facts and tendencies.

You always refer to the Norwegian party “as it is” and “as it should be.” I recognize only the first. The second is only the result of a pious wish. The fact that the Norwegian workers are “more radical” than the party is not exceptional — with reformist parties that is the rule. The fact that the Norwegian party is the party of the class is just as true for the Austro-Marxist or the Belgian party. In my considerations, should I substitute the Austrian party “as it should be” for the Austrian party “as it is” and then form an alliance with the product of my wishful thinking?

The newest development has shown once again that parties with a definite past and an entrenched “apparatus” are very hard realities, and one must take them just “as they are” and not as one would like to have them.

Because of your totally ill-considered alliance with the NAP you are in the process of losing the Mot Dag group. Mot Dag is, however, the only group you have in Norway. This group is far from “intransigent.” It has not succeeded, however, in influencing the NAP “as it is.” One of the reasons for this, at least in my opinion, is the adherence of the NAP to the International Labor Community, which puts no obligations whatsoever on Tranmæl and Company but gives them international cover and protection in the eyes of the Norwegian workers. Do you think that you can succeed in exercising the kind of influence on Tranmæl from Paris that Falk so far has not succeeded in exercising from Oslo? No. It is just simpler to foster illusions about Oslo in Paris than it is in Oslo itself.

If one follows the Paris discussions of the Second International, one can see that different parties and factions are in the process of taking the road of the Two-and-a-Half International. The difference between the NAP and the Austrian or the American party is national and conjunctural, not fundamental. The less clarification this question gets now, the more brutal will be the break with the NAP later.

It is unwise, you write, to anticipate developments. Really? But it has always seemed to me that the task of the vanguard — and we should be nothing other than the vanguard of the vanguard — consists of anticipating developments.

This policy would have particularly dire consequences where the ILP is concerned. No one should have any illusions about this. The policy of waiting, feeling one’s way, gaining time (i.e., wasting time) will spell the end for the ILP in the immediate future. The crisis in the ILP is caused by the fact that the membership is starving for clear, solid, revolutionary answers, while the leadership vacillates between Manuilsky and Tranmæl without making up its mind to take the independent road of Marxist politics (which now also means the road of the new International). Thus it is unavoidable that the right wing of the party went to the Labour Party while the left wing swings toward the Stalinists. A few more months of vacillation and there will be nothing left of the ILP but a memory. It is not a tactical question, but a principled one. The accusations many comrades raise against us in this connection are nothing but the worst aspects of the old “Trotskyism.” More than once, I developed all of these arguments in both written and oral form against Lenin three decades ago. At that time, I too wished to make a distinction between Menshevism or its left wing “as it was” and “as it should be” according to my analysis, and I regarded Lenin’s efforts at separation to be harmful. Moreover, Marx and Engels throughout their lives were looked upon as “disruptive elements” by other groups; Lenin too … until the victory, after which they began to praise his sense of expediency without having properly understood the long and difficult work of selection and education. The school of Marx-Engels-Lenin is good enough that we can all learn something from it.

With cordial greetings,