Letter to Lazar Kling, February 9, 1932

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Three Letters to Lazar Kling

Dear Comrade Kling:

Thank you for the books you sent, one of which I am returning to you because I already have a copy.

It is very difficult for me to judge from here whether the League is devoting enough attention to work among "adulterated American" workers, including the Jews. Everything depends on the forces and the means available and on their sound allocation. From the sidelines and from far away it is difficult to form an opinion on this.

The importance of foreign workers in the American revolution will be enormous — in a sense decisive. Certainly the Opposition must, no matter what, make its way into the Jewish workers' surroundings.

You ask what my attitude is toward the Jewish language. It is the same as toward any other language. If I did indeed use the term "jargon" in my autobiography, it is because in the years of my youth in Odessa the Jewish language was not called "Yiddish," as it is now, but "jargon." Jews themselves used this expression, at least in Odessa, and absolutely nothing scornful was meant by it. The word "Yiddish" has come into general use — this applies even in France, for example — only in the last fifteen or twenty years.

You say that I am called an "assimilator." I have no idea what this word can mean. I am, of course, an opponent of Zionism and all other forms of self-isolation of the Jewish workers. I call upon the Jewish workers in France to familiarize themselves as much as possible with the conditions of French life and of the French working class, since without this it will be difficult for them to participate in the workers' movement of that country where they are being exploited. Because the Jewish proletariat has been scattered among different countries, the Jewish worker must strive to know, besides the Jewish language, the languages of other countries as a weapon in the class struggle. Is that "assimilation"?

My attitude toward proletarian culture is set forth in my book Literature and Revolution. It is wrong, or not totally correct, to contrast proletarian culture to bourgeois culture. The bourgeois regime and, consequently, bourgeois culture developed over many centuries. The proletarian regime is only a short-term regime, transitional to socialism. During this transitional regime (the dictatorship of the proletariat), the proletariat cannot create any finished class culture. It can only prepare elements of socialist culture. The task, then, of the proletariat is to create, not a proletarian culture, but a socialist culture on the basis of a classless society.

Such, in brief, is my opinion on the question of proletarian culture. It would not be difficult to demonstrate that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mehring, Rosa Luxemburg, and others held a similar view on this question.

Once again, thank you for the book. With affectionate comradely greetings.

Yours,

L. Trotsky