Letter to Max Shachtman, March 8, 1933

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Don’t Forget We Have an International Organization

Dear Comrade Shachtman:

I have not written to you for a long time. A collection of many causes has made my response to your latest letters difficult. Even now I write you quite briefly. The situation in the [American] League now constitutes our greatest worry. You are heading toward a split, and that will mean catastrophe for the League. It is actually a matter of complete indifference which side in the fight is more wrong, for neither side will be in a position to explain to the workers what caused the split. And that will completely compromise both groups. In one of your letters you gave expression to the hope that the next conference will settle the disputes. That is not my opinion at all. If your group gets 51 percent that would not change anything at all. The determined intervention of the International Secretariat is necessary. I am in correspondence with the Secretariat on the matter, and I hope that you will get word on this in the next period.

I would like to touch fleetingly on just one question. It seems to me that you were mistaken in undertaking the big protest campaign against delegating Comrade Swabeck [to see Trotsky and attend the preconference]. Had he come to Copenhagen at that time, it would have been most opportune. We badly needed a Danish-speaking comrade, and with his help we could certainly have built a good section. His participation in the Copenhagen consultations would have been of the greatest significance. Perhaps under this condition the internal struggles in the American League in the course of the last months would not have taken on the current unprecedentedly sharp character. The preconference took on a much greater significance than it seemed to have, on the evening before, to many of us, including me. Comrade Swabeck's participation was very useful. And his stay here is, for me and the other members of our local group, of great value. I also hope that Comrade Swabeck will not regret his stay here. Without contact with him the intervention of the International Secretariat would not come off so effectively.

I would really like to implore you, as well as your friends, not to be so nervous, so impatient, to adopt a longer-range perspective and not for a moment to forget that we have an international organization that is not at all inclined to adopt a one-sided view and in whose eyes the "aggressor," the instigator, has much more to lose than to win.

This is it for now. Thanks for sending the fishing line, which I received in good time.

With best greetings,

Yours,

L. Trotsky