Letter to Oppositionists exiled in Cheboksary, October 22, 1928

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How to Criticize the Centrists

Dear Cheboksary Comrades:

I am replying to your letter of September 22 with some delay because I have been very busy during the last few weeks. I will answer point by point.

1. My health in the recent period has become considerably better – after prolonged use of quinine. I am again working without interruptions. I am getting ready for a big hunting trip. Whether the malaria will return this fall, the future will tell.

2. I am very pleased by your comments on the "Criticism of the Draft Program." Unfortunately the work had to be written extremely rapidly. After it was sent off, I found quite a few deficiencies in it, and since then I have found here in my files quite a few transcriptions, quotations, and documents, which could be used to good advantage to supplement and make more precise what was said in the critique. Well, but what can you do? – we'll say it another time.

3. I hope that "The Chinese Question After the Sixth Congress" reaches you [see Leon Trotsky on China, pp. 345-401]. This work is devoted to the immediate perspectives and tasks in China and, in particular, presents the arguments for the Constituent Assembly slogan.

4. You raise the question of "permanent revolution," so to speak from a retrospective standpoint, i.e., looking back on the past. Yes, the question has been posed and it must be answered. I have a rough draft on this question, aimed against Stalin and Bukharin, who have never understood Lenin's approach to the question, or mine, and who counterpose the two approaches precisely in the fundamental area that brings them closest together. When I free myself of the most urgent tasks, I will take up "permanent revolution," that is, finish that old draft. No less than two or three weeks will be needed for that, however, because it is a vast subject.

5. You give me a pretty good "working over" for the ways I have defined the "left course." You quite skillfully pick apart, I must confess, all the imperfections of my terminology in regard to the centrist zigzag. In one case I speak of a "turn," in another, a "shift"; in one place of a turn "being carried out," and in another, of one that "has been carried out"; and so on. All that is true, but here you tend, ever so slightly, to substitute grammar for politics. No science has yet worked out a precise terminology for such centrist zigzags. A turn (of course, a turn to a certain degree) was carried out in February; that is, a change of direction occurred in the line. But this left turn is still "being carried out," since it is being extended to other areas and to other parties (e.g., the Czechoslovak party). When you are dealing with an unfinished process, and an internally contradictory one at that, you may fall into schematism if you chase after precise and finished terminology and put periods where they should not be.

Thus, your letter could be understood to mean that the struggle of the rights against the centrists is over and that July drew the final balance sheet. Comrade Nevelson's letter grants the possibility that at a certain new stage the centrists could come close to us (of course, only under the influence of major objective causes: contradictions, mass pressure, etc.). I discuss this topic in more detail, however, in the letter to a number of comrades enclosed with this [see "The Danger of Bonapartism and the Opposition's Role"] and therefore I won't repeat.

6. Comrade Nevelson, in his letter about the direction of our fire, comes to the absolutely indisputable conclusion that the main fire must be directed against centrism as the camouflage and source of support for the rights within the party. Unfortunately, Comrade Nevelson did not notice that that is what we have been doing all along. Against whom did we aim our fire in all our articles and speeches, in the Platform, etc.? Against Stalin. And against Bukharin, to the extent that the latter identified himself with Stalin. In our Platform a few dozen lines were devoted to the rights. We simply indicated their presence. For the workers no more than that was needed. In their naked, openly revealed form, the rights do not draw the workers behind them. All the fire of our criticism, all along, has been concentrated almost exclusively on the centrists.

But there is another and no less important aspect of the matter that cannot be left out of sight. The centrists rest, through the party apparatus, upon the undifferentiated mass of party members, including the worker members. The rights rest, through the Soviet [i.e., government] apparatus, on the new property-owners. Thus far the center and the right have spoken and acted "monolithically." Stalin uses all the power of the propertied elements against us, and against Rykov he uses the support of the workers. A break between the center and the rights would mean a class fissure, with the propertied elements dragging Rykov much farther to the right, and the workers dragging Stalin much farther to the left. In the long term, there could be a civil war between us and the army of the rights, and a common front between us and the army of the centrists. I deliberately speak of armies, i.e., of classes, and not of the little groupings at the top. It would be sheer suicide to soften our criticism of centrism with the aim of drawing closer to the masses who today are following the centrists. However, it is entirely correct and politically expedient in appealing to these masses to say: "You fear a split? You fear upheavals? Then let us try to make the turn that is being or has been carried out by your leadership – which you have confidence in but we do not, not in the slightest – let us try to make this turn (whether completed or in process) into a starting point for a genuine left course. We are ready to assist you in every way along this path. To start with, let us present the leadership with such and such modest demands (return of the Oppositionists to the party, honest preparation for a new party congress, a reduction in the party budget, etc.) and in that way let us test the political line and the just plain honesty of the leadership." Such an approach to the audience is absolutely correct. All Oppositionists in a cell or at a workers' meeting would take exactly this approach if they are Bolshevik-Leninists and not frenzied Democratic Centralists who have turned their backs on the party, having decided that "the party is a corpse" (V. Smirnov). To the extent that such a tone in my approach to the audience troubles you, to that extent, it seems to me, you are not right. There are no concessions of principle in this approach. For it is not excluded that the left zigzag can be transformed into a left course (it was not excluded yesterday and it can prove not to be excluded tomorrow) – on one very small condition: the growing activity of the masses and the growing influence of the Opposition on those masses.

I will end with that. I am afraid that I have written too much and in some places have overstated the case in regard to both the past and the present. However, please don't take it to heart. I can only be gladdened by such attentive and meticulous reading by you of all our documents. Meticulousness is a good old Marxist tradition.

I firmly shake your hands and wish you all the best.