Letter to Reg Groves, September 6, 1932

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After the British Expulsions

Dear Comrade Groves:

Thank you for your very interesting information. You ask for advice as to the attitude toward the party and the workers’ movement, in general. My impression is that you don’t need any advice in that respect, as your activity seems to be totally “all right.” We are a fraction of the party, but we are a very peculiar fraction, which has been expelled from the party and is acting outside of the party. We must naturally occupy not only a theoretical position but a practical organizational position in every branch of the workers’ movement. Our political adherence to the party is expressed not in our abstention from any work outside of the party, but in the content of that work.

I had a minor disagreement with our International Secretariat about the “friendly” estimation of Pollitt by Comrade Purkis,but we are all fully agreed that the Left Opposition would be committing suicide by restricting itself to internal criticism of the party’s actions, without devoting a great and growing part of its forces to the immediate action in the mass organizations under the centralized control of the Left Opposition as such.

I am sending you an article by Comrade Field on the German economic situation. I hope this article will interest the English comrades.

With communist greetings,

L. Trotsky