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Special pages :
Letter to Thomas, March 8, 1932
| Author(s) | Leon Trotsky |
|---|---|
| Written | 8 March 1932 |
On an Entry into the SAP
Dear Comrade :
In immediate reply to your letter:
The fact that your group has joined the SAP without its own program and its own paper means that your group is dissolving itself into the SAP. I of course do not doubt for a moment that individually and collectively you have set yourselves the task of winning the SAP for communism. But day-to-day politics and the requirements of the mass organizations will have unavoidable consequences. I really do not see in what way your group can maintain itself as a communist grouping in the SAP.
In your statement to the SAP there are already unambiguous symptoms of this liquidation. How sharp â and rightly so â is your criticism of the SPD and the KPD [German CP], and how mild, blurred, and conditional is your criticism of the SAP! While painting the motley picture of the SAP with watercolors, you leave out the fact that the leadership of this party and the leadership of its central paper are total centrists. And for the physiognomy of the party as it appears before us today, that is of decisive significance.
You have taken the characterization of the KPD as ultraleftist from the KPO. This characterization is one-sided, says little, and these days is even incorrect within specific limits. The nonsense with Scheringer has nothing âultraleftâ about it. They close their eyes to the openly opportunist past [of the KPD], which can be resurrected as the living present tomorrow. But I treat this topic at greater length in my pamphlet.
It seems quite wrong to me that you see the trouble in general as the âentanglement of communist politics in the capitalist countries in the factional struggles of the Russian party.â Quite the contrary. The trouble with the KPO was that in the internal disputes of the Russian party it constantly supported the wrong line against the correct one.
Your formulations with regard to the united front strike me as being too general and, allow me to use the word, too SAP-ish. I find the insistence upon a united presidential candidacy thoroughly wrong. In the future will you propose common slates for the Prussian elections and later the Reichstag elections too? We are for the united front only in practical mass actions. That has absolutely nothing in common with a renunciation of our own banner, our own program, and our own candidacy in the elections.
I do not want to go into minor matters. What is most important has in any case been suggested above. It seems to me quite correct that you come out against a hasty adoption of program by the SAP. The more comprehensive and detailed the programmatic discussion turns out to be, the greater the advantages the revolutionary tendency will derive from it. I am receiving the SAZ and am collecting the programmatic proposals. Perhaps I will intervene in the programmatic discussion later with a pamphlet. âŚ
L. Trotsky