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Special pages :
Letter to the Spanish Youth, June 13, 1932
| Author(s) | Leon Trotsky |
|---|---|
| Written | 13 June 1932 |
Dear Comrades:
I learned with joy that you are undertaking the publication of your own paper. A revolutionary tendency that does not educate the youth will die stillborn. In the present world, communism is the only task of great magnitude that demands a whole series of generations for its complete realization. The proletarian revolution requires continuity. To assure this continuity is the mission of the youth; that is to say, it is your mission. Marxism shows how this is to be done.
The strength of Marxism is in the unity of scientific theory with revolutionary struggle. On these two rails, the education of the communist youth should progress. The study of Marxism outside the revolutionary struggle can create bookworms but not revolutionaries. Participation in the revolutionary struggle without the study of Marxism is unavoidably full of danger, uncertainty, half-blindness. To study Marxism as a Marxist is possible only by participating in the life and struggle of the class; revolutionary theory is verified by practice, and practice is clarified by theory. Only the truths of Marxism that are conquered in struggle enter the mind and the blood.
A letter from the Soviet Union, which I received some days ago, states that despite the monstrous persecutions, arrests, and deportations, new organizations and new Left Opposition (Bolshevik-Leninist) groups have been formed in every industrial center, especially among the youth. No repression can break revolutionary continuity as long as it supports itself on revolutionary theory.
I hope with all my heart that your paper will successfully accomplish the task before it: to unite theory with practice. This will not be easy. You will make mistakes; but we too, the old ones, who possess some revolutionary experience, make mistakes very often, more often than necessary. You will learn by your mistakes. The second and the third step will be more certain than the first.
I warmly greet the young proletarian communists of Spain in the name of the thousands and thousands of our cothinkers, the Russian Bolshevik-Leninists, who are carrying on the struggle in the factories and the mines and who are dispersed in the prisons and the exile camps of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Yours,
L. D. Trotsky