Second Letter to the International Secretariat, July 2, 1935

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For a Special Information Service

To the International Secretariat

Dear Comrades:

I am sending you a letter dealing with the publication of the manifesto of the Fourth International. I implore you not to wait on this question any longer. If you have the Americans’ signature, this will be sufficient to exert the appropriate pressure on the Dutch organization, if necessary. I hope that the Dutch will not withhold their signature … even without organizational pressure. No matter what, the manifesto has to be published by the eleventh.

Some remarks about other questions:

1. The internal life of the Second and especially the Third International remains a book sealed with seven seals. Here too, saying what is, is an important political task. In order to fulfill this task, we have to know what is, i.e., what is going on in the parties. A special information service should be organized to carefully collect and classify all the news, even the small and personal items, in somewhat the way military staffs do with news from the country of the presumed enemy. Everything of importance or organizational value should be published in our press immediately.

In fact, nothing like this happens. Rather, one gets the impression that our editors are embarrassed to deal with the internal and especially the personal matters of the parties in their papers and also that they consider these matters “gossip.” This is completely wrong. Sometimes the best way to make general ideas clear to the reader is to use concrete, vivid examples, even if they are of the second order.

A short time ago, for example, I received a copy of a letter from Wo. to Comrade Erde, containing highly interesting and informative descriptions of the internal processes in the Comintern and its German section. All this should be known by the broad public. The comrades mentioned above and many more could certainly give our press regular articles and notes of this kind.

There is, for example, a great deal of talk about the conflict between Wels and Aufhäuser and about the events in the. Austrian Social Democratic Party, etc. Our press does not cover this. This abstention is characteristic of a spirit of isolation and a lack of interest in the internal processes of other organizations, i.e., also a lack of will to intervene into these processes.

The International Secretariat could perhaps give advice and set an example in this area.

2. It seems that the Stalinists in France for the time being have abandoned Stalin’s position in favor of the position of the SFIO.Blum probably argued successfully as follows: If we come out openly for militarism now, we will be liquidated even before the outbreak of the war. We have to maintain an ambiguous policy now, so that we can complete the turn at the moment the war starts and carry the workers with us on a wave of patriotism.