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Special pages :
Tactics in the USSR
| Author(s) | Leon Trotsky |
|---|---|
| Written | 1 October 1929 |
1. The declaration by Rakovsky and the others is an episode that will prove useful more than once in the future. (In speaking to the workers, we will point with justification to the goodwill shown by the Opposition and the ill will of the apparatus.) The perspective of the struggle by the Russian Opposition is determined, however, not by the declaration, but by factors of a more profound nature.
2. Stalinâs left zigzag called for some necessary changes in the tactics of the Opposition more than a year and a half ago: (a) we stated out loud the fact that there was a left shift taking place; (b) we criticized the contradictions in it; (c) we declared our readiness to support every genuinely left step of centrism; (d) we showed this support through a clear and complete Marxist evaluation of the danger from the right and our merciless criticism of centrism itself, and it was precisely our criticism that forced and is still forcing the centrists to go further left than they originally intended to go.
The demand for a secret ballot remains, of course, completely valid. It is far more advantageous for the revolution if the Bessedovskys vote the way they really think than if we just happen to find out about their âthoughtsâ after they jump out a back window.
And the question of the leading of strikes, as it was at one time posed and clarified by the Opposition, retains all its significance. The Opposition did not invent this question. The resolution of the Eleventh Congress [of the CPSU in 1922], worked out by Lenin and adopted unanimously, recognized the possibility, and in certain instances the inevitability, of strikes led by Soviet trade unions, insofar as one of the tasks of the latter is to protect the workersâ interests against bureaucratic distortions within their own state. The fact that since the time of the Eleventh Congress the trade unions themselves have been bureaucratized to a terrible extent does not remove the question of strikes either practically or theoretically. The Oppositionâs attitude toward strikes was formulated by us at one time with absolute precision. There is no basis at all for changing this formulation, which is imbued with the genuine spirit of the party.