Tenacity, Tenacity, Tenacity!

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The vacillations of Radek and a few others at the top are evidently encouraging Zinoviev. The papers say — and it looks very like the truth — that Zinoviev suggested to Stalin a brand new slogan: “With the Trotskyists, but without Trotsky.” Since Zinoviev at his capitulation lost not only the last shreds of political honor but also his supporters, he is now trying to get Stalin to include the “Trotskyists” in the party, so that they can then like every other capitulating group and grouplet condemn themselves to political nullity. Pyatakov has become an ordinary official. Nothing is heard of the famous Safarov group (the left Zinovievists); it is as if they had drowned. Zinoviev and Kamenev are vainly knocking at Molotov’s, Ordzhonikidze’s, and Voroshilov’s, mistaking the doors of the party offices for the doors of the party. But the officials are not opening their arms to them. Kamenev, as letters from Moscow report, was on the point of completely saying goodbye to politics and writing a book on Lenin. And why not? A bad book is always better than a hopeless policy. But Zinoviev is pretending as hard as he can to be alive. Each new capitulation acts on the venerable capitulator like a shot in the arm.

All these people talk about the party, swear by the party, capitulate in the name of the party. It is as if they are waiting for the party finally to appreciate their political cowardice and call them to leadership. Isn’t it grotesque? True, the press reports that the capitulators’ anguish for the party will be rewarded in the person of the not unknown Maslow. Maslow is supposed to be due appointment as a “leader.” But by whom? Not by the party, but by the Stalinist apparatus, which now needs a change in Germany. But Stalin has no intention of replacing himself. The paradox is that the Maslows can come to their new “glory” in the apparatus only by betraying Zinoviev, although the policy of Maslow was a shadow of the Zinoviev model. Stalin can need Maslow only against the ill-fated Thälmann But Stalin cannot need Zinoviev and Kamenev. Stalin needs the official Pyatakov, the official Krestinsky. But Radek can hardly find himself a place in Molotov’s system. To control the Comintern they now need people like Gusev and Manuilsky.

Radek and a few others with him think that the most favorable moment for their capitulation has now arrived. Why, actually? Because, you see, Stalin has dealt with Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin. But was our task really to get one part of the ruling group to deal with the other? Has the principled position on basic political questions really changed? Has the party regime changed? Hasn’t the anti-Marxist program of the Comintern remained in force? Is there really anything at all sure about tomorrow?

The present crushing of the Right, sharp in form but superficial in content, in its turn is only a by-product of the policy of the Opposition. Bukharin is completely correct when he accuses Stalin of not having thought up a single word, but just used bits of the Opposition platform. What has produced the left twitch of the apparatus? Our attack, our irreconcilability, the growth of our influence, the courage of our cadres. If at the Fifteenth Congress we had committed hara-kiri along with Zinoviev, Stalin would have had no convincing reason to deny his own past and adorn himself with feathers plucked from the Opposition.

By capitulating, Radek has simply struck himself from the ranks of the living. He will fall into the category headed by Zinoviev of half-suspended, half-pardoned people. These people are afraid to say a word of their own aloud, are afraid to have their own opinions, and exist by looking round at their own shadows. They are not even allowed to support the ruling faction publicly. Stalin has answered them through Molotov, as once Benkendorf, the general of Nicholas I, answered the editor of a patriotic newspaper: the government has no need of your support. If Radek could become the cashier of the State Bank, like Pyatakov, that would be another matter. But Radek is pursuing the very highest of political goals. He wants to approach the party. Like others of his type, he has ceased to see that it is precisely the Opposition that is the most alive and active force in the party.

The whole life of the party, all its decisions and actions, revolve around the ideas and slogans of the Left Opposition. In the struggle between Stalin and Bukharin both sides, like clowns in the circus, are throwing accusations of Trotskyism at each other. They have no ideas of their own. It is only we who have a theoretical position and political foresight. On these bases we are forming new cadres — the second Bolshevik enrollment. But the capitulators are destroying and demoralizing the official cadres, teaching them to sham, to play the chameleon, to grovel ideologically, in conditions and at a time when theoretical clarity must be assured with unyielding revolutionary courage.

A revolutionary epoch quickly exhausts people. It is not so easy to withstand the pressure of the imperialist war, the October Revolution, the series of international defeats and the reaction growing from them. People spend themselves, their nerves fail, consciousness gets worn out and falls apart. This fact can always be observed in a revolutionary struggle. We have seen the tragic examples of how the generation of Bebel, Guesde, Victor Adler, and Plekhanov was used up. But there the process took decades. Development has gone at a completely different rate from the time of the imperialist war and the October Revolution. Some perished in the civil war, others could not hold out physically; many, all too many, gave up ideologically and morally. Hundreds and hundreds of Old Bolsheviks are now living as obedient officials, criticizing the boss over a cup of tea, and toiling away. But these at least have not shared in the complicated conjuring tricks, have not pretended to be eagles, have not taken up oppositional struggle, have not written platforms, but have quietly and slowly degenerated from revolutionaries into bureaucrats.

One should not think that the Opposition is protected from Thermidorean influences. We have seen a whole series of examples of how Old Bolsheviks, who had fought to maintain the tradition of the party and themselves, put out their last effort for the Opposition: some by 1925, some by 1927, some by 1929. But finally they have written themselves off; their nerves couldn’t take it. Radek is now the hurried, clamorous ideologist of that kind of element.

The Opposition would have committed shameful suicide if it had begun to equate itself with the moods of the tired and the skeptical. Over six years of intensive ideological struggle a new generation of revolutionaries has grown up and been educated, which for the first time approaches great historical tasks on the basis of its own experience. The capitulation of the older people produces in this generation the necessary selection. This is the real leaven for future mass struggles. These elements of the Opposition will find the way to the proletarian core of the party and to the working class as a whole.

Tenacity, tenacity, tenacity! — that is the slogan for the current period. And let the dead bury their dead.