To the Conference of the Young People's Socialist League

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A revolutionary party must of necessity base itself on the youth. It can even be said that the revolutionary character of a party can be judged in the first instance by its capacity to attract to its banner the working class youth. The basic attribute of socialist youth – and I have in mind the genuine youth and not old men of twenty – lies in its readiness to give itself fully and completely to the cause of socialism. Without heroic self-sacrifice, courage, resoluteness, history in general does not move forward.

But self-sacrifice alone is not enough. What is necessary is to have a clear understanding of the unfolding course of development and the appropriate methods of action. This can be gained only through theory and through living experience. The most flaming enthusiasm soon cools off and evaporates if it does not find timely support in a clear understanding of the laws of historic development. How often have we not observed how young enthusiasts, having bumped their heads, become wise opportunists, how disappointed ultra-leftists turn in very short time into conservative bureaucrats, just as an outlaw settles down and becomes transformed into an excellent gendarme. To acquire knowledge and experience and at the same time not to dissipate the fighting spirit, revolutionary self-sacrifice, and readiness to go to the very end – that is the task of education and self-education of revolutionary youth.

Revolutionary irreconcilability is a precious quality once it is directed against opportunist adaptation to the bourgeoisie and against the theoretical flabbiness and fainthearted hesitation of all sorts of office and parlor Communists and Socialists of the type of Browder, Norman Thomas, Lovestone, and the like. But "irreconcilability" turns into its opposite when it merely serves the sectarians and confusionists as a platonic consolation for their inability to link themselves up with the masses.

Fealty to the ideological banner is the indispensable and fundamental quality of the genuine revolutionist. But woe to him who turns this "fealty" into doctrinaire stubbornness, into repetition of ready-made, once-and-for-all learned formulas, without the capacity to give heed to life and respond to its needs. Genuine Marxist policy means carrying the ideas of the proletarian revolution to ever wider masses, through ever changing and ever new and frequently unexpected combinations of historic conditions.

The main enemy within the ranks of the proletariat remains, of course, opportunism, especially its most vicious and malignant form – Stalinism, that syphilis of the working class movement. But for a successful struggle against opportunism it is essential that we do away with the vices of sectarianism and pedantic phrase-mongering in our own ranks. The history of the Fourth International, including the section in the United States, has afforded us not a few lessons on this score; we must understand and apply them. The ancient Greeks used to parade drunken helots in order to turn their youth away from alcoholism. All the Oehlers, Fields, Vereeckens, and Company are the helots of sectarianism who fashion their grimaces and leaps as if with the special aim of repelling our youth from sterile and annoying sectarianism.

It remains to be hoped that the next conference of the League will become an important stage on the road of acquiring political experience on the granite basis of Marxist program. Only with this condition will the fate of the great historic movement of which the youth League is one of the advance sections be assured.

Leon Trotsky