Vol. 78/No. 4 February 3, 2014
Below is an excerpt from Writings of Leon Trotsky (1929), one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for January. It contains articles, interviews, and letters written after Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union and arrival in Turkey in February 1929. A central leader of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky formed the Left Opposition in 1923 to fight for the revolution’s internationalist course, championed by V. I. Lenin, against the counterrevolutionary privileged social layer headed by Josef Stalin. The excerpt is from an August 1929 open letter to the editorial board of the French opposition newspaper La Verité, which publicized the situation inside the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Copyright © 1975 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
Dear Comrades:
You are about to publish a weekly newspaper based on the principles of the Communist Left Opposition. …
Those ideas which you represent — the ideas of Marxism, enriched by the practice of Lenin’s party and the entire postwar revolutionary struggle of the international proletariat — will cut a path for themselves. There can be no doubt of this. All that is necessary is that these ideas be intimately tied to the facts of life, geared to actual events, and fructified by the living experience of the masses. Your weekly will serve this end.
Thereby it will become an irreplaceable instrument for elaborating the platform of the French Opposition — a platform that is correct in principle and viable. Only pedants are capable of thinking that a platform can be hatched in an office and then proclaimed as a ready-made premise for political activity. No, a fighting program can only set down and generalize the political experience that has already been gone through, and in this way create conditions for broader and more successful experiences in the future.
Marx once remarked that a single actual step of the movement is more important than a dozen programs. Marx had in mind programs which are created outside the actual struggle, primarily for the consolation of their creators. Marx’s words, alas, apply most directly to the present position of the French Communist Opposition. Wherein lies its weakness? In this, that it has not waged a political struggle, or, in those cases where this was undertaken, it was done only episodically. This inevitably leads to the formation and preservation of shut-in self-sufficient circles, which, as everyone knows, never pass the test of events. A continuation of this condition threatens to cruelly compromise the French Opposition and for a long time to bar its road to the future. A concentration of all the forces of the Left Opposition faction is indispensable. Your La Verité must become the organ for such a concentration. …
A moment now approaches clearly favorable for the recruitment of revolutionary workers under the banner of Marx and Lenin.
Rejecting the circle spirit, with its petty interests and ambitions, La Verité must unite around itself all the virile, healthy, and genuinely revolutionary elements of the Communist Left Opposition. The vanguard of the workers needs this today as urgently as it needs its daily bread.
The attitude of the revolutionary press toward its readers is the most important test of a political line. The reformists deliberately lie to their readers in order to preserve the bourgeois system. The centrists employ lies to cloak their vacillations, their uncertainty, their capitulation, and their adventures. They do not trust themselves and therefore do not trust their readers. They are of the opinion that the worker can be led only if he is blindfolded and pulled by the hand. Such is the spirit of the official press of the Comintern nowadays. It has no faith in the workers. It exercises guardianship over them, as if they were little children. When they ask awkward questions, it sternly shakes its finger at them. Precisely this engenders apathy in the ranks of the party and the growing vacuum around it.
The mass of workers does not consist of infants! It consists of people with the harsh experience of life. It does not tolerate nursemaids, whose strictness is as a rule directly proportional to their stupidity. The worker seeks, not commands, but assistance in political orientation. For this it is first of all necessary to tell him what is. Not to distort, not to tendentiously select, not to embellish, not to sugarcoat, but honestly to say what is. The politics of communism can only gain from a truthful clarification of reality. Untruth is needed for salvaging false reputations, but not for the education of the masses. The workers need the truth as an instrument of revolutionary action.
Your paper bears the name La Verité. This name, like all others, has been amply abused. Nevertheless it is a good and honorable name. The truth is always revolutionary. To lay bare the truth of their position before the oppressed is to lead them to the highroad of revolution. To tell the truth about the rulers is to undermine the foundations of their rule. To tell the truth about the reformist bureaucracy is to condemn it in the consciousness of the masses. To tell the truth about the centrists is to help the workers assure a correct leadership of the Communist International. This is the task of your weekly. All forms and manifestations of the labor movement must be conscientiously illumined. An attentive reader must become convinced that if he wants to learn the genuine facts of the proletarian struggle in France and in the whole world he must seek them in La Verité. He will in this way adopt our standpoint, for it will loom before him in the light of facts and statistics. Only the tendency which, together with the workers and at their head, seeks a correct orientation can create for itself conscious and devoted partisans who do not know disillusionment and demoralization.
Dear friends! I am with you with all my heart. I joyfully accept your proposal for collaboration. I will do everything in my power to make this collaboration regular and systematic. I will try to supply articles for each issue on the situation in Russia, on events in world life, and on the problems of the international labor movement.
Warmly wishing you success,
L. Trotsky