Leon Trotsky

Letters to Belgium

A Collection of Trotsky’s writings on Belgium
(1929-1938)

Written: Between 1929 and 1938
Publisher: The following introduction was published with Trotsky’s letters on Belgium in Revolutionary History, Vol.7 No.1. For the full list of articles in this journal see the past issues in www.revolutionary-history.co.uk.
Translated: Ted Crawford.
Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive, 2002.
Transcribed: Ted Crawford.
HTML Markup: David Walters.
eBook format: Kollektiv Yakov Perelman, from the version available at Trotsky Internet Archive in December 2014.

Introduction

The pieces translated and assembled here were selected from the large number of letters on Belgian affairs published in the French Oeuvres (first series, vol.3, pp.58-62; vol.8, pp.40-3, 192-8; vol.9, pp.66-9, 126-8; vol.10, pp.56-9; vol.15, pp.332-3; and vol.18, pp.271-2, Paris 1978-84, and second series, vol.3, pp.196-7, Paris 1989) and the Cahiers Leon Trotsky (no.16, December 1983, pp.102-3; no.20, December 1984, pp.102-3), but which were unavailable for inclusion in the English series of the Writings of Leon Trotsky at the time of its compilation. Our principle of selection has been based on how far they touch upon broad political ideas and Marxist analysis in general, and how far they shed light upon the narrative historical material we have printed in this issue.

To form a complete picture of Trotsky’s dealings with the Belgian movement, it is obviously also necessary to consult those letters and articles already in print in English. These include The Sino-Soviet Conflict and the Position of the Belgian Oppositionists, 30 September 1929 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1929, New York 1975, pp.332-6); To the Executive Committee of the Belgian Opposition, 12 October 1930 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1930-31, New York 1973, pp.47-8); An Open Letter to Vandervelde, 5 December 1932 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932, New York 1973, pp.340-2); The Belgian Opposition and Its Newspaper, 20 December 1932 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932-33, New York 1972, pp.39-40); Doubts, Hesitations and Fears, Autumn 1933 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1933-34, New York 1975, pp.132-4); An Offer to Le Peuple, 9 January 1934, The “Belgian” Tradition in Discussion, 22 September 1934 We Should Join the Belgian Young Socialists, 19 November 1934; and After the Belgian Conference, 24 March 1935 (Writings of Leon Trotsky, Supplement 1934-40, New York 1979, pp.439, 527-30, 539-40, 570-1); Austria, Spain, Belgium and the Turn, 1 November 1934; and The Belgian Dispute and the De Man Plan, 2 March 1935 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1934-35, New York 1971, pp.10l-4, 210-8); To the Editors of Action Socialiste Revolutionnaire, 23 August 1935; An Answer to Comrades in Anvers (Antwerp), November 1935; Tactical Questions and Splits, 18 November 1935; Suggestions for the Belgian Section, 27 March 1936; and Echoes of a Belgian Witch-Hunt, 23 September 1935 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1935-36, New York 1977, pp.95-7, 190-6, 287-92, 432-3); Two Manifestations of the Same Tendency, 18 May 1937 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1936-37, New York 1978, p.290); A Test of Ideas and Individuals Through the Spanish Experience, 24 August 1937 (The Spanish Revolution, 1931-39, New York, 1973, pp.269-81); Once More on Comrades Sneevliet and Vereeken, 24 May 1938; and To the Congress of the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Belgium, 22 June 1938 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1937-38, New York 1976, pp.336-42, 367-9). Further correspondence and extracts from letters can be found in G. Vereeken, The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement, London 1976, especially on pp.104-5, 111-2, 270-2, 292-3 and 305-6.

1. First Contact with Belgium

2. The discussion with Hennaut

3. Conversation with Paul-Henri Spaak

4. Letter to Paul Henri Spaak

5. Against the Confusion of the Antwerp Comrades

6. Beware Opportunism!

7. Watch Dauge Carefully

8. About Manoeuvres

9. The Faults of the ASR

10. On Audacity

11. Belgian Perspectives

12. Workers and Theory

13. The Trade Union Question

Additional Articles

In addition to the articles listed above the following article concerning Belgium has been published elsewhere:

1. Revisionism and Planning

Leon Trotsky

The First Contact with Belgium [1]

(April 1929)

30 April 1929

My dear friend [2],

I have not written to you until now for I had been told by everyone that I was going to get a letter soon and I did not wish to write to you until I had received some information from you about the situation in Belgium and on your plans and perspectives. Alas up until today I have had nothing, perhaps for the simple reason that you have sent me nothing.

I get your journal [3] but I am not sure how regularly. I will check on the issues I have received to ask you to send me those missing. I have not yet been able to study Belgian affairs, or even French, even if I am surrounded by French comrades. I am forced and will be for some time still, to spend my time on books which I am publishing in three languages.

I want to publish in the first place things which I think are most important and not be forced to pursue individual polemics so I can refer to already published writings. After doing this job I will be freer to work on present politics. However, that does not stop me from being most interested in the daily events in the international Opposition. Alas, there is a certain isolation of the national sections, not only from the point of view of organisation but also from the point of view of ideas.

We are still retreating. In such a situation international links are more important than ever. Without them everyone risks shutting themselves away, losing themselves, doing their thing in their own national corner or in their particular group. It is the greatest danger that we can imagine and from which only a new mass wave can ultimately preserve us.

As far as I know you are going to take part in the elections, independently, and are putting up candidates against the Party. Some friends are very worried about that. For my part I do not see it as a question of principle. If we are very weak, that is to say if we are only a propaganda grouping, just a few individuals, and wish to make an impression on the masses in the elections, we may easily get the opposite result, that is alienate the masses and even provoke disgust at a pretentious but powerless little group.

In similar situations it is always better and even essential to support the official Party candidates while making our detailed criticisms and our recommendations for Parliamentary and local government activity in order to remind the electors of our recommendations at the appropriate time.

But if we are strong enough we must stand candidates independently and successfully. It would be doctrinaire abstentionism not to do so. During the struggle we must throw the responsibility for splitting on the official leadership.

We can and must, even on the floor of Parliament, propose Communist unity on the basis of Marx and Lenin. So the fact that you are going to stand independent candidates in the election is for me a sign that you feel yourself to be strong enough in comparison with the official Communist party.

Notes

1. Letter to W. van Overstraeten dictated in French (10708) Houghton Library)

2. W. van Overstraeten (1891-1981) had been for some years General Secretary of the Belgium CP from which, with the majority of the central committee, he was expelled for supporting the Russian Opposition

3. The paper of the Belgian opposition was Le Communiste.

Leon Trotsky

The Discussion with Hennaut [1]

(November 1933)

16 November 1933

Dear comrades,

It is with great interest that I have just read No.10 of your internal bulletin which confirmed the reports of the negotiations with the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes. [2] I rejoice at the accuracy with which our comrades have posed the question. Moreover the words of comrade Hennaut [3] have made the most painful impression. As he now is, he at least constitutes a complete model of political and theoretical confusion. There is not a single question, whatever it is, to which he contributes anything at all except doubts, hesitations and fears. That is fatal for someone who wants to be a revolutionary!

The first four Congresses of the Comintern! But there must have been something wrong with them because their consequences were so awful. What exactly did not work? Hennaut does not know. In fact the fault is totally his own. He thinks that the fate of the Comintern was decided, not by the struggle of living social forces but by some original “mistake” that must be found – just like in mathematics. Why not go further and say, “Three Internationals were born from the teachings of Marx and all three were born to fail – we must discover Marx’s ‘fundamental error.’” One can even go further and say that despite science people continue to suffer and endure calamities – it is clear that there is some “fundamental error” in science. The question is posed not in a historical and dialectical way but in a dogmatic fashion, in the spirit of the Catholic Church which explains all the ills of humanity by Original Sin. The theory of Souvarine [4] about the CI is also a theory of original sin. And Hennaut alas has become a disciple of Souvarine and his sterile scholasticism.

According to this same Hennaut – that is to say according to Souvarine – our political line in Germany was wrong from beginning to end. You have to be very impertinent to make such an claim. But where lies our error? Not in our analysis, in our forecasts or in our instructions but when we called upon Communist workers to put pressure on their party and to get it on the right political road. Instead of that we should have said to the workers, “Don’t waste your energy, it is not important, the Comintern is finished.” At the same time Hennaut thinks that the time was not ripe for the foundation of a new International. What practical proposition should we make to the German workers: to reject the old International without building a new one? Alright: we can go to sleep. These pedants cut off from reality see our error as this, that we have not discouraged the workers but done our best to to help them find a way out. Every leader of a strike would do the same. If not there is no leader but a capitulator unworthy of confidence. Hennaut says that the way to re-establish oneself is to start a “discussion” with Souvarine, the Bordhigists [5], Urbahns and other hopeless groups. As if this discussion had not been gone through already, as if it had not been put to the test of events and as if a round table in a “conference”, already clarified in a long theoretical discussion, could add anything to a political experience that is now quite clear.

We must see, says Hennaut, that there is “something” correct about Souvarine and the other “Communist” groups and groupings. He himself cannot decide to say clearly what precisely it is he has found there. But all our daily work consists of looking for a precise answer to every question. We have developed our methods; we have our answers; we have our criticisms of other points of view. Hennaut does not give his approval to this enormous collective work, he leaves on one side all that we have done and proposes to devote himself to “researches” and “discussions” exactly as if we had just been born. A sterile position, completely impregnated with the spirit of Souvarineism!

It is particularly naïve to say that our participation in the Paris conference where we were “seated at the same table” as the Pupists [6] and others represented an “opportunist error”. So for Hennaut what unites is not Marxist principles but ... a table! He says not a word on the content of our statement and our resolution which had four signatures. He forgets, or perhaps he cannot understand that we have kept total freedom of action and criticism vis-à-vis our allies. The fact the that OSP and the SAP voted for the Resolution of the seven [7] without any reservation and hence in a totally erroneous way showed without any possible doubt that our allies lacked the necessary clarity of Marxists. But have not we been the first to proclaim their error in our press? But working together and by criticism we can help our allies to reach the necessary clarity.

The arguments of Hennaut against the struggle for the IV International are not less false and isolated from life than his other reasons. “For the creation of the III International” he says “there had to be a war and the Russian revolution.” Numerous are those who repeat this formula without reflection or qualification. The war did not make easier but on the contrary made the work of revolution enormously more difficult, above all on an international level. That is why all the sceptics like Hennaut considered the slogan for the III International “inopportune” and even “absurd” during the war. Now to some extent Fascism plats the role that the war played in 1914-18 and particularly as it prepares for a new war. But, says Hennaut to us, to create the III International there had to be a Russian Revolution! What a remarkable discovery! But did the Russian Revolution fall out of the sky? For the October victory of the proletariat a Bolshevik party was needed penetrated not by the spirit of Stalin-Kamenev [8] (March 1917) but the spirit of Lenin. In other words Lenin, even at the start of the war in very difficult and unfavourable conditions, had to begin a struggle for the III International without taking any notice of the sceptics and those who hinder and muddle everything. The creation of the III International did not take place at its first Congress in 1919 – that was a simple formality – but in the preliminary process of preparation under the colours of the III International. The deductions for our immediate tasks flow immediately from this historical analogy.

I have not the slightest intention in the world of this letter interfering in your negotiations. If Hennaut’s group, or a part of his group, joins our section I will only rejoice. But Hennaut’s idea that the condition of future success is the reunion of all the oppositional bits and pieces of the III International is radically false. The bits and pieces must be carefully weighed and evaluated, not by the names that they give themselves and their pretensions but by their real political and theoretical content. Those who have something to say will not wait for a general conference at an undetermined date but will publish their ideas in the form of a programme, theses, articles and speeches. Those who call a conference in the future, a conference which must find “something” or discover “something” can only show that they have no ideas at all. I am sure that is as obvious to you as to me.

Notes

1. T3621. International Bulletin, ICL, no.12, November 1933. Letter to the leaders of the Belgian section signed by G. Gourov. It concerns an intervention in the negotiations for the reunification of the left Opposition groups in Belgium. In 1930, the Charleroi Federation, led by Leon Lesoil (1892-1942) – 35 militants – broke with the Opposition majority who were abandoning its policy of “reform”. While the old General Secretary of the Belgian CP W. van Overstraeten (1891-1981) withdrew, the rest of the organisation broke into two groups, that of Antwerp led by Leon de Lee (1900-1942) allied to the RSP of Sneevliet and the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes led by Hennaut (See note below) who was under the influence of Ottorino Perrone alias Vercesi (1897-1957), an active Italian Bordighist refugee in Brussels. The turn of the Opposition in 1933, the adhesion of the RSP and the entry of Sneevliet to the IS opened the possibility of a reunification in Belgium and the internal bulletin of the Belgian section understood the first initiatives in this sense.

2. The Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes found itself outside the international Left Opposition after its break with the Charleroi Federation which had been supported by the latter.

3. Adhemar Hennault (1899-1977) a housepainter and active trade unionist had joined the Belgian CP as a founding member and in 1923 had been the temporary General Secretary. Expelled in 1928 as a “Trotskyist” for having, with the majority of the CC, protested against the repression against Trotsky and the Russian Bolshevik Leninists he was first the administrative secretary of the Left Opposition and then the General Secretary of the ICL.

4. Boris Lifschitz (alias Souvarine – b.1893) a Russian émigré in France had, in the Socialist Party, been one of the first representatives of the left wing supporting the Communist International and was later a delegate of the CP in Moscow. Expelled in 1924 for supporting Trotsky he had been his ally until 1929 and during this period was at the centre of a “Democratic Communist circle”

5. The “Bordigists” were members of the Italian Left Fraction who were inspired by the founder of the PCI Amadeo Bordiga (1899-1970) expelled in 1930 who thought the line of the united workers front and the 3rd Congress of the CI “opportunist”. Hugo Urbahns (1890-1946) had been one of the leaders of the KPD and its “left”. Expelled in 1926 he had been one of the founders of the Leninbund a German version of the Unified Opposition which over time broke up. It described the USSR as “state capitalist”. In 1932 the Belgian LCI called for a broad regroupment of the left oppositionists and entered into relations with the German group of the Austrian Landau, the French Communist Left and what remained of the Leninbund.

6.The “Pupists were members of the Party of Proletarian Unity (PUP) born out of CP right wing oppositions which had been expelled at various times. Its orientation was very opportunist and it tended towards Social Democracy.

7. In spite of a bitter discussion with the representatives of the Left Opposition at the Paris conference, the delegates of the SAP and the OSP had voted for the final general resolution equally with parties like the PUP and the Norwegian DNA who had adopted the resolution adopted by seven organisations in Brussels.

8. Lev B. Rosenfeld, alias Kamenev (1883-1936) an Old Bolshevik, had been, with Zinoviev, allied to Stalin against the Left Opposition and then one of the leaders of the United Opposition opposed to Stalin. Expelled in 1927 he had made a self-criticism and had re-entered the Party but he had been expelled again and had made a new self-criticism. In 1917 between the return from deportation of Kamenev and Stalin and the arrival of Lenin in April the leaders of the Party had adopted a conciliatory line towards the Mensheviks and the provisional Government, going so far as to accept the “National Defence” of Russia. It was this policy that Lenin had demolished in his April Theses.

Leon Trotsky

Conversation with Paul-Henri Spaak [1]

Letter to L. Lesoil (February 1934)

18 February 1934

Dear Friend,

I have had a long conversation from your cousin in Brussels and I want to give you a brief account of it.

I tried to explain to him the misunderstanding with the publication of my letter to you in Holland. He replied in a calm and frank manner that he did not at all contest the right to criticise him even publicly. This little explanation made a favourable impression on me. Basically it was the question of union activity which formed the most important part of the conversation. The union bureaucracy is the most formidable barricade of reaction. The Party opposition is condemned to powerlessness in as much as it cannot find, or to put it better, cannot create a solid base in the unions. Vandervelde says “If I had to choose between our unions and Spaak for example, I would have no difficulty.” So, the power of the union bureaucracy must be worn down. This means the start of “illegal” work because one can do nothing in the unions without clandestine activity, at least up to the point where one can become someone. The work must be carried out in such a way that the immediate and direct responsibility does not fall on the leaders of the political opposition. It seems that it is above all on this approach that an agreement could be established between our comrades and the Party Opposition. At all costs this ignoble, greedy and stupid bureaucracy which hangs on to its privileges while suspended over the abyss must be compromised.

My questioner was very interested in the question of the intermediate classes. On this point I explained to him the same ideas which are found in my letter to you and – on another level—on the theses against the war. I drew his attention to the fact that the plan contained no serious programme in favour of the petty bourgeoisie (peasants, artisans, small shopkeepers). Apart from the expropriation of landed property, the programme could and should declare that the working class has no intention of expropriating small artisans and small shopkeepers but, on the contrary, by the nationalisation of the banks it will lift the crushing burden of debt and that, in its plan for production and distribution it foresees giving to both small shopkeepers and artisans favourable credit, state purchases until the time when they themselves would find it more advantageous to join the nationalised economy. The absence of all these ideas and promises in the programme are explained by the fact that De Man and Co. only concern themselves with the parliamentary leaders of the petty bourgeoisie and not the deeper levels of the class.

I insisted a great deal on the necessity, not only of raising the slogan of the workers militia (for defensive purposes) also to try tirelessly to build it while at the same time studying the enemy forces, their dispersal, their possible plans etc. I believe that is the second area where there could be a close collaboration between our friends and the Socialist opposition.

So that is about the nub of our conversation. We agreed to go on corresponding. I should add that he spoke of our Belgian friends, above all Lesoil and Vereeken, with the greatest admiration.

I am sorry that I have not received La Voix Communiste for at least two months. There must have been some misunderstanding. Could you look into it?

Note

1. Letter in French (8864) from the Houghton Library.

Leon Trotsky

Letter to Paul-Henri Spaak

(April 1934)

14 April 1934

Dear comrade,

I got your letter rather late because unfortunately it had the wrong address. Perhaps my reply will arrive after the decision. Too bad, I hope all the same that the decision was the right one.

As elsewhere things are moving rapidly in Belgium. The working class has only got a few months for the first stage of its regroupment. You say the situation is difficult for the Action Socialiste group: the internal enemy makes horrible progress, the Workers Party is in decline and thus any new party will have a hard beginning. That is true but we do not choose our historical circumstances. The unequalled difficulties in which the working class now finds itself take a sharply concentrated form for the working class left wing but nevertheless this working class is the only key to salvation. To resolve any practical question we must start from general principles. The POB is in a bad way and it worsens from one week to another. Since the lessons of Germany and Austria have not been addressed, things have got even worse and the more the party declines the more it becomes and will become hostile towards the left. Each day lost by the left will be won by the right, that is to say by Fascism.

The union bureaucracy is most limited, reactionary and corrupt. That is precisely why it dominates the party as the contradictions sharpen and demand a clear response.

It is of course regrettable that the Lefts have not created organised strong points in the unions but nothing is lost; the questions posed at the present time are not those of parties and unions. These are questions which affect the fate of the entire working class. They include the workers party and the unions. That is why the union bureaucracies are terrified of being overwhelmed by the masses if the latter can find some leadership and it is precisely because of this that these corrupters and corrupted are afraid of you. They have to push you out, smash you and destroy you. Making concessions to them signifies a repetition on a smaller scale of Austro-Marxist politics towards Dollfuss. The reactionary bureaucracies will use your concessions to discredit you, to grab more concessions from you and to strangle you the day after tomorrow in conditions much more unfavourable for you than those today.

Do not give way. On the contrary, take the offensive. Explain to the working class vanguard that it is the worst capitalist reaction which uses union bureaucracies and “socialists” to strangle preventively all spirit of revolt and revolutionary dignity in the proletariat and thus to help the Fascist killers to do their job.

Without the least hesitation my most profound conviction tells me: do not concede an inch of ground. Naturally you will not take the formal initiative in a split, you will push the responsibility for it on the bureaucrats, but you will agitate with full freedom and steer your course by high political objectives and not the little legal ambushes of the bureaucracy. The left must be mobilised to help the Party without losing an instant, otherwise in a few months you will be under the steam-roller of fascism and then you will only be able to curse the oversights made and time wasted in the present phase.

Dear Comrade, Belgium and France are the last line of defence of the proletariat. If my opinion has the slightest influence on the decision to take I say to you “Do not give way! There is no second chance! Mobilise your supporters! Launch the offensive! Be pitiless to the cowardice and corruption which paralyse from on high the excellent and powerful Belgian working class! Your group can play an historic role, now or never”

Please excuse the tone of near pathos of these lines. The tone is naturally dictated by the gravity of the circumstances as well as by the absolute clarity with which the consequences of your attitude appear to my eyes.

My best greetings and wishes.

P.S. Your interview in Le Matin assures me that my letter is more or less superfluous. You must have taken the decision to fight to the end. I congratulate you.

Leon Trotsky

Against the Confusion of the Antwerp Comrades [1]

(January 1936)

4 January 1936

Dear comrades [2]

The last issue of the Spartacus (Belgium) [3] of 28 December 1935 makes the business of the Antwerp comrades [4] public and forces me to put the problem to you a formal manner.

The Antwerp comrades whom you know have indicated their unhappiness with our Belgian comrades attitude and with our international organisation to Vereeken [5] as they are entitled to do. But not content with using their right to criticise, they wanted to change things by “direct action”, that is to say, they wanted to belong simultaneously to the LCI and the rival Spartacus organisation. This type of democracy goes very well with intellectual anarchists but it has nothing to do with democratic centralism. In this situation comrade Polk [6] had no alternative but to break with the intellectual anarchists who do not respect either the rules or the decisions of the organisation. If not, how else can an organisation of revolutionaries be maintained? In Belgium things are evolving quite rapidly. The Lesoil-Dauge group will probably be expelled soon. [7] We may concede that they will come out much stronger than when they went in, which would show the correctness of entry. But that is not the problem. The expulsion can and must create conditions for a fusion with the Vereeken group, at least if Vereeken takes his responsibilities to the organisation seriously.

In this matter the Antwerp comrades are a problem because they [...] the normal relations between organisations and encourage Vereeken’s negative attempt. At the very moment that negotiations can be started for fusion, this must be stopped. We must know precisely where our organisation starts and the other ends. I have already pointed out that the impatient and the conciliatory anarchists stay outside a real fusion. Since I am involved in this unpleasant affair, I will give you a little example of the mood among the Antwerp comrades: in my first letter on the subject of their objections I justified the impossibility of an immediate collaboration in the following terms: “the Charleroi [8] group does not want to appear in the eyes of the left wing to be the agent of a group outside the party”. The Antwerp hard men tell us that they “have no stupid conditions” that I am “attributing” all this to them and so on etc. The phrase quoted above, with the word appears, excludes this interpretation. There would not then be a question of “allegations” in this context. But in their writings the Antwerp people allow themselves the sort of methods used between two rival organisations. They show that they feel closer to Vereeken’s group than to us. For it is he that they defend and we that they attack, disloyally, in their letter and through Vereeken in Spartacus

They explain to us that they had envisaged a “narrow and illegal organisational collaboration” between the Charleroi group and Spartacus. I would not want to be brutal, but I cannot help saying that any such conception of things is childish. Would a secret meeting between Vereeken and Lesoil be the only collaboration between the two organisations? If it is a question of illegal contacts at the top how can the Antwerp people know anything and control it? They do not belong [...] [9] Belgians. Perhaps such a thing has taken place without their knowledge. And if they demand to be informed of this illegal collaboration the same right must be guaranteed to each member of the two organisations. What is then left of yesterday’s great “secret”? In the eyes of the Dauge group it might look as if Lesoil is secretly plotting with Vereeken against them. And the ASR would collapse immediately. You must also consider the existence of middlemen who collect document after document and put down on paper all the secrets before they have seen the light of day.

The comparison with the relations between Lesoil and the IS is ridiculous. That fact that Lesoil writes once a month to old friends in Geneva [10] or a letter to me, that he can calmly show to any organisation that he wishes, is something else. It is something quite different to practise secret collaboration between two organisations in Belgium. In this case the absolute loyalty of everyone must be counted on. The attitude of the Antwerp people shows all by itself that such a thing would be dangerous.

These examples of childish lack of comprehension of the real difficulties are enough to make us say again: the comrades must be called to order.

Notes

1. Letter in German to the Ausland-Komitee (Foreign Committee) of the IKD. 7905 Harvard Library.

2. The letter is addressed to the leadership of the German section in exile as it concerns the attitude of the Antwerp comrades, in particular one of the exiled leaders, Fritz Besser alias Brink (1908-1977)

3. Entry in to the POB had been decided by a general meeting of the Belgian section on 10 March 1935. Those in the minority, more or less all the Brussels branch, decided to keep an independent organisation and after publishing four issues of the Voix Communiste in a period of two months started to publish a fortnightly Spartacus, subtitled Organ of the International Communist League (Trotskyist) in Belgium

4. The group of the Belgian section in Antwerp were strongly influenced by the Dutch party of Sneevliet which had been, like the Belgian minority, hostile to the policy of entrism in France and Belgian. A minority had supported the demand for unity between the “entrist” and “independent” groups. It had been expelled on the initiative of Polk. Spartacus had made this expulsion and the position of the minority public in an article A Reconciliation Which Is Not Without Danger about a reconciliation occurring between the ASR and the Liga as a result of the attacks on the two of them by the POB.

5. Georges Vereeken (1898-1978), taxi driver, central committee member of the Belgian CP, had been one of the pioneers of the Left Opposition in Belgian and until 1934 one of the principal leaders of the Belgian section (Brussels Federation) and member of the IS. He led the minority hostile to entrism in France and Belgium and had been the main leader of the LCI who put out Spartacus and had signed the Open Letter in August 1935

6. Lodewijk Polk (1902-1942) once a worker in the Bell Telephone company and then a diamond cutter in Antwerp was one of the leading workers in the Opposition then the Belgian League at Antwerp where he was active at this time , on behalf of the Belgian section in the POB and the Liga.

7. Leon Lesoil (1892-1942) mining technician, won to communism in Russia where he was serving as a soldier, had been one of the founders and first leaders of the Belgian CP and then the Left Opposition and the leader of the Worker’s federation of Charleroi. He had led the famous miners’ strike in this region in 1932 and then was the leader of the Belgian section after its split with the “Bruxellois” Van Overstraeten and Hennaut. He had been a supporter of entrism and had been the real leader of the group that was active in the POB and which had grouped round Action socialist revolutionnaire. Trotsky had a particularly high opinion of this real working class communist. Walter Dauge (1907-1944), an ex-student and then a radio announcer who was sacked, was a member of the national committee of the Jeunes Gardes socialistes and secretary of their federation in the Borinage and one of the young leaders of the Left in the POB. His attachment to proletarian anti-militarism and a trip to the USSR in 1935 had brought him closer to the Trotskyists in the POB. He became the standard bearer of the tendency which, in the summer of 1935, had regrouped around the weekly Action socialiste revolutionnaire. He was in league with the Trotskyists but had not totally won their confidence, that of Trotsky in particular.

8. The expression “Charleroi group” meant the entrist Belgian section, the Lesoil group.

9. Several illegible words.

10. “Geneva” is the code for the HQ of the International Secretariat and sometimes the IS itself.

Leon Trotsky

Beware Opportunism! [1]

(February 1936)

9 February 1936

Dear comrades,[2]

I took note of your discussions concerning the candidature of comrade Dauge from the minutes. [3] He said in his conclusion:

“The lists being drawn up, I will use forceful speech before the populace which will oppose them to the leadership. I must sign even if it means considering this commitment a scrap of paper.”

If this declaration can be taken at face value it would seem basically only a stratagem. Unfortunately it is difficult to take this declaration at face value. Why?

For the last few weeks the ASR has changed its attitude. Their paper has become uncertain, hesitant, even ambiguous. On the most important issues they always leave you guessing. This is a very worrying symptom.

“We must manoeuvre” repeats Dauge. He sounds as if he has made this a principle. We reply “We must have a revolutionary policy understood by the masses. Now and then we manoeuvre.”

Let us take a recent example. The attitude to Godefroid. A major lesson is to be drawn from this experience. On 9th Oct 1935 I wrote a letter to comrade Lesoil on Godefroid:

“The relationship between the Jeunes Gardes and the POB are treated in the style of a young centrist big wheel and not of a Marxist. We can be prudent and sober in expressing ourselves, but thought must never be falsified. Godefroid talks of an agreement with the adult party as the rule, and disagreements as an unfortunate exception (“an opportunist policy practised sometimes by the party.”) Sometimes! This is worse than Marceau Pivert. POB policy is the most miserable and reactionary in the whole Second International. Godefroid wants to adapt to this policy and not fight it. That is the reality ... I ask myself what influence do our friends have among the youth? It is a bad mistake to believe that it is enough to write a good article or give a good talk from time to time to ensure the influence of Marxism. We must build cells to influence. In case of war, Godefroid’s JGS will be smashed and scattered. There would only be little well trained and tempered groups left in a struggle not only against patriotism but also against the equivocal centrism of Godefroid.”

Comrade Dauge replied in a letter to Lesoil (17.10.35)

“On the matter of Godefroid my opinion is we must show great prudence. If Godefroid one day (!) risks (!) raising the problem of fractions inside the JGS movement he will find me supporting him energetically. However it is absolutely useless to declare war on him at a time when we ourselves lack militants. We must not overestimate our forces (?). They are very weak. We lack collaborators, speakers and organisers, in a word everything that a powerful movement must have. We are carrying out an often inhuman battle where the best could succumb. As a result it is absolutely useless(!) to alienate(!) the sympathies of certain comrades as long as they can be useful to us(?!!). Evidently if one day(!) Godefroid breaks publicly(!) with us, we must clearly separate from him. But in as much as he keeps his present position(?!) it is useless to start a war with him.”

Well now, some time afterwards Godefroid, as could have been foreseen, unleashed an attack on the ASR taking the youth and also the ASR by surprise. Now, Dauge says “Our present differences with the leadership of the JGS have caused us enormous damage.” The damage is that much greater because we have “manoeuvred” for too long, that is to say, closed our eyes to reality by seeking the line of least resistance and left the field clear for the dubious manoeuvres of Godefroid. We have lost much time. And time is the most precious factor in revolutionary politics.

So what then is the lesson to be learnt? A waiting attitude, passive adaptation and manoeuvring, all incomprehensible to workers, render the best service to our opponents. A revolutionary policy cannot but be offensive with regard to reformists and centrists.

3. In the sphere of pure manoeuvres, the machine is ten thousand times more powerful, cleverer and more experienced than your group. Your whole strength consists of your clarity of ideas and in your revolutionary attitude. In abandoning this supreme advantages for “manoeuvring” you are doomed to perdition.

4. The experience with Liebaers is perhaps rather less conclusive just now but never the less significant. Liebaers is only a petty bourgeois pacifist and rabid anti-marxist (the expulsion of Polk and others despite their conciliatory attitude needs no comment.) The ASR has taken up the defence of the Liga. Very well! But the ASR has gone further. Politically it is identified with the Liga! See what happens to “manoeuvring” in the domain of ideas and principles. In similar ways we can never win over our opponents but we can disorient our own supporters and lose our best friends.

5. In the last ASR we can find an ever so r-r-r-revolutionary formula in a headline by Caballero. [4] That appears to be a trifle but in my eyes it is a very worrying symptom. Caballero has many a time betrayed the Spanish proletariat and several months ago his attitude in court was unworthy of a revolutionary leader. He takes part now in a “Popular Front and signs a joint programme with Az‹na and his cronies. He tacks, he manoeuvres but—en passant—uses resounding formulas. What should our attitude be to him? Denounce his treacherous acts? No, not to use his lying formulas.

In the past there was already in these articles of comrade Dauge this inclination to find imaginary allies in the centrist camp (Zyromski [5], Marceau Pivert). My critical remark on this provoked quite a sharp reply from comrade Dauge. The whole question only interests me in as much as it is a political symptom. One cannot be a political friend of Liebknecht, of Rosa Luxemburg and of Lenin and at the same time of Zyromski and Caballero. How then to explain this interest in figures as equivocal as these? By a tendency to “tack” in the domain of ideas as well? A dangerous tendency!

6. Comrade Dauge insists a great deal on revolutionary defeatism: this is now a cheap formula. Zromski and the Menshevik Dan [6] are for “revolutionary defeatism” ... with certain conditions. The revolutionary attitude of Liebknecht was shown, not by his repetition of the formula of revolutionary defeatism (he never used these words) but by the fact that he knew how to stand up, one against a hundred and ten. Given the vague and colourless character of Action socialiste revolutionnaire in this last period, the insistence on the abstract formula of “revolutionary defeatism” produces a painful impression.

I could also blame comrade Fux who—if I mistake not—looks too much to Godefroid in seeking to influence the top people in the JGS instead of building cells at the base. Without the systematic education of young workers, without the regrouping of revolutionaries, that is to say systematic cell building, work in the reformist parties cannot get serious and long lasting results.

So comrades these are the reasons for which I cannot lightly accept the hypothesis of a simple stratagem. I do not suspect the sincerity of comrade Dauge at all. He really believes he is “manoeuvring”. But in these circumstances he is more likely to be manoeuvred by the apparatus. In this mutual manoeuvring, that apparatus is a hundred times better at it. It will seek to use him and to compromise him, to discard eventually like a squeezed lemon. That is the importance of this question which makes me use by no means diplomatic language. There are some situations where tacking would be a crime.

I would not want to say in practice what electoral terms and conditions to use. I am not sufficiently apprised on the technical questions. But the practical consequences follow logically for comrades better informed that me.

I would only want to add this: the fact that the bureaucracy wants to avoid a split before the elections shows that it has much to fear. Your electoral policy must be all the more decisive. It is not a matter of indifference to know who will take the initiative in a split. Just as the notion of the aggressor is not a matter of indifference in relationships between states. But in any case the question relates only to the form. The form can be a matter for compromise maybe! But no concessions on the essential!

Notes

1. Letter in French to the leaders of the Belgian Section, Harvard Library, 7810.

2. Trotsky is replying here to the Trotskyist leaders of the ASR which is a response to a statement signed by Fux.

3. The question debated by the leadership of the ASR was the possible candidature of the JGS leader, Walter Dauge, in the Borinage on a POB list and the problems which adhesion to a opportunist programme and policy inevitably raised for a revolutionary grouping.

4. Francisco Largo Caballero (1869-1946), originally a plasterer, had been one of the principal reformist leaders of the UGT and PSOE in the twenties, an opponent of the Communists, Councillor of State under Primo de Rivera, then Minister of Labour in the Republican Socialist government of Azana. Since 1933 he had become the spokesman of verbal extremism and had become the leader of the “left” of the Party. Action socialiste revolutionnaire of the 12 February 1936 carried a headline as follows: “It was by violence that the bourgeoisie seized the property of the nobility. It is by violence that the toiling masses will destroy the bourgeoisie.”

5. Jean Zyromski (1890-1975) once a driving force of the Bataille Socialiste, a leader of the SFIO federation of the Seine, in May 1935 rallied to the Stalinist position on the “anti-fascist” war. Allied to Pivert for a long time, he had just broken with him.

6. Fedor I. Gourvitch (1871-1947) alias Dan, doctor, Menshevik leader, expelled from the USSR in 1920, in 1935 had edited Theses on War with Zyromski and Otto Bauer who were very close to Stalinist positions.

Leon Trotsky

Watch Dauge Carefully [1]

(February 1936)

9 February 1936

Dear comrade Lesoil,

No need to say that I am absolutely on your side. [2] I say it clearly in my “official” reply to Fux’s letter. Here I would make in total discretion some supplementary remarks.

The declaration by Dauge that for him it is only a question of a “scrap of paper” [3] is very important. We must use it, discretely but soundly. Unhappily I am not sure that his “strategem” would only be aimed at the bureaucracy, perhaps also [it is] aimed at you. He is quite possible he is being undermined by Liebaers, the SAP etc. In any case he must not be permitted to take the youth by surprise. If the formula about the “scrap of paper” is a trap for you he must be caught in his own trap. That does not mean break with him prematurely but test him after the final publication of candidates and prepare all the comrades for the moment of this test: in case of a lapse on his part we must immediately launch an implacable campaign against him as a Spaak No.2. [4]

Perhaps all my suspicions are unjustified or at least exaggerated. I would be the first to rejoice. But we do not have the right to be confident at the expense of the working class. I have only made these comments to you. With your firmness and usual care you know how to make use of them.

Notes

1. Letter in French to L. Lesoil, Harvard Library 8878.

2. Among the leadership of the ASR, the old Trotskyist Leon Lesoil was worried by the arguments put forward by Dauge to justify him standing for the POB in the Parliamentary elections. In this confidential letter Trotsky entirely supports him.

3. Dauge had treated the agreement he had signed with the leadership of the POB as a “scrap of paper”. (Twenty years previously Britain had gone to war with Germany over “a scrap of paper” guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. – Notes by Eds of RH)

4. Paul-Henri Spaak (1899-1972) lawyer and MP had been for several years the leading figure in the Left Opposition of the POB and the editor of their paper, Action socialiste. In 1934 he had even corresponded with Trotsky. However after several weeks of secret negotiations he finally entered the national government of Paul van Zeeland on 25 March 1935 as Minister of Transport with the President of the POB and the leading man of the “Right” Emile Vandervelde.

Leon Trotsky

About Manoeuvres [1]

(March 1936)

16 March 1936

Dear comrade Dauge [2],

I naturally would not deny the use of this or that manoeuvre towards the class enemy, the reformists included. [3] But the policy of manoeuvring has rules which must be strictly observed.

the manoeuvre must be well understood in all its aspects, at least by the leadership (as a starting point).

The manoeuvre cannot use tricks which are apt to mislead friends without perhaps fooling enemies.

The limits of the manoeuvre must be defined, our own organisation must know what is happening and nothing significant must be undertaken on a purely individual basis.

I must say (because our correspondence would have no value without total frankness) that your explanation does not satisfy me on all these points.

It is clear that the bureaucracy is not going to exclude you purely and simply but will try to drive you into a corner. Questions will be put, you will be asked for details, and you will not be allowed to stay vague (which is already deplorable from a revolutionary point of view). Well, some comrade from the Borinage (I have read the minutes of the discussion) believes that you ... would be happy to make propaganda sharing the slogans of the POB programme. An attitude like that would be fatal. But if you envisage a clear, vigorous propaganda which constantly increases from day to day directed also against the policy of the leaders of the POB, and their ministers etc., then the manoeuvre could turn out as a positive result for the revolutionary party.

Yes, I did say that it was not a matter of “indifference” as to which side initiated the split. But this formulation “not indifferent” signified that this question was not decisive, that it was a procedural question which had to be subordinated to the political content of the struggle. Naturally we must cover ourselves as much as possible by a careful reading of the rulebook etc... But politically the only salvation is a ferocious offensive and an implacable denunciation of the complicity of the POB leaders in the imperialist plot and the complicity of Godefroid and company with the patriot leaders.

You talk of the possibility of having two MPs. [4] Jeune Garde, in publishing your photo, talked of two candidacies too. What does this really mean? To make a bloc between the ASR and the NC of Jeune Garde for the election of two deputies? Or only an attempt by Godefroid to provoke a split in the ASR? On this question the attitude of Action Socialiste Revolutionnaire is not clear. And I continue to consider Godefroid as the most ambiguous and dangerous element in the play of forces within the POB.

I know perfectly well that your forces are modest. [5] But the revolutionary fraction only strengthens itself by clarity. Godefroid for example explains his adaptation to the social patriots by the need to reinforce the organisation. If the ASR starts, for the same reason, to adapt to Godefroid, the only one who will come out of this strengthened will be Belgian capitalism.

To manoeuvre with audacity we must be strong. When we are weak the manoeuvre can turn back on its initiator. The best revolutionary “modesty” is clarity.

I agree with you that it is not recommended to imitate the frog which wanted to blow itself up as big as the ox. But imagine, my dear Dauge, that a frog by clever manoeuvres tried to defeat an ox or even a whole troop of oxen. That would not be “modesty” at all.

On the Liga your explanation does not seem satisfactory to me. [6] To defend the Liga was an elementary duty. But there was a no less important duty: to differentiate ourselves from the confused views of the Liga. In defending the threatened Liga we were obliged at the same time to explain to the readers the irreconcilable antagonism between the pacifism of Liebaers [7] and the Marxism of the ASR. That is the method used by Marx and Lenin. It is still valid.

The same thing goes for Caballero. [8] You says you have taken him as an authority on “a pure tactic”. Do you believe that the Belgian workers will be able to understand such a tactic? I doubt it. They must say to themselves: this Caballero must be a very good lad if we are given him as an example. Thus you will disorient your own readers. At the same time in this manner you will not help your opinions against the Stalinists since they will reply to you: “But we say the same thing as Caballero and we are doing the same as him, that is the Popular Front.” In this way you will be taken in your own trap. You must never play hide and seek with ideas and principles.

The revolutionary defeatism of the ASR is often too abstract since it is reduced to the repetition of general formulas. Today in Belgium revolutionary defeatism consists above all in the duty to denounce the pacifism of Liebaers and capitulationist centrism of Godefroid. Without that the best intentions and the best articles will only serve to prepare the triumph of the social patriots like Godefroid and Liebaers over the ASR.

It is not necessary to say, my dear Dauge, that I would be very happy to continue this mutual discussion.

Notes

1. Letter in French to Dauge, Houghton Library Harvard (7665).

2. Trotsky here replies to a letter from Dauge dated 11 March, Houghton Library Harvard (739), which in turn replies to his letter 9th February.

3. Dauge justified the necessity for manoeuvre and claimed in particular to have embarrassed the right of the party by presenting himself at the “poll”, the primary election, against the advice of his comrades. He explained that his policy, far from being opportunism as Trotsky believed, was an “intelligent tactic”.

4. Not only did Dauge count on two being elected (Lesoil and himself) but he specified that, if he had followed the view of Lesoil and Charleroi, the situation would have resulted in catastrophe for nothing was possible without being elected. “We would not have had a single one elected. In such a case we would be rapidly liquidated and the movement of the ASR would have been covered with ridicule.” (Harvard)

5. Dauge had written in a tone which was usual for him “We are only a handful and with our present cadres that we cannot do anything important. That is an elementary truth that you must understand, comrade Trotsky”

6. Trotsky attacked Dauge and the journal of his tendency for identifying with the positions of the Flemish “Liga” (Die Internationale socialistische Anti-Oorlogsliga) a pacifist organisation persecuted by the POB instead of merely defending it.

7. Franz Liebaers (1895-1957) tailor, secretary of the Liga from 1932 and its spokesman.

8. The Action Socialiste revolutionnaire of 12 Feb. 1936 carried as headline a statement by the leading Spanish Socialist Largo Caballero : “It was by violence that the bourgeoisie seized the property of the nobility. It is by violence that the toiling masses will destroy the bourgeoisie.” Trotsky had bitterly attacked this headline to his comrades in his letter of 9th Feb. Caballero (1869-1946) had by 1933 made a swift turn to the Left.

Leon Trotsky

The Faults of the ASR [1]

(March 1936)

29 March 1936

Dear comrade Fux

I have not had a reply from you to my last (letter). But I wish to write once more to salve my conscience.

I have the feeling that you would be able to have important successes but that a great danger menaces you, the same which has compromised the gains of our comrades in France.

Your stumbling block is called Godefroid, while in France it is called Marceau Pivert. The attitude of Action socialiste revolutionnaire vis-à-vis Godefroid seems to me to be altogether false and extremely dangerous. You strengthen him against yourself.

What is the present role of Godefroid? To show to discontented workers, above all the youth that they can be “revolutionary” and at the same time on good terms with the apparatus or at least so manage things that they are not expelled. But that is essentially a treacherous function. Each “revolutionary” formula of Godefroid serves only to mislead confused revolutionaries and to break them from the ASR.

What should be your attitude in this situation? To denounce the hollow rhetoric of Godefroid, to contrast his verbal radicalism to his servility to the apparatus and his active hostility against the Bolshevik-Leninists. In my opinion you should devote a page in each issue of the ASR to this criticism of La Jeune Garde and also the Liga. Instead of which you keep totally silent on La Jeune Garde, this dubious and equivocal organ which only serves to chloroform the youth. At the same time you seize every opportunity to show your solidarity with Godefroid. Instead of fighting him you try to instil in him revolutionary ideas. Your article on the Hubin-Godefroid incident is wholly characteristic of this attitude of adaptation and caution. [2] Godefroid had attacked Hubin for covereing up Vandervelde, to give workers the idea that Vandervelde was altogther different from Hubin. And when even Godefroid criticised Vandervelde he carried out the same mission. He wished to show workers that Vandervelde could be “criticised” (but really to tell only one tenth or one hundredth of the truth) and at the same time not to be expelled like these clumsy sectarian “Trotskyoids”. That is the mission of Godefroid. Instead of explaining the real significance of his “conflict” with Hubin you embrace this treacherous adversary: “Yes, comrade Godefroid, as you have written in Le Peuple, we must continue the revolutionary struggle even if the threat of expulsion is posed”. But he makes this threat against you.

At the point of your expulsion which is coming your sympathisers are going to say: since Fux himself considers Godefroid as a revolutionary and, since Godefroid knows how to get out of trouble with the apparatus, better stay with Godefroid than go out with Fux.

It is Vandervelde who is going to expel you but it is Godefroid who is going to isolate you. You have already lost a lot of time. Through your policy you are weaker at Charleroi and if this policy continues you will leave the party as small a handful as you entered it.

The offensive against Godefroid is now much more important than against Vandervelde. You can argue with him in a calm and reasoned way. But the reader has to feel that there is a great gulf between you and Godefroid and that it is not by chance that Godefroid hems you in, hunts you down and prepares to expel you.

What a wretched journal is this Jeune Garde where the young bureaucrats imitate the old monkeys, mutually advertise each other, speak only about themselves, treating the most important questions lightly and finish the analysis of a problem where it in fact only starts. The revolutionary phraseology makes this poison even more dangerous.

The Action socialiste revolutionnaire is such that it does not correspond to the present situation any more. The paper loses itself in generalities and repetitions. It buries its head in the sand on the most burning questions (La Jeune Garde, Godefroid, Liebaers etc.)

I implore to discuss this question very seriously since it concerns the life and death of your tendency.

P.S. A serious polemic between the ASR and Godefroid could postpone your expulsion from the party. In similar cases the bureaucracy says to itself “Better leave them a bit to batter one another and weaken both”. This calculation on the part of the bureaucracy is false since it is the revolutionaries who win a new delay to the detriment of the centrists (if the revolutionaries behave as revolutionaries!) In short, the bureaucracy would notice its mistake and expel you anyway but in much more favourable conditions for you. Naturally this is about a hypothetical eventuality. But it is not without importance. In sum: if Godefroid chooses Hubin as a target in order to save Vandervelde you must take Godefroid as a target to better undermine Vandervelde.

Notes

1. Letter to Fux. Houghton Library Harvard (8224). Original in French

2. In Action socialiste revolutionnaire of 21 March Fux had recounted this incident as if Hubin had been on one side of the barricades and Godefroid on the other with the ASR.

Leon Trotsky

On Audacity[1]

(March 1936)

30 March 1936

Dear comrade Dauge,

I have just got Action Socialiste Revolutionnaire of the 28 March with the sharp reply to the threats of Plumat. [2] That is to say the POB. The situation is becoming clearer – not only for the ASR but also for Godefroid. He cannot slip away. He must take a position.

I am sure that in every European country as in America and elsewhere there are numerous groups of friends who directly or indirectly follow your struggle and who will be proud of the courageous attitude of the ASR.

If prudence was needed until yesterday, today the overriding rule is the advice of Danton [3], who called for “de l’audace, encore de l’audace et toujours de l’audace” (audacity, more audacity and always audacity).

Notes

1. Letter to Dauge. Houghton Library Harvard (7667). Original in French

2. A Belgian weekly gives an account, from Dauge’s pen, of a meeting of the Federal Committee of the Borinage in the course of which the secretary of the federation, Plumat, had violently attacked Dauge’s candidature saying that it was incompatible with his role running the Action Socialiste Revolutionnaire. Dauge replied with great vigour that he would envisage subscribing to a party programme which had been democratically discussed and decided on but this was evidently not the case.

3. Georges Danton (1759-1794) had made his historic speech to the legislative assembly, 2 September 1792, on “the country in danger” and the necessity for audacity.

Leon Trotsky

Belgian Perspectives [1]

(June 1936)

6 June 1936

Dear comrade Fux [2],

I have had too little time to analyse the draft programme before the 16th. [3] The general idea in the text is undoubtedly right. As to the formulations there are some good ones and some less good and there are yet others that I would disagree with or are inaccurate.

A general remark: the text is too long. It contains arguments, historical examples etc. Well now, the programme must only contain our most basic ideas and objectives without trying to “demonstrate” them or prove them etc. This task falls entirely on our commentators, our press, our speakers and above all the living experience of the working class itself. The text of the programme must be as concise as possible and each thesis, each phrase and even each word must be unquestionable.

The programme must be able to last. Purely conjunctural considerations and questions must be dealt with in special theses (for example on the question of the USSR.) The programme must only deal with the most categorical things in the USSR, that is what is unquestionable from the theoretical point of view and imperative from our political point of view.

The elaboration of the programme is an extremely important work and demands the critical attention of all our comrades who can contribute something to this task. The first Bolshevik programme (1903) took months and months to elaborate with a vigorous discussion with Lenin, Plekhanov, Zasulich, Axelrod and Riazanov [4] without mentioning the less important people. The elaboration of the second programme (1919) took many months as well. In spite of the civil war numerous comrades took part in elaborating it. The Platform of the B-L Opposition (1927) was elaborated by at least 200 comrades over many months in committees and special sub-committees with a most careful editorship of each part and each paragraph.

What then is my conclusion? Do not start any work too hastily. Your national meeting should ask a leading committee to create a special body and to give them the text and other texts that may emerge or amendments, if there are any, for the discussion which should not be national but international. The part of your draft I have before me, is not really “Belgian”, that is to say national. It is, I suppose, the second part which has a more than national character. For the first, the general part, we have need of an acceptable text for every organisation which puts itself under the banner of the 4th International. Precisely because of this we are starting to work on a model text. The Belgian comrades could and should take part in this in the most active manner. But all this assumes that we postpone a definite acceptance of the programme.

Here is a suggestion for the “calendar” of joint work.

To send your text (perhaps edited and shortened) to every section of the 4th International by the end of June, with an invitation to join in the work.

We will have created, I hope, by the same date an international committee with the same objective.

For the international discussion we devote almost two months (July-August).

The month of September should be devoted to the final editing and the agreement by the respective bodies.

In that case we could have the programme by the month of October.

All that cannot prevent you elaborating the necessary texts immediately. Similar platforms, theses etc. can be reshaped, completed, and replaced at every change in the situation. As for the programme that is something else. It has to last for a whole historical epoch.

It is absolutely necessary to see the development of the new party in its historical context with its data, its quotations and its exact figures for all the organisations of the 4th.

Since Vereeken has stated publicly that you have lost your influence in Charleroi, you must be clear on this point. What are the relative forces of the ASR and Spartacus?

As for your disappointment as regards the elections, I do not share it. [5] I find the result rather encouraging given the situation and above all the preceding policy. Again almost immediately before the elections the ASR had repeated “We agree with Godefroid and his friends”. [6] During this time Godefroid expelled the so-called “Trotskyists”. At the time of the elections, using the authority which you had left him untouched, he declared, “Vote for the party and not for the ASR splitters!” What elements of terrible confusion! We must really admire several thousand workers in the Borinage and Charleroi who are so well oriented in spite of the major failures of the leadership. Now too it is Godefroid – and Liebaers [7] in Flanders – who are your most immediate and dangerous adversaries. They bar the route to the most important and decisive struggles. They must be pitilessly unmasked in all their mischievous emptiness. It is not enough to treat Godefroid as a “centrist”. There are centrists and centrists. There are those who are developing in a Marxist direction, there are centrists who are marking time; and there are centrists who are traitors. Godefroid belongs to the last category. This is a young bureaucrat on the make, empty, clever, ignorant and without scruples. Each of his articles gives an accurate picture of him. He has succeeded (thanks to the indulgence of our Belgian friends) in misleading the “Latin sections” [8] and has created a new international grouping. He must be pitilessly unmasked before the French, Spanish, American etc. youth. We must have a special report on the role of Godefroid for all the youth organisations. That would be a very useful piece of work comrade Fux.

Notes

1. Letter to Fux, Houghton Library Harvard (8225). Original in French.

2. Georges Fux (b.1911), Young Communist militant, went over to the Left Opposition in 1932, became the leader of the Leninist Youth in Charleroi before joining the Jeunes Gardes Socialistes in 1934.

3. The joint conference of the Action socialiste revolutionnaire, a tendency run by Trotskyists which had just been expelled from the POB, and the LCI which gathered together the Trotskyists who had refused to enter in 1935 and who produced Spartacus, had taken place in mid June and Fux had sent Trotsky the draft programme proposing union of the two organisations into a new party.

4. Georgi V. Plekhanov (1857-1918), a former populist, had introduced Marxism into the Russian working class movement and collaborated with Lenin within the RSDLP before 1903 and again just before 1914: Iouli O. Tserderbaum called Martov (1873-1923), a companion of Lenin before 1903 in the Emanipnation at Work group, then on Iskra, became one of the leaders of the Mensheviks; during the war he was an internationalist, he emigrated in 1920. Pavel B. Axelrod (1850-1928) an émigré at first followed Bakunin, became a Marxist and worked on Iskra before 1903, he then became a Menshevik and died an émigré. Vera Zasulich (1851-1919), a populist famous for her participation in individual terrorism, eventually rallied to Marxism, worked with Iskra and later joined the Mensheviks.

5. At the election the two ASR candidates lost, Leon Lesoil by a big margin at Charleroi and Walter Dauge by very little at Mons. The disappointment was great at least among those for whom Dauge was a political guide: the young leader of the ASR was actually not far from thinking that his election was a condition for the pursuit of the struggle to construct a revolutionary party.

6. On Godefroid, Trotsky thought that this leader of the Belgian JGS was a very dangerous centrist and warned his comrades that they must distinguish themselves from him and attack him which both Dauge and Fux refused to do.

7. Franz Liebaers (1895-1958) a leader of garment workers, from 1932 was general secretary of the Anti-Oorlogsliga, the Flemish “Liga” against war which symbolised, in Trotsky’s eyes, “pacifist centrism”. Trotsky had warned his Belgian comrades and notably Fux against Godefroid and Liebaers, whom, like Pivert in France, he held to be obstacles on the route to a new party.

8. The Belgian JGS and the Spanish JSU had just taken the initiative in a conference of youth organisations which constituted a tightening of pressure by the Cominterm on the young socialists.

Leon Trotsky

Workers and Theory [1]

(November 1937)

30 November 1937

Dear Comrade Galloy [2],

Your letter came too late for me to make a judgement on your conference, which now already belongs to the past. Moreover I have spoken on the questions which are on your agenda many times in the last few months, in letters and articles of which some were directly aimed at the point of view of some Belgian friends, in particular against my old friend Vereeken whom I value greatly, but with whom I am unhappily more often in disagreement than agreement.

You complain of your lack of intellectual forces. [3] It is naturally a great advantage for a revolutionary organisation to have a reserve of intellectuals but on the sole condition that they do not play a dominant role as intellectuals only, that is to say as individuals who have a certain store of knowledge. An intellectual should only reach a leadership post after a long and serious testing in many differing circumstances. On the other hand your section possesses excellent working class cadres, well rooted in the soil of their class. That is an enormous advantage. The intellectuals will come after your first successes. They will even be too numerous. You must carefully select them and that will be the moment when the great value of your worker cadres will be fully revealed.

On the other had it is necessary that worker comrades, above all the young, seriously involve themselves in theory to get an education for the vast size of the task that they have to solve. Doctrinal education was never the strong side of the Belgian movement Vandervelde with his superficial eclecticism, Anseele with his cynical empiricism [4] have influenced the older generation very unfavourably. However reformist policy always flees before the light of doctrine. It is the IVth International to which has devolved the task of solidly implanting Marxism in the milieu of the Belgian working class and also in the whole world.

Notes

1. Letter to F. Galloy, Houghton Library Harvard (8226). Original in French

2. Florent Galloy (1904-1958), engineering worker, who was then a leading member of the Belgian PSR.

3. The core of the Belgian section was a working class core which always had great difficulty in recruiting intellectuals.

4. Edouard Anseele (1856-1938) was the boss of the POB apparatus and had, like Vandervelde, been a minister several times.

Leon Trotsky

Revisionism and Planning

The Revolutionary Struggle against Labor Fakers (January 1934)

Written: 9 January 1934.
Published: in New International [New York], Vol.11 No.2, March 1945, pp.59-62.
Transcription/HTML Markup: Damon Maxwell, July 2008.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

The American labor movement is very much stirred by the President’s “plan” for sixty million jobs and Wallace’s “plan” for implementing the promise of the presidential campaign. In reality, neither the President nor Wallace has any plan at all. However, the idea that some sort of plan is necessary to increase production and guarantee employment is now a settled concept with many American workers. We therefore print an important letter by Leon Trotsky advising the Belgian comrades and the Belgian labor movement on the attitude they should adopt toward a plan for making capitalism work.

The de Man plan dealt with in this letter was nothing so nebulous as the vaporings of Wallace and Roosevelt. De Man was a labor leader who published a complete and well-documented “labor plan” for pulling Belgian industry out of the crisis and restoring permanent prosperity. It created quite a stir at the time but soon disappeared from public notice in the conflict that developed between the working class and the Belgian fascists under Leon de Grelle, who called themselves Rexists.

Revisionist plans cannot solve the capitalist crisis or eliminate the class struggle. Nevertheless, they pose a problem which demands a certain answer. Despite the differences between Belgium and the United States, Trotsky’s method in dealing with the problem is of the greatest interest and value to the American Marxist movement and the class-conscious workers.

De Man produced this plan for making capitalism work. He was also very active in international conferences and intrigues among “men of good will” to prevent imperialist war. Having failed in both instances this labor leader ended up by joining the Germans as a collaborationist. True to himself, he could never at any time envisage the only solution to capitalist crisis and capitalist war – the revolutionary struggle of the workers, culminating in the seizure of power. – The Editor.

*   *   *

Dear Comrades:

Needless to say that in the last few days I studied with the greatest attention the newspapers, magazines, minutes and letters sent by you. Thanks to a very fine selection of material, I was able to acquaint myself in a comparatively short time with the question as a whole and with the essence of the differences which arose in your organization. The strictly principled character of your discussion, free from any personal exaggerations, gives a most favorable impression of the whole spirit of your organization and of its moral-political level. It remains only to express the hearty wish that this spirit be pre-served and strengthened not only in the Belgian section but that it should become the prevalent one in all our sections without exception.

The considerations which I wish to express further on the question in dispute itself cannot pretend either to fullness or completion. I am removed from the theater of action. Such important factors as the mood of the masses cannot be grasped through newspaper reports and documents only: it is necessary to feel the pulse of workers’ meetings, which, alas, is beyond my reach. However, inasmuch as it is a question of general suggestions on principles, the position of an outside observer perhaps certain advantages as it enables detachment from details and concentration on the main thing.

I shall go over now to the matter itself.

First of all – and I consider this the central point – I do not see any reason that would impel us to withdraw the slogan: “Let the Belgian workers’ party take power!” When we first advanced this slogan we were all, of course, fully aware of the character of the Belgian social-democracy, which does not want to struggle and does not know how to struggle, which for a number of decades had been used to playing the role of a bourgeois brake on the proletarian locomotive, which tears power outside of a coalition, as it needs bourgeois allies to be able to reject the demands of the workers.

We know all this. But we also know that not only the capitalist regime as a whole but also its parliamentary state machinery entered into a stage of an acute crisis which bears in itself the possibility of quick (relatively) changes of mood of the masses, as well as quick successions of parliamentary and government combinations. If it should be taken into consideration that the Belgian social-democracy together with the reformist trade unions dominate absolutely the proletariat, that the Belgian section of the Comintern is utterly insignificant t and the revolutionary wing extremely weak, it would become clear that the whole political situation must suggest to the proletariat the thought of a social-democratic government.

We considered beforehand that the setting up of such a government would be undoubtedly a step forward. Of course, not in the sense that the government of Vandervelde, de Man & Co. would be capable of playing any progressive role in the replacement of capitalism by socialism, but in the sense that under the given conditions the experiment of a social-democratic government would be of progressive importance in the revolutionary development of the proletariat. The slogan of a social-democratic government is thus calculated not on some exceptional conjuncture but on a more or less lengthy political period. We could give up this slogan only in case that the social-democracy – before its coming to power – should begin greatly to weaken, ceding its influence to a revolutionary party: but, alas, today such a perspective is purely theoretical. Neither the general political situation, nor the relation of forces within the proletariat permit the withdrawal of the slogan: power to the social-democracy!

Labor Plan to Deceive Labor

Certainly not the plan of de Man, bombastically called the “Labor Plan” (it would be more correct to call it: the plan to deceive the toilers) can make us abandon the central political slogan of this period. The “labor plan” will be a new, or a renovated instrument of bourgeois-democratic (or even semi-democratic) conservatism. But the whole point of the matter lies in the fact that the extreme intensity of the situation, the imminence of dangers, threatening the very existence of the social-democracy itself, force it against its will to seize the double-edged weapon, very unsafe though it is from the point y of view of democratic conservatism.

The dynamic equilibrium of capitalism is gone forever, the equilibrium of the parliamentary system is cracking and crumbling. And finally – this is a link of the same chain – the conservative equilibrium of reformism which is forced to denounce the bourgeois regime publicly in order to save it, is beginning to shake. Such a situation is replete with great revolutionary possibilities (together with dangers). We must not retract the slogan power to the social-democracy, but, on the contrary, give this slogan an all the more militant and sharp character.

In our midst there is no need to say that this slogan must not contain even a shadow of hypocrisy, pretense, softening of contradictions, diplomatizing, pretended or qualified trust. Let the left social-democrats use butter and honey (in the spirit of Spaak). We will use as heretofore vinegar and pepper.

In the material sent to me there is expressed the opinion that the working masses are absolutely indifferent to the Labor Plan and are in general in a state of depression and that under such conditions the slogan “power to the social-democrats” can only create illusions and produce disappointment later on. Unable from here to get a clear idea of the moods of the different layers and groups of the Belgian proletariat, I fully allow, however, for the possibility of a certain nervous exhaustion and passivity of the workers. But, in the first place, this mood itself is not final: it must be rather of an expectant than of a hopeless nature. No one of us thinks, of course, that the Belgian proletariat is already incapable of struggle for years to come. Within the proletariat there are plenty of moods of bitterness, hatred and resentment and they are seeking a way out. To save itself from ruin, the social-democracy needs a certain movement of the workers. It must frighten the bourgeoisie to make it more agreeable. It is certainly mortally afraid that this movement should go over its head. But with the absolute insignificance of the Comintern; the weakness of the revolutionary groups and under the fresh impression of the German experience, the social-democracy expects immediate danger from the right and not from the left. Without these prerequisites the slogan “power to the social-democracy” would in general be meaningless.

Sure to Provoke Illusions

None of us can have any doubts that the plan of de Man and the agitation of the social-democracy connected with it will sow illusions and provoke disappointment. But the social-democracy, its influence on the proletariat and its plan, its Christmas congress, its agitation are objective facts: we can neither remove them, nor skip over them. Our task is twofold: first, to explain to the advanced workers the political meaning of the “plan,” that is, decipher the maneuvers of the social-democracy at all stages; secondly, to show in practice to possibly wider circles of workers that insofar as the bourgeoisie tries to put obstacles to the realization of the plan we fight hand in hand with the workers to help them make this experiment. We share the difficulties of the struggle but not the illusions. Our criticism of the illusions must, however, not increase the passivity of the workers and give it a pseudo-theoretic justification but on the contrary push the workers forward. Under these conditions, the inevitable disappointment with the “Labor Plan” will not spell the deepening of passivity but, on the contrary, the going over of the workers to the revolutionary road.

To the plan itself I shall devote in the next few days a special article. Because of the extremely urgent character of this letter I am forced to limit myself here to just a few words. First of all, I consider it incorrect to liken the Plan to the economic policy of fascism. Insofar as fascism advances (before the conquest of power!) the slogan of nationalization as a means of struggle with “super-capitalism,” it simply steals the phraseology of the socialist program. In de Man’s plan we have – under the bourgeois character of the social-democracy – a program of state capitalism which the social-democracy itself passes off, however, for the beginning of socialism and which may actually become the beginning of socialism – against the social-democracy.

A Concrete Bolshevik Program

Within the limits of the economic program (“Labor Plan”) we must, in my opinion, advance the following three points:

On repurchase. Considered abstractly, the socialist revolution does not exclude any and all sorts of repurchase of capitalist property. There was a time when Marx expressed himself in the sense that it would be good to “pay off that gang” (the capitalists). Prior to the World War this was still more or less possible. But taking into consideration the present disruption of the national and world economic system and the impoverishment of the masses, we see that compensation, is a ruinous operation which would create for the new regime from the very start utterly unbearable hardships. We must and can bring this fact home to every worker with figures in hand.

Simultaneously with expropriation without compensation we must advance the slogan of workers’ control. Despite de Man (see Le Mouvement Syndical Belge, 1933, No.11, page 297), nationalization and workers’ control do not exclude each other at all. Even if the government were an extremely left one and full of the best intentions, we would stand for the control of workers over industry and circulation: we do not want a bureaucratic management of nationalized industry; we demand direct participation of the workers themselves in control and administration through shop committees, trade un-ions, etc. Only in this way can we lay the supporting bases for proletarian dictatorship in economy.

The Plan says nothing concerning landed property as such. Here we need a slogan adapted to agricultural workers and the poorest peasants. I shall endeavor to take up separately this involved question.

It is necessary now to take up the political side of the Plan. Two questions come here naturally to the fore: (1) the method of struggle for the realization of the plan (in particular the question of legality and illegality) and (2) the attitude toward the petty bourgeoisie of the city and village.

In his programmatic speech published in the trade union organ, de Man rejects categorically the revolutionary struggle (general strike and insurrection). Can anything else be expected of these people? No matter what the individual reservations and changes intended mainly for the consolation of left simpletons may be, the official position of the party remains that of parliamentary cretinism. The main blows of our criticism should be aimed along this line-not only against the party as a whole, but also against its left wing (see below). This side of the question-of the methods of struggle for nationalization – are pointed out with equal precision and correctness by both sides in your discussion so there is no need for me to dwell on it much longer.

The Parliamentary Deception

I wish to bring out only one “small” point. Can these people earnestly think of revolutionary struggle when in their hearts they are ... monarchists? It is a great mistake to think that the king’s power in Belgium is a fiction. First of all this fiction costs money and should be eliminated if only out of economic considerations. But this is not the principal side of the matter. In time of social crisis ghosts frequently take on flesh and blood. The same role that Hindenburg, Hitler’s ostler, played in Germany before our very eyes, the king may play in Belgium – following the example of his Italian colleague. A series of gestures made by the Belgian king in the last period clearly indicate this road. Whoever wants to struggle against fascism must begin with the struggle for the liquidation of the monarchy. We must not permit the social-democracy to hide itself in this question behind all sorts of tricks and reservations.

Revolutionary posing of questions of strategy and tactics does not mean at all, however, that our criticism should not follow the social-democracy also to its parliamentary hideaway. New elections will take place only in 1936; until that time capitalist reaction in alliance with hunger can break the neck of the working class three times over. We must pose this question in all its sharpness to the social-democratic workers. There is only one way to speed up new elections: to make the functioning of the present Parliament impossible by sharp opposition to it, which merges into parliamentary obstruction. Vandervelde, de Man & Co. must be branded not merely because they do not develop the revolutionary extra-parliamentary struggle, but also because their parliamentary activity serves not at all to prepare and bring nearer and realize their own “Labor Plan.” Contradictions and hypocrisy in this sphere will be, clearly understood even by the average social-democratic worker who has not yet grown to the understanding of the methods of proletarian revolution.

The Way to Win the Petty Bourgeoisie

The question of the attitude to the intermediary classes is of no less importance. It would be foolish to accuse the reformists of placing themselves on “the road of fascism” because they want to win over the petty bourgeoisie. We too want to win over the petty bourgeoisie. This is one of the essential conditions for the full success of the proletarian revolution. But there are fagots and there are fagots, as Molière says. A street peddler, or a poor peasant is a petty bourgeois, but also a professor, an average official bearing a distinction badge, an aver-age engineer – is also a petty bourgeois. We must choose between them. Capitalist parliamentarism (and no different parliamentarism exists) leads to Messrs, lawyers, officials, journalists coming out as the licensed representatives of the starving artisans, street peddlers, small clerks and semi-proletarian peasants. And finance capital leads by the nose or simply bribes the parliamentaries from the sphere of petty bourgeois lawyers, officials and journalists.

When Vandervelde, de Man and Co. talk of attracting to the “Plan” the petty-bourgeoisie they have in mind not the masses, but their licensed “representatives,” that is the corrupted agents of finance capital. When we speak of winning over the petty bourgeoisie, we have in mind the liberation of the exploited submerged masses from their diplomaticized political representatives. In view of the desperate position of the petty-bourgeois masses of the population, the old petty bourgeois parties (democratic, catholic and others) burst along all seams. Fascism understood it. It did not seek and does not seek any coalitions with the bankrupt “leaders” of the petty bourgeoisie but tears from under their influence the masses, that is, it performs in its way and in the interests of reaction that work, which the Bolsheviks performed in Russia in the interests of the revolution. Precisely in this way presents itself the question now also in Belgium. The petty bourgeois parties, or the petty bourgeois flanks of big capitalist parties are doomed to disappearance together with parliamentarism, which sets up for them the necessary stage. The whole question lies in who will lead the oppressed and deceived petty bourgeois masses, the proletariat under revolutionary leadership, or the fascist agency of finance capital.

Just as de Man does not want a revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and tears a courageous opposition policy in parliament that could lead to a revolutionary struggle, just so he does not want and fears a real struggle for the petty bourgeois masses. He understands that in its depths are hidden stores of protest, bitterness and hatred which may turn into revolutionary passions and dangerous “excesses,” that is into revolution. Instead of this, de Man seeks parliamentary allies, shabby democrats, catholics, blood relations from the right who are needed by him as bulwark against possible revolutionary excesses of the proletariat. We must know how to make this side of the question clear to the reformist workers in the daily experience of facts. For a close revolutionary union of the proletariat with the oppressed petty bourgeois masses of the city and village but against government coalition with political representatives and traitors of the petty bourgeoisie!

The Fascist Danger

Some comrades express the opinion that the very fact that the social-democracy comes out with the “labor plan” must shake up the intermediary classes and, with the passivity of the proletariat, ease the work of fascism. Of course, if the proletariat will not fight, fascism will be victorious. But this danger follows not from the “Plan” but from the great influence of the social-democracy and the weakness of the revolutionary party. The protracted participation of the German social-democracy in the bourgeois government paved the way for Hitler. Blum’s purely passive abstention from all participation in the government will also create the prerequisites for the growth of fascism. Finally, the announcement of the attack on finance capital, without a corresponding mass revolutionary struggle will inevitably speed up the work of Belgian fascism. It is, therefore, not a question of the “Plan,” but of the treacherous function of the social-democracy and of the fatal ro1e of the Comintern. Insofar as the general situation and in particular the fate of the German social-democracy force upon its younger Belgian sister the policy of “nationalization,” this together with the old dangers, opens up new revolutionary possibilities. It would be the greatest error not to see them. We must learn to strike the enemy with his own weapons.

The new possibilities can be utilized only under the condition that we continue tirelessly to stress to the workers the fascist danger. For the realization of no matter what plan workers organizations must be preserved and strengthened. It is necessary, therefore, first of all to defend them from fascist gangs. It would be the worst stupidity to hope that a democratic government, even headed by the social-democracy, could save the workers from fascism by a decree prohibiting the fascists to organize, to arm, etc. No police measures will help if the workers themselves will not learn to deal with fascists. The organization of proletarian defense/ the creation of workers militia is the first, unpostponable task. Whoever fails to support this slogan and does not carry it out in practice does not deserve the name of a proletarian revolutionist.

How to Deal with the Left Wing

There remains only to say something on our attitude towards the left social-democracy. Least of all here do I want to say something final as until now I was unable to follow the evolution of this grouping. But what I read in the last few days (series of articles by Spaak, his speech at the congress of the party, etc.) did not produce a favorable impression.

When Spaak wants to characterize the interrelation between the legal and illegal struggle, he quotes ... Otto Bauer as an authority, that is, the theoretician of legal and illegal impotence. “Tell me who your masters are and I will tell you who you are.” But let us leave the sphere of theory and turn to actual political questions.

Spaak took de Man’s plan as the basis of the campaign and voted for it without any reservations. It may be said that Spaak did not want to give Vandervelde & Co. the opportunity to bring the matter to a split, that is to eject the weak and still unorganized left wing from the party; Spaak retreated the better to jump. Perhaps such were Spaak’s intentions but in politics we judge not by intentions but by actions. The careful attitude of Spaak at the conference, his pledge to struggle with all determination for the carrying-out of the Plan, his statement on discipline, would have in themselves been comprehensible considering the position of the left opposition in the party. But Spaak did something else: he expressed moral confidence in Vandervelde and political solidarity with de Man not only on the abstract aims of the Plan but also with regard to the concrete methods of struggle.

The words of Spaak to the effect that we cannot demand from the leaders of the party that they tell us openly of their plan of action, of their forces, etc., had an especially inadmissible character. Why cannot we? For confidential reasons? But even if Vandervelde and de Man have confidential matters it is not with the revolutionary workers against the bourgeoisie but with the bourgeois politicians against the workers. And no one demands that confidential matters be made public at the congress! It is necessary to give the general plan of the mobilization of the workers and the perspective of struggle. By his declaration Spaak really helped Vandervelde and de Man to evade the answer to the most important questions of strategy. We can legitimately speak here of secrets between the leaders of the opposition and the leaders of the majority against the revolutionary workers. The fact that Spaak carried away also the “Socialist Guard of Youth” to the road of centrist trustfulness only aggravates his guilt.

The Brussels federation introduced at the congress a “left” resolution on constitutional and revolutionary struggle. The resolution is very weak, has a legalistic and not a political character, is written by a lawyer and not by a revolutionary (“if the bourgeoisie will violate the constitution, then we also ...”). Instead of posing earnestly the question of the preparation of revolutionary struggle, the “left” resolution makes a literary threat in the direction of the bourgeoisie. But what happened at the congress? After the most inane declarations of de Man who as we know considers the revolutionary struggle a harmful myth, the Brussels federation meekly retracted its resolution. People who are so easily satisfied with empty and lying phrases cannot be considered earnest revolutionists. Punishment was not late in coming. At the very next day the “People” commented on the congress resolution in the sense that the party will stay strictly within constitutional lines, that is, it will “struggle” within the limits indicated to it by finance capital aided by the king, judges and police. The organ of the lefts “Socialist Action” actually wept bitter tears: Why, yesterday, just yesterday, “all” were unanimous with regard to the Brussels resolution, why then today? ... Ridiculous lamentations! “Yesterday” the lefts were fooled to make them retract the resolution. And “today” the experienced bureaucratic dodgers gave the ill-fated opposition a little fillip on the nose. Serves them right! These matters are always handled so. But these are only the buds, the fruit will come later.

It occurred more than once that the social-democratic opposition was developing an extremely left criticism as long as it did not obligate itself to anything. But when the decisive hours came (mass strike movement, menace of war, danger of a government overthrowal, etc.) the opposition lowered its banner immediately, opening up to the besmirched leaders of the party a new credit of confidence and proving by this that it is itself only flesh of the flesh of reformism. The socialist opposition of Belgium is now going through its first serious test. We are forced to say that it slipped up badly right away. We must follow attentively and without prejudice its further steps, without exaggerating in criticism, without losing ourselves in sense-less rattle on “social-fascism” but also without making any illusions on the real theoretic and fighting temper of this grouping. To help the better elements of the left opposition to move forward, it is necessary to say what is.

I hurry greatly with this letter so that it might reach you yet before the conference of January 14th; therefore, its in-completeness and possibly a certain lack of systematic exposition. In conclusion I allow myself to express the hearty conviction that your discussion will end in a harmonious decision that will insure complete unity of action. The whole situation predetermines a serious growth of your organization in the next period. If the leaders of the social-democratic opposition should capitulate completely, the direction of the revolutionary wing of the proletariat will rest entirely on you. If, on the contrary, the left wing of the reformist party should advance to the side of Marxism, you will find in them a militant ally and a bridge to the masses. With a clear and unanimous policy your success is fully assured. Long live the Belgian section of the Bolsheviks-Leninists!

G.G.

January 9, 1934

Leon Trotsky

The Trade Union Question [1]

(August 1938)

31 August 1938

Dear comrade Dauge,

I reply to you, moreover in great haste, only on the single point of your letter, the most important point, that which concerns union activity. You say, “Unhappily in this affair we come up against a reformist union bureaucracy absolutely incapable of understanding the virtues of trade union unity for the working class. That is without doubt the greatest obstacle.” This characterisation worries me a little. You say that the scum who lead the unions are incapable of understanding the virtues of trade union unity. For my part I fear that they understand their interests much better than many revolutionaries understand theirs. To tolerate revolutionary activity in the unions, in the name of the abstract principle of unity, signifies suicide for the reformist bosses. Well, they wish to live and dominate. That is why they expel you. From their point of view and that of their bosses, the capitalists, they are right. You say that it is “the greatest obstacle” to our activity. That is the same as saying that the greatest obstacle to our activity among the masses is the existence of the bourgeoisie and its labour lieutenants in working class organisations. The trade union bureaucracy is capital’s policeman, much more effective that the official police. We never alleged that the ill-will of the Tsar’s police excused our separation from the masses. We tried clandestine and conspiratorial methods to fool the police. We must do the same thing to the reformist police in the unions. It is the only really serious work. There cannot be obstacles which can prevent us accomplishing it. I await with great interest the decisions of your conference.

P.S. Vereeken has sent me a big pamphlet containing his address to the conference. The good man, so in love with himself, imagines that I am going to read his prose now that his resignation has freed us from such boring obligations. [2] Henceforth I believe the best method to treat him is to ignore him totally.

Notes

1. Letter to Dauge, Houghton Library Harvard (7669). Dictated in French.

2. Remember that Vereeken had walked out on the 8th June.