Leon Trotsky: Economic Necessity Helps Those Who Help Themselves

Late 1929

[Writings of Leon Trotsky. Vol 13, Supplement 1929-1933, New York 1979, p. 23 f.]

Dear Friend:

The American professor who asserted that in the epoch of War Communism even Churchill would have carried out the policy Lenin did is expressing a small grain of truth, which, however, quickly turns into a crude falsehood if one concludes that Churchill could in general, or even for a prolonged period, have taken Lenin’s place. That “economic necessity” in the long run forges its own road is indisputable. But only in the long run. It is also true that in the process it not infrequently compels the empiricists to make a 180 degree tum. But does this mean that one can reject Marxist politics and rely solely on economic necessity? No, it does not. First of all, what could be called “economic necessity” in the present instance? There are at least two kinds. There is the economic necessity flowing from the situation created by the nationalization, the monopoly of foreign trade, etc. This is the economic necessity of socialist construction. But there exists an economic necessity hostile to it, that of world capitalist development and its extension into the USSR. Which of these two economic necessities will be the stronger? For the coming years (but not in the last analysis), this problem will be wholly resolved by politics, i.e., by the science and art which provides the possibility of orienting ourselves in the struggle between the two economic necessities and of helping one of them against the other. The policy of the right-centrist bloc from 1923 to 1928 was dictated by economic necessity just as much as the current leftward turn that is not even two years old. Where can one look for guarantees for the correct development of the left turn? In bare economic necessity? But it has already produced the various zigzags. In the left turn itself? But precisely that turn was prompted not by bare economic necessity alone but by the presence of a political grouping that knew that “economic necessity helps those who help themselves.” I am talking about us. The serious guarantee that politics will tomorrow serve socialist economic necessity and not capitalist 'would be the capacity of the official party to include us in its ranks just the way we are. There is no other political criterion for us and there cannot be. All else is tricks, a game of hide-and-seek with history, an attempt to replace the struggle for definite ideas with a general inspectorate over the course of development, or simply political cowardice and petty fraud.

Warm greetings,