Leon
Trotsky: Tactics in the USSR
October
1929
[Writings
of Leon Trotsky. Vol 13, Supplement 1929-1933, New York 1979, p. 19
f.]
1.
The declaration by Rakovsky and the others is an episode that will
prove useful more than once in the future. (In speaking to the
workers, we will point with justification to the goodwill shown by
the Opposition and the ill will of the apparatus.) The perspective of
the struggle by the Russian Opposition is determined, however, not by
the declaration, but by factors of a more profound nature.
2.
Stalin’s left zigzag called for some necessary changes in the
tactics of the Opposition more than a year and a half ago: (a) we
stated out loud the fact
that there was a left shift taking place; (b) we criticized the
contradictions in it; (c) we declared our readiness to support every
genuinely left step of centrism; (d) we showed this support through a
clear and complete Marxist evaluation of the danger from the right
and our merciless criticism of centrism itself, and it was precisely
our criticism that forced and is still forcing the centrists to go
further left than they originally intended to go.
The
demand for a secret ballot remains, of course, completely valid. It
is far more advantageous for the revolution if the Bessedovskys vote
the way they really think than if we just happen to find out about
their “thoughts” after they jump out a back window.
And
the question of the leading of strikes, as it was at one time posed
and clarified by the Opposition, retains all its significance. The
Opposition did not invent this question. The resolution of the
Eleventh Congress [of the CPSU in 1922], worked out by Lenin and
adopted unanimously, recognized the possibility, and in certain
instances the inevitability, of strikes led by Soviet trade unions,
insofar as one of the tasks of the latter is to protect the workers’
interests against bureaucratic distortions within their own state.
The fact that since the time of the Eleventh Congress the trade
unions themselves have been bureaucratized to a terrible extent does
not remove the question of strikes either practically or
theoretically. The Opposition’s attitude toward strikes was
formulated by us at one time with absolute precision. There is no
basis at all for changing this formulation, which is imbued with the
genuine spirit of the party.
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