Leon Trotsky: How the ILO Is Doing

[June] 1930

[Writing of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 2, 1930, New York 1975, p. 303 f.]

Dear Friends,

We have not yet received the text of the appeal to the Sixteenth Party Congress. Insofar as we can judge from the secondhand information in letters we have received, the appeal was written in a firm and dignified tone, the only tone that meets the needs of the present situation.

The organizations of our foreign cothinkers have entered into a period of growth and of an expansion of their activities. An impressive, serious group of Indochinese emigres has joined the Communist League in Paris. They organized a demonstration in front of the presidential palace, displaying a sign demanding the abrogation of the death penalty for thirty-nine Indochinese revolutionaries. The demonstration — small but well organized — caught the police unawares, lasted for half an hour, and provoked rabid articles in all the bourgeois press. Twelve comrades were arrested of whom eleven Indochinese face harsh prison sentences. The Communist League has decided that its weekly La Vérité will be published twice a week from now on. In addition, it is putting out leaflets and newsletters in large quantities.

I have already informed you that a very serious group of cothinkers in the Italian party has joined us (apart from the Bordigists, who are maintaining a wait-and-see attitude, not making a decision to take this irrevocable step without Bordiga). The Italian cothinkers are publishing T.'s pamphlet on the "third period" in Italian. In Spain the first number of the newspaper Contra la corriente [Against the Stream] was expected to appear on the first of June. In Brazil an opposition publication in Portuguese has begun coming out. In Paris, besides La Vérité and the solidly based monthly journal La Lutte de classes, three issues of a Jewish Opposition newspaper have appeared and it is now being distributed internationally (in the United States and Argentina). We have just recently established ties in Britain that are very promising. The Czechoslovak Oppositionists took part in the Communist Party's May Day demonstration with their own banner: "Long Live the Soviet United States of Europe." This was the only banner confiscated by the police.

Our cothinkers in the capitalist countries are distinguishing themselves as a high-quality, genuinely proletarian revolutionary current that seriously studies documents, thinks out questions, and is learning to stand on its own feet. There is every reason to believe that over the next few years we will take a very big step forward. It will become more and more difficult for the Communist parties to beat off the Opposition’s attacks by resorting to idiotic slander about "the counterrevolution," etc. The road to the Soviet Communist Party can be opened through the Comintern. This, of course, does not mean that work inside the USSR takes on secondary importance. No, without the work inside the USSR the International Opposition would be seriously weakened. But because the mechanical obstacles to the Opposition's success do not exist abroad, political and organizational results of the Opposition's work are evidenced and, so to speak, bear fruit earlier in Europe than in the USSR.

The general conclusion: despite all the difficulties, the Opposition has every reason to look toward tomorrow with confidence.