Leon
Trotsky: Greetings to the Polish Left Opposition
August
31, 1932
[Writing
of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 4, 1932, New York 1973, p. 180 f.]
In
the ranks of the International Left Opposition in recent years the
question has been raised more than once: What accounts for the fact
that the Bolshevik-Leninist faction has not yet encountered any
significant response from the ranks of the Polish Communist Party?
Polish communism has longstanding, serious theoretical traditions,
going back to Rosa Luxemburg. Only four organizations formed before
the world war — quite a while before it, in fact — entered the
Communist International as complete units: Russian Bolshevism, the
Polish Social Democracy, the Bulgarian Tesniaki,
and
the Dutch Left. (We do not include the Latvian Social Democracy,
which had developed in direct connection with the Russian, whereas
the Polish Social Democracy had its own special origin and
independent position.) All other sections of the Comintern first took
shape as nuclei either during the war or even after it.
But
between the Polish Marxists on the one hand and the Bulgarians and
Dutch on the other, there existed an enormous difference. The
Tesniaki and the Dutch Left were propaganda organizations. They
preached rather radical formulas, but they never went beyond the
framework of preaching. The Polish Social Democracy, like Bolshevism,
participated for one and a half to two decades before the war in
direct revolutionary struggle against czarism and capital. While the
party of the Tesniaki was creating at its top two types: the narrow
and lifeless dogmatist of the Kabakchiev type and the accomplished
bureaucrat of the Kolarov-Dimitrov type, the old Polish Social
Democracy developed the type of the genuine revolutionary. The left
wing of the PPS, it is true, brought with it a series of thoroughly
formed and incorrigible Mensheviks (Walecki, Lapinski, to a large
extent Kostrzewa, and others) into the ranks of the united Communist
Party. However the best of the left-wing workers, having gone through
the school of struggle against czarism, quickly evolved in the
direction of Bolshevism.
Here
too a turning point came with the year 1923: year of inglorious
defeat for the revolution in Germany, and of inglorious victory for
the centrist Moscow bureaucracy, which had found support in the
Thermidorean wave. To measure how far the Polish epigones have fallen
from Luxemburgism, it is enough to recall that Warski, once a close
student of Rosa's, in 1924-27 supported the policy of the Stalinists
in China and in England, in 1926 welcomed Piłsudski's coup in
Poland, and now, by way of Barbusse, fraternizes with the French
Freemasons under the banner of pacifism.
It
is all the more alarming then that the pernicious and unworthy course
of the epigones has not produced a decisive rejection from the Polish
Communist ranks, in the form of new Bolshevik-Leninists. The
explanation for this fact has its roots to a large extent in the
extremely difficult conditions in which the Polish Communist Party
has been placed, fighting under illegal conditions and at the same
time under the direct observation of the Stalinist general staff.
Thus Polish Bolshevik-Leninists must operate in an atmosphere of
double illegality: one flows from Piłsudski, the other … from
Stalin. In underground conditions expulsion from the party, which is
accompanied by vicious hounding and slander, represents a double and
even a triple blow for any revolutionary devoted to the cause of
communism. Such are the conditions that explain to a certain degree
the slowness with which the Polish Left Opposition was formed and the
extreme caution of its first steps.
Now
these first steps have been taken. In the Polish party a hopeful
nucleus has been formed of Opposition workers with combat experience
and serious records in the party. They are actively engaged in
translating (into Polish and Yiddish) and distributing the literature
of the International Left Opposition. They have managed to pass
several pamphlets through the needle's eye of the Polish censorship.
The first number of the Opposition paper Proletariat,
put out in Brussels, contains extensive factual material. Number 2,
we hear, is being prepared for the printer. Opposition publications
in Russian, German, French, and other foreign languages are also
circulating among party members in Poland. We have no doubt that once
the ideas of the Left Opposition penetrate the qualified
revolutionary milieu of Polish communism, they will meet with a broad
and active response.
Warm
greetings to our co-thinkers in Poland!
L.
T.