Leon
Trotsky: Letter to Friends in Frankfurt
November
5, 1932
[Writing
of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 4, 1932, New York 1973, p. 300]
Thank
you for your letter and the clipping from the Frankfurter
Nachrichten
[Frankfurt News]. There is no need to tell you how I rejoice at your
successes and hope that they may increase still more in the near
future. They are extremely significant. In the present situation
careerists seeking office or journalists looking for a newspaper
don't come to the Left Opposition, poor and under attack not only
from the ruling class but also from the Stalinist bureaucracy. To us
come only people who are deeply devoted to the proletarian
revolution, cadre elements. Armed with the correct methods, they
advance on the road to the masses.
The
article in the Frankfurter
Nachrichten,
like many other articles in the bourgeois press, clearly shows that
the class enemy understands very well the danger which the Left
Opposition represents to its policies. Unlike the Stalinists, they do
not raise a howl that we are "counterrevolutionaries"; the
bourgeoisie apparently puts no stock in the Stalinist labels and
considers us — not without reason — their most irreconcilable
enemies. The future will show that they are right.
The
Frankfurter
Nachrichten
speaks of Trotsky's political attack on Thälmann's "Hamburg
dock workers." The purpose of this counterposition is all too
clear: it is to play games with the workers' self-respect and to
assign them to the official bureaucratic party, away from the
influence of Bolshevik-Leninist criticism. Stalinist tactics today,
as we have said, carry very little danger.
Needless
to say, my criticism was directed not against Thälmann's "dock
workers" but against the very lofty bureaucracy, which stops the
arguments of every critical worker with a fist in the mouth. But if
Stalin cannot easily succeed with this method in the Soviet Union,
still less will Thälmann be able to succeed in stifling Marxist
ideas among the proletariat in Germany.
I
wish you success in your work in the future.
L.
Trotsky
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