Leon
Trotsky: Letter to the Spanish Youth
June
13, 1932
[The
Spanish Revolution (1931-39).
New York 1973, p. 179 f.]
Dear
Comrades:
I
learned with joy that you are undertaking the publication of your own
paper. A revolutionary tendency that does not educate the youth will
die stillborn. In the present world, communism is the only task of
great magnitude that demands a whole series of generations for its
complete realization. The proletarian revolution requires continuity.
To assure this continuity is the mission of the youth; that is to
say, it is your mission. Marxism shows how this is to be done.
The
strength of Marxism is in the unity of scientific theory with
revolutionary struggle. On these two rails, the education of the
communist youth should progress. The study of Marxism outside the
revolutionary struggle can create bookworms but not revolutionaries.
Participation in the revolutionary struggle without the study of
Marxism is unavoidably full of danger, uncertainty, half-blindness.
To study Marxism as a Marxist is possible only by participating in
the life and struggle of the class; revolutionary theory is verified
by practice, and practice is clarified by theory. Only the truths of
Marxism that are conquered in struggle enter the mind and the blood.
A
letter from the Soviet Union, which I received some days ago, states
that despite the monstrous persecutions, arrests, and deportations,
new organizations and new Left Opposition (Bolshevik-Leninist) groups
have been formed in every industrial center, especially among the
youth. No repression can break revolutionary continuity as long as it
supports itself on revolutionary theory.
I
hope with all my heart that your paper will successfully accomplish
the task before it: to unite theory with practice. This will not be
easy. You will make mistakes; but we too, the old ones, who possess
some revolutionary experience, make mistakes very often, more often
than necessary. You will learn by your mistakes. The second and the
third step will be more certain than the first.
I
warmly greet the young proletarian communists of Spain in the name of
the thousands and thousands of our cothinkers, the Russian
Bolshevik-Leninists, who are carrying on the struggle in the
factories and the mines and who are dispersed in the prisons and the
exile camps of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Yours,
L.
D. Trotsky