Leon
Trotsky: Reply to the Jewish Group in the Communist League of France
January
15, 1932
[Writing
of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 4, 1932, New York 1973, p. 26-30]
Your
declaration is an anti-Communist document and shows to what a fatal
path the present leaders of your organization have led the group of
Jewish workers.
1.
You have recalled Comrades Felix and Foucs from the Executive
Committee of the League in order to withdraw your "responsibility"
for the direction of the League; this constitutes an act of sabotage.
The conference elected a definite leadership. You are placing
yourselves above the conference, above the League, and you are
sabotaging the leading body of the League.
Basically
this is an action of splitting the organization. For the leaders of
your group, this is a demonstration, a "vote of no confidence,"
in a word, a parliamentary game. This is not the way proletarian
revolutionists act; it is the way of petty-bourgeois anarchists, who
scoff at parliamentarism in words but imitate it in deeds.
2.
What reason have you given for leaving the Executive Committee? My
circular letter. But is the Executive Committee responsible for that?
There is absolutely no relation whatsoever between your action and
its motive. I can't even for a minute assume that all the members of
the Jewish group could have approved of such a disruptive act. I
don't know Comrade Foucs and I cannot judge his motives. But Comrade
Felix, in this case, has remained true to his past.
3.
The situation becomes even more complicated by the fact that you
recall Felix and Foucs not in the name of any faction, or any local
organization, but in the name of a national
group.
You thereby transform the League into a federation of national
groups. This is the structure the Bund attempted to introduce into
the Russian party. As far back as 1903, not only the Bolsheviks but
even the Mensheviks
considered such
an arrangement incompatible with the fundamentals of
revolutionary-proletarian organization. You are introducing Bundism
into the ranks of the Left Opposition. The Left Opposition would only
be preparing its own destruction if it were to tolerate such a state
of affairs for even a day.
4.
By creating such a Jewish factional organization, by separating it in
this way from the League, by opposing it to the League, Comrades Mill
and Felix are attempting to dictate to the League. At the same time
Comrade Felix has misled the Jewish group by greatly exaggerating the
differences, by seeking artificial pretexts for differences, by
making a caricature of the differences. Because of their sterile and
scholastic character, these discussions have not been able to
contribute anything to the League in an ideological sense. In a
political sense, they paralyzed the League by repelling the French
workers. In this manner the Jewish group, instead of being an
instrument to attract Jewish workers, has become, thanks to its
present leaders, an instrument for the repulsion of French workers.
5.
You state that my evaluation of the leaders of the Jewish group (Mill
and Felix), that they sabotage the League and lead the Jewish group
to its destruction, is based on one-sided and false information given
by Comrade Molinier. This again shows how light-mindedly your leaders
make unfounded accusations. To evaluate information, to understand
what information should or should not be believed, to show prudence
about information furnished in the course of internal conflicts —
all these rules and essentials are elementary, the ABC of healthy
political thinking. To accuse anyone of forming an opinion on the
basis of one-sided and false information actually amounts to a charge
of political bankruptcy. We understand things differently, you and I,
as to what the Left Opposition is, as to what a revolutionary
organization should be, etc. But why mix into this the question of
false information by anyone? It is not so long ago that Comrade Mill
explained the utter impermissibility of this argument to Naville. My
circular letter condemning the policy of the present leadership of
the Jewish group was written before I had any discussion at all with
Comrade Molinier.
6.
What finally determined my evaluation of the present leadership of
the Jewish group? It was your letter to Rosmer.
I
consider this document perfectly scandalous; and, through the
mistakes of the leadership, it seriously compromises the group.
The
struggle against Landau, Naville, and Rosmer has up to now been the
most important and significant event in the internal life of the
International Left Opposition, which in this manner purged itself of
alien elements. This struggle has led to splits, amputations, and
desertions. In the process of your struggle against the new
leadership of the League, you suddenly declared your solidarity with
Rosmer. That shows that the leaders of your group have understood
nothing at all of the preceding struggle, or, what is worse, that
they in general are incapable of really taking principled differences
seriously. From the point of view of ideological loyalty and
revolutionary discipline, the letter to Rosmer was a direct act of
treachery. It's understandable that several Jewish workers might be
led into error; but the leaders of this affair knew what they were
doing. For my part, I withhold any confidence in people who impose
such a perfidious act on the Jewish group as an attempt of a bloc
with deserters against the International Left Opposition.
7.
You accuse me of not having taken a position on your differences with
Comrade Treint and others on the question of the "faction,"
"party," etc. I have arrived at my opinion not through
isolated incidents in the constant internal struggle, but on the
experience of the last two to three years as a whole Of what
political importance can the views of Comrades Felix and Mill be on
the question of a faction, if within the faction to which I belong
they, without giving it a second thought, are turning somersaults
into the Rosmer-Landau faction? What if Felix and Mill do subscribe
even today to the very best definition of a faction? All this in my
eyes is only empty talk. By attempting to transform the League into a
federation of independent national groups, Mill and Felix are
rejecting the meaning of a revolutionary faction. What importance
therefore can their exercises around the word "faction"
have in my estimation? Our ideological struggle does not have a
character all of its own but is an instrument of action and of
control by means of action. I keep in mind the activity of Felix and
Mill as a whole and the new episode in the discussion cannot change
my judgment
8.
Paz, as is well known, subscribed 100 percent to all the formulas
which he considered to be Bolshevik-Leninist. When some futile
differences arose between himself and Delfosse,
he
demanded that I pronounce myself immediately on those differences.
And I demanded that the Paz group go over from bombast to serious
work and refused to occupy myself with the differences, which had no
actual relationship to genuine work. The Paz group condemned me for
this, probably believing that I did not sufficiently understand the
depth and importance of the differences that arose within it.
In
that discussion Comrade Felix was with Paz against me. As soon as it
became clear to Paz that I would not support him, he immediately
discovered principled differences between himself and the Russian
Opposition; it seems that Rakovsky did not quite reach the
revolutionary magnitude of Paz. Felix and Mill are only imitating Paz
by demanding of me that I occupy myself with their verbal rubbish
instead of judging their activity as a whole.
9.
If you are interested in the real source of my information, I will
not conceal it from you. My principal informer all this time has been
Comrade Mill. I have exchanged dozens upon dozens of letters with
him. My conclusion regarding the policy of Mill I have drawn
especially on the basis of his own letters. In these letters not a
little has been said about Comrade Felix. But in this case I would
not for the world have trusted to the impartiality of Comrade Mill. I
attempted to judge Comrade Felix by his own actions; his support of
Paz against La
Vérité,
his discussion articles in Vérité,
his role in the attempt of a bloc with Rosmer, his letter to the
Greek Opposition — all this sufficed for me. Add to this the
minutes of the Executive Committee and the internal bulletins of the
League The present departure of Comrade Felix from the Executive
Committee as a sort of parliamentary game only completes the picture.
10.
You propose the creation of an international control commission to
examine my "accusations." In this regard I can only express
my astonishment. _ On my part it is a question of a political
evaluation of the methods and measures by Comrades Mill and Felix. My
evaluation may be correct or incorrect, but what can a control
commission do about it?
When
certain former and present members of the League made use of personal
insinuations against their opponents in the course of their political
struggles, I proposed that a control commission be created. But
nevertheless none of the accusers dared to make a formal accusation.
In this way the accusers definitively disqualified themselves,
showing that they were directed not by revolutionary zeal but by lack
of scruples, typical of the impotent petty bourgeoisie. In such a
case, a control commission is entirely in place in order to clear the
atmosphere. But in our case it is not a matter of accusations of a
moral character. Nor can a commission make a judgment on the
correctness or incorrectness of a political evaluation; the entire
membership of the organization, not a special control commission,
must declare itself.
11.
Your declaration says that I condemn the activity of the Jewish group
as a whole. That's not true. Insofar as the members of your group
under the leadership of the League are conducting propaganda work
among the Jewish workers, are spreading the ideas of Bolshevism among
them, I certainly can only salute their work and aid them as I have
aided them in the past, according to my resources, from the first
period of the group's existence to the time it was drawn onto the
unprincipled path of petty-bourgeois politics by Felix and Mill.
Precisely now, when the crisis strikes the foreign workers in France
above all others, when the Socialist Party betrays them completely
and the Communist Party in part (see the vote of the parliamentary
fraction), the Left Opposition can and must develop energetic work
among the foreign workers, including the Jewish workers. But for that
the Jewish group must cease to be a national Jewish faction within
the League and become the organ of the League for propaganda in the
Jewish language. What must be done for this? The Jewish group must be
freed from the leadership of Felix and Mill, who can bring it nothing
but harm.
With
communist greetings,
L.
Trotsky