Leon Trotsky: Letter to the Editorial Board, Die Sozialistische Arbeiter-Zeitung

January 26, 1933

[Writing of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 5, 1932-33, New York 1972, p. 83-86, title: “A Test of the Three Factions”]

To the Editorial Board, Die Sozialistische Arbeiter-Zeitung

Dear Comrades:

In the two issues of your paper, January 11 and 12, there appeared an article on my pamphlet, The Soviet Economy in Danger. As it deals with an extremely important question about which every revolutionary worker sooner or later must form a clear opinion, I'd like the opportunity to clarify for your readers as briefly as possible in this letter aspects of the question that I believe were given a false interpretation.

1. The article repeats a number of times that you are "not in agreement with everything" and "far from agreeing with everything" in Trotsky's conceptions on the Soviet economy. Differences of opinion between us are to be expected, especially since we belong to different organizations. Nevertheless I must express my regret that, with one single exception dealt with below, you did not indicate which conceptions you are not in agreement with. Let us recall how Marx, Engels, and Lenin condemned and censured evasiveness on fundamental questions, which finds expression usually in the empty formula "far from agreeing with everything." What every revolutionary worker can demand of his organization and his paper is a definite and clear attitude on the question of socialist construction in the USSR.

2. On only one point does your article attempt to demarcate itself more concretely from my conceptions. "We believe," you write, "that Trotsky considers matters somewhat one-sidedly when he ascribes the main blame for these conditions to the Stalinist bureaucracy." (!)… Further on the article states that the main blame does not lie on the bureaucracy but in the circumstance that goals of too great dimensions are placed on the economy for the fulfillment of which the necessary qualified forces are lacking. But who set up these exaggerated goals if not the bureaucracy? And who warned beforehand against their exaggerated dimensions if not the Left Opposition? Therefore, it is precisely your article that "ascribes" the entire blame to the bureaucracy.

Your reproach to me is wrong also for a deeper reason. To place the responsibility for all the difficulties and all the phenomena of crisis upon the ruling faction could be done only by one who believes in the possibility of a planned development of a socialist society within national boundaries. But this is not my view. The main difficulties for the USSR arise out of its economic and cultural backwardness which forces the Soviet state to solve many of the tasks that capitalism has already solved in advanced countries, and out of the isolation of the workers’ state in an epoch in which the division of labor between the states of the whole world has become the most important prerequisite for the national productive forces.

3. We don't blame the Stalinist faction for the objective difficulties, but for its lack of understanding of the nature of these difficulties, its inability to foresee the dialectic of their development, and the continual mistakes of leadership flowing from that. We are far from the idea, naturally, of explaining this lack of understanding" and this "inability" by the personal qualities of individual leaders. It is a question of the system of thinking, of the political tendency, of the factions which have grown out of old Bolshevism. We observe one and the same methodology in the economic leadership of Stalin as in the political leadership of Thälmann. You cannot fight successfully against the zigzags of Thälmann without understanding that it is a question not of Thälmann but of the nature of bureaucratic centrism.

4. Elsewhere your article recalls that the Left Opposition, especially and primarily Rakovsky, from the beginning warned against over-accelerated tempos of construction. But right next to this you write of allegedly analogous warnings by Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. Your article refers twice to the perspicacity of the latter without a single word on the irreconcilable antagonisms between the Right and Left Oppositions. I consider it all the more necessary to clarify this point because it is precisely the Stalin faction that makes every attempt to cover up or to deny the deep antagonisms between the opportunist and the Marxist wings in the camp of Bolshevism.

Since 1922 the Left Opposition, more accurately its future staff, carried on a campaign for developing a five-year plan, the axis of which was industrialization of the country. As early as that we proved that the tempo of development of nationalized industry could, in the very next years, exceed the tempo of Russian capitalism (6 percent annual increase) "two, three, and more times." Our opponents called this program an industrial fantasy. If Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov distinguished themselves from Stalin and Molotov, it was only in the fact that they fought even more resolutely against our "super-industrialization" The struggle against "Trotskyism" was theoretically nurtured almost exclusively by Bukharin. His criticism of "Trotskyism" also served as the platform of the right wing later on.

For years Bukharin was, to employ his own expression, the preacher of "tortoise-pace" industrialization. He continued in that role when the Left Opposition demanded the initiation of a five-year plan and higher tempos of industrialization (in 1923-28), and in the years of the Stalinist ultraleft zigzag, when the Left Opposition warned against the transformation of the five-year plan into a four-year plan and especially against the adventurist collectivization (in 1930-32). From Bukharin's mouth came not a dialectical appraisal of Soviet economy in its contradictory development, but an opportunistic attitude from the very beginning — economic minimalism.

5. How much your article misses the point by equating Bukharin's criticism with Rakovsky's criticism is shown by the following event: on the same day that your paper called attention to the apparent perspicacity of Bukharin in the past, Bukharin himself categorically and completely renounced all his former criticisms and all his prognoses as fundamentally false at the plenum of the Central Committee (Pravda, no January 14, 1933). Rakovsky, however, renounced nothing at the plenum, not because he is chained to Barnaul as an exile but because he has nothing to renounce.

6. Right after the appearance of my pamphlet The Soviet Economy in Danger, a reversal in Soviet economic policy occurred that throws a bright light on the problem engaging us and provides an infallible test of all the prognoses of the various factions. The story of the reversal in two words is the following:

The Seventeenth Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in January 1932 approved the principles of the second five-year plan. The tempo of growth of industry was established at approximately 25 percent, with Stalin declaring at the conference that that was only the minimum limit, and that in the working out of the plan this percentage must and would be raised.

The Left Opposition characterized this perspective as a product of bureaucratic adventurism. It was accused, naturally, of striving for counterrevolution, for the intervention of Japan, and for the restoration of capitalism, if not feudalism.

Exactly one year has passed. At the last plenum of the Central Committee, Stalin introduced a new proposal for the second five-year plan. Not a single word from him about the tempos approved the year before as the minimum. Nobody volunteered to remind him of them. This time Stalin proposed a 13 percent annual increase for the second five-year plan.

We do not at all conclude from this that Stalin plans on calling forth Japanese intervention or the restoration of capitalism. We draw the conclusion that the bureaucracy arrived at this moderation of the tempos not by Marxist foresight but belatedly, after its head had collided against the disastrous consequences of its own economic adventurism. That's exactly what we accuse it of. And that's exactly why we think its new emergency zigzag contains no guarantees at all for the future.

Even more glaring do the distinctions in the three conceptions (the right, the centrist, and the Marxist) appear in the field of agriculture. But this problem is too complex to be touched upon even fleetingly within the limits of a letter to the editorial board. In the course of the next few weeks I hope to issue a new pamphlet on the perspectives of Soviet economy.