Leon Trotsky: No Confidence in the Negrin Government

January 24, 1940

[Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931-1939), New York 1973, p. 352 f.]

Shachtman, as we have already seen, persistently demands the citation of precedents: when and where in the past have the leaders of the opposition manifested petty-bourgeois opportunism? The reply that I have already given him on this score must be supplemented here with two letters that we sent each other on the question of defensism and methods of defensism in connection with the events of the Spanish revolution. On September 18, 1937, Shachtman wrote me:

“… You say, "If we would have a member in the Cortes he would vote against the military budget of Negrin.” Unless this is a typographical error, it seems to us to be a non sequitur. If, as we all contend, the element of an imperialist war is not dominant at the present time in the Spanish struggle, and if instead the decisive element is still the struggle between decaying bourgeois democracy, with all that it involves, on the one side, and fascism, on the other, and further if we are obliged to give military assistance to the struggle against fascism, we don't see how it would be possible to vote in the Cortes against the military budget. … If a Bolshevik-Leninist on the Huesca front were asked by a Socialist comrade why his representative in the Cortes voted against the proposal by Negrin to devote a million pesetas to the purchase of rifles for the front, what would this Bolshevik-Leninist reply? It doesn't seem to us that he would have an effective answer. …” [My emphasis — LTJ

This letter astounded me. Shachtman was willing to express confidence in the perfidious Negrin government on the purely negative basis that the "element of an imperialist war" was not dominant in Spain.

On September 20, 1937, I replied to Shachtman:

“To vote for the military budget of the Negrin government signifies to vote him political confidence. … To do it would be a crime. How [can] we explain our vote to the Anarchist workers? Very simply: We have not the slightest confidence in the capacity of this government to conduct the war and assure victory. We accuse this government of protecting the rich and starving the poor. This government must be smashed. So long as we are not strong enough to replace it, we are fighting under its command. But on every occasion we express openly our non-confidence in it; it is the only one possibility to mobilize the masses politically against this government and to prepare its overthrow. Any other politics would be a betrayal of the revolution.”

The tone of my reply only feebly reflects the … amazement that Shachtman's opportunist position produced in me. Isolated mistakes are of course unavoidable, but today, two and a half years later, this correspondence is illuminated with new light. Since we defend bourgeois democracy against fascism, Shachtman reasons, we therefore cannot refuse confidence to the bourgeois government. In applying this very theorem to the USSR, it is transformed into its converse — since we place no confidence in the Kremlin government, we cannot, therefore, defend the workers' state. Pseudo-radicalism in this instance, too, is only the obverse side of opportunism.