Trotsky’s Suppressed Letter to the WIL: The Knot of History Retied¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: Trotsky’s Suppressed Letter to the WIL: The Knot of History Retied
This chapter recounts the rediscovery in 2018 of a long-suppressed letter from Leon Trotsky to the Workers’ International League (WIL) of Great Britain, the direct ancestor of the present-day International Marxist Tendency (IMT). The letter, found in a New York attic after eighty years, confirms Trotsky’s warm endorsement of the WIL’s political line, particularly his praise for the introduction to his pamphlet The Lessons of Spain – The Last Warning, written by Ted Grant and Ralph Lee, and his commendation of the comrades’ initiative in establishing their own print-shop. The letter’s survival—from Coyoacán to London, Istanbul, Boston, and New York—is described as extraordinary, and for the IMT it constitutes a living ‘birth certificate’, directly linking them to Trotsky and confirming his approbation of their ideas and methods.
The chapter argues that this letter was deliberately suppressed by the leaders of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), specifically James Cannon. While the first two letters from Trotsky to the WIL were published in his Writings, the third was omitted, despite a copy having existed in the possession of Trotsky’s secretary, Joseph Hansen. The suppression is explained by Cannon’s rancorous hostility toward the WIL. In July 1938, Trotsky publicly praised the WIL for establishing its own printing press and chastised the SWP for lacking revolutionary self-sacrifice, calling them “young bureaucrats.” These criticisms stung Cannon, whose prestige was undermined. When Cannon came to London in August 1938 to unify British Trotskyist groups before the founding of the Fourth International, the WIL refused to join a unity it deemed unprincipled, correctly predicting that it would collapse within weeks. Cannon responded by threatening to “crush splitters like beetles.” At the Founding Conference, he suppressed the WIL’s letter requesting sympathetic affiliation, instead delivering a diatribe accusing them of “sectarian nationalism,” and secured recognition of the rival Revolutionary Socialist League as the official British section.
The chapter situates this episode within a broader critique of Cannon’s methods. It argues that Cannon’s approach was Zinovievist, not Bolshevik: he substituted organisational intrigue for political argument, used lies and slanders, and sought complete domination. While Bolsheviks were ‘hards’, Trotsky noted that hardness was not exclusive to Bolshevism; its political basis was principled intransigence, not brutality. Lenin combined hardness on theory with flexibility on organisation and tact towards comrades. Cannon’s suppression of Trotsky’s letter was thus a deliberate act of political falsification, motivated by personal prestige and intolerance of opposition. The chapter concludes that the Fourth International no longer exists as an organisation, discredited by squabbling sects, and that the IMT now defends the true international, its flame burning in the ideas and programme laid down by Trotsky, identical to those of the Communist Manifesto, Lenin, and the first four congresses of the Communist International.