A Letter to James P. Cannon¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 12 September 1939, Trotsky addresses James P. Cannon on the question of the USSR’s social character, a debate sharpened by the recent German-Soviet pact. His core argument is that the USSR’s definition must not be made contingent on its diplomatic alignments. To judge the Soviet Union by its friendship with democracy or fascism, Trotsky insists, is to capitulate to the Stalinist logic of the People’s Front epoch. The social character of the USSR is a matter of its internal class relations and historical trajectory, not its foreign policy.
Trotsky stakes out a clear polemical position against those who argue that the USSR is no longer a degenerated workers’ state but a new social formation. He demands that such theorists specify what new political conclusions follow from their redefinition. The question, he argues, cannot be isolated from the broader historical process. Either the Stalinist state is a transitory deformation of a workers’ state in a backward and isolated country, or it represents a new social formation—‘bureaucratic collectivism’—that is replacing capitalism globally, encompassing Stalinism, fascism, and New Deals alike. Trotsky names Bruno R.’s La Bureaucratisation du Monde (1939) as the theoretical source of this alternative.
The stakes, Trotsky insists, are immense. To adopt the second alternative is to admit, openly or tacitly, that the revolutionary potential of the world proletariat is exhausted, that the socialist movement is bankrupt, and that capitalism is transforming itself into bureaucratic collectivism under a new exploiting class. Such a conclusion contradicts the entire programme, strategy, and tactics of the Marxist movement. Trotsky denounces this as an adventuristic jump, doubly criminal in the context of world war, when the perspective of socialist revolution is an imminent reality and the USSR will appear to all as a transitory episode in that process.
The letter thus functions as a preemptive defence of the orthodox Trotskyist position: the USSR remains a degenerated workers’ state, not a new class society. Trotsky promises a fuller thesis within a week, but the letter already establishes the theoretical and political line of demarcation against what he sees as a capitulation to historical pessimism disguised as theoretical innovation.