A Letter to Sherman Stanley [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 8 October 1939, Trotsky intervenes sharply in an internal factional dispute within the American Socialist Workers Party, addressing Sherman Stanley’s claim that an irreconcilable opposition exists between two resolutions before the party plenum. Trotsky immediately identifies a logical contradiction: Stanley simultaneously asserts that the two texts are not irreconcilably opposed and that a “disaster” threatens the party. For Trotsky, if genuine political differences existed, the proper response would be to wage political struggle to a conclusion, not to prophesy catastrophe. If, however, the two motions represent mere nuances of the same programme—that of the Fourth International—then the minority’s apocalyptic posture is unprincipled and unnatural. Trotsky accuses Stanley of lacking the objectivity he claims for himself.
The letter then turns to a substantive theoretical dispute over the character of the USSR. Trotsky rejects as an “unhappy invention” Stanley’s argument about a degenerated “workers’ empire.” He recalls that the charge of a “Tsarist expansion programme” was levelled against the Bolsheviks from the earliest days of the October Revolution. A sound workers’ state, Trotsky argues, would also tend toward expansion, and its geographical lines would inevitably coincide with those of Tsarist expansion because revolutions do not alter geography. The Marxist objection to the Kremlin bureaucracy is not to expansion as such, nor to its geographical direction, but to its bureaucratic, counter-revolutionary methods. Crucially, Trotsky insists that neither Tsar, nor Hitler, nor Chamberlain abolished capitalist property in occupied countries. This progressive fact—the abolition of capitalist property—derives from the circumstance that the October Revolution has not been definitively assassinated by the bureaucracy, which is forced by its structural position to take measures that Marxists must defend against imperialist enemies. These progressive measures are far less significant than the bureaucracy’s general counter-revolutionary activity, which is precisely why the bureaucracy must be overthrown.
Trotsky concludes with a polemic against those comrades who, indignant over the Stalin-Hitler pact, seek “purely verbalistic satisfaction” by striking from the USSR the title “workers’ state.” He dismisses this as a childish gesture, akin to Stalin depriving a disgraced functionary of an order. Marxist sociology and hysteria, he declares, are absolutely irreconcilable. The letter thus defends the continued designation of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state against those who, in Trotsky’s view, substitute emotional denunciation for materialist analysis.