A Letter to Sherman Stanley [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 22 October 1939, Trotsky addresses Sherman Stanley, a pseudonym for a member of the Socialist Workers Party, intervening in an internal factional dispute that erupted at the onset of the Second World War. The core argument is that the minority faction’s challenge to the party’s established position on the defence of the USSR is not a legitimate programmatic development but a repetition of a pattern of oppositionism that substitutes complaints about the ‘internal regime’ for substantive political disagreement. Trotsky insists that the Russian question is indeed the central issue, not a pretext for a fight over leadership style.
Trotsky identifies two key claims from the minority. First, that Comrade M.S. (Max Shachtman) places a question mark over the old decision on the defence of the USSR without advancing a new one, leaving the party in a vacuum. Second, that Shachtman’s proposed formula—revolution against both Stalin and Hitler—is an abstract negation of defence in any concrete situation, effectively abandoning the USSR to imperialist attack. Trotsky argues that a revolutionary party cannot live between an annulled decision and an unformulated alternative. He references his own new article, sent by airmail to the National Committee, as an attempt to analyse the question concretely.
The letter draws heavily on the history of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky invokes previous factional fights over entry into the Socialist Party, where the same opponents who now decry the ‘regime’ had earlier opposed that entry on principle. He argues that the leadership’s ‘conservatism’—defending old programmatic decisions until replaced—is the elementary duty of a central committee, dictated by the self-preservation of the party. He contrasts this with the tendency of defeated factions to retreat from political defeat into generalised attacks on the ‘regime’, citing the examples of Vereecken, Sneevliet, and Molinier, who each, after being beaten on every point of difference, declared the real trouble to be the bad regime rather than the specific decisions.
Trotsky’s polemic is carefully calibrated. He explicitly refuses to draw a direct analogy between the present American oppositionists and those earlier figures, acknowledging the high qualifications of the minority leaders and expressing hope for continued friendly collaboration. Nevertheless, he warns that the same error—substituting regime complaints for political analysis—is being repeated at a new stage, and he insists that this procedure must be analysed and condemned by the party’s general opinion. The letter is addressed to Stanley, with copies sent to Cannon and Shachtman, making it simultaneously a private intervention and a public positioning document within the factional struggle.