A Letter to Max Shachtman [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 6 November 1939, Trotsky directly challenges Max Shachtman’s claim that the Stalin-Hitler pact and the outbreak of war necessitate a fundamental break with the Fourth International’s existing position on the USSR. Trotsky’s core argument is that Shachtman has misrepresented the historical trajectory of the Left Opposition, presenting its evolution as a series of belated, reactive shifts rather than a principled, staged development. Trotsky insists that the Opposition did not uncritically support the Kremlin in 1920, nor did it remain static thereafter. He reminds Shachtman that as early as 1923, and decisively by 1927, the Opposition had already separated its defence of the USSR as a workers’ state from support for Stalin’s bureaucratic course, codified in the ‘Clemenceau thesis’ which posited the necessity of overthrowing the Stalin government in the interests of genuine defence.
Trotsky dismantles Shachtman’s central charge—that the slogan of unconditional defence previously meant endorsing every diplomatic and military action of the Kremlin. This, Trotsky writes, is a “horrible deformation” of the Opposition’s whole position. Unconditional defence, he clarifies, is determined not by Stalin’s manoeuvres but by the class character of the nationalised property. He draws on Lenin’s 1918 polemic against Bukharin to illustrate that subordinating the defence of the USSR to the world revolution is not a sign of conflict between two equal interests, but a logical subordination of a part to the whole. A German revolution, even if it menaced the Soviet state’s immediate security, would still be supported by Marxists.
The letter is a sharp polemic against what Trotsky sees as a dangerous factional impulse to declare the old orientation bankrupt. He accuses Shachtman of speaking abstractly about the “concreteness of events” while failing to specify what new political conclusions follow. Trotsky is particularly alarmed that Shachtman’s presentation will mislead hundreds of new members who lack the Opposition’s historical experience, leading them to believe the movement was taken unawares by Stalin’s pact with Hitler. Trotsky insists the opposite: the Fourth International foresaw the general tendency, if not the empirical detail, and does not need to improvise a new line. The real danger, he concludes, is not unconditional defence of what is defensible, but the indirect aid such factional attacks give to currents that seek to equate the USSR with fascism and thereby compromise Marxism with Stalinism.