A Letter to Max Shachtman [1]¶
Core Argument¶
Trotsky’s letter to Max Shachtman, dated 20 December 1939, is a final, anguished appeal to a former comrade whom he now regards as having crossed to the wrong side of the class struggle. The core argument is that Shachtman’s political position, whatever its subjective intentions, objectively emboldens petty-bourgeois and anti-Marxist forces within the American socialist movement. Trotsky does not mince words: he declares the divergences between them to be of “decisive character,” and warns that Shachtman is committing “the greatest error of your life.” The letter is not an attempt at persuasion through sustained argument—Trotsky explicitly says he does not hope to convince Shachtman with these lines—but rather a prognosis and a demand for realignment.
The key claim is that Shachtman’s refusal to collaborate with the “Marxist wing” against “petty-bourgeois revisionists” amounts to a betrayal of Marxist doctrine, programme, and tradition. Trotsky does not elaborate the theoretical content of the dispute here, but the context is unmistakable: the factional struggle within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that erupted after the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the outbreak of the Second World War. Shachtman, along with a layer of the party’s youth and intellectuals, had begun to argue that the Soviet Union was no longer a degenerated workers’ state but a new form of class society—a position Trotsky denounced as a capitulation to petty-bourgeois pressure and a break from the Marxist tradition of analysing the USSR as a transitional formation.
The letter draws on the historical experience of the Bolshevik tradition and the fight against centrism and revisionism. Trotsky positions himself as the defender of orthodoxy against a new wave of petty-bourgeois opposition, a struggle he had waged for decades against Stalinism, the German Social Democrats, and the centrists of the London Bureau. The polemical target is not only Shachtman personally but the entire current he represents: the “petty-bourgeois and anti-Marxist elements” who, in Trotsky’s view, were using Shachtman’s prestige to attack the Marxist programme.
Notable is the personal tone—Trotsky writes as a friend, but one who has already judged the matter. He regrets that Shachtman does not feel the need to travel to Coyoacán for a face-to-face discussion, and offers the striking image of taking an aeroplane to New York for an uninterrupted forty-eight or seventy-two hour debate. The letter is thus both a political rupture and a personal lament, a document of the final fragmentation of the Trotskyist movement on the eve of war.