Four Letters to the National Committee Majority [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In these four letters written to the National Committee majority of the Socialist Workers Party in late December 1939 and early January 1940, Leon Trotsky (under the pseudonym W. Rork) intervenes decisively in an escalating factional dispute. The core argument is that the minority, led by James Burnham and Max Shachtman, must not be permitted to use the party’s public organs—the Socialist Appeal and the New International—to air their dissident views. Trotsky reverses his earlier inclination to allow open discussion in these publications, now recognising that such a concession would be a grave political error.
Trotsky’s key claim is that the official party press exists to defend the party line and the programme of the Fourth International, not to serve as a neutral forum. To grant the opposition equal space would place the party’s programme on the same level as every untested innovation, thereby annihilating the party line itself. He dismisses the minority’s demand for “permanent juridical guarantees” as borrowed not from Bolshevik experience but from the French Socialist Party, whose constitutional safeguards never prevented the subjugation of workers by parliamentary cliques. The organisational structure of the proletarian vanguard, he insists, must be subordinated to the positive demands of revolutionary struggle, not to negative guarantees against degeneration.
The letters are sharply polemical. Trotsky identifies in Burnham’s position a “complete lack of revolutionary conception of the party,” evidenced by his purely negative attitudes toward the Dies Committee and the Soviet state. More damningly, he detects the first “social patriotic sin-fall” within the American party. The minority’s eagerness to publish their views is not confidence in their theoretical position—which Trotsky judges primitive and self-contradictory—but an impatient desire to justify themselves before “democratic public opinion,” to shout to the Eastmans and Hooks that they are “not so bad as the ‘Trotskyites’.” This is a form of inner capitulation, analogous to Zinoviev and Kamenev on the eve of October.
Trotsky draws on the Bolshevik tradition to argue that the party must test and select its cadres through internal struggle, not by appealing to external bourgeois judges. He warns that Stalinist agents are likely working to sharpen the discussion and provoke a split. The tone grows more contemptuous in the later letters: Abern’s threats of a split are either intimidation or political suicide; Burnham’s dismissal of dialectics as a religion is a “brutal challenge to all Marxists.” Trotsky announces he will write an open letter to Burnham and an analysis of the opposition documents, gritting his teeth at having to rehearse the ABC of Marxism against such elementary errors.