A Letter to Joseph Hansen [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 18 January 1940, Trotsky writes to Joseph Hansen with a strategic intervention aimed at forestalling an impending split within the American Socialist Workers Party. The immediate context is Trotsky’s completed article against Shachtman, but the more pressing concern is the conduct of the opposition leaders, who are already preparing to break away and positioning themselves as a persecuted minority. Trotsky diagnoses this as a symptom of their political psychology and proposes a counter-offensive based on offering the most generous possible guarantees for minority rights within the party.
The core of the letter is a four-point proposal for mutual guarantees, applicable regardless of which side becomes the minority. These are: no prohibition of factions; no restrictions on factional activity beyond those required for common action; official publications to represent the line established by the new convention; and the right of the minority to publish an internal bulletin for party members or a joint discussion bulletin with the majority. Trotsky acknowledges that continuing discussion bulletins after a convention is an exception and a deplorable one, but he insists that the party must not be bureaucratically rigid. He explicitly grounds this in dialectical method applied to organisational questions: “We are dialecticians also in the organisational field.” The political calculation is clear: legalising post-convention discussion is incomparably preferable to a split.
Trotsky goes further, proposing that the majority offer to publish special discussion symposiums under the supervision of the new National Committee, open not only to party members but to the public. This maximal concession is intended to disarm the opposition’s premature complaints of repression and to handicap their ability to provoke a split. He argues that prolonged discussion, if channelled by good will on both sides, would serve the education of the party. The letter ends with a tactical recommendation: the majority should make these proposals officially and in writing to the National Committee, so that whatever the opposition’s answer, the party can only gain.
The polemical target is the Shachtmanite opposition, which Trotsky accuses of preparing a split under the cover of claiming victimhood. The letter is a model of Trotsky’s approach to factional struggle: pre-emptive, principled in form, and ruthless in political logic. It draws on the historical experience of the Bolshevik party’s internal debates and the degeneration of the Comintern under Stalin, against which Trotsky insists on democratic norms as a weapon against bureaucratic degeneration—but also as a means to isolate those he considers objectively splitting.