Two Letters to Albert Goldman [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In these two letters from February 1940, Trotsky addresses the deepening factional crisis inside the Socialist Workers Party, responding to Albert Goldman’s reports on the minority opposition led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham. The core argument is that the opposition’s behaviour stems not from principled political differences but from petty-bourgeois hysteria and factional desperation, which Trotsky insists must be met with Marxist objectivism rather than reciprocal recrimination.
Trotsky’s first letter defends his decision to publish Abern’s remark about an alleged split, explaining that his aim was to force the opposition leaders into an unambiguous statement about their own intentions, not to expose supposed conspiracies by the majority. He dismisses the charge that the majority treats the minority as “second-class citizens,” retorting that the opposition’s own labels—“Cannon’s clique,” “conservative bureaucrats”—are themselves designed to degrade their opponents. He attributes the opposition’s extreme sensitivity to its petty-bourgeois character and refuses to engage in “psychoanalytical guessing” about Shachtman’s motives in his “Open Letter.” Trotsky’s polemical target is the opposition’s substitution of psychological speculation for political analysis, and he insists that the party must continue discussing the substantive questions—dialectics, the class nature of the Soviet state, the character of the war—not to provoke a split but to help the party’s petty-bourgeois wing adopt a proletarian position.
The second letter addresses the minority’s decision to hold a national convention in Cleveland on 24-25 February 1940. Trotsky argues that a national caucus does not in itself constitute a split, but is a “bad step on the road of split.” He notes that the convention likely aims to unify two or three tendencies within the opposition, some of which see no alternative to splitting. Trotsky proposes that the majority intervene vigorously in favour of unity, perhaps by sending a message to the convention focusing solely on party unity, without demanding that the minority abandon its positions on the Soviet Union or the war. He insists that the minority should be accepted as they are, provided they demonstrate real devotion to the party and accept discipline in action. The editorial note confirms that the Cleveland conference demanded the right for the minority to publish its own journal, a demand the majority rejected.
The letters draw on the immediate context of the 1940 SWP faction fight, which revolved around the class nature of the USSR and the character of the Second World War. Trotsky’s polemic is directed against the Shachtman-Burnham opposition, whom he accuses of substituting factional hysteria for Marxist analysis and of pushing toward an unnecessary split.