Back to the Party [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 21 February 1940, Trotsky addresses the deepening factional crisis within the Socialist Workers Party, specifically targeting the splitist trajectory of the Minority faction led by Abern, Shachtman, and MacDonald. The core argument is that the Minority leaders, having failed to win the party through theoretical or political argument, have abandoned principled struggle in favour of guerrilla warfare and a wilful drive toward organisational rupture. Trotsky frames this as a desertion, not a political necessity.
The letter opens with a polemic against MacDonald, who had accused Trotsky of capitulating to Stalinism in a Liberty article. Trotsky dismisses this as a psychoanalytic projection: MacDonald mistakes his own subconscious for Trotsky’s politics. The article in question was a tactical intervention against Stalin’s international role, not a sociological treatise on the Soviet state. Trotsky insists that politics requires saying what is necessary at a given moment, not reciting the whole of one’s theoretical apparatus each time. The accusation is thus both dishonest and self-revealing.
The central target, however, is Abern’s declared intention to split. Abern justified this by claiming that if Cannon’s majority prevailed at the convention, he and his associates would become “second-class citizens.” Trotsky calls this justification “lamentable and scandalous.” Lamentable because it amounts to desertion: the Minority had full freedom of discussion and failed to convince the party; the proper response is patient, serious work, not secession. Scandalous because the underlying motive is petty-bourgeois contempt for the proletarian majority: the intellectuals cannot bear to be outvoted by workers they consider uncultivated. Trotsky contrasts this with the behaviour of the Bolsheviks in the Third International, who remained a faction to the very last possibility despite persecution, arrests, and executions. The Fourth International, by contrast, has no coercive apparatus and operates through complete party democracy. A minority can educate the majority over time, attract new members, and become the majority. What is required is confidence in the workers.
Trotsky diagnoses the Minority’s impatience as class-based: the reverse side of intellectual contempt for the working class. Abern’s attitude is driven by personal hatred, which Trotsky denounces as abominable in politics. The letter ends with an appeal to the rank-and-file of the opposition to reject the splitist course: “Back to the party.” There is no viable path outside the Fourth International.