A Letter to Joseph Hansen [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 29 February 1940, Trotsky mounts a sharp polemical defence against accusations levelled by the petty-bourgeois factionalists within the American Socialist Workers Party — specifically Shachtman, Abern and Burnham. The immediate trigger is a dispute over documentary evidence: Shachtman claims that a letter quoted by Trotsky concerning Spain bore the signatures of Cannon and Carter as well as his own. Trotsky counters flatly that photographs prove the letter was signed by Shachtman alone. He concedes that the Majority comrades may have shared Shachtman’s errors on particular questions, but insists they never systematised them into a factional platform — and that, he asserts, is the crux of the matter.
The letter then turns to the moral indignation of Abern and Burnham. They object that Trotsky quotes their oral declarations without prior ‘verification’ — a demand Trotsky dismisses as absurd, caricaturing it as a call for an investigating committee with stenographers. Burnham, he notes, has repeatedly identified dialectics with religion; the present squabble is over whether he uttered a specific sentence reported to Trotsky. Abern, meanwhile, is caught preparing for a split but denies having spoken the words attributed to him. Trotsky treats these denials as hypocritical posturing, a fresh outbreak of the “moral sweatings of the disorientated petty bourgeois” that he had already diagnosed in an earlier article on morals.
The most substantial passage addresses the affair of Max Eastman and Lenin’s Testament — a charge Trotsky clearly regards as the height of hypocrisy. In 1925, Eastman published Lenin’s Testament without consulting the opposition faction, at a moment when the faction had decided to suspend public activity to avoid a premature split. The Troika (Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev) sought to exploit Eastman’s publication to provoke an oppositional abortion, presenting Trotsky with an ultimatum: sign a declaration written by the Politburo or face immediate open struggle. The opposition centre unanimously judged the moment unfavourable and instructed Trotsky to sign. Trotsky insists this was a political necessity, not an abstract moral question. To treat it as such, he argues, is the prerogative of petty-bourgeois fakers who proclaim “Pereat mundus, fiat justicia!” while keeping far more indulgent accounts for their own daily procedures. He closes with a withering comparison: the old Mensheviks were heroes next to such people.
The letter thus functions as both a specific rebuttal of factional slanders and a broader indictment of moralising abstraction divorced from revolutionary political calculation.