Three Letters to Farrell Dobbs [1]¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: Three Letters to Farrell Dobbs (March–April 1940)¶
These three letters from Trotsky to Farrell Dobbs, written in the months preceding the 1940 split in the Socialist Workers Party, constitute a sustained polemical intervention against the faction led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham, and Martin Abern. Trotsky’s core argument is that the minority’s demand for a “united” party while maintaining an independent public press is a fraud: it is a demand for split disguised as unity. He insists that a revolutionary propaganda organisation of the SWP’s size cannot tolerate the coexistence of two organisations addressing the working class with different theories, programmes, and slogans. Such an arrangement, he argues, would not convince the party’s membership but rather appeal over its head to an external audience, accelerating the minority’s degeneration toward Burnham’s positions.
Trotsky draws on Bolshevik historical precedents to refute the minority’s own use of them. Shachtman had invoked the existence of opposition newspapers inside the pre-1917 Bolshevik Party. Trotsky counters that the Bolshevik Party then numbered hundreds of thousands, and the purpose of open discussion was to reach and convince that mass; the danger of parallel publications was mitigated by the scale of the membership. In a small propaganda group, by contrast, a separate public organ is not a tool of internal persuasion but a weapon for external appeal. He dismisses the minority’s reference to temporary coexistence of two groups in the same country as irrelevant: such arrangements were exceptional, adopted only when political physiognomies were unclear or disagreements narrowly concrete (e.g., entry into the French PSOP). The American situation is qualitatively different: a united party with a serious tradition has, in a few months, produced an irreconcilable conflict over theory, programme, politics, and organisational methods.
The polemic sharpens against the minority leaders’ self-conception as superior journalists. Trotsky scorns their reliance on “literary capacities,” comparing them to the Mensheviks, who as a petty-bourgeois faction had more intellectuals and fluent pens but lacked a granite theoretical base. A “fluent pen is not sufficient to create a revolutionary party.” The alternative he poses to the convention is stark: genuine unity on the basis of democratic centralism, with serious guarantees for the minority inside the party, or an open, demonstrative break before the forum of the working class. He explicitly rejects a “hypocritical unity” that would allow the Fourth International to camouflage the minority’s inevitable degeneration.
In the second letter, Trotsky addresses the tactical question of how to handle Abern if the minority retreats from an immediate split. He argues against excluding Abern from the Secretariat, even though he is the source of organisational leaks. The better course is to bring him inside the Secretariat, under real control, and to establish clear rules of secrecy with graduated penalties. A Secretariat composed only of majority representatives is unsustainable if unity is preserved; a five-member body with three majority and two minority members is preferable. The only unacceptable outcome is the transformation of the minority into an independent political factor.
The third letter, written after the convention, expresses satisfaction that the majority did everything possible to preserve unity. Trotsky also urges a sustained theoretical campaign in favour of dialectical materialism, praising an article against Burnham on symbolic logic and recommending that Cannon’s pamphlet The Struggle for a Proletarian Party be recognised as the work of a genuine workers’ leader. The letters as a whole are a defence of Bolshevik organisational principles—democratic centralism, theoretical coherence, and the subordination of individual literary ambition to collective discipline—against what Trotsky sees as a petty-bourgeois faction’s drive toward organisational independence and theoretical capitulation.