A Letter to Chris Andrews [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this brief letter from August 1940, Trotsky articulates the revolutionary Marxist position on conscription and military service, directly countering the pacifist and sectarian tendencies within the labour movement. The core argument is that the party’s anti-pacifist stance is both revolutionary and non-sectarian because it does not oppose the masses’ instinctive turn toward arming themselves, but instead seeks to channel it toward proletarian ends. Trotsky identifies two key advantages of this position: it is rooted in the epoch’s character, where questions are decided not by criticism of arms but by the critique of arms—a clear inversion of Marx’s famous dictum—and it avoids the sterile moralism of abstractly asserting the party’s purity against the actual movement of events and mass sentiment.
Trotsky’s polemic is directed squarely at Labor Action, which had declared itself “100 per cent” with the anti-conscription campaigner Lewis. Trotsky dismisses this outright, arguing that Lewis defends the capitalist fatherland with obsolete means—voluntary professional armies—which are militarily outdated and class-dangerous. The workers, he claims, understand or feel this, which is why they support conscription. This support, however confused and contradictory, represents an embryonic form of adhering to the “arming of the proletariat.” The sectarians, by flatly rejecting conscription, miss this historical opening. Trotsky’s intervention is to accept conscription as a fact and a point of departure, but on the condition that it be “made by ourselves”—that is, under working-class control and for revolutionary purposes.
The letter draws on the theoretical context of the epoch of imperialist war and revolution, where the state’s military apparatus is a central terrain of class struggle. Trotsky’s approach is consistent with the Marxist rejection of abstract pacifism and the insistence that the proletariat must learn to use arms, not renounce them. The polemic is against both liberal anti-conscriptionists and left-wing sectarians who refuse to engage with the concrete, contradictory consciousness of the masses. The letter’s brevity and directness reflect Trotsky’s characteristic insistence on revolutionary realism: the task is not to oppose conscription but to transform it into a weapon of class war.