Letter From the RCP to the SWP¶
Core Argument¶
This letter, dated 1 June 1946, from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) of Britain to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States, is a sharp polemic against the SWP leadership’s refusal to join a coordinated international campaign to expose the Moscow Trials during the Nuremberg proceedings. The core argument is that the SWP’s passivity is indefensible, born of excessive caution and a failure to grasp the strategic opportunity presented by the unique conditions of the Nuremberg Trial. The RCP contends that the SWP’s leadership, particularly Comrades Stein and Goldman, advanced two flawed objections: that the campaign might provoke the Stalinists into fabricating new evidence linking Trotsky to the Nazis, and that the campaign was unnecessary since no fresh allegations against Trotskyists had emerged at Nuremberg.
The RCP systematically dismantles these objections. On the first point, it argues that the political conditions at Nuremberg—the absence of unity among the Allied prosecutors, the antagonism between the Anglo-American imperialists and the Stalinists, and the presence of Nazi defendants with their own agendas—made a Stalinist frame-up impossible. The Stalinists, experts in the art of perjury, require total control over prosecutors, witnesses, and judges; Nuremberg offered no such conditions. The RCP insists that the real risk lay in inaction, not action. On the second point, the RCP contends that the campaign was not aimed at convincing hardened Stalinists but at the tens of thousands of workers who had been bamboozled by wartime Stalinist propaganda into accepting the Moscow Trials as legitimate anti-Nazi measures. It cites a letter from SWP members Allen, Jeffries, and Lyons, who note that Stalin’s wartime prestige had retroactively legitimised the Trials in the eyes of many.
The RCP draws on the authority of the Dewey Commission, which had already provided conclusive proof of the frame-up, but insists that this was insufficient without an active propaganda offensive. It points to the success of the British campaign, which had reversed the offensive-defensive dynamic: in Britain, the Stalinists were now silenced and on the defensive, whereas previously they had dominated the narrative. The RCP contrasts this with the SWP’s defensive posture, exemplified by The Militant’s weak rebuttal of a Stalinist leaflet that falsely claimed Nuremberg documents proved Trotsky plotted with Hess. Instead of using the RCP’s campaign as an offensive weapon, the SWP merely denied the documents existed.
The letter also critiques the SWP’s objection that the RCP’s approach was an “appeal to the hangmen” at Nuremberg. The RCP retorts that Trotsky himself never hesitated to demand that his accusers produce evidence, and that the SWP’s orientation is “nervous” and lacking in boldness. The RCP appeals to the authority of Natalia Trotsky, who had urged the campaign forward, and notes with dismay that American workers learned of the campaign through the Shachtmanite Workers Party, not the SWP. The letter closes with a fraternal but firm demand that the SWP join the French, Dutch, Belgian, British, Irish, Indian, and other sections of the Fourth International in seizing this unique opportunity.