Summary Speech¶
Core Argument¶
In this summary speech to the Second Congress of the Communist Youth International, Trotsky mounts a sustained polemic against the sectarian leftism of youth leaders who opposed the Third Congress resolution on the Italian Socialist Party. The core argument is that the Comintern must pursue a tactic of winning over the mass of workers still following centrist and reformist leaders, rather than demanding chemically pure revolutionary parties and waiting for periodic betrayals to disillusion the masses. Trotsky directly refutes the Italian youth delegates Tranquilli and Polano, who argued that the Socialist Party was hopeless because both its leaders and its rank-and-file were unreformable. Trotsky counters by pointing to the party’s internal composition: 100,000 in the ‘unity’ wing, 50,000 communists, and only 14,000 reformists. The very fact that the Socialist Party sent delegates to Moscow despite knowing the ECCI had expelled them proves that the masses are compelling their leaders toward the Comintern. The party’s leaders, including Serrati and Lazzari, are forced into hypocrisy precisely because their members are gravitating toward Moscow. Trotsky insists that to reject these workers would be to strengthen the negative side of their organisational conservatism and to insult them.
The speech draws on the concrete experience of the Italian revolutionary wave — political strikes, uprisings in cities and villages, army mutinies — to argue that Italy has had no shortage of dynamic actions, but a catastrophic lack of preparation. Against comrade Schueller, who demanded only dynamic action, Trotsky insists that action without revolutionary organisation and preparation is futile. The theses of the Third Congress, far from being opportunist, express this same clarity. Trotsky mocks the logic of comrade Laporte, who argued that because Smeral agreed with the theses, the theses must be bad. Trotsky turns this inside out: if Smeral and Serrati accept the theses, it means the masses who follow them are now for the Comintern, and the centrists have been stripped of their weapons. The alternative — rejecting Smeral together with the masses — is the path of sectarianism, not revolution. Trotsky warns that such a policy would never win the majority of the Italian proletariat. He concludes by predicting that the Comintern’s tactic will provoke a split in the Socialist Party, forcing the left wing to demand expulsion of the reformists, and that even municipal councillors who enter the party will prove useful in organising food supplies after the conquest of power. The speech is a defence of the united front tactic against leftist purism, grounded in the concrete balance of forces in Italy and the need to expand the Comintern’s base among the working class.