Paul Levi and Some ‘Lefts’¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of January 1922, Trotsky delivers a polemical dissection of Paul Levi’s expulsion from the Communist International and the subsequent formation of the Communist League of Germany (KAG). The core argument is that Levi’s political trajectory was determined not by Marxist principle but by an egocentric inability to accept party discipline or submit to collective decisions. Trotsky frames Levi’s conduct as a series of escalating errors: having opposed the March 1921 uprising in Germany—which Trotsky concedes involved “crude theoretical and practical mistakes”—Levi did not confine himself to legitimate criticism but instead set himself against the German party and its workers as a whole. Trotsky’s metaphor is vivid: in his panic at the train rounding a dangerous curve, Levi “flew out of the window and down the embankment,” while the party, though shaken, stayed on track.
The key claim is that Levi then demanded that the Third World Congress impose him back on the party he had left, a demand Trotsky finds absurd given Levi’s simultaneous accusations of Moscow’s dictatorial rule. Trotsky insists the expulsion was not arbitrary: the Russian delegation, including himself, voted for it under Central Committee direction. He notes that Lenin’s letter to the Jena Convention of the German CP had already expressed the correct position. Trotsky’s advice—that Levi should have silently submitted and worked as a rank-and-file soldier until readmitted—was ignored; instead, Levi began building a “whole ‘party’” on the basis of his personal grievances.
The letter also takes aim at the German “lefts,” particularly Arkadi Maslow and his co-thinkers, whom Trotsky charges with converting Marx’s historical theory into “automatism” combined with “unbridled revolutionary subjectivism.” He predicts that such elements, who preach an uninterrupted economic crisis leading to dictatorship, will flip into reformism at the first improvement in the conjuncture. Trotsky dismisses the Jena Convention’s vague differentiation from his views as a harmless revenge of the lefts for the lesson taught them at the Congress.
The most notable polemic concerns Levi’s publication of Rosa Luxemburg’s 1918 prison manuscript criticising Bolshevik policy. Trotsky argues the manuscript represents only a biographical stage in Luxemburg’s development, not a theoretical contribution; she never published it herself and was revising her views by the time of the German CP’s founding. Levi, who had previously opposed publication, now used it for factional revenge. Trotsky denounces this as a “monstrous intellectualistic egocentrism” that makes Paul Levi “the measure of all things.” The KAG itself is dismissed as a sanatorium for tired pilgrims seeking a pretext to leave the Communist Party without returning directly to the Independents.