To Comrade McKay [1]¶
Core Argument¶
Trotsky’s letter to Comrade McKay, dated 13 March 1923, constitutes a direct and programmatic intervention on the question of colonial troops, revolutionary strategy, and the national oppression of Black people under capitalism. The core argument is that the use of African and Asian troops by French and British imperialism to suppress the European working class is not a peripheral matter but a central question of the European revolution itself. Trotsky insists that the epoch of mere resolutions on self-determination and racial equality is finished; what is required now is direct, practical action.
He makes several key claims. First, the resistance to the deployment of negro troops must come from the negroes themselves, whose consciousness must be raised to recognise that serving French imperialism in Europe is identical to reinforcing their own subjugation in the colonies. Second, the European working class, especially in France and Germany, has a vital interest in this work of enlightenment. Third, the use of colonial reserves is a deliberate strategy by European capitalism to have armed, disciplined forces ready against the revolutionary masses at home. Trotsky argues that this is an inherently risky experiment for the bourgeoisie: tearing colonial peoples from their accustomed economic conditions and forcing them into the class conflicts of Europe shatters their mental rigidity and opens their consciousness rapidly to revolutionary ideas.
The historical context is the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the revolutionary wave in Europe, with French colonial troops occupying German territory in the Ruhr. Trotsky draws on the Marxist understanding that capitalism’s own dynamic of uprooting pre-capitalist relations creates the conditions for revolutionary consciousness among the colonised. He polemicises sharply against the Second International, dismissing its resolutions as worthless compared to even small groups of negroes organised for practical revolutionary work. He also attacks the American labour bureaucracy, singling out Gompers’ policy as founded on the “abominable obtuseness and caste presumption” of the privileged upper strata of the white working class, which refuses to recognise negroes as fellow workers and fighting comrades. This policy, Trotsky argues, is the most effective guarantee for the subjugation of both white and coloured workers alike.
The letter concludes with a clear directive: the urgent revolutionary task is the education of negro propagandists, who must work not in a spirit of negro chauvinism—which would merely mirror white chauvinism—but in the spirit of solidarity of all the exploited, regardless of colour. Trotsky declines to prescribe specific organisational forms for the American negro movement, stating that these will be found once there is sufficient will to action.