Comrades,
When we learned, at the beginning of August, about documents by your leaders now circulating among you and about their unexpected and unspeakable content, we made a great effort to suppress our indignation and decided to do nothing for the moment, hoping that you would reconsider and resume a responsible attitude toward the International and its supreme interests. We wrote the letter of August 10 in this spirit.
Unfortunately, since then signs are accumulating which do not seem to justify this hope and show on the contrary that you are embarked on a road which can only disturb us immensely.
It is time for us to speak clearly and frankly amongst ourselves. The publication of the "minutes" of your Penum with the astonishing and revolting last pages with the persistent questioning of Comrade Campbell by Comrade Walter, the latest issue of the FI, as well as a series of articles recently published in *The Militant*, sketch out a course whose meaning it is not difficult to discern. It seems to us that you are now in the process of developing a line different from ours on two fundamental planes: *the conception and the functioning of the International; and the manner of understanding and explaining the events which are unfolding in the Soviet Union and the buffer countries since Stalin's death.*
On the plane of the International, it appears that you challenge its character as a world Party with a *centralized international leadership* as the statutes voted at the Second World Congress very explicitly specified and as it has developed and functioned up to the present with perfect agreement from its overwhelming majority, including yourselves at their head.
The right and the duty of the international leadership to defend the application of the political line defined by the World Congresses and Plenums of the IEC throughout all the sections, and the regime of democratic centralism as it has been defined with precision by the statutes of the International and not by each national leadership according to the calculation it makes of its interests during a factional struggle in its section, have been challenged.
Under the pretext of coping with the misdeeds of the "cominternist degeneration" and the alleged organizational and tactical errors committed by the International — both of "softness" and "toughness" — the idea is cultivated of an International which would be a kind of Federation of national groupings, each enjoying almost complete autonomy to regulate its own struggles and in which no political intervention by the International is welcome or permissable except, perhaps, if it completely upholds the interests of this or that national fraction.
[p. 88]
Going even further, ideas are now circulating among elements who seem in a hurry to enroll themselves in an anti-International faction, according to which the International after all does not yet exist, that it is only composed of certain important sections, the others do not count, and that it cannot pretend to play the role the statutes assign to is and tradition has up to now sanctioned. The elements who preach the decentralization of the International and now desperately seek proofs of its "bureaucratism" behave as a general rule in their own sections in a completely different manner, fervently defending there the strictest "Bolshevik" centralism.
In reality we have had to deal with such arguments and such resistances each time a factional struggle occurred in a given section and wherever it was necessary to call upon a given section to readjust its policy to that of the International.
But we have advanced despite that toward the creation of a genuine international leadership, which is representative and effective, which reflects a real process of more and more intimate fusion of our international movement into a world Party with a centralized international leadership. The conception and organization of the International, such as we now have it, really reflects an objective progress of the revolutionary workers' movement in general, a higher stage in the development of its consciousness, and *we will not betray it, we will not abandon it, under any pretext or at any price.*
Your organization has greatly contributed to what the International now is. It would be infinitely regrettable if other considerations lead you to reverse your attitude and to stand at the head of the centrifugal, isolationist and anti-International tendencies. If you do so, you will find us irreconcilably opposed to you on this precise plane. We will defend with utmost energy the conception and functioning of the International as its statutes specify them and that its life has sanctioned.
From this viewpoint, we protest against the fact that the pages of the interrogation were added to the "minutes" of your Plenum which give a resume of the record of its work. This is an inadmissible, unpolitical, factional method, alien to the customs of the International, of discrediting leading comrades of the International and preparing the struggle against its entire leadership. Without any proof, suddenly, in the midst of a discussion and struggle over different questions, during your Plenum, Comrade Walter rises up and poses a series of questions of an unspeakable kind to another member of the leadership. You dare to publish this so "political" part without any comment and send it to a series of leading comrades of your section and probably of the International, ignoring, among other things, its statutes on the matter which stipulate: "Article 39 — All political or organizational relations of any importance between national sections pass through the intermediary of the IS. In case of urgent necessity, such relations can be effected directly on condition that the IS is rapidly informed of all the details."
And this is also in flagrant contradiction with what you demand of the International: its non-intervention in the internal struggles of your organization. But even before the International undertakes, in line with its right and its duty, any *political* intervention in this field, you carry the struggle — and in what a manner! — into the International against its leadership. Comrades, the International has no need of secretly instigating factional struggles in any section, it does not dream of struggles "for power," it does not maintain "agents." Its present leadership was formed in the school of democratic centralism in the time of Trotsky and has not experienced the atmosphere of "cliques" and of "combinations" of the Cominternist era. The International sets forth and defends a political line; it sows and encourages political ideas; its strength and its means are political. People of cliques and combinations are always those who lack political means and ideas.
You well know that the International has taken no position *on the political content* of your internal struggle and that it reserves doing so until a more advanced stage of your discussion (that it hopes to see unfold in a different tone and without threat of split) when the differences will have appeared clearly and sharply, which is not yet the case. You ought not to look, comrades, for the causes of the factional struggle within your organization in shadowy actions by the International, but in the fundamental changes in the postwar world situation, in the special situation in the United States, and in the still more special situation of your organization in the framework of this international and national situation. By acting otherwise, you uselessly envenom the atmosphere and lamentably lower the level of the discussion.
Where do you want to arrive at by acting in this fashion?
When we received your Plenum resolution on the agreement and the concluding speech by Comrade Cannon we saluted and praised your wisdom. We then sincerely thought that a period of genuine peace would open for your organization. Now we no longer understand anything. We do not understand the subtleties of your technique of conducting the struggle. We do not understand how, some days after the Plenum and his magnanimous speech, Comrade Walter found himself placed in charge of "foreign affairs," renews the struggle this time against *Paris,* and tries to recruit Stuart — who is a convinced and active opponent of the Third World Congress and present line of the International — as a member of a faction, militarily and preventatively organized against some eventual ulterior but not certain intervention of the IS in your struggle! We do not understand why, after having decided at your Plenum to continue the discussion in a more moderate tone between the majority and minority, you carry the polemic abroad shortly after in as confused and envenomed a manner as before!
Finally we do not understand, in the light of articles by Comrade Wright in *The Militant* and by certain others on the events in East Germany, what your responsible position is on these questions. We do not know if you support the line and ideas contained in these articles; and in this case, we do not know what your position is toward the line and documents of the International on these same questions. For neither the idea of the capitulation of the Bonapartist bureaucracy before imperialism or the restorationist elements in the Soviet Union, nor the idea of the present reinforcement of these elements in the Soviet Union nor the idea that Malenkov plays and purely and simply continues Stalin's role, that he makes concessions only to the bureaucracy and to restorationist elements and not to the masses, nor the idea of bloody "purges" now in prospect in the USSR on a scale identical or comparable with that of 1936-38, are ours — and you well know it.
[p. 89]
The line of Comrade Wright's articles is based on schemas and old reminiscences and not on a correct analysis of the present reality, of the existing relation of forces, and of the present dynamic. It minimizes everything now happening in the Soviet Union and the buffer zone, it is oriented on the *desires* of the bureaucracy — which it envisages as a compact bloc as rigid and homogeneous as a genuine class — and not in the international revolutionary dynamic and the new relation of forces between the masses and the bureaucracy which is unfavorable to the latter, obliging it to make real concessions and limiting its *possibilities* of repression and purges.
We must make the same remark on the subject of the events in East Germany. These events have not demonstrated above all the reactionary and repressive role of the bureaucracy (which we well know), but its weakness in relation to the masses and its dislocation under the pressure and influence of the masses. In East Germany the native and Soviet Stalinists have not above all replied to the revolt of the workers by a large-scale repression, shootings and so on, but *much more* by a series of concessions. Moreover, in Hungary, Rumania, Poland, Bulgaria, Albania they made concessions even before the pressure of the masses was outwardly manifested precisely in order to avoid it. It is in a *second phase* that in East Germany the bureaucracy, in order to survive and maintain itself, is *combining reform and repression.*
On the other hand, the events in East Germany have provoked an extremely significant and valuable phenomenon for understanding the real, and not the bookish, course of the political revolution in these countries: namely, a split from top to bottom in the Stalinist party, with an entire wing of the bureaucracy capitulating before the workers and siding with them at the moment of the workers' uprising.
In all this there is a brilliant illustration of the correctness of the line of the International, of its documents and especially of the document on "The Rise and Decline of Stalinism" which anticipated this development.
We would like to see these points find an adequate echo in the columns of *The Militant*. Naturally you have full right now to be in disagreement with our ideas on this subject and to formulate political differences which up until recently had not at all appeared or at least were not clearly apparent. The international discussion for the Fourth World Congress amply furnishes the opportunity for all sides to enlighten us thoroughly on all these questions.
If we now summarily lay emphasis on this subject, it is to acquaint you with our viewpoint on the course that your policy now seems to be taking, which could have the most important implications. We ask you whether, before any important crystallization develops on all these questions which would naturally cause the gravest crisis ever recorded in our movement to break out, if it would not be possible to avoid or to limit it by proceeding to a *direct, face-to-face* exchange of views between yourselves and us.
In the last analysis what is involved is the unity of the international Trotskyist movement. Among responsible comrades it is never too late and everything ought to be attempted. Once again, in the name of the consciousness we have of our responsibilities toward the International, in the name of its supreme interests, in the name of loyal and effective collaboration that we and you have had together for so many years and that we have never wished to break, we ask you to *very quickly* decide upon a meeting either at the local of the IS or in some country close to your own.
With Communist internationalist greetings,
The IS
September 3, 1953