March 23, 1953
Dear Friend:
I have received your letter which I naturally awaited with much impatience. What you write me about the atmosphere in the Party, and more especially Clarke's reactions in the PC toward you during the discussion of your report and the projected tour you ought to undertake, saddened me much. I will let him know my opinion on this matter.
Naturally it is not a question of yielding to this or that sentiment but of politically reacting, discerning the political essence of the matter, then taking this position or that, and striving to orient the struggle, henceforth inevitable, toward as progressive an outcome as possible for the whole of the movement nationally and internationally.
The political basis of the struggle is not yet sufficiently clear to me personally. I have read only the first documents, the last being Hansen's article.
I will restrain myself quite a bit from expressing any opinion before arriving myself to a very clear insight into the struggle and acquiring a conviction about it. This both through a spirit of responsibility toward your own as well as the international movement.
In this letter I content myself simply to conveying to you certain remarks. If Bartell's report did not satisfy me much in certain of its phrases, I found his second document "The struggle, etc." much clearer and better balanced. It is difficult to extract from this text that it represents any pro-Stalinist or essentially pessimistic tendency.
Hansen's article struck me by its very sharp attack against what he calls prostalinist ideas and tendencies indirectly expressed here and there by this or that person in the NY local.
This manner of opening in any way the national discussion risks being considered by the others as provocative, exasperating them, and from the first carrying the factional atmosphere to a paroxysm.
But that seems to my by far the most important thing is the following: is there really now in the US in our organization a prostalinist tendency to which it is necessary to give elementary lessons on what Stalinism and Trotskyism is? Is it possible that a part of the organization, a tendency is submitting to the pressure of Stalinism? Is it correct to see the essence of the matter in that, and center the discussion on that?
I confess to you that for the moment I doubt the correctness of such an orientation of the discussion. And for the following reasons.
Since the Old Man's death up to now we have not had to deal in the world movement with pro-stalinist tendencies (I don't speak of individuals here and there) who have capitulated or wanted to capitulate to Stalinism, but on the contrary with tendencies which have gravely erred in the opposite sense. Both during the war and after, where we committed the gravest mistakes, even unpardonable ones, it was a question of tendencies which confused the mass movement and the Revolution with its episodic and ephemeral Stalinist or Stalinized leadership as in Greece in 1944, Czechoslovakia in 1948, China yesterday and even still today. All this without mentioning the delays and errors committed by the entire movement on such questions as the nature of the buffer countries, the Yugoslav Revolution and the Chinese Revolution.
Stalinophobia is not simply a sentimental reaction toward Stalinism (its odious appearance) as Hansen writes, but a much deeper manifestation in our movement which has expressed the sectarian consequences of our isolation and the mechanical, scholastic handling of the genuine revolutionary spirit of the teaching and method of the Old Man, in a new international period created during and since the recent war.
It is there that the principal danger by far lies, and there is still the danger today against which we have effectively fought. All those who have quit us have not gone to the Stalinists but to the reaction and have become both anti-Stalinists and fierce anticommunists.
It is hard for me to see that in the US, the fortress of imperialism preparing counter-revolutionary war, there can be a genuine danger of a tendency in the Trotskyist organization which is capitulating to Stalinism.
What appears to me much more possible is that the pressure now weighing upon our American organization and its isolation inevitably provokes internal uneasiness and unconscious tendencies toward discouragement and pessimism. There is the true danger that could be surmounted only on condition of elaborating concretely both the specifically American prospects for tomorrow and the tactic most appropriate for the present to bind us, to help us root ourselves in the real movement of the masses of the country.
While exploiting to the full the present possibilities, this tactic should not sacrifice the future; in any case it ought not to separate us from the real proletarian masses and their organizations.
[p. 84]
Such a discussion which would show either that the Party is now doing all that is possible in this field, while also retaining a clear perspective of its future role, or that there actually are certain matters to think over and eventually to correct, could be a highly profitable discussion, at the end of which the organization as a whole would emerge strengthened.
Meanwhile a discussion centered on Stalinism seems to me (at this precise moment, perhaps tomorrow I shall see its eventual value) as artificial, passing by the essential issue.
I repeat that all this still buzzes in my brain without myself being able to say that I as yet see sufficiently clearly.
Fraternally,