The Stalinists are causing serious incidents

From New York

News has reached us from New York of serious clashes that have taken place there between the majority and the opposition within the American Communist Party. On Tuesday, February 20, a rally organized by the American opposition was held at the Labor Temple to protest Russia’s expulsion of Comrade Trotsky. About 400 people attended the meeting. The Stalinists, numbering about a hundred, initially refused to pay the 25-cent admission fee, but eventually paid to get in. When the meeting’s “chairman,” Martino Abern, opened the rally on behalf of the minority that had remained faithful to the principles of the October Revolution, the Stalinists interrupted him and sparked a clash that lasted an hour and a half.

The commotion caught the attention of the police, who intervened on several occasions; at one point, reinforcements from three police stations and two teams of detectives were even called in. But the minority broke up the rally, and Marino Abern made the following statement: “We protest against the fascist tactics of these ‘gangsters’. They prompted a police response, but we don’t want their protection. We’ll make sure the next meeting is better organized.” The Stalinists were armed with batons, sandbags, and some even with brass knuckles, which further proves that the demonstration was organized. There were numerous casualties on both sides. Two Italian left-wing activists were also injured, one of them very seriously. Just for the record. Our observations are as follows: 

The watchword of the centrists is to prevent by any means necessary, in Russia as in other countries, the opposition from reaching out to the masses and from clarifying—in the face of the constant distortions by the machinery of Bolshevization—its own revolutionary political stance toward the communist proletariat. The tactic is to discredit left-wing comrades in the eyes of party members by expelling them from the parties themselves on charges of treason—a cliché that has become a catch-all excuse—and to prevent the opposition from finding a way to speak to the misled comrades outside the party ranks.

This tactic is currently being implemented. At a time when the position of the bureaucracy dominating the Russian and international parties is seriously threatened by the steady, impressive advances of the Russian Left, it applies the infamous Article 58 to the communists, deporting or imprisoning hundreds of communist proletarians, and exiles the most prominent figure of the Russian Left, Trotsky,around whom the proletariat can rally as it has in other difficult moments during the revolution, is exiled with the clear aim, as demonstrated by the publications of Pravda, the various Hammer and Sickle journals, and the Bolshevized press in general—of discrediting him, and with him the Russian Left in the eyes of the world proletariat. The Bolshevized press of the other parties of the International scrupulously adheres—where it does not do worse—to this eminently… revolutionary tactic. Since Article 58 cannot be applied internationally, this Bolshevized press resorts to misrepresenting Left-wing thought and to denunciation in Belgium, and to base slander in France and Germany; furthermore, when it comes to granting Trotsky asylum in a sanatorium in Czechoslovakia, the leadership of that country’s Communist Party agrees with the Minister of the Interior to refuse him! To reiterate, the tactic currently being employed is to discredit the Russian Left and its leader, Trotsky, and to prevent their voice—along with that of communists in other countries—from reaching the proletariat still within the Communist Parties. The practical manifestations of this tactic are those that are currently unfolding here, which serve to define it. The consequences:

We state clearly and immediately that there can be no confusion between our communist position, which fully embraces the historical responsibility for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary measures it enacted against the individuals and political currents that actively fought it in Russia and continue to oppose it in principle today, and the position of opportunism. Opportunism bears the responsibility for creating a situation in which the struggle for the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat within the proletariat itself has become extremely difficult—a situation that allows for easy, superficial exploitation by anarchists of various stripes and by social democracy; it bears the even greater responsibility for the conflict among communists and for the proletariat’s growing estrangement from Russia.

If anarchists and social democrats believe that they can raise the question of “freedom of speech” in cases like the one in New York from a point of view that we communists cannot accept, they cannot. We will prevent any confusion; above all, we will prevent the struggle waged by the Left—based on the principles of revolutionary Marxism and the tradition of the Italian Communist Party, in irreconcilable opposition to the Centrism that the PCI’s tradition and program have abandoned, and based on the principles that enabled October 1917—from being distorted by having it dragged onto the terrain of sentimental and petty-bourgeois demands.

We therefore affirm our full support for the principles upon which the Third International was founded.

We fight opportunism because it has shifted from those foundations, creating the current unsustainable situation; today we fight against anarchists, social democrats, and Centrists—not in the name of “freedom of speech,” nor in the name of abstruse notions lacking a revolutionary basis, but in the name of the communist principles that led the Russian proletariat to victory, and for the dictatorship of the proletariat—a cause against which Centrists, social democrats, and anarchists have formed a united front, not merely in terms of appearances, form, or the expression of the moment, but fundamentally and historically. And along this path—as we have said and repeated—we will respond to all attacks, all provocations, and all acts of aggression by opportunism.