September 1940 TRIRI. A M on thl y Organ of Revolutionary M arxisrn THE HERITAGE .•••........ By Max Shachtman HIS PLACE IN HISTORY • • • • •.. By J. R. Johnson SIXTEEN YEARS OF TERROR . • . By Albert Gates TROTSKY'S WRITINGS IN ENGLISH A Bibliography A LETTER TO THE AMERICAN TROTSKYISTS By Leon Trotsky Fifteen Cents Single Copy Subscription Per Year $1.50 r THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ..4 Mon,hly Organ 01 Ref)olutionary Mar",lam Volume VI September, 1940 No.8 (Whole No. 47) Published ~onthly by NEW INTERNATIONAL Publishing Company, 114 West 14th Street, New York, N. Y. Telephone CHelsea 2·9681. One bit of good news this month is the fact that we have Subscription rates: $1.50 per year; bundles, 10c for 5 copies obtained second class mailing privileges for THE NEW INTER­ and up. Canada and foreign: $1.75 per year; bundles, 12c for 5 NATIONAL. This will help our program in the coming months. and up. Entered as second·class matter July 10, 1940, at the poet office at New York, N.Y. under the act of March 3, 1879. We succeeded in issuing a 32 page number in memory of Leon Trotsky, and we are going to try to continue with the larger Editor: MAX SHACHTMAN magazine. Business Manager: ALBERT GATES • TABLE OF CONTENTS The October issue is already in preparation. As we told you LEON TROTSKY: THE HERITAGE in August a special election would be published. We had orig­ By Max Shachtman ----------------------------------------- 147 inally planned this for September, but the tragic death of Trot­ TROTSKY'S PLACE IN HISTORY sky made necessary that postponement. The October number By J. R. Johnson ------------------------------------ .. --------- 15 1 promises to be of a high caliber. It will deal with a variety of SIXTEEN YEARS OF TERROR subjects related to the elections and the war question which is By A Ibert Gates ____________________________________________ 167 the dominant one in the presidential campaign. A LETTER TO THE AMERICAN TROTSKY­ • ISTS, By Leon Trotsky ----_____________________________ 17 1 There will be a declaration of the Political Committee of TROTSKY'S WRITINGS IN ENGLISH the Workers Party on the elections in which the position of the A Bibliography, Compiled by Jack Mann ____ 173 Party will be stated. The political situation in the United States in the light of the war and the swiftly developing militarization of the country, will be treated in an exhaustive review by Max Shachtman, National Secretary of the Workers Party. The recent are additional topics that will be discussed in the next issue. national tour taken by Shachtman has enabled him to get some Another feature of the October N. I. is a discussion article by first hand information on the attitude of large numbers of Dwight Macdonald on the nature of German economy. All in workers to the current situation. all, we expect to have a well-rounded and extremely i~teresting • number. • David Coolidge is at work on an article dealing with the trades unions and the elections. Coolidge tells us that he is ex­ B. L. from Akron writes to say that he enjoyed the August amining the failure of the trades union movement in the United issue and notes a considerable improvement in the contents of States to develop a political party of its own, especially the the magazine. D. B. from St. Louis says the article on The Inter­ failure to produce working class political leaders of any note. American Cartel was fine and hopes we can increase the size This is a subject of extreme importance and we are sure the of THE NEW INTERNATIONAL. J. R. Johnson's article, trade unionist readers of THE NEW INTERNATIONAL will Capitalist Society and the War has received praise from many be highly interested in it. Demby's article on the situation in the quarters, proponents and opponents alike. With added sup­ ranks of the financial ruling class, centering specifically around port from our comrades and all readers of the magazine we can the House of Morgan and the Rockefellers, is already finished promise a 32 page magazine and a wide variety of excellent and will appear in the October issue. articles. Naturally, we need help to put this program across. • • Latin America and the United States is the subject of a M. S. from Lynn responded nobly by paying up his entire study by M. Lebrun which will appear in the next number. The account of $20.00. Miller, of the New York YPSL, keeps push­ article will take up hemispheric relations from the point of the ing the magazine and what is more, pays for them regularly. In view of the interests of the Spanish American nations, the con­ both respects, the New York party can learn some lessons from flict of their internal economies with that of the United States the YPSL. Columbus and Boston, also, l1,l"e two cities who keep and their connection to the second world war. Lebrun is highly their accounts in good shape. 1£ the other branches do the same qualified to treat with this subject and we are certain that his we shall be in a better position to put our plan into effect. We article will be a top-notcher. Other articles will deal with the need more subscriptions ! We want all accounts cleaned up! presidential candidates and subject them to a Marxist evalua­ Forward to the 32 page magazine! tion. The Negroes and the War, conscription and the elections -The MANAGER I THE NEW INTERNATIONAL A Monthly Organ 01 Revolutionary Marxism VOLUME VI SEPTEMBER, 1940 NUMBER 8 Leon Trotsl{.y: His Heritage EON TROTSKY belonged to the school of Karl Marx. permitted them by the outlived feudal regimes. The new . The difference between these two titans of the revolu­ ruling class ruthlessly razed the suffocating frontiers of L tionary socialist movement can be found not so much Popes and princes and dukes and counts so that the new in a comparison of their respective intellectual attainments economic system might have a whole nation in which to as in a comparison of the epochs in which they made their expand freely. At the same time, the new national frontiers mark and which could not but leave their mark upon them. which it erected were raised less for the purpose of confining Marx was the incomparable analyst, critic and revolu­ themselves than for protecting the new order from the en­ tionizer of capitalist society. With a pitiless scalpel, he dis­ croachments and invasions of dying but still vicious reaction, closed the immanent contradictions which doomed the con­ at the beginning from the Holy Alliance and towards the temporary social order to collapse and which at the same end from the Gendarme-Czar. time generated the living force that had the destruction of Marx, who was not and could not by his whole spirit the old society and the building of the new as its historic be a mere sentimental anti-nationalist, was altogether on the mission. In the more than ninety years since his views were side of the struggle for national independence. He was not, to first presented systematically if briefly in the Communist be sure, a bourgeois democrat, but a socialist revolutionary. Manifesto, they have successfully withstood every effort to He saw in the fight for the free bourgeois-democratic na­ demolish them. The crashing noises of capitalism collapsing tion the pre-condition for developing the independent strug­ throughout the world at this very moment only give us the gle of the young proletariat for its own social emancipation grimmest and most emphatic confirmation of Marx's an­ and thereby the emancipation of society from all class rule. alytical insight. The bourgeoisie never erred, even in its most revolutionary What Marx miscalculated-it was his only serious error period, in its judgment of Marx and his ideas, and it never -was the rate of speed at which the inexorable process of hesitated to turn to an alliance with hated reaction against disintegration would take place. Even there, his error was them. It never mistook Marx for °a bourgeois democrat or a that of a genius, in that he foresaw with such penetration German nationalist-as venomous critics have tried to picture what was to occur long after his time had passed. But the him-for its class interests gave it sufficient perspicacity to error was nevertheless the error of an epoch. After his death, understand more clearly even than did the followers of Marx world capitalism reached new heights of development and what that latter meant by the war-cry: "The revolution expanded beyond the dreams of his contemporaries; the in permanence I" proletariat, on the other hand, did not move directly towards There. are few things so tragic, and sometimes disastrous the revolutionary maturity that wourd make possible the in politics as the inability of men to understand when an execution of its historic mission. old situation has changed to a new one, when ideas and Marx's time was not the epoch of the proletarian world slogans suitable for one set of circumstances have become the revolution, the Vienna uprising and the Paris Commune very opposite of suitable in other circumstances. Marx's notwithstanding. It was the epoch in which the great bour­ conception of the revolution in permanence embraced this geois nations of Europe and America were finally established set of ideas: the struggle for the independent bourgeois and consolidated. The founder of the scientific socialist nation was progressive; the bourgeoisie conducting that movement was born on the morrow of the Great French struggle against feudalism and reaction was playing a pro­ Revolution and of the revolution of the thirteen American gressive role; the working class, no matter how young or colonies against English sovereignty.