Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From New International, Vol.12 No.1, January 1946, p.30.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
March 17, 1945
To the Editorial Board of Labor Action, New York, NY
Comrades:
We have just received a copy of your issue of December 11, 1944, in which appears, under the title: A Letter from German Socialists, a statement made in the name of the “Committee Abroad of the IKD.”
The very fact that this committee has sent you this letter, which you introduce as coming from “our” comrades, is a disgraceful action on the part of a leadership claiming to “represent” a section of the Fourth International. But that is a matter which will be settled within the ranks of the Fourth International itself.
The Committee of the IKD, by its letter, and you, by endorsing it, endeavor to throw suspicion upon the information published concerning the activity of the Fourth International on the European continent under the yoke of the Gestapo. You present this information as unreliable and unverifiable. But in spite of the still difficult communication, you were not – at the time of your publication – altogether ignorant of parts of this activity, of the clandestine meetings, the illegal publications, the many victims. You affect to ignore this and are very eager to show your political hostility by publishing a scandalous letter: German militants have forgotten or have been unable to register with the so-called IKD leadership before being murdered by the Gestapo. Therefore, they are not Fourth Internationalists! The Stalinist slanders against us are more dangerous, but certainly no more odious, than the alleged objectivity to which you pretend.
In fact, the comrades here are now in direct contact with the European parties, and the information to which the “Committee Abroad of the IKD” objected was information given directly by the provisional European Secretariat of the Fourth International.
In the above-mentioned statement, the so-called leadership of the IKD and yourself ignore and refuse to recognize the members of the Fourth International, militants who have propagated the program of the Fourth International under the Gestapo terror. It is obvious that this so-called leadership of the IKD and yourself, having both abandoned fundamental points of the Bolshevik-Leninist program, are only recognizing each other in order to fight against the program of the Fourth International and the organizations struggling for it.
To conclude, may we add that, at present, the groups which had fought each other bitterly for many years, are either unified or attempting to unite on the basic program of the Fourth International. Conditions in Europe are sweeping away those who have used revolutionary words to cover their skepticism and they are leaving room only for those who really take the revolutionary struggle to heart The distance which is separating you from the comrades in Europe should incite you to some caution in dealing with them.
|
|
Bolshevik-Leninist greetings |
P. S. – Copies of this letter have been sent to The Socialist Appeal, London, and The Militant, New York.
Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 24.9.2005