Questions & Answers on the Piatakov-Radek Trial by William Z. Foster

Author:William Z. Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workers Library Publishers
Published: 1937-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Trotskyism Heard and Repudiated

The fact is, these leaders fully expounded their policies to the Party membership and to the masses. From 1924 to 1929 the entire Party and its press rang with the historic discussion, and so, also, did the whole Communist International. It was a prolonged, widespread, penetrating and intense mass political debate. Vote after vote among the Party members, in executive committees and in conventions were taken. Many books and hundreds of pamphlets were written. And the final result of it all was that the realistic policies put forth by Stalin and the Central Committee were repeatedly ratified by majorities running from 90 per cent to 98 per cent. The Russian toiling masses, as a result of the profound debate and their own vast experience, were able to see the disastrous implications of Trotsky's theory that socialism could not be built in the U.S.S.R. and, despite its many well-known defenders, they rejected it decisively.

Up to this point in the internal Party struggle no restrictions whatever had been used against the Trotsky opposition. These restrictions began when Trotsky refused to accept the decisions of the Party, violated Party discipline, built an underground conspiratorial organization, and started a campaign to overthrow the Party leadership and its policies by force. And as the Trotsky group and its program gradually degenerated more and more politically and eventually the Trotskyites took to assassination, sabotage, espionage and treason, the Soviet government had no other recourse, in self-defense, than correspondingly to carry through its repression of the Trotsky movement and finally to outlaw it altogether as counter-revolutionary and the advance guard of fascism.

Contrary to The Nation's statement, the degeneration of the Trotsky opposition into a gang of counter-revolutionaries and the development of its treasonable conspiracy was not due to any lack of democracy in the Soviet Union but to the fundamentally anti-socialist character of Trotskyism, to its counter-revolutionary heart which was exposed to view by the severe pressure of the revolutionary struggle in the Soviet Union and internationally.

In Soviet democracy there is ample room for honest differences of socialist opinion, but there is no place for openly capitalist parties or conspiratorial gangs seeking to overthrow the workers and peasants' government and to re-establish capitalism.

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