Written: April 1931.
First Published: The Militant, Vol. IV No. 8, 15 April 1931, p. 2.
Transcription/HTML Markup: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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The delegates to the May Day Conference from the New York branch of the Communist League gave a practical demonstration of the actual policy of the Opposition. It was not lost on the Communist workers present; of this we may be sure. The action of representatives of the Opposition, in disregarding all provocation and breaking through the bureaucratic barriers to speak directly to the rank and file for solidarity, is one to be proud of and to set up as a model for Oppositionist conduct. This is the way to carry our ideas deeper into the party.
Our policy is the policy of united front with the party. Several hundred Communist workers, assembled at the May Day Conference saw it exemplified there in deed and heard it expounded in the speeches of our delegates. Let the Stalinist disrupters of the workers’ vanguard slander and misrepresent us all they want. If we keep our own line straight, and if we find enough comrades who can represent it as faithfully as our May Day Conference delegates did, our slogans and ideas will make their way into the minds and hearts of the conscious proletarians.
A friendly reception was accorded to our delegates by the workers present, despite the attempts to incite a lynching spirit against them. Applause, even, greeted their exposition of our policy. These are signs of the times. Do they not indicate the beginning of a break in the wall between the Opposition and the party ranks?
The results of this incident confirm once more the rightness of our attitude toward the party from which opportunists and muddle-heads have tried and still try to divert us. Every new experience proves over again that those who want to turn the course of the Opposition away from the party, who complain about being “a tail to the party”, do not speak our language and are not going our way.
We are with the party, and no one can tear us away from it. But to be with the party in the revolutionary, and not merely in the formal sense, means to be against the Centrist bureaucrats, who corrupt and miseducate it, with an irreconcilability that grows harder and more relentless as we draw nearer to the workers in the ranks. Our delegates to the May Day Conference acted in this spirit and thereby advanced our cause another step forward.
Last updated on: 14.12.2012