Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature

On Trotskyism

Basmanov

Inventions and Reality -Trotskyism

Even a short survey of the fundamental propositions of "the theory of permanent revolution" shows how clumsy were the attempts to present it as being in line with Lenin's views and his teaching on revolution. One of the most active propagandists of Trotsky's ideas, Isaac Deutscher, produced the fantastic idea that "the theory of permanent revolution" was adopted in all essentials by Lenin and the Bolshevik party as part of their weaponry. Deutscher readily repeats the assertion made by Trotsky in his time that the October Revolution "corresponded more to Trotsky's ideas than to Lenin's".

Bourgeois sociologists were quick to pick up these wild ideas, as they have long acted on the principle that the more fantastic the lie, the more delicious a dish it would make in the kitchen of the anti-communist propagandists.

It is sufficient to compare the views of Lenin and Trotsky on the fundamental questions of the strategy of the working- class movement — the paths and prospects of the revolution, the relationship between general democratic and socialist aims, allies of the working class, the combination of the national and international tasks of the proletariat, the building of socialism — to find oneself confronted with two completely different approaches and two lines of thought. One oriented proletarian revolution on victory and suc- cessful development, the other spelled defeat.

Bourgeois propaganda is not satisfied with attempts to present Trotsky as some sort of "revolutionary theoretician". At the same time various other myths are put into circula- tion with the object of making Trotsky out a more important figure, and an outstanding "practising revolutionary".

Thus Trotsky's role in the events of 1905 is exaggerated. For instance, the author of a number of books published in the USA, Louis Fischer, states that Trotsky became "a leader of the revolution" in that period. The same view of Trotsky is given by that double-dyed falsifier, Leonard Schapiro, in his book The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In order to make this legend credible the falsifiers assert that it was Trotsky, as one of the leaders of the Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies, who energetically pressed for an armed insurrection and a general political strike.

The facts prove the opposite. As can be seen from the records of the Petersburg Soviet, the question of armed insurrection was never on the agenda. Moreover, at the beginning of December 1905, the Executive Committee of the Soviet published a resolution in which the necessity for an armed insurrection was rejected. It noted: "The Execu- tive Committee has been receiving a significant number of recommendations to this effect for some time past. The Executive Committee is not inclined to consider them." One of the reasons for this attitude of the Petersburg Soviet was that Trotsky was wholly on the side of the Mensheviks who had seized control of the Soviet.

In the foreword to the pamphlet Before January 9 Trotsky expressed his doubts as to the possibility of overcoming tsarism by means of armed insurrection. And later, in a letter to the Central Committee of the Russian Social- Democratic Labour Party of June 14, 1906, he justified the Mensheviks who had opposed the arming of the working class. As a result of the position taken up by Trotsky and his Menshevik colleagues, the Petersburg Soviet did not become an organ of armed insurrection, and the Petersburg proletariat did not support the December armed rising in Moscow.

At the same time Trotsky, while clamouring for a general political strike and proposing it as an alternative to an armed insurrection, announced that Petersburg could not take upon itself the role of initiator, and should only move after the provinces had moved. When the strike in Petersburg began to reach considerable dimensions, he hastily brought before the Petersburg Soviet on November 5 a recommenda- tion that it should be called off. He was supported by the Mensheviks. 1 If Trotsky has left any trace of himself in the history of the first Russian revolution, then it is only as a defeatist and disbeliever in the revolutionary strength of the working class.

And here is another false report spread around by the bour- geois falsifiers. They try to attribute to Trotsky the role of one of the organisers of the Bolshevik party. In his three-volume biography of Trotsky, Deutscher persistently attempts to convince the reader that Trotsky was a founder of the Bolshevik party. The anti-communist West German journal Osteuropa saw the main value of Deutscher's books in the fact that "he has disposed of the version that one comes across now and again that Trotsky was a man who from the beginning stood in opposition to the Bolshevik system; in fact he took part in its foundation". Here is another fact which the falsifiers carefully pass over: right up to 1917 Trotsky was not in the Bolshevik ranks, so he could not have played any part in founding the Bolshevik party. For more than 15 years, starting in 1903, he was attached organisationally to the Mensheviks, either coming out openly as a Menshevik, or hiding his adherence by proclaiming him- self a so-called man of the centre.

Trotsky soon found much in common with the Mensheviks with regard to questions of the organisational structure of the party, for the Mensheviks were also opposed to Lenin's plan for the creation of a monolithic, fighting, disciplined, revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat. They advocated free access to the party for the petty-bourgeois, opportunist elements. It was not by accident that soon after the Second Congress, at which Trotsky had spoken from Menshevik positions on programme and organisational problems, he allied himself with the Mensheviks, who, according to Martov, "rebelled against Leninism".

During more than ten years before the Revolution, Trotsky concentrated his energies on fighting Lenin, the Bol- sheviks. He frankly stated that he saw this as the main purpose of his political activity. The congratulatory postcard to Joffe (1910) is sufficiently widely known; in it Trotsky urged "a great fight" against Lenin, and threatened that in it "Lenin will meet his death". A few years later, in 1913, in a letter full of hatred of Lenin, addressed to Chkheidze, Trotsky wrote venomously: ". . .The whole Lenin edifice . . . carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own decay."

As an emigre Trotsky never stopped asserting that Bol- shevism was an accidental, and not a typical phenomenon of the Russian revolutionary movement. The Amsterdam International Institute for Social History published in 1969 a hitherto unknown letter from Trotsky to Henriette Roland- Hoist. She was connected with the journal Vorbote (Fore- runner), which was published by a group of Left-wing members of the Zimmerwald conference.* In this letter, written at the beginning of 1916, Trotsky described Bolshe- vism as "the product of an amorphous and uncultured social environment". "There can be no Leninist supporters, to my mind, either in Germany, or in France, or in Britain," he asserted. Trotsky opposed in those years Lenin's efforts to rally internationalist elements within the world revolutionary movement on the basis of revolutionary Marxism. "Extrem- ists," he stated, denigrating Lenin's supporters with this name, "cannot create an International.'"

His plans were at that time directed at weakening the Bolshevik positions and creating a Menshevik, opportunist party.

Trotsky sometimes covered up his hostility to Lenin and the Bolsheviks by appearing as a "conciliator". Lenin considered this "conciliating" stance one of the worst aspects of opportunism. "The conciliators," he wrote, "are not Bolsheviks at all ... they have nothing in common with Bolshevism ... they are simply inconsistent Trotskyites." Trotsky formed bloc after bloc, trying to bring together all the enemies of Bolshevism: the liquidators, the otzovists, the Bund members'"* and other carriers of bourgeois influence in the ranks of the party. As a result of the great variety of political combinations in which Trotsky engaged the composition of his adherents was constantly changing. In some cases losing his last supporters, he found himself in complete political isolation.

As Nadezhda Krupskaya pointed out in a letter to Maria Fyodorova on April 4, 1912, a new group brought together by Trotsky consisted "of five Trotskyite intellectuals". Krupskaya also referred to the predominance of intellectuals in Trotsky's "alliance" in another letter, of April 20, 1912.

A little later, in 1914, Lenin noted that Trotsky and his allies had formed a "group of intellectuals" ready to join in a "most unprincipled alliance of bourgeois intellectuals against the workers". 1

Trotsky disguised his struggle against the formation of a Bolshevik party in Russia capable of leading the proletar- iat and seizing power, with arguments that his views on the Party and the progress of revolutionary struggle in Russia were a development of Marxism and the ideas of scientific socialism. Lenin pointed out in this connection that Trotsky's tricks were those of a speculator: "Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given difference of opinion." In exposing the Trotskyites, Lenin emphasised that "they make out all the time that what they 'want' and what are their 'opinions', interpreta- tions, 'views', are the demands of the working-class move- ment". This he saw as "one of the greatest, if not the greatest, faults (or crimes against the working class) of the . . . Trotskyites"

The clumsy attempts of present-day bourgeois falsifiers to present Trotsky as one of the founders of the Bolshevik party are also disproved by the following piece of informa- tion. In May 1917 Trotsky dissociated himself from the Bol- shevik party. As can be seen from Lenin's notes, Trotsky announced at the so-called Mezhrayontsi conference: ".. .1 cannot be called a Bolshevik. .. . We must not be demanded to recognise Bolshevism.'"

However, a few weeks later he realised that there was nothing he and a small group of supporters could propose as an alternative to Bolshevism. Therefore, afraid of "miss- ing the train", Trotsky requested of the Sixth Congress that he be admitted to the party. As he noted in his autobi- ography, My Life, Lenin met him "guardedly and with restraint". Trotsky was obliged to make a statement agreeing with all the Bolshevik tenets.

Further events were to show that this agreement was mere hypocrisy to deceive the party. It was the usual cunning of "Judas Trotsky", as Lenin aptly described him. He made use of his membership of the party to prepare better positions for another series of attacks on Leninism. At first this was "reconnaissance in force": in 1918 the target was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; between 1920 and 1921, the discussions on the trade unions. In Lenin's last years and especially after his death, Trotsky decided that at last "his hour had come", and launched a frontal attack on Leninism and the policy of the Bolshevik party.

So much for the second invention claiming that Trotsky was a "founder" of the Bolshevik party.

The third myth circulated by the bourgeois falsifiers ascribes to Trotsky the leadership of the October Socialist Revolution.

The facts show that Trotsky took up a position which objectively helped the enemies of the revolution in the period of preparation for the armed rising in October. While before then he had at times been in his utterances "more Left than the Left" and "the most revolutionary of all revolutionaries", and had called for leaping over the revolu- tionary stages, when it came to the days when decisive action was needed, he became extremely cautious. He started to talk of the use of "legal" means, and, in effect, tried to put out the flame of revolutionary battle that had been lit.

Trotsky suggested putting off the date of the uprising to time it with the opening of the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets. What would this have led to? The Provisional Government would have had time to gather together counter- revolutionary forces, especially as the day of the opening of the congress might have been postponed owing to the efforts of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. Under the pretext of talks with the Soviets, Kerensky's government would undoubtedly have made use of the delay and taken counter-revolutionary measures.

Lenin resolutely opposed Trotsky's proposal. To waste the favourable political situation that had arisen and to wait for the Congress of Soviets, would, he declared, be "utter idiocy, or sheer treachery" ,'

Even on October 24, when the uprising had virtually started, Trotsky spoke against it at the meeting of the Bolshevik group at the Second Congress of Soviets. "The arrest of the Provisional Government," he said, "is not on the agenda as an independent task. If the Congress were to form a government, and Kerensky refused to submit to it, then it would be a matter for the police and not for politics." 1

Lenin spoke energetically against views of this sort. In his letter to the members of the Central Committee he wrote: "With all my might I urge comrades to realise that everything now hangs by a thread; that we are confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or congresses (even congresses of Soviets), but exclusively by peoples, by the masses, by the struggle of the armed people."

The falsifiers carefully avoid these facts. They prefer to produce the fiction that Trotsky headed the Revolutionary Military Committee. As can be seen from the records of the Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee, Trotsky took no active part in its work.

In this way the October armed rising took place, first, in spite of Trotsky's attempts to turn the revolution on to a bourgeois parliamentary course, and, second, without any noticeable contribution on his part.

It was Lenin and the Central Committee led by him, who organised and who were the inspiration of the rising. They carried out an enormous amount of work in the preparation and implementation of the greatest revolution in history.

The fourth legend paints a vivid picture of Trotsky's "special services" to the Soviet state. The falsifiers carefully pass over in silence the great wrong done by Trotsky to Soviet Russia in continually sowing doubt with regard to the possibility of victoriously developing and strengthening the revolution. By his persistent struggle against Lenin, the party, he caused disorganisation of government and party activity throughout the country.

The establishment of Soviet Russia as a state of workers and peasants did not fit in with his notorious "theory of permanent revolution". And he regarded it as some sort of abnormal act, as "an exception to the rule".

His not very long period as Commissar for Foreign Affairs was distinguished by one particular act — the break- ing off of peace negotiations with the representatives of Kaiser Germany at Brest-Litovsk, an act that exposed Soviet Russia to mortal danger.

Trotsky did not confine himself to declaring that Soviet Russia would stop the war against Germany and would demobilise the Army. He sent a telegram to the Com- mander-in-Chief, N. V. Krylenko, insisting that orders be sent out immediately demobilising the Army. The personal intervention of Lenin was needed to countermand Trotsky's unauthorised instruction. 1

The people of Russia paid dearly for Trotsky's "dip- lomatic" activity. It was his fault that in the fighting that took place near Pskov, Revel and Narva thousands of Red Army men were killed resisting the German troops. Because of Trotsky's treacherous policy, the new peace terms proved a great deal heavier and more humiliating than those which, despite Lenin's directive, Trotsky had rejected.

The falsifiers praise Trotsky to the skies for his "military activity": as member and head of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic he is alleged to have done a great deal to secure the defences of the Soviet state in the years of the Civil War. Trotsky is depicted as "the organiser of the Red Army". For a long time the bourgeois press has given space to statements aimed at belittling the part played by Lenin, the Communist Party in creating the Soviet Armed Forces and organising the country's defences.

In actual fact it was Lenin, the party that were in charge of the formation of the Red Army. The Red Army was created by their efforts in those same threatening days of February 1918, when they repudiated Trotsky's treach- erous line of unilateral demobilisation of the Russian forces and surrendering Petrograd and Moscow to the Germans for the sake of keeping the world "in a state of tension".

Lenin, the party worked out the principles for building up the Red Army, which embodied the alliance of the working class and the peasantry, an alliance of the working people of all Russia's peoples. The Central Committee of the party determined the strategy of the most important operations of the Red Army and mobilised the human and material resources for it.

This huge work was organised by the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defence, set up on November 30, 1918 (in 1920 its name was changed to the Council of Labour and Defence). This body was entrusted with full powers to turn the country into a war camp and mobilise all forces and resources in order to defend the Soviet state. The Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defence, with Lenin as its chairman, worked in accordance with the political line of the Central Committee of the Party, and the most important commissions of the Council were at the same time commissions of the Central Committee.

The activity of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and other military organisations was carried on under the strictest party control. In December 1918 the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party passed a special resolution, which emphasised that "the policy of the military department, as of all other departments and establishments, is carried out in complete conformity with general directives, issued by the party through the Central Committee, and under its immediate control". 1

"The Communist Party — Organiser of the Victory of the Great Trotsky sometimes tried to act in contravention of the party directives. Whenever this happened, a stop was put to it. At the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1919 there was some particularly sharp criticism of Trotsky's striving to act against the opinion of the party organisations in the Army.

In this connection, the party's Central Committee, elected at the Eighth Congress, at its very first meeting on March 25, 1919, described the congress delegates' criticism of Trotsky as a "serious warning". In a special decision signed on March 26 by those members of the Central Committee, who constituted the Politbureau, it was stated: "(5) To point out to Comrade Trotsky the need for the most thoughtful atti- tude to Communists working at the front, since the policy of the Central Committee in military matters cannot be carried out without the fullest comradely solidarity with them." 1

In spite of this the falsifiers try to create the impression that Trotsky was also "prominent" even in the period when Soviet Russia was changing over to peaceful economic reconstruction. They base their assertions, partly, on the fact that he enjoyed great influence on the biggest trade union in the country — the Central Committee of the Railwaymen's and Water Transport Workers' Union (Tsektran). Trotsky is credited with "special" services in the solution of the most important problem facing the republic — the restoration of transport dislocated by the war. With an astounding lack of scruples bourgeois historians bestow on him the title of "founder of the Soviet trade unions".

One has only to study the resolutions of Party congresses and of the Central Committee, and to go through the news- papers of that period, to realise the absurdity of these asser- tions. The work of restoring transport in 1920 was organised by the party under the personal supervision of Lenin. A tenth of the delegates to the Ninth Party Congress and thousands of the best Communists from various parts of the country were sent to restore transport and organise party political work among the transport workers. The newspapers daily published news of the progress of the transport restora- tion work side by side with military reports. It was due to the efforts of the working class, led by the Communists, that the transport situation improved.

At that time Trotsky was instituting in Tsektran dictato- rial management methods and petty tyranny, was suppress- ing democracy and carrying out a policy which he himself called "tightening the screws". It was Trotsky's factional activity that brought about the split in Tsektran, and the creation of a gulf between the leadership and the rank-and- file members of the union. The harm done by Trotsky's policy was considerable because the enormous problems that faced the transport workers demanded good teamwork.

The party firmly rejected Trotsky's "advice". It had worked out the principles of the activity of Soviet trade unions and defined their role and place in the life of the socialist state as social non-party organisations without which the broad masses could not be drawn into manage- ment of the state and production, and building the new socialist society. Noting the immense significance of trade unions as the embodiment of the dictatorship of the prole- tariat, Lenin said: "But it is not a state organisation; nor is it one designed for coercion, but for education. It is an organisation designed to draw in and to train; it is, in fact, a school: a school of administration, a school of economic management, a school of communism.'"

The fifth legend sets out to present the ideological and organisational defeat of Trotskyism in the twenties as having been due to some kind of "coincidence", and to reduce the very serious differences of opinion that had arisen regard- ing the paths of development of the Soviet state to motives of a personal nature. 2

Meanwhile the Soviet Communists showed great clarity of mind in the twenties, a time when the fate of all mankind hung in the balance, by casting aside the defeatists who advocated giving up the idea of building socialism. Who can deny the colossal influence exercised by the building of soci- alism in the USSR on the whole course of history? The peoples of the world were shown an actually existing social- ist society, and the experience of the Soviet Union became the treasured possession of the international communist movement.

And how could mankind have been saved from the threat of fascist enslavement, if the political monolith of the Soviet Union, with its highly developed socialist economy, had not existed? The transformation of the communist movement into the most influential force of modern times, the establish- ment of a world socialist system, the development of the national liberation movement, the continually growing power of attraction throughout the whole world of the ideas of scientific socialism — all these events, characteristic of our times, proved Lenin's prophecy that fundamental socialist reforms would have the very greatest influence on the whole progress of world history.

In the twenties the Trotskyites did all they could to hinder the development of these events, and to block the continuous movement of the Soviet peoples along the road to socialism. From forcing one discussion after another on the Party, from creating factions and groupings, from attempts to substitute Trotskyism for Leninism, they turned to open anti-Soviet action. Trotskyites organised anti-party demon- strations, printed slanderous pamphlets and declarations on underground presses, arranged conspiratorial meetings, and even created illegal Trotskyite centres. 1

For these same purposes Trotsky made slanderous state- ments concerning the "degeneration" of the Soviet state and "thermidor". Having always advocated "tightening the screws", the principle of appointement instead of electivity, army-type command of the working masses, and "the iron dictatorship of the party", he tried to pose as some sort of fighter for democracy. By means of this demagogic device Trotsky hoped to break up the unity of the Soviet people and the unity of the party. The logic of many years of anti-party struggle brought him into the camp of the enemies of the So- viet state, the counter-revolutionary camp.

Thus, the ideological and organisational defeat of Trotskyism was not the result of some fatal coincidence or "unfortunate moves". Having put himself in opposition to the Soviet people and the party, he was fated to suffer defeat.

The ideological and organisational defeat of Trotskyism had been prepared by a lengthy ideological struggle waged by Lenin, the party.

At the Thirteenth Conference of the Russian Communist Party, in January 1924, it had been noted that Trotskyism was "not only an attempt to revise Bolshevism, not only a direct retreat from Leninism, but also a clearly expressed petty-bourgeois deviation. There is not the slightest doubt that this opposition clearly reflects the pressure of the petty bourgeoisie against the position held by the proletarian party and its policy". 1 Thanks to the consistent exposure of Trotskyism, the working masses realised how harmful his "theoretical" arguments and his practical actions were to the Soviet state. The forging ahead of socialist construction gave the lie to the claim that socialism could not be built in the USSR. The more malevolent the actions of the Trot- skyites became, now that they had finally the ground cut from under their feet, the more obvious was the counter- revolutionary content of their opinions and speeches.

The Communists of the Soviet Union unanimously con- demned Trotskyism. Trotsky was roundly defeated at the party meetings held in 1927. Less than 0.5% of the Com munists supported Trotsky's views.

This defeat of the Trotskyites was consolidated by the decisions of the 15th Party Congress, which finally routed Trotskyism both ideologically and organisationally and expelled its most active supporters from the party. As the congress noted, the Trotskyite opposition "took the path of capitulation to the forces of the international and internal bourgeoisie and objectively became a weapon of the third column against the regime of the proletarian dictatorship".' Trotsky had slid to positions close to those of Menshevism. This was reflected in his disbelief in the revolutionary ability of the working class, in his sceptical attitude to the possibil- ity of an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, and in the defeatist declarations on the impossibility of socialist construction in the Soviet Union. Adherence to Trotskyism and the propagation of his views were stated to be incompatible with membership of the Communist Party.

Trotskyite infiltration into the international working-class movement was also thwarted. In March and April 1925 an enlarged plenary meeting of the Executive Committee of the Comintern emphatically stated that Trotskyism was not only a Russian, but a world phenomenon, and declared: "To realise Leninism in the Comintern, means to expose Trotsky- ism in all the parties and to liquidate it as a tendency." The plenum called on all parties to fight anti-Leninist deviations on the same high level as the Communists of Russia.

The Trotskyites tried to set up factions in several West European countries. "All the worst elements in the labour movement, the openly opportunist elements in the communist movement, all renegade groups kicked out from the ranks of the Comintern are now uniting on the Trotskyite platform of struggle against the USSR, the CPSU and the Comin- tern. . . " noted the Ninth Plenum of the Comintern Execu- tive.

In the Comintern the Trotskyites pursued the same line as in the CPSU — they aimed at undermining Leninism, liquidating the principles of Bolshevik organisation, and at dragging in opportunist views, foreign to the working class, under the banner of Marxism.

The Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks). December 1917. Verbatim Report, Russ. ed., Vol. 1, p. 429. International Press Correspondence, Vol. 5, No. 47, June 4, 1925, p. 616. ' Ibid., Vol. 8, No. 12, March 1, 1928, p. 256.

In February 1928 the Ninth Plenum of the Comintern Executive approved the decision of the 15th Congress of the All-Russia Communist Party (Bolsheviks). ". . . Adherence to the Trotskyist Opposition and solidarity with its views, is incompatible with further membership of the Communist International. '" This resolution of the Ninth Plenum was fully approved by the Sixth Congress of the Comintern.

As a result of determined and consistent struggle, the ranks of the Communist parties were cleared of all overt adherents to Trotskyism. The task set by the fifth enlarged plenary meeting of the Executive Committee of the Comin- tern concerning the liquidation of Trotskyism as a trend within the communist movement was thus fulfilled. The ideological and organisational defeat of Trotskyism had a historic significance for the Soviet Union, for its Communist Party and for the international communist move- ment as a whole.

Pointing out the meaning of the defeat of Trotskyism, William Z. Foster, a well-known activist in the Communist Party of the USA wrote: "In this fight not only was the fate of the Revolution in Russia at stake, but also that of the world communist movement. A victory for the Trotsky forces would have been a decisive success for the world reaction." 2

The defeat of Trotskyism added ideological and organisa- tional strength to the international communist movement. The Communists' sense of responsibility for unity and soli- darity increased both in separate parties and in the commu- nist movement as a whole.

Communists applied in real life Lenin's directives on a decisive, uncompromising fight against all forms of oppor- tunism, as an essential condition of the development of the new type of party. They learnt to expose the opportunist and defeatist nature of pseudo-revolutionism, to cope with instances of petty-bourgeois instability and to defend their ranks from the influence of petty-bourgeois ideology. In 1926, the seventh enlarged plenum of the Comintern Executive noted that the fight against "ultra-Leftism", like the fight against Right-wing opportunism, was an absolute prerequisite for the successes of the communist movement. 1

The great work of enlightenment, which was carried out by the Communist parties in exposing Trotskyism, led to a higher level of theoretical knowledge among Communists, and helped them equip themselves with an understanding of the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism and learn to apply Marxist method to the practical problems of the revolu- tionary struggle.

The anti-communist campaign of the defeated Trotskyites that followed became a struggle of small groups that found themselves outside the organised working-class movement.

The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Comunist Party of Uruguay, Rodney Arismendi, described these groups as the wreckage of a sunken ship. This simile clearly defines the present state of affairs. International Press Correspondence, Vol. 7, No. 11, February 3, 1927, p. 224.