“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder
App. V. Letter
Section summary
Lenin withdraws his blanket reference to the “Dutch Tribunists”, admitting he misrepresented the Dutch Communist Party as a whole, and prints a letter from D. J. Wijnkoop, for the Dutch delegation to the Second Comintern Congress, protesting that the party should not be held responsible for a few members who hardly took part in its work.
In the Russian text of this book, I in some degree misrepresented the conduct of the Dutch Communist Party, as a whole, in international revolutionary politics. I therefore take this opportunity to publish the letter, given below, of the Dutch comrades on this point, and, further, to correct the expression “Dutch Tribunists,” which I used in the Russian version, and to substitute for it “some members of the Dutch Communist Party.”
Thanks to your kindness we, the members of the Dutch Delegation to the Second Congress of the Communist International, could look over your book, “Left Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, before the translations into the Western European languages were published.
In this book of yours, you emphasize several times your disapproval of the rôle some of the members of the Dutch Communist Party have played in international politics.
We, however, must protest against your making the Communist Party responsible for their deeds. It is utterly incorrect. Moreover, it is unjust. For these members of the Dutch Communist Party hardly, or not at all, participated in the every-day fight of our party; also, directly or indirectly, they are trying to introduce oppositional slogans in the Communist Party, against which the Dutch Party, and everyone of its organs, with all their energy, have fought and are fighting, up till to-day.