“I stopped arguing about religion long ago,”67 Burnham said to one of his comrades, when asked whether he was going to respond to Trotsky’s defense of dialectical materialism. The remark rippled quickly through the revolutionary grapevine to Trotsky, who was so infuriated by it that he fired off another long essay, “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham,” almost before he’d come down from the last. And with that the last pretenses of comradeship fell away.”
