Results and Prospects

Contents

1. I The Peculiarities of Historical Development 21 min 25

   Marxism foretold a bourgeois revolution in Russia; the task now is to analyse its internal mechanics rather than reason by analogy with 1789 or 1848. Russian society formed on a poor, slow-growing economy under constant military pressure from richer Western states. To survive, the state took a disproportionate share of the social product, held back the formation of classes and then forced industry from above. The result by the 1890s was an absolutism of immense military and financial power, financed by European loans, which seemed to rule out revolution but in fact made a radical revolution the only way out.

2. II The Town and Capital 14 min 16

   Russian towns were few and small until recent decades, and were administrative and military posts rather than centres of craft; manufacture stayed in the villages as peasant cottage industry. Modern capitalism therefore arrived from outside, financed by European loans and investment and promoted by the autocracy, skipping the stage of urban handicraft. The outcome was a huge, concentrated industrial proletariat facing absolutism, with only a small, half-foreign capitalist bourgeoisie, and no artisan petty bourgeoisie of the kind that formed the base of earlier bourgeois democracy.

3. III 1789–1848–1905 24 min 16

   History does not repeat itself. In 1789 a confident bourgeoisie led a united nation; in 1848 the German and Austrian bourgeoisie feared the masses more than the crown, while the petty bourgeoisie, peasants, intellectuals and an immature proletariat could not take its place, as the Vienna rising showed. Trotsky defends the Jacobin tradition against liberal abuse, cites Lassalle on the need for independent workers’ action, and contrasts 1848 with the Russian soviets of 1905. Arming the people in Russia means arming the workers, which is why the liberals have dropped the demand for a militia.

4. IV Revolution and the Proletariat 15 min 12

   Revolution is a struggle for state power, and when the workers take power depends not directly on a country’s productive forces but on the balance of class forces. The proletariat of backward Russia can come to power before its bourgeoisie, as Kautsky’s comparison with America suggests and against the “textual Marxists” who quote Marx’s “like master, like man”. Calling the revolution bourgeois does not settle its course: the proletariat, once in power, will not give it up and will be pushed towards running the economy, so Social-Democrats must decide whether to aim at a workers’ government.

5. V The Proletariat in Power and the Peasantry 11 min 13

   A victorious revolution will put power in the hands of the proletariat, which may admit representatives of the peasantry and intelligentsia but must hold the majority and the hegemony, as the Jacobins did in the Convention. Unlike in 1789 or 1848, no bourgeois regime will free the peasants first, so the workers in power will appear to them as liberators, recognising their land seizures. Historically the countryside has always followed the town, and the peasantry cannot play an independent role; hence a “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” as an equal coalition is unrealisable.

6. VI The Proletarian Regime 16 min 17

   Trotsky follows the workers’ government after it takes power. Its first democratic measures will be popular, but labour laws, unemployment relief and land policy will split the peasantry and narrow its base. A government that decrees the eight-hour day and meets a lockout can only expropriate the closed factories, so the line between the minimum and maximum programmes disappears and collectivism comes onto the agenda. A separate “democratic dictatorship” is therefore impossible. The chapter ends by turning on the Marxists who say the premises of socialism are absent.

7. VII The Premises of Socialism 42 min 21

   A polemic against Rozhkov and Atlanticus on the “premises” of socialism. Trotsky rejects the idea that socialism must wait for complete concentration, universal proletarianisation, leading co-operatives or a socialist-minded majority: these tendencies limit one another and produce a revolution long before they reach their limits. He distinguishes three premises: the technical advantage of large-scale production, present for centuries; a proletariat strong enough by its place in production, already present in Western Europe; and the conquest of power by a class conscious of its interest, which needs no prior moral regeneration of humanity.

8. VIII A Workers’ Government in Russia and Socialism 14 min 13

   Can a workers’ government in Russia begin a socialist transformation? Quoting his own 1905 article, Trotsky argues that state power cannot work miracles but that a proletariat in power will pass from the minimum programme to collectivist measures, with socialised “oases” linked to private enterprise by the market. On the land he rejects the Socialist-Revolutionaries’ equal repartition in favour of working the large estates socially while leaving small holdings alone. The decisive limit is political: without the state support of the European proletariat the Russian workers cannot hold power, a point he supports from Kautsky.

9. IX Europe and Revolution 21 min 17

   Quoting his 1905 preface to Lassalle, Trotsky argues that capitalism has made the world one organism tied to the old bulwarks of reaction, so a revolution in Russia will spread west: through Poland, through a European war, or through the shock of a Russian state bankruptcy to France. Class tension is rising in Germany, France and England, and the Russian example is breaking the conservatism of the Western socialist parties. Left alone, the Russian workers would be crushed once the peasantry turned away; their only course is to join their fate to the European revolution.