Results and Prospects
VIII. A Workers’ Government in Russia and Socialism
Section summary
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.
We have shown above that the objective premises of the socialist revolution have already been created by the economic development of the advanced capitalist countries. But what can be said in this respect about Russia? Can we expect that the passing of power into the hands of the Russian proletariat will be the beginning of the transformation of our national economy on socialist principles?
A year ago we answered these questions as follows, in an article that came under heavy fire from the organs of both factions of our party.
“The Paris workers,” says Marx, “did not expect miracles from the Commune. Nor can instantaneous miracles be expected from the dictatorship of the proletariat now. State power is not omnipotent. It would be absurd to think that the proletariat has only to take power and it will replace capitalism by socialism by means of a few decrees. An economic system is not the product of the activity of the state. All the proletariat can do is to apply state power with all its energy to ease and shorten the road of economic evolution towards collectivism.
“The proletariat will begin with the reforms that make up the so-called minimum programme; and directly from these, by the very logic of its position, it will be compelled to pass over to collectivist practice.
“To introduce the eight-hour working day and a steeply progressive income tax will be comparatively simple, although even here the centre of gravity lies not in issuing an ‘act’ but in organising its practical execution. But the chief difficulty (and here is the transition to collectivism!) will lie in organising production at the state’s expense in those factories and works that their owners close down in reply to the issuing of these acts.
“To issue a law abolishing the right of inheritance and to carry that law into practice will again be comparatively simple; inheritances in the form of money capital will not embarrass the proletariat or burden its economy either. But to come forward as the heir of landed and industrial capital means, for the workers’ state, to take upon itself the organisation of the economy on a social basis.
“The same must be said, on a wider scale, of expropriation, with or without compensation. Expropriation with compensation offers political advantages but financial difficulties; expropriation without compensation offers financial advantages but political difficulties. But greater than either of these will be the economic difficulties, the difficulties of organisation.
“The socialisation of production will begin with the branches that present the fewest difficulties. In the first period socialised production will form oases, linked with private economic enterprises by the laws of commodity circulation. The wider the field already taken over by the socialised economy, the more obvious its advantages will be, the more securely the new political regime will feel itself, and the bolder will be the further economic measures of the proletariat. In these measures it can and will rely not only on the national productive forces but on international technique too, just as in its revolutionary policy it relies not only on the experience of national class relations but on the whole historical experience of the international proletariat.”
The political rule of the proletariat is incompatible with its economic slavery. Under whatever political banner the proletariat may have come to power, it will be compelled to take the road of socialist policy. It must be considered the greatest of utopias to think that the proletariat, raised to the heights of state power by the internal mechanics of a bourgeois revolution, can, even if it wishes, limit its mission to creating republican-democratic conditions for the social rule of the bourgeoisie. The political rule of the proletariat, even if only temporary, will extremely weaken the resistance of capital, which always needs the support of state power, and will give enormous dimensions to the economic struggle of the proletariat. The workers cannot fail to demand that the revolutionary power support the strikers, and a government relying on the proletariat will not be able to refuse such support. But this means paralysing the influence of the reserve army of labour, making the workers masters not only in the political but in the economic field, and turning private property in the means of production into a fiction. These inevitable social and economic consequences of the dictatorship of the proletariat will show themselves immediately, long before the democratisation of the political order has been completed. The boundary between the “minimum” and the “maximum” programme is wiped out as soon as the proletariat takes power.
The proletarian regime will have to set about solving the agrarian question from the very first, and with it is bound up the question of the fate of enormous masses of the population of Russia. In solving this question, as all others, the proletariat will start from the basic aim of its economic policy: to take hold of as large a field as possible for the organisation of a socialist economy. At the same time the forms and tempo of this policy in the agrarian question must be determined both by the material resources the proletariat is able to take hold of, and by the need to arrange its actions so as not to push possible allies into the ranks of the counter-revolutionaries.
It goes without saying that the agrarian question, that is, the question of the fate of agriculture and its social relations, is by no means covered by the land question, that is, the question of the forms of landed property. But there is no doubt that the solution of the land question, if it does not predetermine agrarian evolution, will predetermine the agrarian policy of the proletariat; in other words, the use to which the proletarian regime puts the land must be connected with its general attitude to the course and the needs of agricultural development. That is why the land question will come first.
One of the solutions, to which the Socialist-Revolutionaries have given a popularity far from irreproachable, is the socialisation of all the land; freed of its European make-up, this means nothing other than “equal use of the land”, or the Black Repartition. The programme of equal repartition thus presupposes the expropriation of all land: not only privately owned land in general, not only the privately owned land of peasants, but communal land as well. If we bear in mind that this expropriation would have to be carried out at the very first steps of the new regime, while commodity-capitalist relations still held full sway, it turns out that the first “victims” of the expropriation would be, or rather would feel themselves to be, the peasants. If we bear in mind that for several decades the peasants paid redemption payments that were to have made their allotment land their own property; if we bear in mind that some of the better-off peasants have undoubtedly acquired as their property, at the cost of great sacrifices made by a generation still living, a huge area of land, it is easy to imagine what resistance the taking of communal and small private plots into state ownership would provoke! Going this way, the new regime would begin by setting enormous masses of the peasantry against itself.
In the name of what are the communal and small privately owned plots to be turned into state property? In order, in one way or another, to make them available for “equal” economic exploitation by all cultivators, including the present landless peasants and farm labourers. Thus in the economic respect the new regime will gain nothing by expropriating the small and communal plots, since even after the repartition the state or public land will pass into private cultivation. In the political respect, on the other hand, the new regime will make the greatest of blunders, since it will at once set the mass of the peasantry in hostility against the urban proletariat as the leader of revolutionary policy.
Further. Equal distribution presupposes a legal prohibition on the employment of wage-labour. The abolition of wage-labour can and must be a consequence of economic reforms, but it cannot be decided in advance by legal prohibitions. It is not enough to forbid the capitalist farmer to hire workers; one must first create for the landless labourers a possibility of existence, and an existence that is rational from the point of view of the social economy. Yet under the programme of equal use of the land, to forbid the employment of wage-labour means, on the one hand, obliging the landless labourers to settle on a scrap of land, and, on the other, obliging the state to supply this labourer with the implements needed for his socially irrational production.
Of course, the intervention of the proletariat in the organisation of agriculture will begin not with tying scattered workers to scattered scraps of land but with working the large estates at the expense of the state or the commune.
Only when such socialised production is firmly on its feet can the process of further socialisation be pushed forward by forbidding the employment of wage-labour. In this way small capitalist farming will become impossible, but there will still remain a field for subsistence and semi-subsistence holdings, whose forcible expropriation in no way enters into the plans of the socialist proletariat.
In any case the proletariat can in no way take as its guide the programme of “equal distribution”, which on the one hand presupposes a pointless, purely formal expropriation of the small owners, and on the other demands the quite real fragmentation of the large estates into small parts. Such a policy, directly wasteful in economic terms, would have a reactionary-utopian idea at the back of it, and on top of everything would weaken the revolutionary party politically.
But how far can the socialist policy of the working class go in the economic conditions of Russia? One thing can be said with certainty: it will run into political obstacles much sooner than it comes up against the technical backwardness of the country. Without the direct state support of the European proletariat the working class of Russia will not be able to remain in power and turn its temporary rule into a lasting socialist dictatorship. Of this there can be no doubt for a moment. But on the other hand there can be no doubt either that a socialist revolution in the West will allow us directly and immediately to turn the temporary rule of the working class into a socialist dictatorship.
In 1904, discussing the prospects of social development and reckoning with the near possibility of a revolution in Russia, Kautsky wrote:
“A revolution in Russia could not at once establish a socialist regime. The economic conditions of the country are still far from ripe for this.” But the Russian revolution will have to give a strong impetus to the proletarian movement in the rest of Europe, and as a result of the struggle that flares up the proletariat may attain a dominant position in Germany. “Such an outcome,” Kautsky continues, “will have to influence the whole of Europe, will have to bring in its train the political rule of the proletariat in Western Europe, and create for the East European proletariat the possibility of shortening the stages of its development and, imitating the German example, of artificially creating socialist institutions. Society as a whole cannot artificially leap over particular stages of development; but this is possible for particular component parts of it, which can hasten their backward development by imitating the advanced countries, and thanks to this can even place themselves at the head of development, because they are not burdened with the ballast of tradition that the old nations drag along with them… This may happen,” Kautsky writes further. “But, as has been said, we have here already left the field of necessity that can be studied; here we are already in the field of the possible. Therefore everything may turn out otherwise.” (K. Kautsky, Revolutionary Prospects, Kiev, 1906.)
The theorist of German Social-Democracy wrote these lines at a time when it was still an open question for him whether the revolution would break out first in Russia or in the West.
Since then the Russian proletariat has shown such colossal strength as the most optimistic Russian Social-Democrats did not expect of it. The course of the Russian revolution has been determined in its main features. What two or three years ago was, or seemed, a possibility has become a near probability; and everything points to this probability being ready to become a necessity.