Trotsky

A Study in the Dynamic of His Thought

Ernest Mandel

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781788731966
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Russian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Leon Trotsky was the most important contributor to the development of revolutionary Marxism this century, after Lenin. As exiled militant or Soviet statesman, party organizer or public orator, as political analyst, soldier or commentator on cultural trends, he was centrally involved in the world-historic upheavals of his time and foremost among the interpreters of their significance for socialism. Yet the fate of his achievement was dramatically discrepant from Lenin's. At the latter's death in 1924, his revolutionary authority was at its zenith. In the Soviet Union his writings were consecrated as repository of a finished dogma, 'Leninism'. Abroad, his thought was interpreted in way much closer to its own original spirit by Georg Lukcs, whose remarkable Lenin sought to elicit its unity and actuality for a later revolutionary generation. In polar contrast, factional assault, official disgrace and proscription, anathema and slander, were the conditions of Trotsky's later life and activity-until his assassination in 1940-and the unvarying background of any reaffirmation of his heritage for decades afterwards. Systematic publication of his writings was beyond the means of his political followers-whose internal discussions of his ides were supplemented only by the attentions of liberal (where not reactionary) academics. In the last decade, however, with the resurgence of the political formations associated with his name, Trotsky's political role and ideas have again become topics of vigorous debate among socialists. Ernest Mandel's book makes possible a necessary extension of this debate by providing the first ever synthetic account of the development of Trotsky's Marxism in its successive encounters with the key problems and crises of the epoch. The Russian revolution and the theme of uneven development, the construction of revolutionary parties, the struggle against fascism and imperialism at large, the nature of Stalinism and the prospect of a full socialist democracy, are all discussed in a compact study that makes a fitting and long overdue counterpart to Lukcs's historic study of fifty years ago.

1

Socialist Revolutions in Backward Countries

In general, traditional Marxism looked upon relatively backward countries – those of Eastern and Southern Europe, and even more those of Asia and Latin America – in the light of Marx’s well-known formula: the more advanced countries show the more backward ones the image of their future development as in a looking glass. This led to the conclusion that socialist revolutions would first occur in the most advanced countries, that the proletariat would take power there long before it would be able to do so in more backward countries. In the latter case – not only semi-colonies but also countries like Russia and Spain – there would occur ‘democratic revolutions’ which, while not exactly repetitions of the classical bourgeois-democratic revolutions of the past, would lead to bourgeois-democratic republics in which the labour movement would only start to gather the necessary strength, based upon a quickened development of capitalism, to challenge the ruling bourgeoisie for political power.

No Marxist questioned the basic underlying hypothesis, namely that the objective tasks which such revolutions had to solve in relatively backward countries would be similar if not identical to the tasks with which classical bourgeois-democratic revolutions had been confronted: to overthrow absolutism or autocracy and secure general democratic freedoms, universal franchise and unfettered development of political parties and trade unions; to eliminate the remnants of feudalism and semi-feudal institutions in agriculture and the system of taxation, especially land rent and the great holdings of the nobility; to unify the internal market (both this task and the agrarian revolution being seen as a precondition for rapid development of industry and thorough modernization of the country); to suppress the conditions of dependence upon foreign capital (in cases where even formal national independence did not exist, this was obviously the number-one task) and to solve the question of the minority nationalities living within the frontiers of a historically given state.

On the way in which these tasks would have to be solved there were many differences among Marxists. But there was general agreement that these were the immediate burning tasks which the revolution would have to tackle – and not, for example, the immediate full-scale socialization of industry.

However, this definition of the tasks of the coming revolution was generally combined with a linear and rather mechanical approach to the political problems involved. In this way of thinking, a set of conclusions were supposed to follow in a logical and direct manner from the above-mentioned premises: from the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the coming revolution was derived its character as a bourgeois-democratic revolution; from its bourgeois-democratic character stemmed the impossibility of displacing the bourgeoisie and its parties at the head of the revolution; from the impossibility of displacing the bourgeoisie flowed the tactics of the proletarian party (the social democracy as it was then usually called) which, while defending the specific demands of the working class in such matters as the eight-hour day or the right to strike and form trade unions, should carefully abstain from any excessive actions liable to scare the bourgeoisie and push it into the camp of the counter-revolution, and thereby to condemn the revolution to certain defeat.

This mechanistic approach, most clearly represented by the father of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, came increasingly under fire during and immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1905, both from Russian and Polish Marxists, and from certain German Marxists as well. It was recalled that Marx himself, as early as 1848, had questioned the capacity of the German bourgeoisie to lead a genuine bourgeois revolution. Was that capacity not infinitely more restricted 60 years later? And had not a Jacobin petty-bourgeois leadership, displacing the bourgeoisie at the head of the revolutionary process, been a precondition for victory even during the Great French Revolution of 1789? Who were the equivalents of the French Jacobins in Russia, Poland or Spain? Certainly not traditional bourgeois-liberal politicians, conservatively inclined and more than hesitant to mount the barricades, not to speak about leading armed insurrections.

These objections were raised by such different thinkers as Parvus and Kautsky, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Trotsky. But Trotsky added three structural considerations, showing an amazing insight into the very nature of the economy and society of relatively backward capitalist countries.

First of all he pointed out that, given the relative influence of foreign capital, the modern proletariat tended to be proportionally stronger than the so-called ‘national bourgeoisie’, because it was employed at one and the same time by ‘national’ and by foreign capital. The ‘national’ bourgeoisie was very well aware of the unfavourable relationship of social and political forces, and for this objective reason it went in mortal fear of a revolution. It was quite pointless, Trotsky concluded, for the proletariat to display great self-restraint in its demands lest the bourgeoisie pass into the camp of the counter-revolution. The capitalists would do this anyway, irrespective of the tactics of the proletariat, because of the specific correlation of forces that dominated the country’s political evolution.

Secondly, under 20th-century conditions, the way in which the large estates were related to capital was quite different from that typical of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, or even the first half of the 19th century. They were now thoroughly intertwined with capital by means of credit, banks, usury and co-proprietorship. Since, moreover, a considerable number of bourgeois had themselves acquired landed estates or property shares in agricultural land, a radical agrarian reform – not to speak of a real agrarian revolution, a modern jacquerie – would be a direct blow against the economic as well as the social and political interests of the bourgeois class. Any attack on private landowners would trigger off a challenge to private ownership of the means of production in general: it would, that is, raise the spectre of socialism. Consequently, the bourgeoisie of these relatively backward countries would not have the capacity or the will to carry out a genuinely radical agrarian reform. And this already condemned to certain defeat any revolution that remained under bourgeois leadership in these countries.

Finally, it was more than questionable, given the tremendous weight of foreign capital (then essentially British, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Belgian and Austrian, but to a marginal degree already US and Japanese as well) and the huge superiority of foreign industry on the world market, whether there was enough space left on that market in the imperialist epoch for full-scale capitalist industry to develop in countries like Russia, Poland and Turkey, not to speak of Brazil, India or China. There seemed to be no possibility of a thoroughgoing industrialization and modernization of these countries so long as they remained within the framework of capitalism – a framework which, in the epoch of imperialism, involved the pressure of foreign capital and the competition of commodities produced in the advanced capitalist countries. The lack of a radical agrarian revolution and the subordination to a foreign-dominated world market would thus combine to severely restrict, if not condemn to failure, any attempt at a deep-going industrialization of the country. Russia, Turkey, Brazil, China and India would not repeat the capitalist path of Germany, Italy, Austria or even Japan, because there was no more space for new big industrial powers on the capitalist world market.

To express it in Trotsky’s own words: ‘Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity their backward culture is compelled to make leaps. From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.’¹

Whereas Lenin, writing under the pressure of his polemics with the populists, concentrated in The Development of Capitalism in Russia upon what was ‘classical’ and ‘organic’ in that development, Trotsky, by contrast, insisted on its unique character. At a time when the ‘organic’ development of Russian capitalism was still in its infancy, when a class of commodity-producing craft workers and small capitalists had barely emerged in light industry, the joint action of the state and foreign capital had grafted onto the backward Russian economy a number of large-scale heavy industries, concentrating a majority of wage-earners. It is indispensable to grasp this combination of backward and ultra-modern forms of economic development to understand what happened in Russia, especially in 1905 and 1917.

Now, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg (as well as Kautsky and Franz Mehring) agreed with Trotsky on the first and second reasons why a bourgeois leadership was most unlikely to lead a victorious revolution in Russia. However, Lenin disagreed about the third of these reasons, and Rosa Luxemburg (as well as Kautsky) hesitated to express herself.

This difference had an important political consequence. For Lenin, the task was to replace the potentially counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie at the head of the revolutionary process with other social and political forces able to play a similar role to that of the Jacobins in the French Revolution. But these revolutionary forces, while displacing and even politically crushing the bourgeoisie, would still open a capitalist development in Russia. It would not be capitalism based on a Prussian type of agriculture, but one based on the American model (in which a multitude of free independent farmers provided a huge domestic market for industrial goods) which would force Russian industry to compete on the world market, where space had indeed become too crowded.

In terms of political practice, this would involve a revolutionary leadership (government) in which a working-class party would enter into coalition with a revolutionary peasant party: the famous ‘democratic dictatorship of the workers and the peasants’, different from both a proletarian dictatorship and a bourgeois dictatorship. However, the state emerging from that dictatorship (or revolutionary government) would be a bourgeois state, and the economy developing out of the victorious revolution would be a capitalist economy: ‘The revolution cannot jump over the capitalist stage.’²

The fertile yet undisciplined and unstable mind of Parvus was not satisfied with this way of thinking. He noticed that, throughout modern history, the peasantry had been unable to build its own centralized political parties. What were generally considered ‘peasant parties’ were, in reality, virtually always bourgeois parties (parties of the rural intelligentsia and merchants) that channelled the votes of the peasantry but betrayed their specific social interests when the chips were down. He therefore thought that only a social-democratic government could successfully lead the revolution, and finish the job as the Jacobins had done in France. But like Lenin, and contrary to Trotsky, he visualized such a government as remaining within the realm of a democratic bourgeois state and a capitalist economic system; the model here was the first ‘labour government’ that had just been formed in Australia.

With lightning boldness, the young Trotsky cut through the contradictions and inconsistencies of these positions. While insisting with Lenin that the peasantry would play a key role in the revolution, he powerfully argued against Lenin that the peasantry would be unable to play a political role independent from the proletariat and the bourgeoisie – above all during a revolution! This inability he essentially put down to the peasants’ dispersion and their wavering, as petty commodity owners and producers, between capital and wage labour. As a result of their social heterogeneity, the lower strata were constantly sinking into the proletariat or semi-proletariat, whereas the upper strata were constantly passing over into labour-exploiting rural capitalists. The history of all modern revolutions, and all political experience since the emergence of industrial capitalism, had completely confirmed this analysis. Coalition with a so-called peasant party always threatened to become a coalition with the bourgeoisie, that is, to involve precisely those pitfalls which the traditional Menshevik tactics implied and which Lenin and the Bolsheviks sought to avoid. (On the need to avoid a bloc with the ‘liberal’ bourgeoisie there was of course full agreement between Trotsky and Lenin). Only if the revolutionary process allowed social democracy – the proletarian party – to conquer political hegemony over the peasantry, to mobilize it and centralize its uprisings under working-class leadership, only then could the historical goals of the revolution be fully accomplished.

In other words: the correlation of political and social forces characterizing the revolutionary process in relatively backward countries³ was such that the revolution could only triumph under proletarian socialist leadership. In Russia, China, Turkey, India or Brazil, the role which the Jacobins had played in the French revolution could only be fulfilled by the working-class party.

Against Parvus and Lenin, Trotsky showed that it was completely unrealistic to assume that the workers, having conquered state power, would be able to exercise sufficient self-restraint to limit the defence of their specific class interests to the struggle for democratic and immediate demands, meanwhile allowing themselves to remain exploited by the capitalists. Just visualize the situation, Trotsky told those who, like Parvus and Lenin, were the nearest to his position yet still refused to draw all the ultimate conclusions. Here you have a working class which has just achieved a supreme victory, not only against the autocracy but also against all politically conservative forces, including the bourgeoisie, its own exploiter. This working class has conquered state power. It has established a revolutionary government. It rules the state. It is armed. It is at the height of political and social self-confidence. Yet the following day, it will calmly go back to the factories and the sweatshops – and what sweatshops there were and are in the relatively backward countries! It will meekly submit to being exploited by unarmed capitalists; it will agree to rule outside but not inside the gates of the factory, where it lives the largest and most strenuous part of its life. All this it will do just because certain ideologues tell it that ‘the country is not ripe for socialization.’ Is not such self-restraint, such self-chastizement utterly improbable on the part of a politically victorious social class?

Trotsky’s conclusion was obvious: there would be no ‘stages’ in the coming revolutions in relatively backward countries. If the proletariat succeeded in conquering political hegemony over the peasantry and leadership over the revolutionary process, then the revolution could be victorious. But in that case, the revolution would pass over without interruption from the traditional tasks of bourgeois-democratic revolutions to key tasks of the socialist revolution, above all the socialization of the means of production still in the hands of the capitalist class. This was the first and most important thesis of the theory of permanent revolution formulated by Trotsky as early as 1905–06.

The revolution in Russia and similar countries could only triumph by establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat supporting itself on the peasantry. And such a dictatorship would not stay within the bounds of ‘national’ or ‘international’ capitalism: it would begin at once the task of building a socialist society.

If, however, the proletariat did not conquer the leadership of the whole nation, then the revolution would be defeated, and counter-revolution would triumph. And under the triumphant counter-revolution, any hope of thorough industrialization and modernization of the country would prove to be utopian.

Let it be said in passing that Trotsky’s argument about the improbability of proletarian self-restraint would later be confirmed under unforeseen circumstances. When the Bolsheviks conquered power in the October 1917 Revolution, they were intent upon applying a carefully formulated stage-by-stage plan of nationalization of Russian industry, credit, transport and wholesale trade, generally preceded by periods of workers’ control in which the workers would learn how to administer the enterprises before gradually taking them over. This carefully worked out plan was shattered not only because the bourgeoisie launched a civil war against Soviet power, but above all because the supremely self-confident workers did not tolerate the exploitation, arrogance, command and sabotage of the capitalists. Spontaneous factory take-overs began to spread far and wide; and life – the class struggle – showed that it cannot be controlled by clever preconceived schemes.⁴

The idea that the working class could actually conquer power ‘before’ and ‘instead of’ the bourgeoisie in relatively backward countries, appeared as a wild daydream to the overwhelming majority of Russian and other Marxists. This remained the case even after the 1905 upsurge, in which the Russian workers displayed tremendous revolutionary will and energy, and boldness exceeded that shown by the Paris workers during the days of the Commune. The theory of permanent revolution evoked few echoes beyond the small circle of Trotsky’s most intimate friends and collaborators. And although it is true that Rosa Luxemburg came closest to his positions, even that great revolutionary shrank from the logical conclusion of her thought and refused to embrace the perspective of a dictatorship of the proletariat initiating socialist policies in Russia.

Lenin in particular did not accept this concept. While concentrating his fire on the Menshevik project of critically supporting the bourgeoisie in the revolutionary process, he occasionally ridiculed the theory of permanent revolution. He stuck to the idea that a stage of bourgeois-democratic revolution, of agrarian revolution leading to the development of capitalism, was indispensable before the question of the socialist stage could be raised. In an outspoken and unambiguous way, he defined the coming revolution as bourgeois not only because of the political form to which it should lead (the democratic republic), but also because of its socio-economic content: the unfettered development of capitalism based upon free capitalist farmers. To bring about that combination was the purpose of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ for which the Bolsheviks fought in the 1905–16 period. The Bolshevik cadre was educated in that spirit, which was to create such havoc among the young communist parties in backward countries in the twenties and later. Even Trotsky himself tended to look upon Russia as a special case, and waited until the experience of the Chinese revolution of 1927 before he generalized the thesis of the permanent revolution to embrace all relatively backward countries in which the proletariat already had sufficient strength to make the conquest of political power a real possibility.

It was the Russian Revolution of February 1917 which helped Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg to overcome their hesitations of the previous decade. The first post-February Bolshevik leadership (Kamenev, Molotov and Stalin) tended to cling to the old formulas, envisaging both fusion with the Mensheviks and critical support of the provisional government. Lenin, however, with the enthusiastic support of the Bolshevik vanguard workers, made the turn in his April Theses towards the goal of ‘All power to the Soviets’, i.e., towards the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He became a ‘Trotskyist’ on the question of the dynamics of the Russian Revolution, at the very moment that Trotsky became a ‘Leninist’ on the organization question.

It is true that, in order to convince his old comrades, Lenin used some ambiguous formulas which later enabled his epigones to claim that there had, after all, been two stages in the Russian Revolution: the stage of February 1917, in which the autocracy was overthrown and a bourgeois-democratic republic was established; and the stage of October 1917, in which the working class conquered power. But it is utterly misleading to invo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Socialist Revolutions in Backward Countries
• 2. Limits of Socialist Development in Backward Countries
• 3. World Revolution
• 4. The Proletariat and its Leadership
• 5. Workers’ Councils
• 6. Building Mass Revolutionary Parties
• 7. Stalinism
• 8. Fascism
• 9. Against Imperialism
• 10. The Fourth International
• 11. Socialism
• References
• Trotsky: Major Works in English Translation
• A Critical Bibliography