This article is translated from the pamphlet Trotsky Marxiste published in Paris as No. 2 in the series Marx ou Crève (Maspero, 1971). Part II will appear in our next issue.
The aim of this essay is to provide an analysis of the dialectical relationship between economics and politics in Trotsky's thought. The starting point for such an analysis is contained in the basic tenet of Marxism laid down in the following lines from the preface to the Critique of Political Economy: 'No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.'
This passage expresses the essence of historical materialism. Political developments cannot precede the 'blind', 'unconscious' movement of the laws of economics and the development of the contradiction between the growth of socialised forces of production and private relations of production. No social order can be overthrown before the contradiction governing the birth and rise of the given mode of production has brought it to breaking point, and the social formation must be torn apart to make room for the growth of the productive forces, and give the relations of production a qualitatively new structure. The 'iron necessity' of these 'tendencies', making the historical development of the economic foundations of society comparable to the advance of nature itself, is therefore an absolute constraint on the political struggle, and rules out any attempt to 'skip over' a stage. In economic determinism politics, in the sense of the 'subjective' preparation of the social revolution, occupies a very specific place. Revolutions are the 'locomotives' of history, and it is men who make them, but only in quite specific conditions which can never be disregarded. This economic analysis was the basis of the theory of revolution by stages — according to which the development of the capitalist productive forces within the framework of feudalism had made a bourgeois revolution both possible and necessary, to bring the political superstructure into line with the level of economic development. The increasing socialisation of labour in the capitalist mode of production also called for the destruction of private ownership of the means of production and the kind of state which preserved it. But there could be no proletarian revolution as long as the political and social formation of a given country did not correspond to its economic infrastructure, as long as the bourgeoisie had economic power but not formal political power — as was the case in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. Marx went so far as to say that 'an industrially developed country shows a less developed one the image of its own future', a somewhat equivocal transposition onto the political plane of what is rightly an element of economic analysis. The fact that Marx gave theoretical expression to the economic contradiction did not therefore automatically mean that he was able to go on to show how it could be resolved in concrete political terms in the various unevenly developed European nations.
Because Marx and Engels reduced the analysis of the revolutionary process to the development of the fundamental economic contradictions — deducing the process theoretically from the principles of economics rather than analysing it as a direct function of the relationship of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in a given country — they were unable to draw clear theoretical conclusions from the fact that revolution first appeared, not in England, the most advanced capitalist country of their time, but in France and Germany. They failed to draw from the impossibility of bourgeois revolution, the conclusion that the proletarian revolution was definitely on the agenda. On the one hand, their conception of the nature of the revolution was based on a transposition from prior economic theory. On the other, taking the overall level of development of capitalism in their time, they imposed their model of the economic and political evolution of humanity in general onto every single country, however backward or advanced.
Marx and Engels tried to conceive of the proletarian revolution in an epoch that did not yet permit it, as the events of 1848 in Europe taught them. The age of great bourgeois revolutions had come to an end, that of great proletarian revolutions was only just on the horizon. By the time of Marx and Engels the upper bourgeoisie was no longer equal to the task of overthrowing the feudal order still reigning in Germany and Austria, while throughout Europe the proletariat was still too weak to secure victory. It had become impossible to repeat a bourgeois revolution like 1789. Not only had the French Revolution given an impulse to the development of the forces of production, it had stimulated a commensurate political advance by the proletariat which posed extreme dangers for the bourgeoisie. Though the proletariat in Germany and Austria was far less advanced than in France or England, the bourgeoisies of the two empires were conscious of the dangers they faced even from a bourgeois democratic revolution. They chose to come to terms with feudalism and the monarchy at the cost of impairing their own economic development, rather than be exposed to the threat from the proletariat. Trotsky wrote of the 'revolutionary' bourgeoisie of 1848 that 'its consciousness rose against the objective conditions for its own domination'. (1) The revolution could no longer be made by the bourgeoisie, but only against it. By taking up the fight, the proletariat was only preparing the ground for its own struggles.
Marx and Engels were well aware of this dialectic of the impossibility of further bourgeois revolutions and the [illegible] of the proletarian revolution. In the 1848 insurrections Marx and Engels greeted the dawn of the proletarian revolution, but with the failure of the uprisings they fell back into a determinist conception of the relation between economics and political struggle, a conception particularly apparent in Engels. The main reason for the defeat of the German and Austrian revolutions, as for that of the French proletariat, was, they concluded, that the growth of the capitalist productive forces was still incomplete. Engels noted in his 1895 Preface to The Class Struggles in France that in 1850 history had given the lie to those who thought that the time for 'revolution of the majority' had arrived: 'It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production.' The defeat of the 1848 revolutions, in other words, was economically determined.
The French Republic, bringing the industrial bourgeoisie into power, represented the political consummation of bourgeois rule and clarified class antagonisms. The development of the productive forces since 1789 was such that any future French revolution must take on a proletarian character, but capitalism had to realise its full potential before the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat could become politically clear. Austria and Germany were only just breaking out of the fetters of feudalism, and capitalism was still insufficiently advanced to guarantee a proletarian revolution. Confronted with this incontestable fact, Marx and Engels still failed to weigh up all the theoretical implications of the difference between the Austrian and German revolutions and the French bourgeois revolution of 1789, and consequently to grasp how far the struggle of the French working class in 1848 was distinct from the struggles of the emerging German and Austrian proletariat. Above all, they failed to grasp their complementary nature.
Marx believed that the German bourgeois revolution would be carried out by the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie, and that it could theoretically grow over into a proletarian revolution if the working class could somehow establish dual power, preventing the bourgeoisie, once in power, from crushing it. In his Address to the Communist League of Germany, he analysed the prospects for the German revolution, ending with the words, 'the battle-cry must be: The permanent revolution'. But this was not counterposed to Engels' theory that the German proletariat was as backward as the German bourgeoisie, and that before the proletariat could make a victorious revolution it would first have to be strengthened by the growth of industry.
The results of the uneven development of the European nations were not yet so apparent as to bring out the combined nature of this very development. Because of the low overall rate of growth of the forces of production, it was impossible to conceive of the revolutionary process being anything but a series of stages. Marx still had no theory of the dialectical relationship between national revolutions and the development of the productive forces internationally, and in the last analysis he drew national determinist conclusions from the uneven development of European capitalism requiring every country to pass through all the economic and political stages of the general model. The defeats of 1848 confirmed Marx and Engels in the theory of revolution by stages, the political counterpart of the conception of economic determinism as operating only at a national level, not at the level of the capitalist system as an international totality. To put it more precisely, they thought that within the general linear design of human evolution, economic determinism also operated at a national level in a similarly linear way. The theory of capitalism as the ante-chamber of socialism, valid for imperialism as a whole, was applied without modification to the individual European countries.
It was with this perspective that Marx and Engels constructed a model of the revolution which the Russian Social Democrats took as the basis of their struggle, and which was first challenged by Trotsky, in his analysis of the concrete situation in Russia in the light of the development of imperialism since Marx.
From the common core of the theory of absolute determinism, on which the Marxist analysis of historical evolution is based, widely divergent revolutionary perspectives emerged: perspectives as strongly opposed to each other as those of the Mensheviks and Trotsky. But I intend to bring out the specificity of Trotsky's theoretical contribution by comparing him with Lenin; their theories were quite dissimilar, but in both cases reflected the ambiguities in the political thought of Marx and Engels, and converged on the single goal of proletarian revolution. Founded though they are on a different understanding of Russian reality, their theories enrich and complement one another. Trotsky and Lenin each developed a different side of the theoretical advances made by Marx in understanding the relationship between economic determinism and the revolutionary struggle: Lenin working on the need to resolve the contradiction between feudalism and capitalism before there could be a proletarian revolution, Trotsky on the premonition of the complementarity of the different sectors of the world revolution which Marx developed towards the end of his life, on the basis of the latest developments in European capitalism. The two perspectives took the theoretical and political form of the conflicting theories of permanent revolution and revolution by stages, a conflict charged with historical significance. Lenin's stages theory of course had nothing to do with the strictly mechanistic view of the Mensheviks or of Stalin. In both of these an incorrect concept of determinism, which reduced it to fatalism, was mechanically applied to politics. Nevertheless, as long as Lenin thought it necessary to follow this model, he was unable to work out theoretically what was specific to his own epoch.
In this essay I shall try to give some substance to what may seem to be the arbitrary assertion that for a long time Trotsky was the only person to understand the nature of the revolutionary possibilities opening up in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, because he based himself on Marxist method, not on the conclusions which Marx and Engels had come to in their own time. One of the apparent reasons for the disparity between Lenin's understanding of the revolutionary situation in Russia and Trotsky's is the time at which they developed their theories. Trotsky's views were formed nearly ten years later than Lenin's, at a time when the Populists (Narodniks) had been theoretically, if not politically, defeated. Lenin was obliged to take up Plekhanov's struggle against the claim of Populist ideology that communism could be built in Russia on the basis of the rural communal structure, at the very time when the commune was disintegrating and Russia taking the capitalist road. He had to establish Marxism in Russia, and show that only Marx's theories, worked out with reference to the western countries, could offer a correct revolutionary perspective. The Russian revolution would be proletarian, and capitalism, which made it possible for the proletariat to constitute itself as a revolutionary class, was a progressive historical force: but he concluded from this that the feudal structures would first have to be wiped out, and that a bourgeois revolution was therefore called for. In the heat of the polemic with the Populists, Lenin made his revolutionary perspectives hinge, as had those of Marx and Engels, on the development of the forces of production in Russia.
Trotsky's theoretical armoury was forged at a later period. Not having to conduct the same battle against the Populists that the older social democrats had waged for so long, he was free to go beyond them, separating Lenin's ideas from the relative dogmatism imposed on them by the bitterness of the ideological struggle, and extracting some of the Populists' theories from their reactionary mould. Working at a favourable moment in time he could develop Marx's theories beyond the point that Lenin had reached, and transcend the equivocation about whether a bourgeois stage was 'necessary'.
It is my intention to take up these points and show that the accusations levelled at Trotsky's theories both before and after the October revolution can only be understood in terms of the differences between him and his opponents over economic determinism and the relationship between economics and politics — that is, between the state of the forces of production and the political struggle for the proletarian revolution. I shall define the recurring themes of Trotsky's polemics and other writings from the start to the finish of his political career, and the themes which constitute the unity of his thought; and in so doing, I hope to refute the distortion of Bolshevism and 'Trotskyism' which was the sole 'theoretical' concern of the Stalinist school.
PART ONE — THE FOUNDATION OF TROTSKY'S THEORETICAL OUTLOOK
1. The Law of Combined and Uneven Development as the Basis of the Theory of Permanent Revolution
In 1881, Vera Zasulich wrote to Marx: 'You see then, citizen, what a great service you would be doing if you set down your opinion on what the future might hold for our rural communities, and on the theory that insists that all the people of the world should be forced by historical necessity to go through all the stages of social production.' Marx replied: 'The historical inevitability of this tendency is expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe.'
Historical inevitability had nevertheless suffered something of a setback even in Germany; but the rift between the development of the most advanced capitalist countries and the backwardness of Germany had not yet opened so wide that Marx could see the combined as well as the uneven nature of this development. He saw European capitalism not as an organic whole, with interlocking sectors, but rather as the sum total of the various national economies, which were bound to go through all the phases of capitalist growth he had discerned in the case of England. By the end of his lifetime, however, he came to believe that Western capitalism, as it developed into imperialism, now formed a bloc confronting backward states such as Russia. He had an inkling that in the late nineteenth century things might take a different course in Russia. 'The existence of contemporary western (capitalist) production and its domination of the world market permit Russia to assimilate all the positive gains of capitalism without going through its Caudine forks.' Only 'if Russia were isolated from the rest of the world' would it be necessary to 'achieve on her own the economic advances made in western Europe only in the course of long processes of evolution from the earliest primitive communities to the present.'
He believed it followed 'theoretically speaking' from this that the rural commune, which had survived in Russia, could be 'a direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends', for 'the life of the commune is threatened, not by historical inevitability nor by any theory, but by State oppression and exploitation by capitalist intruders made powerful by the State purse.' Marx formed this view, which the Russian Populists turned into a dogma, because he could not see that elements of capitalism were being produced by the disintegration he knew to be taking place in the socio-economic structure of the commune itself; and that the supposed 'intrusion' of capitalism in Russia was the inevitable consequence of capitalist development in the epoch of imperialism. It was therefore wrong to think that Russia's national peculiarities would simply allow her to by-pass the capitalist phase and its corollary, bourgeois society. For a whole period of his life, Lenin constantly denounced what was an understandable error in Marx, but had become a reactionary illusion with the Populists.
It was nonetheless true that the 'English' model of historical development of the economy was ruled out by the coexistence of the Western capitalist mode of production with Russian backwardness. In Russia, as a capitalist country, there could be no peasant socialist revolution; but by definition, there could be no bourgeois revolution either, even though the superstructure of the country was feudal. While Lenin formulated his economic analysis of Russia and his political perspectives within the framework laid down by Marx for the capitalist countries of his own time, Trotsky succeeded in taking up the perspectives sketched out in Marx's letters to Zasulich (though it is doubtful if he was acquainted with them), and the germ of the theory of combined and uneven development they contained.
Lenin maintained that Russia, like the western countries, was heading for a proletarian socialist revolution, and endeavoured to break with the Populist mystique that it was possible to move directly from the mythically-conceived rural commune to communism, via peasant revolution, by showing that Russia had irrevocably taken the capitalist road. He used an impressive array of statistics from every part of Russia to demonstrate that in the space of half a century Russia had gone through every phase in the gestation of the capitalist mode of production described by Marx in Capital. What this amounted to was an account of the movement of economic laws nationally, within which it was impossible to assess the theoretical and political implications of national peculiarities. Trotsky took the opposite course: he grasped the reality of Russian society as part of the world economy established by imperialism, and he shattered the classical view by showing that the specific features this produced in the Russian social formation demanded a radical re-evaluation both of the concept of economic determinism and of the perspectives for revolution deriving from it.
Basing himself on Marx's exposition of the genesis of the capitalist system, Lenin put forward a theory of the organic, national development of Russia, to which Trotsky (at first only implicitly) counterposed the law of uneven and combined development, involving a re-examination of the constraints imposed by the economic structure. The constant economic and political pressure of the western countries forced feudal Russia to advance by leaps, directly adopting the most advanced techniques so as not to succumb to the pressure of the surrounding capitalist countries. He was later to write: 'Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order.' (2)
Lenin's Development of Capitalism in Russia was quite simply the account of this course of development. Capitalism gradually emerged from agriculture and in turn operated on it, its development following the three stages defined by Marx: pre-capitalist petty craft and petty commodity production; manufacturing; and finally industrial production, in which the break with the agricultural economy was completed. Lenin showed how the break-up of the rural socio-economic structure formed commercial capital, giving rise to industrial capital and later finance capital. But as Trotsky explains in the first few chapters of the History of the Russian Revolution, from the outset Russia had capital in its highest, most abstract form: finance capital, the fusion of banking and industrial capital.
In the course of his polemic against the Populists, to whom capitalism was no more than a malignant excrescence, Lenin wrote of peasant society: '... it is here, remote from all "artificial" influences, and in spite of the institutions which restrict the development of capitalism, that we see the constant formation of the elements of capitalism within the "community" itself.' (3) He wrongly concluded, however, that this development could take place, and lead to the creation of large-scale industry, in abstraction from foreign capital. Trotsky replies in 1905 that 'capitalism in Russia did not develop out of the handicraft system', for 'manufacturing industry was never separated from agriculture' and 'the town handicrafts had no time to develop' before foreign capital and technology took over. What Lenin took as the basis of The Development of Capitalism in Russia was in Trotsky's eyes only an abortive move towards the autonomous development of the forces of production.
Trotsky took the peculiarities of Russia's historical development as the economic and social basis of the Russian revolution. In the early chapters of 1905 and Results and Prospects he shows that the political requirements of international capitalist development obliged the Russian autocracy to play an extremely important part in the country's economic evolution. It had stifled this for so long, drawing off almost the whole of the national surplus for military projects, that once all the European states had become capitalist it had to accelerate the development of the productive forces it had wrung so dry if it was not to founder under this pressure. 'From this standpoint', Trotsky concluded, 'it could be said that all Russian science is the artificial product of government effort, an artificial grafting on the natural stem of national ignorance.' In fact, 'Western economics influenced Russian economics through the intermediary of the State'. This state of affairs, however, was far from being as artificial as the Populists believed. The skipping over of the intermediary stages effected by State intervention resulted on the one hand from the general development of capitalism, and on the other from the fact that 'the national economy, which was naturally developing from natural economy to money-commodity economy, responded only to those measures of the Government which corresponded to its development and only to the extent that they corresponded to it.' (4).
Trotsky was therefore well aware of the factors which Lenin took as his starting-point: he simply showed that the natural evolution of Russia was extremely slow, even embryonic, and that it was being short-circuited by the intervention of foreign capital. Lenin, by contrast, accorded only a secondary importance to foreign capital, and to the fact that it had introduced the 'American' type of industry into Russia. But this intervention had consequences of basic importance for the revolution. Within their conflicting perspectives, Lenin and Trotsky each arrived at an appreciation of the essential importance of the two poles of the economic structure of capitalism in Russia; but while Lenin emphasised the factors for organic development, Trotsky stressed the effects of the world development of the capitalist system on Russia. Trotsky more correctly regarded the two poles of development as operating simultaneously; Lenin, aware that all the stages of capitalism overlapped in Russia, nonetheless tried to place them in a genetic order.
In 1905-1907 Trotsky made an analysis of the historical genesis of the Russian economic, social and political formation, for which later — for example, in his History of the Russian Revolution — he elucidated the theoretical basis in the law of uneven and combined development. 'A backward country', he wrote, 'assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries. But this does not mean that it follows them slavishly, reproduces all the stages of their past.' The capitalist mode of production, as an organic world-wide reality, did not allow of such repetitions. '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.' It was because Lenin was unable to theorise this corollary of the law of uneven development that he continued to subscribe to a national and hence relatively mechanistic notion of economic determinism.
With the understanding he had of the law of combined and uneven development, Trotsky was able to grasp the dialectical articulation of politics and economics, and at once to define his political positions, whereas Lenin thought political perspectives should be deduced from a prior economic analysis. In the context of his analysis of the totality of the capitalist mode of production in his time, Trotsky's exposition of the economic contradictions in Russia automatically grows over into a political theory of the immediate actuality of the proletarian revolution: the proletarian revolution is not simply the theoretical end product of the economic discussion. Trotsky does not really discuss economics except descriptively, through the application of the law of uneven and combined development — which is most clearly expressed on the economic plane, but can also be directly transposed onto the political plane without producing any gap in revolutionary perspectives. There is no separation of economics and politics in Trotsky's thought, because the capitalist system as a whole has entered its period of decline, the stage in which the development of the forces of production internationally calls for conscious preparation of a reorganisation of the mode of production. By the same token, the economic analysis of Russia in Trotsky's early works is directly political, presenting the essential factor as being the State. Lenin failed to grasp this completely, and therefore subordinated the proletarian revolution to the development of capitalism in Russia; whereas Trotsky showed that economic determinism could no longer operate in the same way as it did in Europe in 1848.
The following assertion from the preface to the second edition of The Development of Capitalism in Russia was written in 1907, at the very time Trotsky was developing his theory of permanent revolution: 'With this economic basis the revolution in Russia is, of course, inevitably a bourgeois revolution. This Marxist position is absolutely irrefutable. It must never be forgotten. It must always be applied to all the economic and political problems of the Russian Revolution.' Just as, according to Lenin, the development of capitalism in Russia had taken the classic course, if at an accelerated pace, the revolutionary process would also universally follow the model established by Marx and Engels. There was, as always, a lag between the state superstructure and the socio-economic formation: the new mode of production was growing in the womb of a social structure destined to disappear, and the gap had to be filled before it was possible to pass on to a new, higher order. Russia at the turn of the century was a country committed to the capitalist road, but that road was barred by Tsarism and feudal land tenure. These twin evils had to be cleared away and a democratic superstructure established in accordance with the needs of development of the forces of production, for 'society can neither leap over, nor abolish by decree, the stages of its natural development.'
Trotsky never denied that the qualitative leap of revolution was impossible so long as there was potential for developing the forces of production within a given mode of production. But the level of capitalist development as a whole made it impossible to go back to national economic determinism. The system as a totality had reached breaking point, and the Russian revolution would be proletarian from the outset because the basic contradiction, there as in the rest of Europe, lay in the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In Russia, as in the advanced capitalist countries, rational economic growth could only come as the result of proletarian revolution. Russia was the first country to set out on this road: and this, though at first sight paradoxical, was precisely because of the backwardness which made it a weak link in the imperialist chain. To impose any kind of bourgeois limitation to the revolution was theoretically mistaken and politically dangerous, and demonstrated a failure to understand the nature of the period — a failure of a fundamental order in the case of the Mensheviks, though only relative in Lenin's.
Such an account of Lenin's perspectives may seem far too schematic, as what he meant by bourgeois revolution was something quite different from, for example, the Mensheviks. In his analysis of the Russian social formation the revolution acquired a very specific sociological content: it was to be a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. I shall come back to this analysis, which brought Lenin much closer than he thought to the theory of permanent revolution, and to an indirect recognition, in his treatment of social forces, of the law of uneven and combined development. It is nonetheless true that the whole Bolshevik Party clung to the stages model until 1917.
In this respect Trotsky notes that in the theoretical arsenal of the party, forged by Russian Marxists in the struggle against Populism, there was no questioning of this perspective, even in the hypothetical case of revolution in the West: it was never changed, except insofar as development accelerated and lags between countries were reduced. There must first be a political solution of the agrarian problem, and the socialist revolution had to be put off into the indefinite future. That was why Lenin described the permanent revolution as an 'absurd theory'; and it is also why Trotsky did not understand the extent of the differences between Lenin and the proponents of bourgeois revolution as such.
In analysing these positions I have tried to show that for Trotsky there were no longer any insurmountable barriers to the proletarian revolution, even in backward countries. Theoretically, the self-development of the law of economics elucidated by Marx had led to the stage in which, as he put it, necessity gives way to freedom, or at least lays the ground for it. From this point on, in other words, all problems, even economic ones, can only be solved politically; and in backward as well as advanced countries, a quantitative and still more qualitative advance in the forces of production can only be brought about by the dictatorship of the proletariat. This did not imply that all countries were equally ripe for revolution, but only that there was no need to wait for or even create any further 'objective conditions' before preparing the proletariat for its historic tasks. That was the political meaning of the law of combined development. Uneven development, however, assigned quite different tasks to each revolution, such that the Russian revolution had to take on the immediate tasks of a bourgeois revolution.
The proletarian revolution was everywhere on the agenda. Internationalism, from which Trotsky never departed, was not just a principle but the political expression of the law of combined and uneven development. 'The international character of the socialist revolution, which constitutes the third aspect of the theory of permanent revolution, flows from the present state of economy and the social structure of humanity. Internationalism is no abstract principle but a theoretical and political reflection of the character of world economy, of the world development of productive forces and the world scale of the class struggle.' (5) It was on a world scale that economic determinism operated to prevent the 'skipping of a stage', and it was because he understood this that Trotsky opposed the alleged necessity for a democratic stage in Russia. This is also why the allegations against him do not stand up to analysis and are not in the least borne out by the potentialities of the period.
The theory of capitalism as the ante-chamber of socialism, and the theory of revolution by stages, are in the last analysis valid for the development of humanity only on a world scale. Genuine bourgeois revolutions occurred only during the emergence of western capitalism. From 1848 they were in a sense bastardised, and in the subsequent period, as Lenin said, it was the proletariat which fought while the bourgeoisie sneaked into power.
In 1905, or even, according to Marx, with the Paris Commune, the age of proletarian revolutions began. They failed only because the working class was unprepared for taking power: but clearly no bourgeois revolution of any kind was now possible. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the first step in the world proletarian revolution. No theoretical understanding of the nature of the coming revolution could be gained by attempting to fit the economic and political evolution of a country into a straitjacket of abstract possibilities, without taking into account that country's dependence on the world situation. The theory of permanent revolution, implying the fusion of the democratic stage with the dictatorship of the proletariat, is in the last analysis merely the expression of a fresh understanding of the theory of revolution by stages, in terms of the general historical progress of mankind. The accusation that Trotsky did not have a clear conception of the transition from the bourgeois to the proletarian revolution reveals a complete failure to understand this. The theory of permanent revolution was not in conflict with economic determinism: it was simply the direct political expression given by Trotsky to the analysis of capitalism as a world-wide reality, which had throughout the world created the objective conditions for a proletarian, and even directly socialist, revolution.
2. The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution, Permanent Revolution and 'Growing Over'
The ideas described in the previous chapter were developed and clarified in the process of analysing the Russian social formation. According to Lenin, the feudal structure weighed so heavily on the development of capitalism and on the resulting social differentiation that a bourgeois revolution was called for in Russia. But as soon as the basic contradiction of capitalism, expressed in the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, appeared alongside this contradiction, it fell to the proletariat to be the driving force of the entire revolutionary process, and to transform the bourgeois democratic stage into the first step towards socialism.
By conceiving revolution by stages in terms of a growing over of the bourgeois phase into the proletarian revolution, Lenin was always able to act in the interests of the final goal of the struggle. The fact remains that with this model he was unable to grasp the nature of the revolutionary process except in a very approximate and unsatisfactory way, as is evident in his vagueness about the political form of the democratic stage (Constituent Assembly, bourgeois Republic, provisional revolutionary government or whatever). The extreme complexity of the Russian social formation — the result of two different interpenetrating modes of production — obscured the revolutionary perspectives of the proletariat, but it was incorrect to say that the two overlapping contradictions of pre-revolutionary Russia could be resolved only one after the other. This is what Trotsky meant by asserting that the democratic stage could only come with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Trotsky reminds us that 'Marxism teaches that the development of the forces of production determines the socio-historical process' (6); and both he and Lenin gave an account of the genesis of the Russian capitalist social formation in accordance with their respective understanding of the origins of the capitalist mode of production in Russia. Thus in Lenin's view social classes were formed within the old peasant society which 'is being completely dissolved', it is ceasing to exist, it is being ousted by completely new types of rural inhabitants — types that are the basis of a society in which commodity economy and capitalist production prevail.' According to Trotsky, however, this development was very slow in Russia, and still at a low level; the role of the State, not only in the economy but in capitalist social differentiation, had also to be taken into consideration. The autocracy at first hindered and then fostered the formation of dominant economic groups as an indispensable 'buffer' between the masses and the State; but they tried to subordinate this development to their own economic and military interests. Through this complex relationship between the State and the 'natural' development of social forces, the autocracy became an absolute power which could use all the material and military power of the European states to remain in being long after it had ceased to satisfy the most elementary needs of social development: the more so since the dominant economic groups were in turn occupied with using the State to consolidate their own positions.
Taking rural society as the point of departure for the capitalist social formation, Lenin thought that for capitalist development to progress freely the problem of development in the rural sphere must first be solved. He did see the Tsarist State as one possible form of dictatorship of big capital, since it tended to give way to the pressure of the dominant economic groups, but he saw it much more as a barrier to the development of the capitalist productive forces in agriculture. This is why he thought a bourgeois political revolution was necessary before the capitalist mode of production could be destroyed: and why he thought that Trotsky, in calling for the immediate establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, underestimated the democratic aspirations of the peasantry, and the importance of demands based on the need to overthrow the remaining feudal structures so that the capitalist transformation of the agricultural economy could be carried out. Though Trotsky repeatedly denounced this as a one-sided perspective, his estimate of the revolutionary capacities of the various social forces appears to have been rather similar. But while Lenin's explanation of this was in terms of the co-existence within Russia of two contradictions, one between the dominant economic structure and the political superstructure, and the other within the economic structure, Trotsky went to the international roots of such a co-existence. Hence the importance of what at first sight might appear as no more than a difference of emphasis in the understanding of the revolutionary process.
In the social classes caught between the two contradictions — the bourgeoisie and the mass of the peasantry — the close interpenetration of the two social structures opened up a rift between the ideology of which they were the bearers and their real political aspirations. Only the classes at the two extremes of the whole social formation — the nobility and the proletariat — developed a firm, open and consistent class line. There was no disagreement between Lenin and Trotsky on that score. The nobility was the reactionary class par excellence, doomed by either the proletarian revolution or any hypothetical bourgeois democratic stage. After the 1905 revolution they closed ranks around the tottering autocracy, taking up the reins of power, for although they had been kept under by the monarchy much more than had the Western nobility, it was still the instrument of their rule. They refused to give up the smallest plot of land, even at the high price the Cadets proposed in the Duma after 1905, knowing full well that the least attack on landownership would mean the liquidation of their political role as the dominant class. Dragged along despite themselves by the irreversible development of capitalism, they would take this road only from above — by transforming their estates into capitalist enterprises so that they could maintain the political status quo.
Whilst the nobility took the first timid steps down the bourgeois road, the upper bourgeoisie, knowing that revolution of any kind would prove fatal to them, supported reaction. Financially the autocracy was enslaved to the western countries. The economic base of the upper bourgeoisie was not therefore strongly developed, and their political influence was almost nil. Furthermore, they were dependent on state orders, and were directly exposed to the hostility of the masses. Once they had acquired landed property, they preferred to secure the services of a strong centralised power which, despite the restrictions it imposed on them, would guarantee their existence as a class, rather than face the threat of even democratic revolution, which would strip them of their economic and political power. The upper bourgeoisie, then, were in no position to constitute a revolutionary class. There remained the liberal bourgeoisie which was more than ready to declare its democratic aspirations. The Mensheviks even went so far as to argue that if there had to be a bourgeois revolution, power would by right fall to them. But they had no economic base. Trotsky wrote in 1905 that by stifling the development of the Russian artisan class, European capital removed the ground from under the feet of bourgeois democracy; and the European petty bourgeoisie of 1848 was replaced by a new middle class, the product of the most modern capitalist development — professionally trained and educated lawyers, doctors, journalists, lecturers and school teachers.
This class, being economically dependent, attempted to attach itself to one or other of the great classes according to the relationship of forces. Eager for democracy before 1905, they were allowed by the revolutionary forces to insinuate their way into power, and then quickly cast aside the mask and turned on those same forces whose struggle, as they well knew, was not yet over. Lenin constantly denounced their duplicity and the constitutional illusions they propagated. It had to be understood that behind the democratic facade stood a monarchist party, and that 'the class position of the bourgeoisie inevitably gives rise to an inherent instability and falsity in the very formulation of its basic political tasks'. Needing the people to gain the political 'freedom' to take power, they deceived them: they would not allow any further assault on the new political status quo. 'The Constitutional-Democrat' (read constitutional-monarchist) will strike a bargain with Tsarism at a cheaper price than its present programme... the class conscious proletariat should have no illusions on that score.' (7)
Once it had become a force in the eyes of the autocracy, the Cadet party was bound to turn against the working class and the peasantry, whatever the price of the transaction. Immediately following the 1905 revolution, Lenin wrote: 'The times have long since gone when it was necessary for us to rouse the bourgeoisie to political awareness... when it was necessary for us to help the bourgeoisie to organise itself into a political opposition.'(8) Lenin had never seen the bourgeoisie as anything but a conjunctural ally to be deeply mistrusted. The liberal bourgeoisie had brought out the real nature of its demands during the revolutionary period, and had taken the side of law and order: and from then on the Cadets were nothing but 'the worms in the grave of the revolution'.(9) The revolution would, then, be made against the bourgeoisie, including the liberal bourgeoisie which Lenin had only ever seen as a supporting force for the struggle of the proletariat and the peasantry against the monarchy. But what Lenin theorised in terms of the struggle of the proletariat and peasantry for democratic emancipation, Trotsky saw as the negation of the bourgeois state as such. Lenin re-drew the classic model of revolution in accordance with the fact that Russia was still essentially a peasant country, and that it would be sheer philistinism to keep to the exact plan drawn up by Marx and Engels. It was still valid in general terms, but in Russia the democratic stage would not be a republic under the aegis of the bourgeoisie, but a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Trotsky claimed that such a stage was actually impossible. The political maturity of the proletariat and objective international conditions made it impossible to impose such a limitation, even on a temporary basis. Though Lenin and Trotsky had, admittedly from different standpoints, come to share a similar estimation of the role of the bourgeoisie, they were in violent disagreement on the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, and therefore of the proletariat too. Underlying the dispute was always their differing concepts of economic determinism. It was because the peasantry was a force of overwhelming economic and political importance that the polemic between the theory of permanent revolution and the theory of revolution by stages crystallised around this problem.
It fell to the proletariat and the peasantry to assume the historical role of the bourgeoisie. How would they come into alliance, given that the peasantry wished to make a democratic revolution, while the proletariat struggled for the goal of the socialist revolution? The leading political force in the whole process was the proletariat. What kind of political power would then result from this revolution? Lenin and Trotsky gave different answers to these questions, according to their respective views of the revolutionary potential of the two classes. The questions at issue were what the proletariat represented as compared to the peasantry; the relationship between its political strength and its economic weakness; and whether it needed to be strengthened by a growth of the productive forces before it could embark on a relentless struggle against the new bourgeoisie which would emerge out of the peasantry after its final liberation from serfdom. Although Lenin's theories appeared internally coherent, at the concrete political level they produced a degree of equivocation absent from Trotsky's perspectives.
This discussion can usefully take as its point of departure a passage Trotsky quotes from the collection of articles Engels wrote for Marx in the New York Tribune, subsequently published as Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany. 'The working class in Germany', wrote Engels, 'is, in its social and political development, as far behind that of England and France as the German bourgeoisie is behind the bourgeoisie of those countries. Like master, like man. The evolution of the conditions of existence for a numerous, strong, concentrated and intelligent proletarian class goes hand in hand with the development of the conditions of existence for a numerous, wealthy, concentrated and powerful middle class. The working class movement itself never is independent, never is of an exclusively proletarian character until all the different factions of the middle class, and particularly its most progressive faction, the large manufacturers, have conquered political power and remodelled the State according to their wants. It is then that the inevitable conflict between the employer and the employed becomes imminent and cannot be adjourned any longer.'
Most Russian Marxists made a dogma out of the conclusions Engels drew from the defeat of the German revolution, and which, since they had been confirmed by the French events of 1848, he thought would have to be the basis of revolutionary perspectives in all countries where capitalism was not fully developed. But the conception of economic determinism underlying this analysis, though it was understandable in the Europe of 1848, was completely out of place for Russia at the turn of the century. In 1848 there might still have been room for the growth of the productive forces and of the proletariat such as to prevent the victory of a proletarian revolution — and in this respect, Engels' analysis was well-founded. But since 1848, the relationship between the advanced capitalist countries and the backward countries had changed not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Russia in 1905 was not to the western countries what Germany had been to England and France in 1848. The uneven development of capitalist countries had not simply been copied in the East. It followed that the axiom 'like master, like man' was no longer meaningful in Russia. Once the proletariat was understood to be a section of the world proletariat struggling against a section of the international bourgeoisie, there was no longer a direct correlation between the degree of development of the productive forces and of the bourgeoisie in a given country, and the strength and political maturity of its proletariat. 'Between the productive forces of a country and the political strength of its classes, there cut across at any given moment various social and political factors of a national and international character, and these displace and even sometimes completely alter the political expression of economic relations.'
In Results and Prospects, Trotsky used Kautsky's analysis of the American and Russian working classes to show that if the political force of the proletariat depended on the strength of the bourgeoisie, i.e. on the development of the productive forces, then the country most likely to see the upsurge of proletarian revolution would be the United States, as the nation where capitalism was the most advanced and the proletariat most numerous and concentrated. But it was here that the proletariat was the least influential politically precisely because its bourgeoisie was all-powerful economically, politically and ideologically. On the other hand, while the Russian proletariat was still not very numerous, since industry was not yet far advanced, the same applied to the exploiting class, which as we have already seen was not very important politically. As Kautsky wrote: 'in no other country than America is there so much basis for speaking of the dictatorship of capital, while the militant proletariat has nowhere acquired such importance as in Russia.' This was the fundamental fact from which the nature of the coming revolution stemmed, and not the agrarian question. Kautsky added: '... the struggle for the emancipation of Russia from the incubus of absolutism which is stifling it has become converted into a single combat between absolutism and the industrial proletariat, a single combat in which the peasants may render considerable support but cannot play a leading role.' (10) Any other perspective derived from a mechanistic caricature of Marxism, from the substitution of a ready-made schema for analysis of the social formation.
The Russian proletariat, emanating directly from the peasantry, was in fact thrust straight into the most modern, intensive industries. Trotsky wrote that as soon as the Russian proletariat emerged it was confronted with a highly centralised state power and equally centralised capital. It had no experience of the prejudices and corporative traditions of the crafts, and was from the outset engaged in the most relentless struggle. Its situation was quite unlike that of the Western proletariat, and had the advantage of making it open to accepting the Marxist view of its historical tasks, as the bourgeoisie had neither the means nor the time to corrupt it and divert it from its goal. This is why Lenin said after October that revolution could be begun more easily in Russia than in the West. He always opposed vulgar Marxists over the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, struggling to organise from the late 19th century. But given that the 'nub of the Russian revolution' was the agrarian question, he tended to subscribe to Engels' analysis, or at least to its theoretical basis if not its concrete content.
In 1906, in an article entitled The Proletariat and its Ally in the Russian Revolution, he also cited Kautsky to show that in Russia the revolution would not be strictly speaking bourgeois, because 'the bourgeoisie is not one of the driving forces of the present revolutionary movement in Russia.' (11). Yet it would not be socialist either, because of the existence of the autocracy and serfdom... This was a correct way of posing the problem: Trotsky did not challenge the need to carry out bourgeois agrarian tasks. He knew the importance of the peasant question in the Russian revolutionary process. He nonetheless always held that the theoretical and political conclusions Lenin drew before the revolution were wrong, and that he subordinated the proletarian revolution to an ill-conceived kind of determinism. The importance he gave to the agrarian revolution led him to underestimate the possibilities of extending the struggle of the proletariat, which had in 1905 fought for the first time under its own banner. He never clearly defined the nature of the democratic stage, nor what would hold it back from growing over into a socialist revolution, because his understanding of the period was based on a priori positions which he thought needed only to be adapted to the period and the concrete situation, without seeing that they prevented him from grasping its essential features.
The peasant question therefore became the crux of the polemic in which Trotsky set out to refute the theory of revolution by stages. 'That revolution', Lenin wrote, 'marks the period in the development of society in which the mass of society virtually stands between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and constitutes an immense petty-bourgeois, peasant stratum.' This determined the nature of the future regime. Any underestimation of its importance would put the proletariat in a false position. Had Engels not written in The Peasant War that a social class coming into power before conditions were ripe was obliged to 'advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed its own class with phrases and promises, and with the assurances that the interests of that alien class are its own interests', and that anyone put in such a situation was 'irremediably lost'? This was the trap which awaited those who did not understand the non-proletarian nature of the coming revolution. Trotsky for his part was nothing but a windbag who refused to recognise that 'the objective logic of historical development confronts them at the present time with the tasks, not of a socialist, but of a democratic revolution'. (12) To confuse the overthrow of the autocracy by an alliance including the whole of the peasantry with the socialist overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the introduction of the class struggle into the village not only betrayed a theoretical error, but represented a disastrous attempt to move faster than economic and social conditions would permit. It would in practice foster illusions in the working class which could only end in a long period of demoralisation.
The Menshevik Martynov made the same mistake when he said that if the proletariat gained political hegemony in the democratic dictatorship, this would represent the immediate establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, arguing that such a prospect would scare off the petty bourgeoisie. The Mensheviks understood the implications of Lenin's concept of a democratic stage, but used it to postpone proletarian power to a safe distance in the future for the petty bourgeois forces; whereas Trotsky saw it as creating the need to move directly into the dictatorship of the proletariat. But Lenin considered that these attitudes had a common basis, and he lumped Trotsky with the Mensheviks because he took objectively the same political line, while Trotsky regarded Lenin as belonging in the ranks of the Mensheviks for maintaining the distinction between the democratic and proletarian stages.
Where Lenin parted company with the Mensheviks was in stressing the need to understand that the only purpose of the democratic stage was for the proletariat to equip itself for its own struggle. The agrarian programme of Social Democracy advanced by Lenin therefore had a dual purpose: to support the whole of the peasantry against serfdom and landownership, which were to be completely abolished; and to organise the work of organising the rural proletariat with the aim of this fight growing over into a socialist revolution. Lenin wrote: ' we must organise the rural proletariat, like the urban proletariat, and together with it, into an independent class party; we must explain to it that its interests are antagonistic to those of the bourgeois peasantry; we must call upon it to fight for the socialist revolution, and to point out to it that liberation from oppression and poverty lies not in turning several sections of the peasantry into petty bourgeois, but only in replacing the entire bourgeois system by the socialist system.' (13)
Lenin never lost sight of the fact that this second plank of the programme was more important than the first, and that they must constantly be on their guard against the treacherous instability of the peasantry as a petty bourgeois layer. But the theories from which he worked prevented his perspectives from growing over to abrogate the distinction between the minimum programme to be realised within capitalism, and the maximum programme, which could only be put forward after the beginning of the first stage. In 1907 he re-wrote his agrarian programme in the light of the events of 1905. While Trotsky took this revolution as factual confirmation of the theory of permanent revolution, Lenin's determinist concept of the revolutionary process was reinforced. There were two possible ways for agriculture to develop in Russia: the Prussian way, by transforming feudal serfdom into capitalist slavery; or the peasant way, on the basis of capitalist differentiation of the peasantry. Both ways were bourgeois: but the Social Democrats had to support the peasant way, if only to wipe out all previous rural landowning forces, including the commune, to prepare the way, economically and politically, for the final struggle. Lenin added that the previous programme had underestimated the importance of feudal institutions, for capitalism proved to be much less developed in the countryside than he had at first thought. The coming revolution would, more than ever, be bourgeois, and the feudal structure would have to be completely demolished to make room for growth, while the better off class of peasants would become a new ascendant bourgeoisie whose fight would have to be supported and even stimulated. The 'trudoviks' in the Duma who demanded land nationalisation were only asking for the chance to carry out a capitalist transformation of agriculture. That meant a new democratic political structure, to meet the needs of such development.
[illegible] His formulation did not make it clear that in the democratic stage, if it was the proletariat, Lenin constantly claimed, why should this be a 'bourgeois' stage? And if it was really a bourgeois stage, there might be reason to think that the proletariat and the peasantry would share power equally. In 1909 Lenin wrote that he could not see why the two formulations — the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, and the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry — should be mutually exclusive, as in the revolutionary process the proletariat would draw the peasantry behind it. It was therefore absurd to raise a question of terminology. But in fact, the debate between Lenin's 'and' and Trotsky's 'supported by' was only meaningful by virtue of the contrast between democratic dictatorship and dictatorship of the proletariat. Moreover, according to Trotsky, Lenin's formulation concealed a further ambiguity: the proposal for a coalition government pre-supposed that the protagonists should have formed political parties. Now, the peasantry could only follow the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Being organically incapable of creating a powerful autonomous party, it was therefore bound to fall under the control of the bourgeoisie. Lenin replied that on the one hand a coalition government could rest on an alliance of classes and not of parties, and that on the other hand the peasantry had after 1905 begun to build an independent political organisation: 'There is not the slightest doubt that a revolution which reaches so high a degree of development as the revolutionary dictatorship will create a more firmly-formed and more powerful revolutionary peasant party.' What Lenin did not see was that if it were possible to build such a party (in which case Russia would be the most suitable country for it), there could be no growing over from the democratic stage to the proletarian revolution, for the proletariat could only appear as the liberator of the peasantry if the latter were unable to advance its own struggles. It followed from the very nature of the peasantry that democracy could not be established in Russia before the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Trotsky wrote later, when his prognosis had been confirmed by history, the tasks of the bourgeois revolution in Russia could only really be carried out if the proletariat, with the support of millions of peasants, had the revolutionary dictatorship in its hands.
Trotsky in no way 'underestimated' the peasantry, but apart from opposing Lenin together with all the Bolsheviks over their subordination of the proletarian revolution to some hypothetical development of the productive forces within capitalism, he laid bare, as early as 1905, the ambiguities concealed by Lenin's formula of the democratic dictatorship. After the debate had been cut short by history, he wrote in Permanent Revolution that the argument had never been about the need for an alliance of the proletariat and peasantry, but on the political mechanism of their collaboration. 'The theoretical as well as the political dispute among us was... over the programme of this collaboration, its party forms and political methods.' (14) Though this was an important qualification, and one which throws light on the debate reaching its height around 1905, it did not dissuade him from thinking that Lenin's position on the question was rather unclear, and moreover politically dangerous: apart from the fact that imperialism put the proletarian revolution on the order of the day the world over, if the demands of the peasantry could be satisfied by a 'democratic' stage of any kind, they would at once become a pillar of reaction. To preserve their gains they would take the side of the bourgeois order, and set back the proletarian challenge. Because its social composition was so heterogeneous, and because it occupied an intermediate position between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the peasantry was incapable of taking on an [illegible] the full conclusions.
'The theory of historical materialism', Lukacs writes at the beginning of his book on Lenin, '.... presupposes the universal actuality of the proletarian revolution.' (15) I have argued that in this respect Trotsky was in some ways right as against Lenin, and that for him the perspective of the proletarian revolution was not only a theoretical perspective but concrete and immediate. Lenin, viewing the revolutionary process as a totality, but from a national standpoint, could only imagine the dialectical transformation of the democratic stage into the dictatorship of the proletariat taking place by means of a resolution of the agrarian question. Paradoxically, this perspective was in a sense confirmed around 1920, when the peasantry took its stand en bloc against a regime in which it no longer saw any guarantee of its own economic development. But the peasant question only became dominant to the extent that the European proletariat was defeated. In that respect Trotsky was right not to subordinate the working class struggle to it. This has to be qualified by grasping what is essential to Leninism, as Lukacs does: in synthesis, and in the light of October, it does seem that despite his adherence to the theory of revolution by stages, Lenin stood out from all the Marxists of his time, as 'the first and for a long time the only important leader and theoretician who tackled this problem at its theoretical roots and therefore at its decisive, practical point: that of organisation'. (16)
As Trotsky later recognised, in terms of revolutionary outlook, and taking into account that Lenin in theory saw the democratic stage only as the period of economic and political preparation of the socialist revolution, strict organisational principles were more effective than the best of general perspectives. The basic feature of Leninism, and Trotsky could not see this until 1917, was not support for the theory of revolution by stages, but the forging of the political weapons of the class struggle. The theory of organisation casts a new light on Lenin's and Trotsky's theories, and makes the difference between their respective concepts of the relationship between politics and economics much clearer. While Trotsky fought the vulgarisers of materialism for the recognition that the Russian proletariat was capable of defeating both feudalism and capitalism, Lenin made it the political subject of revolution. (17)
3. Building the Revolutionary Party
It might at first sight seem that Lenin's organisational policy found its theoretical justification in the theory of permanent revolution, expressing the fusion of the democratic stage and the dictatorship of the proletariat in a backward country, as a result of the decline of the world capitalist system; while on the other hand, his struggle to build the party of the proletariat was the indispensable practical corollary of Trotsky's perspective of the revolution. It is true that Leninism and Trotskyism are in this sense complementary: but according to the positions analysed above, Lenin was not theoretically inconsistent. By stressing the growing over of the 'bourgeois' democratic stage into the proletarian revolution, and the role of the proletariat in the process as a whole, he showed that the very policy of alliances imposed on the proletariat by the 'objective course of history' required the latter to take up a class line and organise intransigently for it, so as not to be dependent on the social layers following it. The equivocation lay elsewhere, in the fact that his perspectives for revolution did not match up to the reality of the social conflict shaking the foundations of Tsarism and capitalism in early twentieth century Russia. It was Lenin's organisational principles that prevented him, indeed many others, from lapsing into dogmatism. Trotsky never challenged the basic principles of Lenin's organisational policy, but by rejecting the means he proposed for putting them into practice, he renounced the successful conduct of the political struggle required by his theory of revolution, and it was therefore he, not Lenin, who failed to achieve the basic unity of theory and praxis of which Lukacs speaks.
Lenin came to the 1903 Congress, where the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was to be reorganised, armed with a minutely worked out series of statutes based on the principles on which the Social Democrats had until then been unanimous: the two basic ideas of democratic centralism — though it was not yet known by that name — and the selection of members. Lenin's proposals for the first time gave life to what had previously been abstract principles, but they aroused a wave of indignation among the participants. Lenin's plan seemed monstrous. But they did not believe that by rejecting it they were negating these principles, and failed to see that there was no middle way between the kind of organisation Lenin advocated and opportunism pure and simple.
When Lenin laid down the clause, 'A member of the Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organisations', he was at a loss to understand the virulence of the accusations hurled against him. The need for a party of 'professional revolutionaries', described by Lukacs in Lenin as 'the strictly centralised organisation of the proletariat's most conscious elements — and only as such' (18) was based on the nature of the coming revolution and of the Russian social formation. In the course of his polemics against the Populists, Lenin had argued that Russian society was a predominantly capitalist social formation, though it was marked by the survival of the feudal mode of production. The fact that a democratic revolution was called for did not mean that this could be neglected. The proletariat faced a strongly centralised power, one of the possible forms of the political rule of capital. It therefore had to build an equally centralised organisation, all the stricter because it would have to push the petty bourgeoisie into fighting for democracy without allowing their influence to divert it from the final goal. By giving a precise definition of the previously vague notion of 'party membership', Lenin was not closing the door of what should be the organisation of the proletariat, as the Mensheviks, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg thought. He was only forging the indispensable political instrument for carrying out the immense tasks facing the class without deviating from a class position.
The general charge of substitutionism covers all the accusations against Lenin by both Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Rosa Luxemburg denounced Lenin for 'Blanquism' because he was trying to build a European type of party in advance of the social and political development of the Russian working class. In Marxism versus Dictatorship she wrote that the kind of organisation Lenin was proposing had nothing to do with the needs of the Russian situation, since the Social Democrats did not have the political raw materials which would only be produced by bourgeois society. The unification of the working masses would come not from their own aspirations for unity, but initially as a response to the unification of the bourgeoisie: it was as a result of the actual capitalist relations of production that it formed into a class conscious of its own interests. Because of the backwardness of the country, the Russian proletariat had not developed fully. She added that the revolution, which was certain to break out in Russia, was not a proletarian but a bourgeois revolution, and this made a radical difference to the conditions of social struggle. As the Social Democratic party had been established in Russia before the bourgeoisie had control of government, the problem of organisation was radically different from that in an advanced capitalist country. Lenin was in a sense doing away with stages, going too fast for the self maturation of the working class by preparing and organising for its socialist tasks before the economic tasks were carried out. Lenin's reply was that they must not erect a Chinese Wall between the two stages, and that the revolutionary process, seen as a totality, made it imperative to keep in view the final objective: the establishment of proletarian power.
In Permanent Revolution, Trotsky states that by 1903 he had developed the main elements of his theory and already saw the coming revolution as proletarian. But this was precisely why he thought Lenin's plan a dangerous aberration, and his 'substitutionism' the more intolerable as the proletariat had already, in the course of a powerful strike wave, given proof of its political maturity. The 1905 revolution was to confirm him in his opinion. The Russian working class already had a highly developed class consciousness, and the type of organisation proposed by Lenin could only paralyse it. For different reasons, then, and with a different perspective, both Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg extolled the spontaneity of the masses — he on the grounds that their level of consciousness made such an outrageously sectarian type of organisation superfluous, and she with the argument that the working class could not yet support such a party. Both found this type of organisation abhorrent, and from their differing standpoints came to similar conclusions. According to Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin's ultra-centralist tendencies were dangerous, for he forgot that organisation, advances in consciousness and the struggle itself were not distinct phases mechanically separated from each other, as in the Blanquist movement, but the various aspects of a single process. By putting up barriers between the party and the proletariat and subjecting party members to blind obedience, Lenin could only stifle the movement of the working class itself, as long as the conditions were not right for the formation of a strongly centralised party; and even apart from this, centralism was only a tendency, which became reality only in step with the development and political education of the masses in struggle. The strikes of 1896, 1901 and 1903 had been stages in the spontaneous political development of the masses, and showed that they did not need the kind of party conceived of by Lenin, which ran the grave risk of going beyond the control of its base and degenerating like German social democracy.
Rosa Luxemburg believed it was wrong to think that the absolute power of a central committee acting under some kind of mandate could be 'temporarily' substituted for the still unrealisable control of the majority of workers in the party, or that the public control of the working masses over the party organisations could be replaced by the control of the central committee over the activities of the proletariat. Trotsky for his part thought that the Russian workers were conscious enough to control their leaderships. But he took Rosa Luxemburg's position a stage further in warning against the dangers of refusing to build a broadly based organisation: 'Lenin's method', he said, 'led to the organisation of the party (in a small committee) beginning to substitute for the party as a whole; then the central committee is substituted for the whole organisation, and finally a ''dictator'' is substituted for the central committee.' Both the 1904 pamphlet from which this quotation comes, and Rosa Luxemburg's attack, show that the two revolutionary leaders failed to understand the relationship between the vanguard and the masses that Lenin had analysed in What is to be Done? Moreover, because they rejected not centralism itself but too much centralism, they could only attack Lenin's ideas at a sub-theoretical level, denouncing him for thirsting after personal power and for throwing out the most venerable collaborators on Iskra.
In What is to be Done?, Lenin argued that the spontaneity of the masses 'in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form'; but that the working class cannot on its own become conscious of the irreconcilable opposition between its own interests and the whole social and political order, and that 'Social Democratic consciousness' has to be brought from the outside. The proletariat is 'spontaneously' trade unionist, not able to transform its own economic struggles into political struggles, and therefore any 'cult of spontaneity' would reinforce the hold of bourgeois ideology. 'Social democratic consciousness... would have to be brought from without' (19) to the proletariat. In that sense, as Lukacs says, the party is 'the tangible embodiment of proletarian class consciousness.' (20)
One of the party's main tasks was to educate the proletariat, to take it beyond the economic limitations of economist 'spontaneity', and raise the political consciousness of the masses, not lower the party's ideological level to theirs. This required the party to be powerful, coherent and politically stable, to carry out both the Social Democratic and trade union tasks. Not only was the proletariat unable, even in the sharpest revolutionary struggles, to formulate clearly the political objectives it fought for, but it 'forgot' in periods of ebb what had been gained in a few months or days. In this sense the party was also the memory of the proletariat. Only a highly disciplined party could maintain a revolutionary perspective through all the ebbs and flows of history, without foundering in the deviations opened up by the influence of classes in alliance with or opposed to the proletariat.
Not only had Trotsky failed to grasp the basic idea of What is to be Done?, he had failed to understand the nature of the organisation Lenin proposed to establish. This is why his accusations at the 1903 congress were quite beside the point. In A Letter to a Comrade on our Organisational Tasks in 1902 (21), Lenin had described in the greatest detail how the working class must organise going from the formation of the party to its ultimate victory. It was clear that such organisation had nothing to do with conspiracy. Trotsky had forgotten the diversity of the organisms which had to be set up to encompass the working class, and in particular that 'the Party must be only the vanguard, the leader of the vast masses of the working class, the whole (or nearly the whole) of which works ''under the control and direction'' of the Party organisations, but the whole of which does not and should not belong to a ''party''. (22) Trotsky did not take into consideration the dangers of opportunism which flowed from the Mensheviks' theory that anyone on strike could declare themselves a member of the party. He thereby confused the revolutionary instinct driving the proletariat into strikes, and even insurrections, with clear political consciousness; and the class consciousness the proletariat could gain through struggle, with socialist consciousness. It was not that he denied the role of the party: this is apparent in the analysis he made after 1905 of the relationship between the St. Petersburg Soviet and the RSDLP. The Soviet was an assembly which emerged organically from the proletariat in the course of the struggle for power. This embryo of the revolutionary government was the fruit quite simply of the class instinct of the proletariat, and the focus in which all revolutionary forces were concentrated. But it was only able to take the struggle as far as it did because from the beginning it felt the all-powerful influence of the Social Democracy. It was in the Soviet that the Social Democratic organisation, which could now put into practice all the advantages that Marxism taught it, met up with the revolutionary instincts of the working class.
It was not therefore over a question of principle that Trotsky opposed Lenin: in demanding that the party should have a broader, more elastic base he simply put forward a different view of where revolutionary theory, of which the party was the bearer, joined up with the 'spontaneous' consciousness of the working masses. Theoretically, he did not reject political organisation or believe that social forces could shape history directly, but in practical terms the consequences of his view of organisation were very dangerous and worked against his principles. Rejecting what he thought on Lenin's part was an over-exaggeration of centralism at the expense of democracy in practice, he could not see that his own organisational perspectives, in reality if not in intention, went against the Bolshevik theory of party-building.
After the 1903 congress neither Lenin nor Trotsky could understand how the debate around the first paragraph of the statutes had become so important as to threaten to split the party. Since Lenin's opponents could not deny that the main tasks of the party were to educate the proletariat, show it the real goal of its struggles and organise it for the final battle, he believed that the conflict would die down of its own accord once the Mensheviks realised the practical implications of these tasks. If, however, the theories of the Mensheviks did not remain a dead letter, if they persevered in error, they would open wide the gates of the party to petty bourgeois opportunists who were happy to be sympathisers of the Social Democratic Party, but not to work in one of its organisations. They could then only move further and further away from a proletarian political line, and from the theoretical ideas underlying it. The subsequent evolution of the Mensheviks was an overwhelming proof — were any needed — of Lenin's political clearsightedness, and of the good grounds he had for intransigence on organisational questions.
The factional struggle over organisational questions at this point cut across the polemic over whether there was to be a bourgeois revolution or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Refusing to build a revolutionary party such as Lenin conceived of meant pushing the socialist revolution back into the indefinite future. The Mensheviks turned to the theory of revolution by stages to justify their opportunist slide towards the liberal bourgeoisie. They were unable to raise themselves above the political horizon of the radicalised petty bourgeoisie. Their mechanistic counter-position of centralism and democracy within the party was paralleled by their counter-position of democratic and socialist tasks, which in this particular situation would have to be carried out simultaneously. Stretching out a hand to the liberal bourgeoisie, their organisational opportunism merged into political opportunism. Under cover of the stages theory of revolution, they made every effort to get the Cadets into power.
Trotsky refused to follow them in this, and constantly argued that the coming revolution must be proletarian. But he would not join the Bolsheviks either, convinced as he was that Leninism was 'incompatible with the organisation of workers into a political party.' (23) His view of the party, based on Martov's document to the 1903 congress at which the RSDLP split, led him to think that Lenin (against whom he used harsh language) was quite wrong, and to pose as the champion of unity — the more so because after all the Bolsheviks also supported the theory of revolution by stages. Later, in 1921, when Olminsky hypocritically asked him if he thought it would be a good thing to publish certain documents on his opposition to Lenin, he wrote back: 'I was quite wrong in my assessment of the Menshevik faction: I overestimated their revolutionary potential and thought it possible to isolate and defeat the right wing. But I made this basic error because I assessed both the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions from the standpoint of permanent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, while at that period both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks held the position of bourgeois revolution and democratic dictatorship. I did not believe the differences separating the factions to be so deep and hoped... that the advance of the revolution itself would lead them to accept the platform of permanent revolution and the conquest of power by the working class, and this did happen in part in 1905.' The main reason, however, that Trotsky went on reiterating his vain appeals for reunification, was that before 1917 he was unable to see that the debate over bourgeois or proletarian revolution was fading in significance compared to the concrete preparation of the latter, and that in this respect Lenin was right to say he belonged with the Mensheviks, and to see only empty phrase-mongering in his revolutionary proclamations. It was pointless to repeat that the dictatorship of the proletariat was in sight if he refused to break with those who regarded this perspective as a bogey to be carefully concealed from the bourgeois 'democratic' forces.
In the pages of the Vienna Pravda, Trotsky went on and on publishing appeals for unity. Pravda pledged itself 'in all its activity constantly to respect above factional differences, the general principle of the unity of the class struggle which is obligatory on all of us. We have nothing but our revolutionary unity to oppose to the power of the blood-thirsty enemy.' Holding such a view, he was again unable to understand Lenin's organisational principles when, in 1907-8, the problem of party unity was raised in a new, acute form. The period could only be described as 'inter-revolutionary', a phase of transition to a new wave of revolution still stronger than that of 1905. There were important political conclusions to be drawn from this period of relative calm in the class struggle, in which the proletariat had still not recovered from the defeat and the revolutionary forces and their vanguard had suffered brutal repression.
The autocracy had been forced to take a constitutional form, if of a limited kind, and the right wing of the Mensheviks claimed that the hour had come to liquidate the clandestine organisation. The left of the Bolshevik faction, on the other hand, thought it more than ever necessary to concentrate on clandestine activity. Lenin, and also Trotsky, thought that the time had come to combine legal and illegal action. But while Lenin was under attack from both the left 'Otzovists' and the right liquidationists, Trotsky attempted once more to resolve the crisis without expulsions or splits. He claimed that unification could come about through the political struggle, that 'both deviations must be defeated by broadening and deepening the work of Social Democracy in every field of the proletarian class struggle, and by denouncing the danger of either deviation' (Pravda no. 12, 1910). Lenin replied that it was not a matter of reconciling persons, groups or institutions, but of having a party line, a political and ideological orientation, and a content to the work.
For Lenin once again what was at issue was the class line, the effectiveness of the revolutionary struggle. The only way of reunifying the party was to carry through the debate, not to hold back from it for fear of breaking a unity which in fact no longer existed. Trotsky's conciliationist stand, whether he liked it or not, put him in the same camp as the deviationists. 'Otzovism' and liquidationism alike had to be wiped out, leaving aside people, groups and institutions 'which disagree with that policy or do not carry it out.' Trotsky took the 'standpoint of a matchmaker' (24) by attempting to make reconciliations without looking for the roots of their deviations in the nature of the period. Deep changes both in the workers movement and in the composition of the vanguard were brought about by the objective conditions, which inevitably resulted in deviations, the new influence of the bourgeoisie producing a kind of semi-liberalism in some and semi-anarchism in others. The party had to struggle on both fronts if it was not to be diverted from its final goal. Trotsky's eleventh hour diplomacy, his attempt to preserve party unity at all costs, in order, as he thought, not to compromise the proletarian perspective, only weakened the position of the organisation: by trying to avoid the exclusion of the liquidators at any price, he was objectively working for their policies. He failed to see that if Lenin got rid of the Otzovists, the Mensheviks could not expel the liquidationists without consigning themselves to oblivion.
Lenin regarded the immediate task of the party as being the organisation of much apparently uninspiring work, using all the legal and semi-legal institutions which were the property of the Duma, while maintaining, even in this field, all the revolutionary traditions of Social Democracy, the watchwords of its heroic recent past, its spirit of intransigence towards opportunists and reformists. It would be a dangerous time in which firm political leadership was more than ever necessary, and if Trotsky would not recognise the correctness of Lenin's position, which was no more than resolute class politics, he would quite simply be a traitor to the party. The 'crisis of party unity' had confirmed Trotsky's political inconsistency, and he had become 'the hero and sworn advocate of the liquidators and Otzovists, with whom he agrees on nothing theoretically, but in everything practically. (25) He did not see that no concessions were possible without compromising the party line, and by taking up conciliationism he became the prisoner of the Mensheviks in the unhappy experience of the August 1912 bloc — the last attempt at reconciliation, in which the Bolsheviks refused to participate.
Lenin's 'hardness' was based on the same considerations of political effectiveness as his writing of the 1903 statutes, which alone made the party 'capable of immediately adjusting its interpretation to the ever-changing situation'. Otherwise it would have lagged behind events, followed instead of led, lost contact with the masses and disintegrated. The only way for the party to 'become an instrument of this totality' was 'the strictest party discipline and the strictest ideological cohesion'.(26) Trotsky later admitted that Lenin was 'completely right' on this score.
It is the theory of organisation that puts any set of theories claiming to be based on Marxism to the test. Once again it was Lukacs who wrote that it fell to Lenin to take the step over the threshold between theory and practice, which also, it must be remembered, represented a theoretical advance, from the abstract to the concrete. The building of the revolutionary party was the immediate corollary of his theoretical and political perspectives. Trotsky failed in this respect. He refused to recognise that Lenin was organising the party of revolution, while he, by refusing to break with the Mensheviks, was helping to build the reformist party. As Deutscher has shown, his policy of conciliation merely made him a treacherous enemy in the eyes of the Bolsheviks and a dubious ally for the Mensheviks.
Lukacs wrote, again in his Lenin, that the Leninist conception of the party marked a violent break with the fatalistic and mechanistic vulgarisation of Marxism. Just as socialist consciousness was not the mechanical product of the class situation of the proletariat, of its position in the relations of production, so the revolution was not the inevitable consequence of the ripening of objective conditions. If the revolutionary forces were unprepared, the revolutionary situation could hang fire for a whole period. But the ambiguity of the period appeared to Lenin to justify the separation, from a theoretical point of view, of the revolution into two distinct stages; and in this respect Trotsky went further in breaking with the mechanical relationship established between economy and politics. But his attitude on the question of organisation was based paradoxically on this 'fatalism' which bred spontaneism, and which expressed itself with him in an overestimation of the class consciousness of the proletariat. It is therefore clear that there were gaps in the theoretical schemas of both Trotsky and Lenin; and that while both of them broke with an economistic conception of Marxism, they were working on very different — though in the last analysis, complementary — terrains. It is absolutely necessary to understand this if one is to analyse Trotsky's position after the revolution, and especially after the death of Lenin, when Stalin and his 'theoreticians' were to give a purely Menshevik interpretation to Leninism.
To be concluded
FOOTNOTES
1. Results and Prospects, in Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, London (New Park), 1962, p188.
2. History of the Russian Revolution, London, 1965, p26.
3. Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow, 1956, p173.
4. Results and Prospects, pp173 and [illegible].
5. The Permanent Revolution, London (New Park), 1962, [illegible].
6. Results and Prospects, p169.
7. Revolutionary Struggle and Liberal Brokerage, Collected Works, vol. 8, Moscow ed., pp489 and 493.
8. [illegible] Cadets and the Tasks of the Workers Party, [illegible].
9. [illegible]
10. Results and Prospects, pp 197-198.
11. Collected Works, vol. 11, p372.
12. Collected Works, vol. 3, [Two Tactics...] the Provisional Revolutionary Government, pp 200, [illegible].
13. Collected Works, vol. 8, The Proletariat and the Peasantry, p231.
14. [illegible]
15. London (NLB), 1970, pp11-12.
16. Ibid., p25.
17. G. Lukacs, Lenin's Theory of Organisation, (IMG).
18. [illegible] Moscow ed., [illegible].
19. [illegible]
20. op. cit., p27.
21. Collected Works, vol. 6.
22. Collected Works, vol. 6, Second Speech in the Discussion on the Party Rules, [illegible].
23. Letter from Trotsky to Cheidze, April 1913.
24. Op. cit., vol. 16, Notes of a Publicist, p.213.
25. Op. cit., vol. 16, An Open Letter to all pro-Party Social-Democrats, [illegible].
26. Lukacs, op. cit., p28.