Chapter 8 Conclusions¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the author concludes by synthesising the book’s central argument: that the theoretical divergence between Lenin and Trotsky before 1917 on the nature of the coming Russian revolution was resolved in practice by Lenin’s own political evolution. The chapter’s core narrative thrust is that Lenin, from the April Theses onward, abandoned his earlier theory of the Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry (RDDPP) and adopted a position functionally identical to Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution (ToPR). This is not presented as a convergence, but as Lenin’s qualitative shift to a permanentist perspective, which he then generalised for the international communist movement.
The key claim is that Lenin’s Collected Works demonstrate a clear and substantial change in 1917. The author cites specific evidence: the Letters from Afar and the April Theses, where Lenin first posed the socialist revolution as the new Bolshevik goal; the August 1917 text From a Publicist’s Diary, which places him “unambiguously as a permanentist”; and his consistent post-October references to the revolution as socialist and the state as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Crucially, the author asserts that Lenin, more than Trotsky, emphasised that the workers must seize state power before the land question could be solved—a reversal of the RDDPP schema, which held that the peasantry’s land hunger imposed bourgeois-democratic limits.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical context of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, the behaviour of the Russian bourgeoisie and peasantry, and the debates within the Second and Third Internationals. The theoretical context is the Marxist problem of backwardness: how a socialist revolution could begin in semi-feudal Russia before the advanced West. The author argues that Lenin’s presentation of a permanentist analysis to the Communist International in July 1920, just before its Second Congress, generalised the ToPR and gave it an international dimension.
The polemic is directed against authors who have attempted to present Lenin’s ideas as following a single, uni-directional trajectory. The author accuses them of using the “method of the amalgam”—tearing unrelated quotations out of context to prove a predetermined conclusion. The essential weakness of their arguments, the author contends, is that none address the key questions posed at the chapter’s end: why Lenin consistently called the October Revolution socialist, why he never referred to the post-October regime as the RDDPP, and how the first stage of the international socialist revolution took place in backward Russia. The chapter concludes by asserting that the ToPR passed the test of subsequent events far better than the RDDPP, and that Lenin himself recognised this, changing his strategy accordingly from at least August 1917.