Postscript¶
Core Argument¶
This postscript mounts a sustained polemic against a school of ‘Leninists’ who have sought to defend the concept of the Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry (RDDPP) by appealing to the authority of Marx, Engels, and Lenin himself. The core argument is that these defenders, in their zeal to prove Lenin infallible, have misrepresented what the Marxist classics actually wrote about the Russian Revolution, and in doing so have stripped Lenin’s method of its materialist and historical content.
The postscript identifies two main lines of defence among these ‘Leninists’. The first is a crude appeal to authority: because Lenin was the greatest Marxist after Marx, and because he proposed the RDDPP, the Trotskyist interpretation of that concept must be wrong. The postscript dismisses this as a “barefaced appeal to the infallibility of the leader” more suited to North Korea than to serious socialist debate. The second, more sophisticated argument, invokes Marx’s late writings on the possibility that Russia’s peasant commune (the obshchina) could serve as a basis for bypassing capitalism and moving directly to socialism. The ‘Leninists’ claim that Lenin developed these ideas and that the RDDPP was therefore a strategy for an immediate socialist transformation, not a bourgeois-democratic stage.
The postscript systematically demolishes this reading by examining what Marx, Engels, and Lenin actually wrote. It cites Marx’s 1881 draft letter to Vera Zasulich, in which he considered the theoretical possibility of the commune developing directly into collective production, but only under a unique combination of circumstances: the commune’s preservation on a national scale, its coexistence with a capitalist world system in fear of proletarian revolution, and—crucially—the prior or simultaneous victory of socialist revolution in Western Europe. Marx made clear that the commune contained inherent contradictions—private farming by individual families, state-enforced delays in land redivision, and the growth of a kulak layer—which could lead to its disintegration. The outcome was not predetermined; it depended on the historical context. Engels, in his 1875 essay On Social Relations in Russia and his 1894 afterword, was even more pessimistic, arguing that the commune was already in a state of severe disintegration and that the development of railways, money economy, and internal class differentiation was destroying it. Both Marx and Engels insisted that a socialist transformation in Russia required a proletarian revolution in the West to provide material support.
The postscript then turns to Lenin’s own early works, particularly What the “Friends of the People” Are (1894) and The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). Far from arguing that the commune could be the basis for a leap over capitalism, Lenin’s central theme was the native development of capitalism in Russia, the formation of a home market, the differentiation of the peasantry, and the disappearance of small-scale handicraft production. Lenin identified only two possible lines of development: the slow evolution of landlord economy into capitalism with feudal survivals, or a revolutionary break that would clear the way for small capitalist peasant farms. Neither path involved the commune as a socialist starting point. Lenin concluded that the proletariat would lead the democratic revolution and then unite with the Western European proletariat for the communist revolution.
The postscript concludes that the ‘Leninist’ argument fails on three grounds: it is methodologically wrong to treat any Marxist authority as infallible; the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin say the opposite of what is claimed—the Russian Revolution could only move to socialism simultaneously with or after a Western European revolution; and it is a mistake to mechanically apply writings from one era to another. The great Marxists built their analyses on concrete events, and it was this method that allowed Lenin in 1917 to move from a stagist position to one coincident with Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. The postscript ends by asserting that the Russian Revolution required a socialist, not a bourgeois-democratic, revolution for the people to take power, and that those who attack the Theory of Permanent Revolution are, in practice, denying the validity of Lenin’s own struggle for socialist revolution in October 1917.