Trotsky’s “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership”¶
Core Argument¶
Trotsky’s “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership” — Chapter Digest¶
Graeme Anfinson’s exposition of Trotsky’s 1940 article centres on a single polemical target: the argument that the Spanish Revolution failed because the working class was not sufficiently “mature” to carry through a socialist transformation. This position, advanced by the Paris-based bourgeois intellectual journal Que Faire in its review of Casanova’s pamphlet Spain Betrayed, is subjected to a sustained dialectical demolition. Anfinson makes clear that the Que Faire editors, despite deploying Marxist-sounding phrases like “condition of class forces,” in fact produced a circular argument: the revolution failed because workers were immature; workers were immature because the revolution failed. This tautology, Trotsky insists, explains nothing.
The chapter’s core narrative thrust is that the Spanish working class was more revolutionary than its leadership—not the reverse. Trotsky’s evidence is concrete: in July 1936, workers repelled the fascist military uprising, improvised militias, and created workers’ committees that constituted the embryo of a workers’ dictatorship. Yet every major workers’ organisation—the Stalinist Communist Party, the anarchist CNT leadership, and the POUM—actively helped the bourgeoisie dismantle these organs, liquidate assaults on private property, and subordinate workers’ militias to bourgeois command. The CNT leadership famously boasted of refusing to take power. The workers who fought and died for revolutionary power were betrayed by their own organisations.
Trotsky draws on the Russian Revolution as a counter-example: in early 1917, only Lenin within the Bolshevik Party grasped the revolutionary moment; many Bolsheviks supported Kerensky’s Provisional Government. Workers’ “maturity” is not a fixed attribute but shifts rapidly with events. The same Russian working class that overthrew the tsar later tolerated a bureaucratic counter-revolution. Leadership, Trotsky argues, arises from class struggle but then “invariably rises above its class,” becoming subject to pressures from other classes. A class may tolerate a degenerated leadership for long periods; only great shocks like war and revolution expose the contradiction. The Spanish workers could move beyond their leadership but could not replace it mid-civil-war.
The chapter’s polemic is directed not only at Que Faire’s pseudo-Marxism but at the anarchist logic that workers will one day spontaneously take power without leadership. Trotsky’s rejoinder is sharp: the answer to bad leadership is not no leadership, but a democratically accountable revolutionary leadership built beforehand. Anfinson draws contemporary parallels to Venezuela, where academics blame workers’ “maturity” for revolutionary stagnation, and to cynical liberals who dismiss workers as “stupid” or “backwards.” The Spanish Revolution’s tragedy, he concludes, is not that workers were unready, but that they lacked a party capable of leading them to victory.