In Defence Of October¶
Core Argument¶
The October Revolution succeeded in backward Russia not despite its backwardness, but because of it—a vindication of the law of uneven and combined development. Russia formed the weakest link in the chain of world capitalism, where the unbearable pressures of the Great War forced the overthrow of the ruling classes. Yet this alone cannot explain how a socialist revolution triumphed in a semi-feudal country. The answer lies in the peculiar hybrid produced by combined development: peasant agriculture remained at a seventeenth-century level while industry, concentrated in vast enterprises employing over 41% of workers (compared to under 18% in the United States), reached the most advanced type. The industrial bourgeoisie was numerically weak, foreign-dominated, and rootless; the proletariat was relatively strong, concentrated, and free of conservatism. Its revolutionary reserves lay in the peasantry, crushed by semi-feudal land tenure—30,000 large landowners held as much land as 10 million peasants.
By autumn 1917, peasant revolts affected 482 of Russia's 642 departments. The peasant war against landowners—a classic element of bourgeois revolution—did not drive the Russian bourgeoisie forward but pushed it permanently into reaction. Unable to solve the agrarian question courageously, the bourgeoisie delivered power to the proletariat. The Soviet State required collaboration between two historically different factors: the peasant war (characteristic of bourgeois development's dawn) and the proletarian insurrection (announcing bourgeois decline). This constituted the combined character of the Russian Revolution. The second revolutionary reserve was oppressed nationalities: the ruling Great Russians comprised only 43% of the population, and Lenin's Bolshevik Party won their confidence by struggling for national self-determination.
The theory of permanent revolution, formulated by Trotsky in 1905, held that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution in immediate tasks, but the anti-revolutionary bourgeoisie made victory possible only as proletarian victory. The victorious proletariat would proceed beyond bourgeois democracy to socialism, making the Russian Revolution the first stage of the socialist world revolution. Socialism is not feasible within national boundaries; "Socialism in one country" is a petty-bourgeois utopia.
Trotsky rejects Hippolyte Taine's reactionary verdict on the French Revolution, arguing that misery was caused by the ruling classes who provoked revolution, and that the Revolution's positive legacy outweighs its costs. He draws a parallel with the US Civil War, where 50,000 deaths are justified from the standpoint of humanity's developmental progress. The October Revolution's creative consequences require longer to emerge because it transformed property relations. Soviet industrial production rose from an index of 25 in 1920 to 300 in 1932 (1913=100), while German and American production fell. He acknowledges difficulties in agriculture but insists the fundamental fact—that socialist methods can raise collective labour productivity to unprecedented heights—is empirically established. The Revolution forged a new national character, transforming passive, mystical Russians into determined, active builders. Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system; socialism must subject economic life to conscious, planned control. Once society is rationally organised, humanity will turn to perfecting itself, using science to overcome the dark psychic forces revealed by psychoanalysis, and create a new, happier race.