A Creeping Revolution [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this April 1919 article, Trotsky analyses the German revolution through a comparative lens with Russia, arguing that its "creeping" character—a succession of strikes, uprisings, and open battles without respite—is not a sign of weakness or tactical error but the necessary form of struggle given Germany's specific historical conditions. The core argument is that the German proletariat, unlike the Russian, entered the revolutionary epoch without a centralised revolutionary party. German Social Democracy, far from being a combat organisation, had become "the most counter-revolutionary factor in world history," an auxiliary organ of the bourgeois state that disciplined the working class. When war broke the paralysis, the old party split, but the proletariat was left organisationally defenceless. The Russian working class, by contrast, inherited a priceless legacy: decades of underground struggle, from the Narodnik pilgrimages and terrorist campaigns of the Narodovoltsi to the 1905 revolution and the revolutionary parliamentarianism of the Stolypin era, which produced a large cadre of tested revolutionary leaders bound by a unified programme.
Germany had nothing comparable. Its revolution is therefore compelled to create its organisation and train its leaders in the very course of battle. The intermittent, chaotic, creeping movement—erupting strikes and insurrections—is not a deviation from the correct path but the only accessible form of openly mobilising the proletariat, freeing it from the old party's yoke, and educating new leaders. Trotsky draws a direct analogy with Russia after Bloody Sunday 1905, when "sages" wept over the chaotic strike movement and predicted exhaustion, yet those strikes laid the groundwork for the October general strike and the first Soviets. The German movement, however, develops on "incomparably higher and mightier foundations": the political and cultural level of the German workers, their organisational habits, are superlative. Tens of thousands of worker-leaders, temporarily blinded and deceived by the old apparatus, are now awakening through the harsh experience of this creeping revolution.
The polemic is directed against two targets. First, those who fear the movement is being bled white section by section, or who suspect the leaders of tactical blunders. Second, and more sharply, against the Independent Social Democrats of Kautsky and Haase, whose role is to introduce vacillation and provide refuge for frightened elements. The Spartacists' heroic struggle, Trotsky insists, will demolish the Independent Party from the left, drawing its best elements into the Communist movement. History offers no choice of ways: the stubborn, unabated, creeping revolution is approaching the critical moment when, having mobilised and trained all its forces, it will deal the class enemy the final mortal blow.