En Route: Thoughts on the Progress of the Proletarian Revolution [1]¶
Core Argument¶
En Route: Thoughts on the Progress of the Proletarian Revolution¶
Trotsky’s essay confronts the profound disjuncture between Marxist expectation and revolutionary reality. Against the Mensheviks’ mechanical gradualism—which held that socialist revolution must await the sequential maturation of capitalist stages in the most advanced economies—the actual course of events unfolded in reverse. The proletarian revolution began in the East, not the West: Russia in October 1917, then Hungary and Bavaria, ascending toward more developed countries. This ‘incongruity’ demands explanation, and Trotsky locates it in the complexity of class relations shaped by uneven capitalist development.
England’s early industrialisation produced a privileged labour aristocracy and deep conservatism. France’s early bourgeois civilisation fostered petty-bourgeois illusions. Germany’s rapid capitalist flowering bred organisational fetishism and a counter-revolutionary Social Democracy. Russia, by contrast, received capitalism belatedly and in concentrated form, implanted by foreign capital and technology. This created a million-strong proletariat without democratic traditions, possessing mobility, initiative, and receptivity to extreme class conclusions. The Russian proletariat thus became the most irreconcilable bearer of social revolution.
A mechanical conception of revolution—positing the proletariat’s steady numerical growth until it peacefully assumes power—is false. Both enemies grow simultaneously. The higher a country’s capitalist development, the greater the inertia of peaceful class relations and the more bitter the civil war once it erupts. The Second International’s nationally-limited framework, treating each country as a self-sufficient unit progressing toward socialism, is reactionary. Imperialism, as a world factor, disrupts ‘organic’ development and discounts national differences. The imperialist war simultaneously shook all countries’ productive foundations, and civil war begins where class equilibrium is weakest.
The proletarian revolution therefore unfolds from East to West, the reverse of capitalist development. The Russian proletariat’s uprising was directed not only against its own bourgeoisie but against English and French capitalism, because French capital rested on Russian labour—making Entente intervention inevitable. History took the line of least resistance, placing revolutionary initiation on the young, backward Russian proletariat. This temporary revolutionary ‘primogeniture’ will shift westward once the European working class overthrows its bourgeoisie and assists Russia with organisation and technology.