Speech Delivered at the Second World Conference of Communist Women¶
Core Argument¶
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Trotsky’s speech to the Second World Conference of Communist Women in July 1921 is a strategic intervention against a mood of defeatism and capitalist triumphalism. He directly confronts the argument, advanced by the movement’s enemies, that the failure of world revolution to materialise in the immediate post-war years proves the proletariat’s incapacity and capitalism’s resilience. The core narrative thrust is to reject this mechanical reading of history. While conceding that the revolutionary wave has ebbed—resulting only in bourgeois republics in Germany and Austria, and leaving Russia as the sole dictatorship of the proletariat—Trotsky insists that the historical balance sheet is not yet closed. The question of whether capitalism can restore its equilibrium or whether the proletariat will mount a decisive assault cannot be settled like “adding up a list of groceries.”
Drawing on a Marxist understanding of history as determined by objective causes but accomplished through human beings, Trotsky argues that the bourgeoisie is actively striving to rebuild its rule by destroying European civilisation and shifting the centre of world development to America and Japan. The outcome depends on whether the working class learns the lessons of the war, the Russian Revolution, and the “semi-revolutions” in Central Europe. The speech’s key theoretical contribution is its analysis of the uneven development of revolutionary consciousness within the proletariat itself. Trotsky uses the example of Germany to illustrate this: the advanced workers of Berlin and Saxony, having entered the revolution early and suffered defeat, became cautious and conservative, while the previously most backward section—the central German miners—became the most dynamic and revolutionary. He draws a direct parallel to the Russian experience with the Ural proletariat.
It is here that Trotsky locates the historic role of women workers. He argues that women proletarians, as the most backward, oppressed, and lowliest section of labour, stand in the same relation to the advanced male workers as the central German miners did to the Berliners. Their very degradation, and the reaction against it, can make them the most active and initiative-taking force in the coming upheaval. This is not mere energy, but a necessary counterweight to the “excessive caution” and “opportunism” that accumulates among more privileged layers of the male working class. The speech concludes by linking the fate of the European revolution to the East, arguing that English capitalism maintains itself not only on the inertia of English workers but also on the “inertia of the toiling masses of the East.” The awakening of the East is therefore an integral part of the world revolution. Trotsky frames the conference’s task as replacing illusions with a clearer perception, forged in a struggle that will be “fierce and hard,” and calls on women to become direct participants on the main revolutionary battlefront rather than political “sisters of mercy.”