Political Perspectives¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Trotsky mounts a polemic against what he terms the "mechanical, fatalistic and non-Marxist conception of revolutionary development" still harboured by certain self-styled leftists within the Communist International, despite the corrective work of the Third World Congress. The core argument is that revolutionary strategy cannot be derived from a linear, one-directional reading of the economic conjuncture — that capitalism is on the offensive, therefore the proletarian uprising must follow directly — but must instead reckon with the dialectical interplay of objective and subjective forces, including the capacity of the bourgeoisie to manoeuvre politically.
Trotsky grounds his case in concrete national prognoses. In Italy, where fascism under Mussolini has reached its apogee, he posits two equally probable variants: either the fascist regime collapses directly into proletarian dictatorship, or it founders first on its own internal contradictions before the proletariat is ready, opening the way for an interim "Kerenskyist" regime of Nitti or Turati. Such a regime would not be a revision of communist tactics but a further stage of bourgeois disintegration. In France, Trotsky insists that the crystallisation of a "Left Bloc" alternative to the National Bloc is already underway, despite the continued capitalist offensive, and that this is no contradiction. The British case is treated as most instructive: the 1922 election returned a pure Tory government, yet the combined vote for Labour and independent Liberals reached nearly seven million against the Tories' five and a half. The British electorate, Trotsky argues, has already swung from imperialist illusions to reformist-pacifist ones, and a Labour government is the most probable intermediate stage before the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The chapter's theoretical context is the post-Third World Congress debate over the "theory of the offensive" and the nature of conjunctural fluctuations. Trotsky explicitly links the ultra-left position to a mechanistic transposition of economic fatalism into politics. He draws on the Russian revolutionary experience — the impact of the Russian Revolution brought Scheidemann, not Liebknecht, to power in Germany — to argue that even a victorious German revolution might produce Henderson or Clynes in Britain, or Caillaux and Blum in France, as a brief interlude. The polemic is directed against Friedlander, Ravenstein, and unnamed Austrian and Dutch communists whose "revolutionary radicalism" Trotsky diagnoses as concealing pessimism and mistrust. The bourgeoisie, he insists, is not a stone dropping into an abyss but a living historical force that advances now on its right flank, now on its left; only a dialectical prognosis that grasps all the means and methods of bourgeois society can prepare the moment for a single confident stroke.