3. Three Elements of the ‘Democratic Dictatorship’: Classes, Tasks and Political Mechanics¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter dissects the protracted dispute between Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and the Leninist conception of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’. Trotsky insists the disagreement was never about skipping the bourgeois-democratic stage, nor about the necessity of a worker-peasant alliance. Rather, it concerned the political mechanics of that collaboration—the party-political and state form through which the democratic revolution would be realised. He charges that Radek, by abstracting from the subjective factor of parties, programmes and organisational forms, reduced the dictatorship to a mere correlation of classes, thereby eliminating all distinction between Bolshevism and Menshevism, and between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and all earlier bourgeois revolutions.
Lenin himself, Trotsky argues, treated the democratic dictatorship as an ‘algebraic formula’ precisely because the peasantry was a politically indeterminate quantity. Lenin refused to prejudge its party-political form, offering contradictory hypothetical interpretations at different times: sometimes suggesting petty-bourgeois predominance, sometimes power concentrated in peasant hands, sometimes leading participation by the proletarian party. These contradictions reflected the ‘great unknown’ of the peasantry. The decisive question was whether the peasantry could create an independent revolutionary party hostile to the liberal bourgeoisie. Trotsky contends that Lenin’s 1909 view—that the proletariat leads the peasantry, supported by it—converges with the theory of permanent revolution. The historical test, he insists, proved that petty-bourgeois peasant parties, like the SRs, betray the peasants to the bourgeoisie when fundamental property questions arise.
Trotsky defends his own 1905 reference to the intelligentsia as a period-specific observation, not a theoretical position. He insists he fully accepted Lenin’s content of the democratic dictatorship, demanding only a clearer definition of its political mechanism to prevent the proletariat becoming a hostage within a petty-bourgeois majority. Examining Lenin’s 1916 article, Trotsky argues that Lenin’s accusation that he ‘denied the peasantry’ was misdirected, actually aimed at Bukharin and Radek. Lenin’s own quotation shows Trotsky accepted the Bolshevik formula of worker-peasant collaboration for democratic tasks; the dispute was over the political and party character of the dictatorship, not the programme or class forces. Trotsky cites Lenin’s 1905 theses, published in 1926, which he claims reveal Lenin guilty of ‘Trotskyism’ by Stalinist standards. He then attacks Radek’s 1927 designation of Chiang Kai-shek’s Canton government as a ‘peasants’ and workers’ government’ as a profound error—revealing it as a bourgeois government. Trotsky concludes that a ‘peasants’ and workers’ government’ means the peasantry follows the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat.