5. Was the ‘Democratic Dictatorship’ Realised in Our Country? If so, When?¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 5: Was the ‘Democratic Dictatorship’ Realised in Our Country? If so, When?¶
This chapter dissects the fate of the Bolshevik slogan of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ in the Russian Revolution, arguing that its realisation occurred only after the October insurrection, and only then as the first stage of the proletarian dictatorship. Lenin, it is shown, only conditionally and occasionally acknowledged the slogan’s fulfilment during the dual power of April to October 1917, and did so primarily to polemicise against those who anticipated a second edition of that unstable arrangement. In truth, the Menshevik-SR coalition with the bourgeoisie—which refused the peasants land and hounded the Bolsheviks—was a ‘miserable miscarriage’, not a genuine democratic dictatorship. The real democratic tasks—destroying the old state and liquidating landed estates—were not achieved under Kerensky. They were accomplished only after October, when the workers took power in alliance with the peasantry as a whole. Lenin repeatedly affirmed this: the revolution remained bourgeois-democratic so long as it marched with the whole peasantry, and the peasant war supported the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat had to seize power to solve the agrarian question; the dictatorship of the proletariat was the prerequisite for completing the democratic revolution, not its product. This, the chapter contends, reproduces the fundamental elements of the theory of permanent revolution formulated in 1905.
The chapter then evaluates the relationship between Lenin’s slogan and Trotsky’s permanent revolution. The difference between them is deemed secondary; what united them was fundamental and irreconcilable with the February-March line of Stalin and the April-October line of Kamenev, Rykov, and Zinoviev, as well as with Radek’s later ‘China’ line. Trotsky maintains that the train of thought from Results and Prospects is confirmed as completely correct and in agreement with Bolshevik strategy. He notes that at the February Revolution, the entire old Bolshevik guard held the reactionary position of counterposing democratic to socialist dictatorship; had Lenin not arrived opportunely, they could have knifed the October Revolution under the banner of struggle against Trotskyism. Trotsky rejects Radek’s characterisation of this as an ‘accident’, insisting the old algebraic formula contained dangers that were filled with a hostile content. He argues against accepting Lenin’s 1905 formula in its ambiguous algebraic form for China and India, awaiting a Lenin to correct it, and instead insists on introducing corrections demonstrated by historical experience. The slogan of democratic dictatorship should not be dismissed as a mere ‘mistake’ but understood through the method of successive approximations. Lenin’s formula probed the question of peasant independence, concluding the peasant must go either with the bourgeois or the worker; the epigones canonise a provisional hypothesis, ignoring this conclusion.