6. On the Skipping of Historical Stages¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Trotsky mounts a vigorous theoretical defence of the concept that historical stages can be skipped, directly countering the Stalinist orthodoxy represented by Radek and Stalin himself. The core argument is that the living historical process does not proceed through neatly separated, predetermined stages, but makes leaps and combinations. Trotsky insists that the distinction between bourgeois and socialist revolution is political ABC, but history itself has accomplished a combination of these letters into syllables. The Russian October Revolution, he argues, was precisely such a combination: the democratic revolution was not realised as an independent stage, but was organically combined with the first stage of the proletarian revolution. Had this not occurred, the dictatorship of the proletariat would not exist in Russia.
Trotsky draws on Marx’s schema of industrial development—handicraft, manufacture, factory—to illustrate his point. In Russia, the factory arrived by skipping over the epoch of manufacture and urban handicrafts. The theoretical distinction of stages remains necessary, but to comprehend nothing but the schema is to comprehend nothing at all. The quantitative contraction of the first two stages engendered an entirely new quality in the social structure, whose most striking political expression was the October Revolution. Trotsky turns Stalin’s own theoretical baggage against him, arguing that the “law of uneven development” and the “non-skipping of stages” are contradictory. The skipping of stages is precisely what uneven development consists of. Stalin, he charges, does not understand this, and merely chews upon a 1915 quotation from Lenin, interpreting it like an illiterate.
The polemic is sharp. Stalinism is denounced as a “gross ideological vulgarity” and the “worthy daughter of the party reaction,” which has created a cult of progress by stages to cover its political tailism. Radek is accused of deepening and generalising his earlier opportunist errors, having opposed withdrawal from the Kuomintang during the revolutionary ascent and now resisting the mobilisation of Chinese workers under democratic slogans in the epoch of counter-revolutionary dictatorship. Trotsky cites Lenin’s 1919 article, which directly states that Russia made a “leap across bourgeois democracy,” and his own foreword to The Year 1905, which describes political democracy as a necessary stage but with the crucial reservation that its duration can be compressed to nothing by a revolutionary situation. The chapter concludes with a distinction between adventurism—skipping over objectively conditioned stages in the development of the masses—and the revolutionary capacity to recognise and exploit moments when history itself leaps over isolated stages.