7. What Does the Slogan of the Democratic Dictatorship Mean Today for the East?¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Trotsky delivers a polemical demolition of Karl Radek’s defence of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” as a universal slogan for the colonial and semi-colonial East, particularly China. The core argument is that Radek, trapped within a Stalinist evolutionary conception of historical stages, has transformed what was for Lenin a concrete, temporary, and nationally specific “working hypothesis” into a suprahistorical schema. Trotsky insists that the slogan, appropriate for Russia in 1905, was already obsolete by April 1917 and is a “reactionary snare” for China after 1925-27.
Trotsky’s key claim is that Radek’s position is self-contradictory and historically illiterate. He seizes on Radek’s admission that the “heritage of preceding social-political formations” remains unliquidated in China, and contrasts it with Radek’s earlier assertion (March 1927) that the Chinese revolution would be directed “only against one class, the bourgeoisie”. If the peasantry fights only the bourgeoisie, Trotsky asks, what is democratic about such a revolution? He argues that Radek’s own logic proves the slogan’s inapplicability: if the “democratic dictatorship” was supposedly “realised” in Russia’s February-March 1917 dual power, then it was even more fully realised in China under the Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Ching-wei, making an immediate change of slogan all the more necessary.
The chapter draws heavily on the theoretical and historical context of the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions, and on Marx’s 1850 circular on the permanent revolution. Trotsky retrieves Marx’s 1856 letter to Engels, in which Marx envisioned the German revolution succeeding through “a second edition of the Peasants’ War” supporting the proletariat, not through an independent peasant or petty-bourgeois revolution. This, Trotsky argues, is the true key to October 1917 and to China: the peasantry can support the proletarian dictatorship, but cannot lead an independent democratic stage.
The polemic is directed squarely at Radek, but also at Stalin, Molotov, Rykov, Kamenev, and Martynov, whose “pedantic reactionary theory on stages and steps” Trotsky demands be “cast aside, broken up and swept away with a broom”. He extends the critique to a series of international experiences—Kerenskyism, Italian fascism, Pilsudski’s Poland, Stambulisky’s Bulgaria, the American Farmer-Labour Party, Zinoviev’s dealings with Radić—all of which, he claims, confirm Lenin’s fundamental conclusion: in modern bourgeois society, only the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat is possible; the “democratic dictatorship” is merely a mask for bourgeois rule. The peasantry can follow either class, but when the proletariat tries to march with a peasantry not following it, the workers end up tailing finance capital.