4. Revolution and the Proletariat¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Trotsky advances a decisive polemic against the textual dogmatists who treat Marx’s writings as a set of supra-historical axioms rather than as a method of analysis. The core argument is that the conquest of political power by the proletariat is not mechanically dependent upon the level of capitalist development in a given country. The state is defined as a machine in the hands of the dominant social forces, with class interest as its driving force, agitation and propaganda as its motor mechanism, legislative bodies as its transmitting mechanism, and the police, courts, and army as its executive mechanism. Every political party worthy of the name strives to capture this machine; the Social-Democrats, as the party of the proletariat, naturally strive for the political domination of the working class.
Trotsky directly confronts the vulgar ‘economic’ materialism that would make the dictatorship of the proletariat automatically dependent upon technical development and national resources. He cites the Paris Commune of 1871 as evidence: the workers seized power in petty-bourgeois Paris for two months, while in the far more advanced capitalist centres of Britain and the United States they have never held power for an hour. The decisive factors are not the level of productive forces but the relations of class struggle, the international situation, and subjective factors such as traditions, initiative, and readiness to fight.
The chapter’s central polemic is directed against those who invoke Marx’s 1848-49 writings for The Tribune — where Marx wrote that the German working class was as far behind that of England and France as the German bourgeoisie was behind the bourgeoisie of those countries — as an irrefutable argument against working-class government in Russia. Trotsky demolishes this textual fetishism by posing a simple question: does the weakness of capitalist liberalism in Russia necessarily mean the weakness of the labour movement? He draws on Kautsky’s recent work on the American proletariat to demonstrate that there is no direct relation between the political power of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the level of capitalist development on the other. Kautsky observes that in America the capitalist class is developed inordinately out of proportion to the capitalist mode of production, while in Russia it is the proletariat that has acquired such importance — a fact that appears to contradict the materialist conception of history only as depicted by its critics and opponents, who treat it as a ready-made stereotype rather than a method of investigation.
Trotsky provides statistical evidence: Russian manufacturing industry employed five million persons (16.6 per cent of the economically occupied population) compared to six million in the USA (22.2 per cent), but the population of Russia was nearly twice that of the USA. In 1900, American factories turned out goods worth 25 milliard roubles against Russia’s less than two-and-a-half milliard. Yet despite the productive forces of the United States being ten times greater, the political role of the Russian proletariat and its capacity to influence world politics were incomparably greater. The conclusion is that the Russian ‘man’ — the proletariat — will take power sooner than his ‘master’ — the bourgeoisie.