5. The Proletariat in Power and the Peasantry¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Trotsky confronts the question of class power in the immediate aftermath of a victorious revolution, arguing that hegemony must belong to the proletariat, not to any coalition of democratic or petty-bourgeois forces. He insists that while non-proletarian elements—urban petty-bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and peasants—may and should enter a revolutionary government, the decisive issue is which class determines the content of policy and commands a solid majority. To admit proletarian representatives into a bourgeois-democratic government as hostages is a betrayal; the only permissible form of working-class participation is as the dominant and leading force. Such a government, he asserts, may be called a dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry or a coalition, but the substance remains: the working class must wield hegemony.
Trotsky draws on the historical precedent of the Jacobin dictatorship during the French Revolution. The National Convention, he notes, was formally a national representation in which Jacobins were a minority, yet the pressure of the sansculottes and the exigencies of national defence concentrated power in Jacobin hands. This illustrates his central claim: formal composition matters less than the class that actually leads. The proletariat in power, he argues, will widen the revolution’s base, drawing peasants and other strata into political organisation through state resources and legislative power. Unlike the revolutions of 1789–93 and 1848, where the bourgeoisie emancipated the peasantry before handing power to revolutionary democracy—thereby turning the peasantry into a conservative bulwark of order—the Russian revolution cannot establish any stable bourgeois-constitutional order. The reforms of Witte and Stolypin have been nullified by the regime’s own struggle for existence. Consequently, the elementary revolutionary interests of the peasantry are bound up with the fate of the proletariat.
The proletariat in power will appear to the peasantry as its emancipator, guaranteeing democratic equality, free self-government, progressive taxation, dissolution of the standing army, abolition of compulsory church imposts, and recognition of peasant land expropriations. Trotsky draws a parallel with the French peasantry under Napoleon Bonaparte, who supported the military regime because it guaranteed their new property holdings. Similarly, the Russian peasantry will be interested in maintaining a proletarian regime. The representative body convened under proletarian leadership, with peasant support, will be no more than a democratic dress for proletarian rule.
Trotsky polemicises against the notion of an independent peasant dictatorship or a genuine “proletarian and peasant dictatorship.” He declares it unrealisable, because the peasantry is historically incapable of an independent political role. Capitalism subordinates the countryside to the town; no rural class has ever abolished feudalism on its own. The peasantry, he argues, is politically enslaved to capitalist parties, which use it as an electoral domain while subjecting it to usury, taxation, and militarism. The Russian bourgeoisie will surrender revolutionary hegemony over the peasants to the proletariat, leaving the peasantry no choice but to rally to workers’ democracy. The proletariat, unlike any bourgeois party, will use power to raise the cultural and political level of the countryside. The idea of a coalition government between proletariat and peasantry as equal partners is dismissed as a direct impossibility.