7. The Pre-Requisites of Socialism¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Trotsky mounts a devastating polemic against the Menshevik Rozhkov, who had presented what he claimed were the ‘necessary pre-requisites of the future society, firmly laid down by Marx’. Trotsky’s core argument is that Rozhkov, in fetishising the objective and subjective preconditions for socialism, has drained Marxism of its revolutionary content and reduced it to a passive, quasi-evolutionary fatalism. Rozhkov’s schema demands, as material prerequisites, a level of technique that reduces personal gain to a minimum and the ‘almost complete’ domination of large-scale production in all branches of the economy; as a psychological prerequisite, the spiritual unity of the overwhelming majority of the people under socialist consciousness. Trotsky demonstrates that these conditions, taken to their logical conclusion, are not only unrealisable under capitalism but are actually incompatible with one another.
Trotsky’s method is to push Rozhkov’s premises to their absurd limit. If large-scale production dominated every branch and technique eliminated human labour, the result would be the conversion of ninety per cent of the population into a reserve army of labour, living in state workhouses. This, Trotsky notes, is the ‘brilliantly consistent theory’ of the bourgeois economist Tugan-Baranovsky, not Marx. Similarly, if co-operative production were to become the leading form of enterprise under capitalism, it would simply have to expropriate the trusts automatically, requiring no revolution. The psychological prerequisite—that the overwhelming majority be consciously socialist—would likewise render revolution superfluous, as the magnates of capital would be crushed by a unified popular will. In each case, Rozhkov has eliminated the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat as essential preconditions, replacing them with a mechanical waiting-game.
Trotsky then turns to history to expose the absurdity of Rozhkov’s position. Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, regarded the revolutions of 1848 as the immediate prologue to socialist revolution, despite the fact that none of Rozhkov’s prerequisites existed. If Rozhkov’s schema were correct, Marx himself would have been a utopian. The real error, Trotsky argues, is methodological. The processes of technical development, concentration of production, and growth of consciousness do not develop in isolation towards some mathematical limit; they limit and retard each other. Technique tends towards a single automatic mechanism, but this tendency is interrupted by class struggle long before it reaches its ideal. Concentration tends towards universal proletarianisation, but revolution intervenes before the majority are reduced to a reserve army. Consciousness grows through struggle, but that struggle itself provokes a reaction from the bourgeoisie, forcing a denouement long before the whole population is won. The dialectical point is that these processes, in their complex interaction, produce a qualitative change—social revolution—at a stage far removed from their abstract, isolated limits. The hegemony of industry over agriculture and the town over the country, and a revolutionary proletariat strong enough to overcome counter-revolution and attract the intermediate strata, are the real, living prerequisites, not the static, utopian checklist of Rozhkov.