TWO¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Trotsky moves from the productive-technical prerequisites for socialism to the social-economic ones, arguing that the mere demonstration of socialism’s technical superiority is politically worthless without a social force capable of realising it. He directly attacks the vulgar socialism of Atlanticus, who believed that once the advantages of state ownership and reduced working hours were proved, it was a matter of indifference whether Marx’s theory of capitalist concentration held true. Atlanticus proposed that social democrats should simply begin comprehensive preparations for the transition to socialism, abandoning purely oppositional tactics. Trotsky dismisses this as utopian book-keeping: Atlanticus forgets that the Social Democrats lack state power, while Wilhelm II, Bülow, and the Reichstag majority have no intention of introducing socialism. The socialist schemes of Atlanticus are no more convincing to the Hohenzollerns than Fourier’s were to the restored Bourbons.
The core argument is that scientific socialism’s fundamental service was to discover in the proletariat the objective social force driven toward socialism by its class position within capitalism. Trotsky then addresses the question of what numerical weight the proletariat must attain for this second prerequisite to be realised. He rejects any attempt to fix an arithmetical limit—half, two-thirds, or nine-tenths of the population—as a hopeless schematic effort. The definition of ‘proletariat’ itself is contested: should it include semi-proletarian semi-peasants, the urban reserve masses, or parasitical elements like beggars and small traders? More importantly, the proletariat’s social power does not derive from its numbers alone but from its structural position within large-scale production. Unlike the bourgeoisie, which relies on its ownership of the means of production, the proletariat’s power comes from the fact that it alone can set those means in motion. It is the non-automatic part of the economic mechanism, capable of halting production through partial or general strikes. Consequently, a proletarian in a large factory is a greater social magnitude than a handicraft worker, an urban worker greater than a rural one. The political role of the proletariat increases as large-scale production dominates small production, industry dominates agriculture, and the town dominates the country.
Trotsky illustrates this with historical comparisons: when the German proletariat formed the same proportion of the population as the Russian proletariat does today, it could not play the same role. The same applies to towns—when German towns held only fifteen per cent of the population, as in contemporary Russia, they could not exert the same economic and political weight, because the concentration of large industrial and commercial institutions and railway links gives towns an importance far exceeding their mere population numbers. He cites Italy in 1848, where handicraftsmen and proletarians together formed about fifteen per cent of the population—similar to Russia’s current proportion—yet played an incomparably smaller role. The chapter concludes with statistical evidence from Germany (1895), Belgium, and Britain to demonstrate that in the advanced European countries, economic evolution has already prepared the arena not only for the proletariat’s struggle for political power but for its actual conquest.