8. A Workers’ Government in Russia and Socialism¶
Core Argument¶
Here, Trotsky confronts the central strategic question of the Russian Revolution: can a workers’ government in a backward country initiate a socialist transformation of the economy? The chapter’s core argument is that it can and must, but not through miraculous decrees. Trotsky insists that political power is not omnipotence; an economic system cannot be legislated into existence overnight. The proletariat, upon taking power, will necessarily be compelled by the logic of its position to move beyond the “minimum programme” of bourgeois-democratic reforms (eight-hour day, progressive taxation) toward collectivist measures. The barrier between minimum and maximum programmes disappears the moment the proletariat holds state power.
Trotsky grounds this argument in a materialist analysis of class struggle. He predicts that the bourgeoisie will respond to workers’ reforms by closing factories, forcing the workers’ state to organise production itself. Expropriation, with or without compensation, is less the problem than the subsequent task of organising social production. Socialisation will begin in the least difficult industries, creating “oases” of socialist production still connected to private enterprise by commodity circulation. The key claim is that proletarian political domination is incompatible with economic enslavement; a workers’ government cannot refuse demands for strike support, which would paralyse the reserve army of labour and render private property a fiction.
The chapter’s most sustained polemic is directed against the Socialist-Revolutionaries’ programme of land socialisation—the “equalisation of the use of land” or “black redistribution.” Trotsky argues this would be a catastrophic error. Expropriating communal and small-scale peasant holdings would immediately turn the peasantry against the proletariat, as peasants who have paid redemption money for their land would see it seized. Economically, it would gain nothing, since land would still be cultivated as private holdings. Prohibiting hired labour by decree, before securing a rational existence for landless labourers, would merely compel them onto tiny, inefficient plots. Trotsky counterposes a strategy of beginning with the state or communal exploitation of large estates, advancing toward the prohibition of wage labour only after socialist production is well-established. Small subsistence holdings would be left untouched. The equal distribution programme is denounced as economically wasteful, reactionary-utopian, and politically suicidal.