9. Europe and Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, written in June 1905, argues that the impending Russian revolution cannot be contained within Russia’s borders; its logic compels it to become the detonator of socialist revolution across Europe. Trotsky’s core claim is that capitalism has converted the world into a single economic and political organism, binding all countries together. The bourgeoisie, by avoiding every fundamental conflict and clinging to every pre-bourgeois reactionary force—the Pope, the Sultan, the Tsar—has merely postponed the denouement, preparing instead a radical liquidation of its rule on a world scale. The Russian proletariat, once raised to power by the bourgeois revolution, will either carry the revolution to Europe on its own initiative or be forced to do so by the combined forces of European feudal-bourgeois reaction.
The chapter develops this thesis through a series of concrete scenarios. Poland is presented as the most immediate link between revolutionary East and West: a revolutionary regime in Russian Poland would inevitably ignite Galicia and Poznan, provoking Hohenzollern and Habsburg military intervention. The Russian revolutionary government would be compelled to defend its Western advance-guard, and a war between feudal-bourgeois Germany and revolutionary Russia would lead inevitably to proletarian revolution in Germany. Trotsky cites the rumour that the October ministry placed Poland under martial law on direct instructions from Berlin, and the publication of negotiations between Berlin and Vienna for armed intervention in Russia, as evidence that the neighbouring semi-feudal monarchies were already preparing counter-revolutionary revenge.
Beyond Poland, Trotsky identifies two other potential triggers. A European war, he argues, is now a serious possibility because the Russo-Japanese War destroyed the European balance of power that had rested on Russian despotism as the gendarme of reaction; but a European war inevitably means a European revolution, since bourgeois governments can no longer conduct national wars that command mass support. Alternatively, the state bankruptcy of Russia—whether through continued bureaucratic mismanagement or a revolutionary government’s refusal to pay the old regime’s debts—will produce a financial crisis in France, where the Radicals have taken power only to protect capital, and this crisis can end only with the transference of power to the French proletariat.
The chapter also argues that revolution may arise independently in Europe from the sharpening of class contradictions. In Germany, the colossal growth of Social Democracy under a semi-absolutist constitution will lead to an open clash; the question of the general strike has already become central. In France, the Radicals’ assumption of power unties the proletariat’s hands. In Britain, the proletariat has just taken the path of political separation and may overtake continental socialism in a few leaps. Trotsky polemicises directly against the conservatism of the European socialist parties themselves, particularly the German Social-Democratic Party, which has developed an internal inertia and may become a direct obstacle to open conflict. The Russian revolution, he insists, will destroy this party routine and conservatism, infecting the Western proletariat with revolutionary idealism and a desire to speak to their enemies ‘in Russian’.
The chapter concludes with a stark strategic warning: left to its own resources, the Russian working class will be crushed by the counter-revolution the moment the peasantry turns its back on it. It has no alternative but to cast its colossal state-political power into the scales of the class struggle of the entire capitalist world, sending forth the old rallying cry as a call for the last attack: Workers of all countries, unite!