10. The Struggle for Power [17]¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Trotsky delivers a polemical dissection of a leaflet titled ‘The Tasks Confronting the Russian Proletariat’, signed by Axelrod, Martov, and other leading Mensheviks. His core argument is that the document’s central category—‘people’s revolution’—is a vacuous abstraction that obscures the real class forces at play. The authors, Trotsky charges, fail to define what they mean by ‘democracy’, a term they deploy as though it designated a coherent revolutionary subject. Trotsky insists that in Russia of 1915, no such subject exists. The war has not created new revolutionary forces; it has merely exposed the bankruptcy of the tsarist regime, while simultaneously deepening the confusion of social consciousness, where patriotism and hatred of the monarchy coexist without resolution.
Trotsky’s key claim is that a national bourgeois revolution is impossible in Russia because there is no genuinely revolutionary bourgeois democracy. The time for such revolutions, he asserts, has passed for Europe; the epoch of imperialism does not pit the bourgeois nation against the old regime, but the proletariat against the bourgeois nation itself. He marshals evidence from the experience of 1905 and the intervening decade: the petty bourgeoisie has declined further under Russian capitalism, which deals more harshly with intermediate classes than older economies do; the intelligentsia, though grown numerically, has lost even its illusory independence and is now saturated with imperialist tendencies—Trotsky flatly contradicts the leaflet’s claim that only ‘part’ of the radical intelligentsia has rallied to national defence, insisting it is the whole. Urban democracy as a revolutionary factor is not worth mentioning. The peasantry remains, but Trotsky notes that neither Axelrod nor Martov ever placed great hopes on its independent role, and class differentiation among peasants has only deepened.
The polemic is directed squarely at the Menshevik authors, but also at the broader current of social-patriotism represented by Plekhanov, Kerensky, Milyukov, and Guchkov. Trotsky accuses the leaflet of ignoring the social-patriots entirely. He argues that the Social-Democratic Party is the only revolutionary party in the country, isolated in the open political arena despite universal discontent. This isolation must be faced, not finessed with vague slogans. The central question of power is unavoidable: if the proletariat is to ‘take the lead’ in a national struggle, victory must transfer power to the proletariat itself—not to a vague ‘revolutionary provisional government’, but to a revolutionary workers’ government. The slogans of constituent assembly, republic, land confiscation, and peace retain agitational value, but without the proletariat’s readiness to conquer power, they lose all direct revolutionary significance. The worst illusion from which the proletariat has suffered, Trotsky concludes, is reliance upon others.