While stressing that the proletariat could achieve state power only through a nation-wide upsurge, and would enter government as the champion of the nation in the revolutionary democratic struggle against absolutism and feudalism, Trotsky pointed out that once in power, the proletariat would have to make policy. The first measures would include restructuring all social and state relations (most importantly, land to the peasant), which would have the active support of the whole nation. However, “the workers’ government” would also be immediately confronted by other important issues such as the length of the working day and the problem of unemployment.

Drawing once again on his experience of leading the St Petersburg Soviet, Trotsky considered the demand for the 8-hour day, explaining that the introduction of such a measure in a time of intense class antagonisms (as in November, 1905), would almost certainly meet the organised and determined resistance of the capitalists, even to the extent of lockouts and the closing down of factories. In such a situation the workers would demand maintenance and support from the revolutionary government they had created, and a government relying upon the workers could not refuse them. (Of course, Trotsky was making a point in principle, the 8-hour day would not be such a significant issue in 1917 as it had been in 1905 due to supply shortages limiting war-time production. The issue in 1917 would be much more to do with employer sabotage of production and laying-off workers.)

In such circumstances, which would occur more or less immediately after power was transferred into the hands of a revolutionary government with a SD majority, the division between minimum demands (demands which are compatible with private property in the means of production), and maximum demands (demands that would form the first steps towards socialism and presupposed a proletarian dictatorship), would lose its significance, since a proletarian government would be faced with enacting policies which cannot be divided so neatly.

If the employers resorted to a lock-out as they did in 1905, and threw hundreds of thousands of workers onto the streets, what should the revolutionary government do? A bourgeois-democratic government would retreat, but a government based to a large extent on workers’ Soviets would call for workers’ occupation of the closed factories and the introduction, in at least the largest of them, of state supported communal production. The speed with which the proletariat would advance towards such collectivist measures would, naturally, depend upon the balance of forces. It will be shown later that in the 1917 October Revolution, the workers moved almost immediately to the demand for nationalisation. Trotsky, if anything, under-estimated the likely proletarian pressures on “a workers’ government”.

Trotsky, like Lenin, was hypothesising about possible activities by a future revolutionary government, and both came to similar pessimistic conclusions. Trotsky’s prognosis was that as the “workers’ government” took actions on behalf of the working class and its policy ceased to be general-democratic and became more a class policy, the revolutionary ties between the proletariat and the nation would be broken. Like Lenin, Trotsky saw the activities of the post-revolutionary government in carrying the class struggle into the villages, as generating the active opposition of the upper, and possibly middle sections, of the peasantry which would have an influence on a section of the intellectuals and the petty-bourgeoisie of the towns. The more definite and determined the policy of the proletariat in power became, the narrower would its base become.

Trotsky’s pessimism bears a strong resemblance to that of Lenin who saw the liberal bourgeoisie becoming downright counter-revolutionary, and organising itself with the whole of the well-to-do peasants, and a fairly large part of the middle peasantry, to take away from the proletariat the gains of the revolution[56]. Both Lenin and Trotsky concluded that despite their foreboding it was the business of SDs to enter the revolutionary provisional government and, during the period of revolutionary-democratic reforms, lead the fight for these to have a most radical character, relying for this purpose upon the organised proletariat and, eventually, the support of the revolutionary proletariat in the West.

  1. Lenin, V.I., The Stages, the Trend and the Prospects of the Revolution, 1905/06, CW 10:89

    ↩