Lenin like Trotsky agreed on the likely counter-revolutionary role of the Russian bourgeois. Both agreed that the peasantry would not play an independent leading political role. However, Trotsky, more than Lenin, emphasised the reasons why:
“because of its dispersion, political backwardness, and especially of its deep inner contradictions which cannot be resolved within the framework of a capitalist system, the peasantry can only deal the old order some powerful blows from the rear, by spontaneous risings in the countryside, on the one hand, and by creating discontent within the army on the other. … Because the town leads in modern society, only an urban class can play a leading role and because the bourgeoisie is not revolutionary (and the urban petty-bourgeoisie in any case is incapable of playing the part of sans-culottes), the conclusion remains that only the proletariat in its class struggle, placing the peasant masses under its revolutionary leadership, can carry the revolution to the end”[71].
Lenin would reinforce this idea of the town as the leader of modern society in The … Renegade Kautsky[72] but, of course, that would be written a full year after the October Revolution, while Trotsky was writing twelve years before the October Revolution.
Both Lenin and Trotsky explained that only the working class, in alliance with the peasant masses, could carry out the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and both agreed that the proletariat must assume the leadership of the armed struggle and would, at least initially in so far as it solved the agrarian question, have the support of the vast majority of the peasantry. Both agreed that the Social Democratic Party should participate in the revolutionary dictatorship and any subsequent government. To the extent that both Lenin and Trotsky considered the support of the mass of the peasants as essential for the success of the revolution, both placed the same qualitative emphasis on the peasantry. In 1917 both Lenin and Trotsky would see the key to gaining the necessary peasant support for the proletarian, socialist revolution as legitimising the peasants’ seizure of the land.
Neither Lenin nor Trotsky saw the worker-peasant alliance as an alliance of equals. But while Lenin presented the democratic dictatorship as being led by the proletariat whose actions would be constrained by the need to preserve the alliance, Trotsky presented the peasantry as being led by the proletariat which would inevitably carry out collectivist measures in its own interest[73].
In his article The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution, Lenin reviewed the discussions in the RSDLP on the slogan of the provisional RDDPP. His debate was with Martov and other leading Mensheviks, and one issue was whether, in the alliance of workers and peasants, the joint actions were the activities of equals. Lenin was quite clear – the workers would lead the revolution assisted by the peasants. He pointed out that his unease with the phrase; the proletariat “relying on” the peasantry, as it could give the impression that the proletariat were the weaker party in the alliance, relying on a stronger peasantry. He favoured the phrase “the proletariat with the help of the peasantry”[74].
In 1906 Trotsky, while still in prison, wrote Our Tactics (a small pamphlet which was published by the Bolsheviks):
“The proletariat will be able to support itself upon the uprising of the village, and in the towns, the centres of political life, it will be able to carry through to a victorious conclusion the cause which it has been able to initiate. Supporting itself upon the elemental forces of the peasantry, and leading the latter, the proletariat will not only deal reaction the final triumphant blow, but it will also know how to secure the victory of the revolution” [75].
Trotsky’s use of such phrases as “supported by the peasantry”[76] may be considered as not qualitatively different from those of Lenin. What separated Lenin and Trotsky was not so much the degree and kind of peasant support needed by the proletariat, as the class nature of the state that would immediately follow the revolution. With armed power in the hands of the proletariat and the Social Democratic Party participating in the revolutionary dictatorship, Lenin’s and Trotsky’s analyses parted company.
Lenin argued that the proletariat, arms in hand, would lead the revolution in an alliance with the revolutionary peasantry, would implement the essential bourgeois-democratic tasks of solving the agrarian problem in a revolutionary manner (the provisional RDDPP), establish a Constituent Assembly, and then hand governmental and state power to the bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties in open, free elections.
Four months before the St Petersburg Soviet, Lenin denounced, in Two Tactics, the very conclusions that Trotsky would come to:
“… by making it the task of the provisional revolutionary government to put into effect the minimum programme, the resolution eliminated the absurd, semi-anarchist ideas about … the conquest of power for a socialist revolution. The degree of economic development of Russia (an objective condition) and the degree of class consciousness and organisation of the broad masses of the proletariat (a subjective condition inseparably connected with the objective condition) make the immediate complete emancipation of the working class impossible. Only the most ignorant people can ignore the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place; only the most naive optimists can forget how little as yet the masses of the workers are informed about the aims of Socialism and about the methods of achieving it. … a socialist revolution is out of the question unless the masses become class conscious and organised, trained and educated in open class struggle against the entire bourgeoisie. In answer to the anarchist objections that we are putting off the socialist revolution, we say: we are not putting it off, but we are taking the first step towards it in the only possible way, along the only correct road, namely, the road of a democratic republic. Whoever wants to reach Socialism by a different road, other than that of political democracy, will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense. If any workers ask us at the given moment why we should not go ahead and carry out our maximum programme, we shall answer by pointing out how far the masses of the democratically-minded people still are from Socialism, how undeveloped class antagonisms still are, how unorganised the proletarians still are. … in order to achieve this organisation, in order to spread this socialist enlightenment, we must achieve the fullest possible measure of democratic reforms”[77].
There is little ambiguity here: the workers’ party would seek to limit the revolution to the minimum demands (‘the three pillars’ – a democratic republic, confiscation of the landed estates, and an 8-hour working day) and, convinced of the general unpreparedness of society for socialism, would dissuade the workers from pressing their maximum demands. The idea that the workers’ party should immediately struggle for socialism, was “absurd” but in any case, it was “impossible” that the Social Democratic Party would be a majority in the revolutionary government.
The purpose of the coalition of the proletariat and the peasantry in a bourgeois revolution, was to democratise economic and political relations within the limits of private ownership of the means of production. Lenin saw the low level of productive forces objectively barring any immediate transition to the hegemony of the armed working class. His answer to why should the working class restrict its demands, was to make a distinction of principle between the socialist revolution led by the armed proletariat, and the revolutionary democratic (i.e. bourgeois) revolution led by the armed proletariat. If the attempt to achieve a socialist revolution would inevitably be defeated, it was necessary for the proletariat, having achieved power together with the peasantry, to agree that its dictatorship would be merely “democratic”. The contradiction between the proletariat’s self interests and the bourgeois limitations of the revolution would be solved by raising the proletariat’s consciousness to such an extent that it would accept the political limitation imposed upon it by its SD leaders, in order to retain the mass of peasants as collaborators or co-dictators. This self-limitation would be the result of the proletariat’s own party, the SDs, having the necessary theoretical awareness to limit its demand to those acceptable within the limits imposed by private ownership of the means of production – the minimum demands.
Trotsky’s response in Our Differences was founded on the actuality of the St Petersburg Soviet and the lessons learned. He pointed out that the proletariat, despite the best intentions of its leaders, had ignored the formal boundary which confined it to a democratic dictatorship. Arguing by analogy, Trotsky drew upon the events at the end of 1905, and the factory owners’ response to the (minimum programme) demand for the 8-hour day: the shutting down of factories and plants. He explained that with a revolutionary democratic (bourgeois) dictatorship, the factory owners would believe they were secure in their actions because the response of the proletariat would be constrained by that democratic dictatorship. Trotsky then asked the question which exposed Lenin’s schema to reality: Initially the revolutionary government would be a workers’ government, and what would that do when faced with factory and plant closures? and answered, “It must re-open them and resume production at the government’s expense. But is that not the way to socialism? Of course it is. What other way do you suggest?”[78]. Whatever Lenin predicted, Trotsky’s experience told him that a revolutionary dictatorship in Russia would be a government dominated by workers who would not restrict their actions to what was acceptable to the factory owners.
Trotsky elaborated this point by asking whether the alliance with peasant representatives or peasant parties, would refuse state support for those workers striking for the 8-hour day, or publicly-funded work for those laid off by the factory owners. Would the peasant parties oppose the government opening of factories closed down by the owners and the commencement of production under workers’ control? If so, Trotsky concluded, then very early in the coalition the proletariat would enter into conflict with the revolutionary government.
What hope was there for the success of the Russian Revolution? The hegemonic role of the working-class meant the growing over and intermingling of the democratic revolution into the socialist revolution, but the ToPR never suggested that Russia could be carried straight into socialism. Trotsky was convinced that the working class would play the leading role in the Russian Revolution, and would then be confronted with the objective problem of taking the first steps towards socialism. These measures would very rapidly conflict with the country’s economic backwardness. The reality of the victory of the revolution would be the transfer of power into the hands of a party that enjoyed the support of the armed urban population, but Trotsky saw socialism as unattainable in a predominantly peasant country within the framework of a national revolution. Trotsky cut the Gordian knot: the workers’ government would have to unite its forces with those of the socialist proletariat of Western Europe. This was the only realistic way its temporary revolutionary hegemony could develop into a socialist dictatorship[80].
Here, again, is the symmetry in the analysis and predictions of both men seen in the previous chapter. Lenin had predicted a counter-revolutionary upsurge by the liberal bourgeoisie, the well-to-do peasants and a section of the middle peasants with the proletariat fighting to retain its democratic gains[79]. Trotsky now went further, and drew the conclusion that dictatorship by coalition would not work, and foresaw a counter-revolutionary upsurge by the liberal bourgeoisie, the well-to-do peasants and a section of the middle peasants with the proletariat fighting to retain its socialist gains. Neither model allowed for the possibility that the vast majority of the peasantry might be so grateful for the solution of the agrarian problem, and so preoccupied with implementing it, that it would accede to the demands of the working class and defend a proletarian state against the restoration of the landlords.
Lenin drew the conclusion that the RSDLP (a minority in the RDDPP) should limit itself to its minimum demands, and only the victory of the proletariat in the West would protect Russia from Tsarist restoration and secure the possibility of a socialist transformation: “The European workers will show us ‘how to do it’, and then together with them we shall bring about the socialist revolution”[81].
It can be seen that Trotsky and Lenin had crucial differences on the social character of the revolutionary dictatorship which would be brought to power in the Russian Revolution. In 1905, Lenin correctly indicated the general direction of the struggle, but failed to predict the rate with which it would progress after the overthrow of the autocracy and the taking of power by the urban proletariat, and thus failed to recognise its class nature. This inadequacy was not revealed because the 1905 revolution was defeated.
Lenin publicly attacked Trotsky’s ideas on the ToPR some two years before the October Revolution, in On the Two Lines in the Revolution. Here he spends two pages of a six page article, replying to The Struggle for Power written by Trotsky and published in Nashe Slovo, 17 October 1915[82]. In his article Lenin used a description of Trotsky’s ToPR that was to become famous:
“From the Bolsheviks Trotsky … has borrowed their call for a decisive proletarian revolutionary struggle and for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, while from the Mensheviks [he] has borrowed ‘repudiation’ of the peasantry’s role”[83].
In fact, Trotsky had (correctly) pointed out that the capacity of the Russian peasantry for independent political activity as an estate had declined even further as it had become increasingly socially differentiated since 1905: the overthrow of Tsarism would not be the result of an independent revolutionary uprising of the peasantry “as a whole”. Nor would Tsarism be overthrown by an alliance between labour and the bourgeoisie, it would be overthrown by a revolution led by the proletariat whose allies would (initially) be the peasantry as an estate, but in the long term would be the landless labourers and semi-proletarians in the villages[84]. Superficially, this scenario may appear to be much the same as Lenin’s. The difference, however, was crucial: what would be the class nature of the state resulting from the revolution? For Trotsky the alliance with the peasantry as a whole would follow the revolutionary seizure of state power by the urban workers. We shall see later that this is just the realisation that Lenin came to in 1917, during and after the October Revolution.
In 1915, Lenin argued that if Trotsky believed that in the era of imperialism, a Russian “national” revolution was impossible (that is the bourgeois-democratic revolution could only succeed if the proletariat seized power), then Russia faced a socialist revolution and Trotsky should have been calling not for a revolutionary workers’ government, but for a workers’ socialist government[85]. Of course, the ToPR did not differentiate between the two in this way, and in that lay one of its great strengths – the former would necessarily include the first steps towards the latter.
The distinction Lenin made between a workers’ revolutionary, and a workers’ socialist government gives the distinct impression that he confused the positions of Trotsky and Parvus. This is confirmed because Lenin went on to say “Trotsky has not realised that if the proletariat induce the non-proletarian masses to confiscate the landed estates and overthrow the monarchy, then that will be the consummation of the ‘national bourgeois revolution’ in Russia; it will be a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry!”[86]. The implication was that the class nature of the regime necessary to solve the land question, was of little real consequence, confirming that Lenin was not familiar with the ToPR. Interestingly, within two years Lenin, himself, would be calling for the socialist October Revolution and the transfer of all state power to the proletariat.
Lenin, in the final paragraph of this article, repeats his perspective that it would require an alliance of the Russian and Western European proletariat to bring about a Russian socialist revolution:
“The proletariat are fighting, and will fight valiantly, to win power, for a republic, for the confiscation of the land, i.e. to win over the peasantry, make full use of their revolutionary powers, and get the “non-proletarian masses of the people” to take part in liberating bourgeois Russia from military-feudal “imperialism” (tsarism). The proletariat will at once utilise this ridding of bourgeois Russia of tsarism and the rule of the landowners … to bring about the socialist revolution in alliance with the proletarians of Europe”[87].
We should examine Lenin’s proposition. Was he saying the Russian workers would lead the revolution, arms in hand, would at once attempt to ally with the European proletariat to bring about the socialist revolution in Russia, without itself taking the first steps for this very purpose? Or was he saying the Russian proletariat would lead the revolution, arms in hand, would at once attempt to ally with the European proletariat to bring about the socialist revolution in Russia and, simultaneously, itself take the first steps for this very purpose? Reader make up your own mind – but the latter scenario had no principled differences with the ToPR!
In either case, however, the limits previously imposed on RDSLP participation in the RDDPP (specifically the impossibility of being in a majority and restricting its demands to the minimum programme), are now put in serious doubt. It could be argued that this article, while on the face of it being a criticism of Trotsky and the ToPR, was in fact an early indication that Lenin was prepared to reconsider the RDDPP and the role of SDs within it.
The analyses of the two men, as they stood at that time, were shown in their writings on the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland. It is possible to find Trotsky’s Lessons of the Events in Dublin juxtaposed with a section from Lenin’s The Discussion on Self-determination Summed Up[88], as though one was a reply to the other, in an effort to imply political differences between the two men on issues current today[89]. Both Lenin and Trotsky condemned the British imperialists’ execution of the heroic defenders of the Dublin barricades and demanded self-determination for Ireland.
Lenin defended the uprising as a blow delivered against the English imperialist bourgeoisie, a symptom of the general crisis of imperialism that he expected to lead to revolutions across Europe. Within the context of his support for a genuinely revolutionary nationalist movement, he simultaneously emphasised that it was a premature revolutionary outburst by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie supported by elements of the workers movement that had yet to find its real, socialist, leaders. Lenin presented this analysis of the Easter uprising in the context of his debate with Rosa Luxemburg on the national question, and so he was concerned with emphasising its revolutionary potential, thus this “article” contained no mention of the failure of the uprising to gain the support of the Irish peasantry.
It was left to Trotsky, who had supposedly “repudiated” the necessity of an alliance with the revolutionary peasantry, to criticise the uprising, specifically, for taking place in a situation where it did not have, and was unlikely to gain, peasant support. Trotsky, just as Lenin, also criticised the uprising because it was led not by socialist, proletarian elements, but petty bourgeois. The workers had allowed the “ascendancy of the green flag over the red”90. Of course, for Trotsky this meant that the workers should have had a strategy for moving uninterruptedly to the dictatorship of the proletariat instead of stopping at the national, bourgeois revolution.
However, we now have some ninety years since the Easter Rebellion and can trace the historic direction taken by the forces involved. How far even the most radical current amongst the nationalists has moved towards becoming part of the governmental structure of the English imperialist state was made clear when, on 25 July 2005, the Irish Republican Army officially decommissioned its weaponry and Sinn Fein, at a national gathering on 28 January 2007, endorsed co-operation with the power of the state (the Police Service of Northern Ireland). Clearly, the analyses proposed by both men agreed on one key fundamental: without a socialist perspective and leadership, even the most radical trend amongst the rebels could become a component part of the British state structure. In 1916, of course, Lenin had not yet made his transition to a permanentist perspective, and this was a serious gap in his comments on the Easter Rebellion.
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p312
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Lenin, V.I., The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Oct-Nov 1918, CW 28:227-325
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Cliff, T.C., Lenin: Building the Party, Pluto Press, 1975, p201- 204
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Lenin, V.I., The Aim of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, March 1909, CW 15:368
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Quoted in Woods, A. and Grant, T., Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For, Wellred Publications, London, 1976
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In his July 1905 preface to Lassalle’s Speech before a Jury Trotsky wrote “the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry”, quoted in Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p310
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Lenin, V.I., Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, June – July 1905 CW 9:28
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p315
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Lenin, V.I., The Stages, the Trend and the Prospects of the Revolution, 1905/06, CW 10:89
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p317-318
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Lenin, V.I., The Stages, the Trend and the Prospects of the Revolution, 1905/06, CW 10:92
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p319-325
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Lenin, V.I., On the Two Lines in the Revolution, Nov 1915 CW 21:419
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Trotsky, L.D., The Lessons of the Great Year, originally published in New York Jan. 20th 1917, available on www.
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Lenin, V.I., On the Two Lines in the Revolution, Nov 1915 CW 21:419
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 21:420
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 21:420
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Lenin, V.I., The Discussion on Self-determination Summed Up, July 1916, CW 22:353-358
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See New International Vol 1 No 1 pp 149-156