Trotsky’s ideas formed the third, relatively tiny current, that developed within the RSDLP after 1905, being differentiated by his daring conclusion that the Russian proletariat, having taken power, would not limit itself to the RSDLP minimum programme (see for example Our Differences[1]). Based on his experience of the struggle for the 8-hour day in St Petersburg, and a perspective which placed the Russian Revolution in both an international and historic context, Trotsky concluded that the reality of class relations would compel the working class, as the leading force in the revolution, to exercise its political domination in its own economic interests, and against those of the bourgeoisie. It would be in this way, he predicted in the ToPR, that the struggle of the working class for an end to feudalism would, necessarily, carry over into a struggle for state power, that is, it would take on a socialist character. Trotsky was alone, until 1917, in proposing an explanation for how and why a socialist revolution could be on the immediate agenda in semi-feudal Russia, before it occurred in Western Europe[2].
It must be realised that whilst Lenin was alive, no leader of the RSDLP, from any faction or grouping, declared that Russia was ready for socialism. Tsarist Russia’s industrialisation was primarily for military, not social, purposes. Indeed, the industrialisation of Russia was largely state directed, and accompanied by mechanisms of mass repression precisely to minimise any consequent social changes that might occur and threaten the privileges of the aristocracy. Russia lagged too far behind the West educationally, culturally, economically and industrially for any socialist to believe that socialism could be reached by her own efforts. All Russian socialists agreed that the immediate tasks facing Russia were bourgeois-democratic. The differences were in how these would be achieved.
Despite his behaviour during and after the 1903 Congress of the RSDLP, Trotsky was, in fact, in fundamental political disagreement with the core Menshevik strategy of a revolutionary alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie. Woods describes how, in an article in the (new) Iskra on 15 March 1904, he severely criticised the liberals as indecisive and treacherous[3]. Later, he would suggest that RSDLP support for the liberals should be a noose around their neck dragging them forward until liberalism was left a corpse on the path of history[4]. Incensed, Plekhanov demanded his removal from the editorial board. Whatever his intentions, Trotsky was outside the two major groupings within the RSDLP and was more or less politically isolated by the end of 1904[5].
Trotsky’s campaign against the Menshevik policy of gaining the support of the liberal bourgeoisie culminated in a pamphlet, Before the Ninth January, that would appear early in 1905, after Bloody Sunday. The pamphlet was a sweeping and devastating indictment of the Mensheviks, arguing – in agreement with Kautsky and Lenin – that the liberal bourgeoisie was more afraid of revolution than of the Tsar, and incapable of revolutionary activities[6]. This pamphlet predicted that the town would be the main area of revolutionary events – the armed uprising of the proletariat – but that the urban proletariat was not strong enough on its own to determine the outcome of the revolution. The peasantry represented the necessary reservoir of energy and support, and the pamphlet strongly underlined the dangers of the urban proletariat becoming isolated from the peasantry in a situation where the vast majority of soldiers were peasants in uniform. Trotsky considered that Bloody Sunday, the subsequent strike wave, and the initial armed clashes which supplemented the strike wave, were a “vivid confirmation of the prognosis” contained in his pamphlet[7].
It was in the period between Bloody Sunday and the October strike, in the heat of the strike wave spreading across Russia, that the ToPR took shape in Trotsky’s mind, to be systematised and articulated after his experience of the St Petersburg Soviet. Essentially, he proposed that the urban proletariat, the necessary leader of the revolution would seize power in the urban centres, and once having power in its hands, would not remain within the bourgeois limits of universal suffrage, a republic, etc. On the contrary, precisely in order to protect the gains it had made, the proletarian vanguard would, from the very first stages of its rule, have to make deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations. The attempts by the proletariat to implement its own, specific, measures – both democratic and transitional (e.g. 8-hour day, end to unemployment) would bring it into hostile conflict, not only with those bourgeois groups which had supported it during the initial stages of the revolutionary struggle, but also with the broad masses of the peasantry, with whose collaboration it – the proletariat – had come to power[8].
As a matter of record, in his Results and Prospects[9], Trotsky does not use the phrase ‘Permanent Revolution’. This title appears to have been given to Trotsky’s theory by Martynov[10], and has little to do with what Trotsky actually wrote at that time. It is unfortunate that Trotsky accepted this designation, but he did, and that is the name by which his theory is now known. In fact, Trotsky used the description “uninterrupted revolution”[11], and referred to a process which combined the bourgeois with the proletarian revolution, moving without interruption from one historical stage (the bourgeois) to another (the socialist). The revolution would begin as bourgeois-democratic but its internal dynamic, largely determined by the leading role of the urban proletariat, flows through in an uninterrupted process to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the first steps towards socialism.
Results and Prospects, written while Trotsky was in prison for his leading role in the Soviet, and which succinctly described the ToPR, was originally published as an 80-page final chapter in the book Our Revolution. The immediate influence of the theory that would come to define ‘Trotskyism’ was negligible:
• An important factor in the lack of impact of the new theory was that Trotsky had antagonised all the leading Russian Marxists and had become a political lone wolf, outside of both major factions whose leaders had no interest in any theory that Trotsky might develop, nor in popularising him or his ideas.
• Despite Trotsky’s undoubted popularity as head of the St Petersburg Soviet, the revolution was on the downturn and the idea of “uninterrupted” or Permanent Revolution was out of synchronisation with the pessimistic mood of the time.
• Most copies of the book were seized by police and only a few copies were actually circulated.
• By publishing his new theory as the last chapter in a book mainly composed of old essays, Trotsky could hardly have found a better way to hide it.
• Trotsky was only 26 years old and in a society which, at that time, gave weight to age. His relative youth – he was some 20 years younger than Plekhanov – meant he was considered too young for his novel ideas to be taken as a serious threat to the ideological hegemony of the older generation.
It is likely that far more SDs met Trotsky’s ideas on Permanent Revolution in his short polemical article Our Differences and the first four chapters of 1905[12], than read the original Russian text[13]. The article was published in 1908, in a Polish journal edited by Rosa Luxemburg, the significance of the title of the article was not lost on its readers – it was the same as that used by Plekhanov in 1885 for his major work against the non-Marxist, People’s Will group. The book, 1905, was published in 1910, in German, under the title Russland in der Revolution.
To critically review the development of Lenin’s theory of the provisional RDDPP a large number of texts and references must be read, studied and compared. This is not the situation with Trotsky’s ToPR. Before 1917 there is really only one major text – Results and Prospects. In the time between the first Russian Revolution and the second, it is noticeable that there was no work that significantly extended or deepened his initial writing. Thus, the ToPR as described below, deliberately relies on Results and Prospects since this was the definitive text describing the theory which was contemporaneous with Lenin’s writings on the revolutionary democratic dictatorship and the most finished form of the theory existing before the 1917 October Revolution. Of course, later Trotsky would be forced, by the faction fights in the CPSU after Lenin’s death, to revisit and generalise his arguments[14].
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Trotsky, L.D., Our Differences in 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p299-318
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Knei-Paz, B., The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1978, p5
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Woods, A., Bolshevism the Road to Revolution, Wellred Publications, London, 1999, p162
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Trotsky, L.D., On the Road to the Second Duma in Journal of Trotsky Studies No 2, 1994, p62-63. – Note Lenin was to use a similar analogy in Left-Wing Communism – an Infantile Disorder, when he likened Communist support for the Labour leaders to a rope that supports a hanged man CW 31:88)
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Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p88 – 97
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Knei-Paz, B., op cit p34-38
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Trotsky, L.D., Our Differences in 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, vi
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Trotsky, L.D., My Life Penguin Books, 1984, p171-2
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Trotsky, L.D., Results and Prospects, New Park Publications, London, 1962
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Knei-Paz, B., op cit p153
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Trotsky, L.D., Results and Prospects, New Park Publications, London, 1962, p212
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Trotsky, L.D., Our Differences in 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p299-318
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White, J.D. Lenin The Practice and Theory of Revolution, Palgrave, 2001, p10
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See the introduction to Permanent Revolution written in 1928 and the introduction to the 1919 reprint of Results and Prospects (both in one volume, New Park Publications, 1962).