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A Maverick in european social Democracy: trotsky’s Political trajectory Between 1905 and 1917

jOHN MAROT

It is good that Richard Day and Daniel Gaido brought together a collection of articles, written by leading European Social Democrats between 1902 and 1907, on the nature of the coming revolution in Russia (Day and Gaido, 2011). It is even better that Lars Lih has decisively intervened to set the re-cord straight, by forcefully reaffirming what has generally and traditionally understood to be the uniqueness of Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory, that is, his appraisal of the driving forces, and the final political result, of that forthcoming revolution (Lih, 2012). Gaido and Day, however, deny Trotsky’s originality in this matter, claiming that Kautsky, Ryazanov, Luxemburg, Parvus and Mehring “anticipated” Trotsky’s scenario of permanent revolution — an incorrect conclusion, as Lih shows. My aim in this brief comment is to add to Lih’s intervention what I believe to be the chief explanation for Trotsky’s political isolation in the period 1907–1914 and, arguably, up to 1917.

Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory clearly set him apart from all Social Democrats, as Lih rightly reaffirms. However, Trotsky’s singular theory need not have led to his political isolation in practice, as Lih appears to imply. The reason Trotsky stood alone politically is one that few on the left, and even fewer in the Trotskyist tradition, are willing to entertain: Trotsky privileged theory over practice, at least in this instance. The kissing cousin to doctrinarism in theory is sectarianism in politics: Trotsky deliberately walked into the political wilderness after 1907 — and deliberately walked out of it only in 1917, under the impulse of mighty events. This assessment does not accord with Gaido and Day’s reverential defense of the “visionary” Trotsky, but it does, I believe, accord with the facts, to which I now turn.

Lih shows how all Social Democrats, including Trotsky, agreed that the material premises for socialism were not present in Russia: 100 million small-propertied peasants would have no interest in collectively organizing production. Notwithstanding the disinterest of the overwhelming majority of the population in socialized production, Lih restates the commonly held and correct view that only Trotsky thought the dynamics of the bourgeois–democratic revolution would inevitably lead the proletariat to seize power and make a socialist revolution, shattering the bourgeois limitations of the democratic revolution. The peasants would support such a revolution, not

Science & Society, Vol. 77, No. 3, july 2013, 412–415

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because it would bring socialism but because it would bring land redistri-bution and a swift end to gentry rule in the countryside. Though Russian Social Democrats differed in their assessments of peasant political capaci-ties, Trotsky, Lih writes, “arrived at the same practical goal of some sort of worker/peasant revolutionary government” advocated by Lenin, thus “put-ting Trotsky’s views on the peasants in the democratic revolution squarely” into the Bolshevik wing of Russian Social Democracy (455, emphasis added). Indeed, Trotsky’s “ideas about the democratic revolution itself were practical politics” up to at least 1917, Lih avers (459, emphasis added).

Nevertheless, should the working-class seizure of power in Russia fail to trigger socialist revolutions in the heartlands of capitalism, it was Trotsky’s prediction of inevitable conflict between the proletariat and its class ally, the peasantry, that “isolated him” among Russian Social Democrats, writes Lih, because Social Democrats were then trying to “enlist” the peasantry in the “democratic revolution” to overthrow Tsarism. “For this reason alone, what-ever its merits as predictive analysis, the Trotsky scenario was unacceptable as a party program” (460). Lih’s analysis raises the following issues.

Does the theory of permanent revolution contain within it the requirement that all Russian Social Democrats accept it as part of the program of the RSDLP? Lih does not ask this question because explaining Trotsky’s political trajectory is not the main object of his intervention; it is mine. Nevertheless, if the ques-tion were posed, I believe Lih would find no textual evidence that the Social Democrats’ mandatory programmatic adoption of the theory was in the theory.

What then prevents Trotsky and the Bolsheviks from making common cause at this juncture, given their agreement that the peasantry must pres-ently be considered an ally in the democratic revolution leading up to the overthrow of Tsarism? After all, the concluding part of Trotsky’s scenario is scheduled to take place only after the overthrow of Tsarism, not before. It follows that since the conflict between Bolshevism and Trotsky in the pre-1917 period on this question is only theoretical and latent, not practical and active, it seems that it is Trotsky who has isolated himself — and not the Social Democrats who have isolated him — by apparently insisting that So-cial Democrats accept the entirety of his scenario, including the concluding part, which has no practical political relevance in the here and now — an insistence expressed in Trotsky’s political behavior, if not in his speeches and texts; in his practice, if not in his theory. That, in this instance, Trotsky chose to privilege his theory over practical cooperation with the Bolsheviks — cooperation, moreover, that contained within it the potential to modify or inflect the Bolshevik attitude toward Trotsky’s ideas — is, in my view, a telling sign of Trotsky’s political inflexibility.

This conclusion seems to be further strengthened when we examine Bolshevism and Menshevism’s opposed attitudes toward the liberal bourgeois

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opposition. More precisely, it is Trotsky’s striking summary assessment of those opposed attitudes that I wish to spotlight, an assessment Lih does not integrate in his intervention. In 1909 Trotsky wrote:

Whereas the Mensheviks, proceeding from the abstract notion that “our revolution is a bourgeois revolution,” arrive at the idea that the proletariat must adapt all its tactics to the behavior of the liberal bourgeoisie to ensure the transfer of state power to that bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks proceed from an equally abstract notion — “democratic dictatorship, not socialist dictatorship” — and arrive at the idea of a proletariat in possession of state power imposing a bourgeois democratic limitation upon itself. It is true that the difference between them in this matter is very considerable; while the anti-revolution aspects of Menshevism have already become fully apparent, those of Bolshevism are likely to become a serious threat only in the event of victory. (Trotsky, 1905, 316–17, emphasis added.)

Thus, Trotsky writes about how the counter-revolutionary traits of Men-shevism had become apparent in the aftermath of the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, because experience had shown that the bourgeois–democratic revolution would never reach victory if the working class followed Menshevik leadership. On the other hand, the counter-revolutionary traits of Bolshe-vism would become apparent only in case of a proletarian victory led by the Bolsheviks, because the Bolsheviks would then insist on maintaining the revolution within its bourgeois–democratic limits — avoiding conflict with the peasantry — but reversing the proletarian victory.1

Clearly, in light of his own assessment of the Mensheviks, Trotsky’s opposition to them was immediate, direct, active and practical, excluding any political rapprochement with them. Equally clearly, and on the same grounds of effective politics, Trotsky should have joined the Bolsheviks long before 1917, trying at the same time to convince them of the correctness of his permanent revolution theory — but prepared to split with them in 1917 if they proved unwilling to lead the working class beyond the limits of the bourgeois–democratic revolution. Trotsky refused to follow this course. In this matter — and it was not a small one! — Trotsky proved to be incorrigibly doctrinaire right up to 1917, when the Bolsheviks came around to the theory of permanent revolution entirely independently of Trotsky, by adopting Lenin’s “April Theses” to guide their political activity.

1 “The leading role of the proletariat was part of the Social Democratic consensus about the Russian democratic revolution” writes Lih (440). Actually, as Trotsky shows, there was no consensus. Consensus broke down in 1904, when the Bolsheviks developed their views on the leading role of the working class, views they clearly counterposed to those then being put forth by the Mensheviks in Iskra, which the Mensheviks had placed under their editorial control as part of their campaign ignoring certain decisions of the Second Party Congress, held the previous year. The key text here is Lenin’s “The Zemstvo Campaign and Iskra’s Plan” (Lenin, 1961, 497–516).

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Even then, Trotsky still did not formally join the Bolsheviks until months later, in july 1917.

Finally, it is not just Trotsky who foresaw an antagonism of interests developing between the property-loving peasantry and the working class in case of a working-class victory: all Social Democrats did, and Lih readily recognizes this. However, no Social Democrat correctly grasped the actual nature of this conflict.2

Department of HistoryKeimyung UniversityDaegu, Koreajemarot@aol.com

REFERENCES

Day, Richard B., and Daniel Gaido, eds. and trans. 2009. Witnesses to Permanent Revolu-tion: The Documentary Record. Leiden, Amsterdam: Brill.

Lenin, V. I. 1961 (1904). Collected Works, 4th English edition, Vol. 7. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Lih, Lars. 2012. “Democratic Revolution in Permanenz.” Science & Society, 76:4 (Oc-tober), 433–462.

Marot, john. 2012. The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History. Leiden, Amsterdam: Brill.

Trotsky, Leon. 1972. “Our Differences.” Pp. 316–317 in 1905. New york: Vintage. Originally published in Rosa Luxemburg’s Polish Marxist journal, Przeglad social-demokratyczny.

2 I study this in detail in “The Peasant Question and the Origins of Stalinism: Rethinking the Destruction of the October Revolution” (in Marot, 2012).

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