"Many sections of the toiling masses, especially in the village, will be drawn into the revolution and embraced by a political organization for the first time, only after the vanguard of the revolution, the city proletariat, has placed itself at the helm of state power. Revolutionary agitation and organization will be carried out with the help of state resources. Finally, the legislative power itself will become a mighty instrument for revolutionizing the masses of the people..."The fate of the most elementary interests of the peasantry even of the whole peasantry as a class is knit together with the fate of the revolution, i.e., with the fate of the proletariat.
64 NOT A "LEAP" BUT A "GROWING-OVEB" "The proletariat in power will appear to the peasan- try as the liberating class."
"The rule of the proletariat will not only mean: democratic equality, free self-administration, transference of the tax burden to the possessing classes, transforma- tion of the standing army into the armed people, aboli- tion of compulsory church taxes, but also recognition of all the revolutionary redivisions (seizures) of landed pro- perty undertaken by the peasantry. The proletariat will make this redivision the point of departure for further state measures in the field of agriculture. Under these condi- tions, the Russian peasantry in the first, most difficult period will be no less interested in supporting the proleta- rian regime than the French peasantry in sup- porting the military regime of Napoleon Bonaparte, which guaranteed the new possessors the inviolability of their land tracts by virtue of the bayonet..."
"But perhaps the peasantry will dislodge the proleta- riat and itself occupy its place?"
"This is impossible. All historical experience pro- tests against such an assumption. This experience proves that the peasantry is entirely incapable of an independent political role. 9 ' (Page 251).
All this was written not in 1929, nor yet in 1924, but in 1905. Does this look like "ignoring the peasantry", I should like to know? Where is the "jumping over" the agrarian question here? Is it not time, friends, to show somewhat more of a sense of propriety?
Now let us see in what condition this "sense of propriety" is with Stalin. Referring to my New York articles on the February 1917 revolution, which agree in every essential with Lenin's Geneva articles, the theoreti- cian of party reaction writes: "The letters of comrade Trotsky, both in spirit and in conclusions, are entirely dissimilar from Lenin's letters, for they repeat entirely the anti-Bolshevik slogan of Trotsky: 'No czar and a labor government', a slogan 65 PBBMANENT REVOLUTION which means: Revolution without the peasantry." (Speech to the fraction of the Central Committee of the Trade Unions, November 19%.)
Exquisite is the sound of these words on the "anti- Bolshevik slogan" (allegedly Trotsky's): "No czar and a labor government." According to Stalin, the Bolshevik slogan should have read: "No labor government, but a czar." We will still speak of the alleged "slogan" of Trotsky. But we would first like to hear from another of the notables of the ruling spirit of the day, less illiterate perhaps, but one who has, however, taken leave forever from any theoretical scruples: I speak of Lunatcharsky: "In 1905, Leo Davidovitch Trotsky inclined to the idea: the proletariat must remain isolated (!) and must not support the bourgeoisie, for that would be opportu- nism; for the proletariat alone, however, it would be very difficult to carry through the revolution, because the pro- letariat at that time amounted to only seven-eighths of a percent of the total population and no great war could be conducted with so small a cadre. Thus, Leo Davidovitch decided that the proletariat in Russia must support the permanent revolution, that is, fight for the greatest possi- ble success, until the fiery sparks of this conflagration blew the powder deposits of the world into the air." (The Power of the Soviets, No. 7. On the Characteristics O/ the October Revolution: A. Lunatcharsky, page 10.)
The proletariat "must remain isolated" until the fiery sparks blow up the powder deposits...How beautifully many People's Commissars write who are for the moment not yet "isolated" in spite of the threatened position of their own mental power 7. But we do not want to be so severe with Lunatcharsky: from each according to his abilities. His slovenly absurdities are no more senseless than those of many others.
But how, according to Trotsky, must "the proletariat remain isolated"? Let us adduce one quotation from my polemic against Strfcve (1906). At the time, Lunatchar- 66 jsky chanted immoderate hymns of praise for this work. While the bourgeois parties the reference is to the Soviet of Deputies "remained entirely aloof" from the awaken- ing masses.
"...political life became concentrated around the workers 5 Soviet. The attitude of the city masses to the Soviet (1905) was manifestly sympathetic, even if not clear. All the oppressed and offended sought its protec- tion. The popularity of the Soviet grew far beyond the city. It received 'petitions' from peasants who suffered injustices, peasants' resolutions poured into the Soviet, delegations from village communities came to it. Here, right here, is where were concentrated the thoughts and sympathies of the nation, of the real and not the falsified democratic nation." (Our Revolution, page 199.)
In all these quotations their number can easily be increased two, three, and tenfold the permanent revolu- tion is described as a revolution which welds together the oppressed masses of city and village around the proletariat organized in Soviets; as a national revolution that raises the proletariat to power and by that alone affords the possibility of the democratic revolution growing into a socialist revolution.
The permanent revolution is no isolated leap of the proletariat, rather it is the rebuilding of the whole nation under the leadership of the proletariat. That is how I pictured the perspective of the permanent revolution since 1905, and so I construed it.
Radek is also wrong with regard to Parvus 5 whose views on the Russian revolution in 1905 bordered closely on mine, without, however, being identical with them when he repeats the stereotyped phrase about Parvus' "leap" from the czarist to the social democratic govern- ment. Radek actually refutes himself when, in another 67 PERMANENT REVOLUTION part of his article, he indicates in passing but quite cor 7 rectly, wherein my views on the revolution actually differ- ed from those of Parvus. Parvus was not of the opinion that the labor government in Russia has a way out in the direction of the socialist revolution, that is, that in the process of fulfilling the tasks of democracy it can emerge into the socialist dictatorship. As is proved by the quo- tation from 1905 adduced by Radek himself, Parvus con- fined the tasks of the labor government to the tasks of democracy. Then where is the leap to socialism? As a result of the revolutionary overthrow, the erection of a labor government on the "Australian" model already then hovered before Parvus. Parvus also made the compari- son between Russia and Australia after the October revo- lution, when he himself already stood at the extreme Right wing of social reformism. Bucharin said about this that Parvus had "discovered" Australia after the fact in order to cover up his old sins with regard to the perma- nent revolution. But that is wrong. In 1905, Parvus saw in the conquest of power by the proletariat the road to democracy and not to socialism, that is, he assigned to the proletariat only that role which it actually played in Russia in the first eight to ten months of the October re- volution. As a further perspective, Parvus even then pointed to the Australian democracy of that time, that is, to *a regime in which the labour party does indeed govern but does not rule, and carries out its reformist demands only as the supplement to the program of the bourgeoisie. Irony of fate: the fundamental tendency of the Right- Centrist bloc of 1923-1928 consisted precisely of drawing the dictatorship of the proletariat closer to the labor de- mocracy of the Australian model, that is, of the prognosis of Parvus. This becomes all the clearer when it is recall- ed that the Russian philistine "socialists" of two or three decades ago continually depicted Australia in the Rus- sian press as a workers' 'and peasants' country which, shut off from the outer world by high tariffs, was de- 68 NOT A "LEAP" BUT A "GROWING-OVEB" veloping "socialist" legislation and in that way was building socialism in one country. Radek would have acted correctly had he pushed this side of the question to the foreground instead of repeating the fairy tales of the fantastic skipping over of democracy.
CHAPTER THREE THREE ELEMENTS OF THE "DEMOCRATIC DICTATORSHIP": CLASSES, TASKS AND POLITICAL MECHANICS THE DIFFERENCE between the *' permanent" stand-point and that of Lenin, expressed itself politically in the con- trast of the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat which supports itself upon the peasantry and the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. The dispute was not concerned with whether the bourgeois-democratic stage could be skipped and whether an alliance between the workers and the peasants was necessary it concerned the political mechanics of the collaboration of the proletariat and the peasantry in the democratic revolution.
Far too presumptive, not to say light-minded, is Radek's contention that only people "who have not thought out the complexity of the methods of Marxism and Leninism to the end" could push to the foreground the question of the party-political expression of the democratic dictatorship, when Lenin saw the whole question only in the collaboration of the two classes in the objective histo- rical task. No, that is not how it stood.
If the subjective factor of the revolution, the parties and their programs in this case, the political and organizational form of the collaboration of proletariat and peasantry is abandoned, then there vanish all the differences of opinion, not only between Lenin and me, which marked two shades of the same revolutionary wing, but what is certainly 70 CLASSES, TASKS & POLITICAL MECHANICS worse, also the differences of opinion between Bolshevism and Menshevism, and finally, the differences between the Russian revolution of 1905 and the revolutions of 1848 and even of 1789, in so far as the proletariat can at all be spoken of in relation to the latter. All bourgeois revolu- tions have rested on the cooperation of the oppressed classes of city and country. That is just what invested the revolutions to a lesser or greater degree with a national character, that is, one embracing the whole people.
The theoretical as well as the political dispute among us was not over the collaboration of the worker and peasant as such, but over the program of this collaboration, its party forms and political methods. In the old revolutions, workers and peasants "collaborated" under the leadership of the liberal bourgeoisie or its petty bourgeois democratic wing. The Communist International repeated the experi- ment of the old revolutions in a new historical situation by doing everything it could to subject the Chinese workers and peasants to the political leadership of the national liberal Chiang Kai-Shek and later, of the "democrat" Wang Chin Wei. Lenin put the question of an alliance of the workers and peasants in irreconcilable antagonism to the liberal bourgeoisie. Such an alliance had never existed in history before. It was a matter, so far as its method went, of a new experiment in the collaboration of the oppressed class of city and village. By this, the question of the political forms of the collaboration was posed for the first time. Radek has simply overlooked this. This is why he leads us back not only from the formula of the perma- nent revolution, but also from Lenin's "democratic dictatorship" into the vacuum of historical abstractions. Yes, Lenin refused for a number of years to answer in advance the question of what the political party and state organization of the democratic dictator- ship of the proletariat and the peasantry would look like and he pushed into the foreground the collaboration of these two classes in contrast to the coali- 71 ' PERMANENT REVOLUTION tion with the liberal bourgeoisie. Lenin said: At a certain historical stage, there inevitably results from the whole objective situation the revolutionary alliance of the.work- ing class with the peasantry for the solution of the tasks of the democratic revolution. Whether the peasantry will have time enough or will understand how to create a party of its own, whether this party will be the specific. gravity of the representatives of the proletariat in the revolutionary government all these questions permit of no generally valid reply. "Experience will show!" Even though the formula of the democratic dictatorship left open the question of the political mecha- nics of the alliance of the workers and peasants, it never- theless remained, up to a certain period, without being converted into a naked abstraction like Radek's, an algebraic formula which allowed of greatly divergent political constructions for the future.
Lenin himself was in no way of the opinion that the question would be exhausted by the class basis of the dictatorship and its objective historical aim. The signi- ficance of the subj'ective factors: of the aim, the conscious method, the party Lenin well understood and taught all this to us. And that is why Lenin, in his commentaries to his slogan, did not renounce even a hypothetical reply to the question: what political forms might be assumed by the first independent alliance of workers and peasants in history. However, Lenin took up the question different- ly at different times. Lenin's ideas must not be regarded dogmatically. Lenin brought no finished comments from Sinai, but forged ideas and slogans in the furnace of the class struggle. He adapted these slogans to reality, making them concrete and precise, and at different time? filled them with different content. But this side of the ques- tion, which later gained a decisive character, and brought the Bolshevik party right to the verge of a split at the beginning of 1917, has not been studied by Radek; he simply ignored it.
72 CLASSES, TASKS & POLITICAL MECHANICS It is, however, a fact that Lenin did not always charac- terize the probable party-political expression arid govern- mental form of the alliance of the two classes in the same way and that he refrained from binding the party by hypothetical interpretations. What are the reasons for such caution? The reasons are to be sought in the fact that one element of this algebraic formula is represented by a quantity, gigantic in significance, but politically extremely indefinite: the peasantry.
I want to quote only a few examples of Lenin's interpre- tation of the democratic dictatorship, observing, however, that a cohesive characterization of the evolution of Lenin *sf idea in this question would require a separate work.
Developing the thought that the proletariat and the peasantry would be the basis of the dictatorship, Lenin wrote in March 1905: "And this composition of the social basis of the probable and desirable revolutionary dictatorship will naturally also be expressed in the composition of the revolutionary government, it will render inevitable the participation of the most varied representatives of the revolutionary demo- cracy in this government and even their predominance." (Volume VI, Russian edition, page 132. My emphasis.)
In these words, Lenin shows not only the class basis but also a definite governmental form of the dictatorship with a possible predominance of the representatives of the pretty bourgeois democracy.
In 1907, Lenin wrote: "The peasant agrarian revolution of which you speak, gentlemen, must, in order to triumph as such, as a peasant revolution, become the central power of the whole state." (Volume IX, page 539.)
This formula goes even further. It can be understood in the sense that the revolutionary power must be directly concentrated in the hands of the peasantry. This formula, however, also embraces, in the more far- reaching interpretation accorded it by the passage 78 PERMANENT REVOLUTION of developments, the October revolution which brought the proletariat to power as the "agent" of the peasant revolution. These are the extreme poles of the permissible interpretations of the formula of the demo* cratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. It is probable that up to a certain point its strength lay in this algebraic instability, but its dangers also lay there, manifested themselves among us crassly enough in Febru- ary and led to the catastrophe in China.
In July 1905, Lenin wrote: "Nobody speaks of the seizure of power by the party we speak only of participation, as leading a participation in the revolution as possible..." (Volume VI, page 228.)
In December 1906, Lenin considered it possible to agree with Kautsky in the question of the seizure of power by the party: "Kautsky considers it not only 'as very probable' that Victory will fall to the social democratic party in the course of the revolution,' but declares it the duty of the social democrats 'to suggest the certainty of victory to their adherents, for one cannot fight successfully if victory is renounced beforehand.' " (Volume VIII, page 58.)
The distance between these two interpretations given by Lenin himself is no smaller than between Lenin's formula- tions and mine. We will see this even more plainly later on. Here we want to raise the question: What is the meaning of these contradictions in Lenin? They reflect the same great unknown in the political formula of the revolu- tion: the peasantry. Not for nothing did the radicals once <call the peasant the Sphinx of Russian history. The ques- tion of the nature of the revolutionary dictatorship whether Radek wills it or not is inseparable from the question of the possibility of a revolutionary peasant party hostile to the liberal bourgeoisie and independent of the proletariat. Were the peasantry capable of creating an independent party in the epoch of the democratic revolution then the democratic revolution could be realized in its truest and 74 CLASSES, TASKS & POLITICAL MECHANICS most direct sense, and the question of the participation of the proletarian minority would obtain an important, it is true, but subordinated significance. The matter presents itself quite differently if one proceeds from the fact that the peasantry, because of its hybrid class character and the lack of uniformity of its social composition, can have neither an independent policy nor an independent party, and is compelled, in the revolutionary epoch, to choose between the policy of the bourgeoisie and the policy of the proletariat. Only this evaluation of the political nature of the peasantry produces the perspective of the dictatorship of the proletariat which grows directly out of the democratic revolution. In this, naturally, there lies no "denial", "ignoring" or "underestimation" of the peasantry. Without the decisive significance of the agra- rian question for the life of all society and without the deep and gigantic impulsion of the peasant revolution there could in general be no talk about the proletarian dictator- ship in Russia. But the fact that the agrarian revolution created the conditions for the dictatorship of the proletariat grew out of the inability of the peasantry to solve its own historical problem with its own resources and under its own leadership. Under present conditions in bourgeois coun- tries, even in the backward ones, in so far as they have already entered the epoch of capitalist industry and are bound into a unit by railroads and telegraphs this refers not only to Russia, but to China and India as well the peasantry is still less capable of a leading or even only an independent political role than in the epoch of the old bourgeois revolutions. Because I constantly and persist- ently underlined this idea, which forms one of the most important constituents of the theory of the permanent revolution, was a completely insufficient and, in essence, quite unfounded reason for accusing me of an underestima- tion of the peasantry.
How does Lenin stand on the question of a peasant party? To reply to this question, a special article would have to 75 PERMANENT REVOLUTION be devoted to the transformation of Lenin's views on the Russian revolution in the period of 1905-1917. Let us con- fine ourselves here to two quotations.
In 1907, Lenin wrote: "It is possible...that the objective difficulties of a unification of the petty bourgeoisie will check the forma- tion of such a party and leave the peasant democracy for a long time in the present state of a spongy, shapeless, pulpy, Trudovik-like "mass." (Volume VIII, page 494.) In 1909, Lenin expressed himself on the same theme as follows: "There is not the slightest doubt that a revolution which reaches so high a degree of development as the revolu- tionary dictatorship, will create a more firmly formed and more powerful revolutionary peasant party. To judge the matter otherwise would mean to assume that in a grown- up man, the size, form and degree of development of cer- tain essential organs could remain in an embryonic state." (Volume X7, Part 1, page 230).
Was this assumption confirmed? No, it was not. But that is just what induced Lenin, up to the moment of the complete historical verification, to give only a con- ditioned reply to the question of the revolutionary power. It is self-understood that Lenin did not put his hypotheti- cal formula above the reality. The struggle for the inde- pendent political party of the proletariat constituted the main content of his life. The woeful epigones, however, in the hunt after a peasants' party, landed at the subordi- nation of the Chinese workers to the Kuo Min Tang, at the strangulation of Communism in India in the name of the "Workers' and Peasants' Party", at the dangerous fiction of the Peasant's International, at the masquerade of the Anti-Imperialist League, and so on.
Prevailing thought at present makes no effort to dwell on the contradictions in Lenin adduced above, which exist in part externally and in appearance, in part also in Reality, but which always result from the problem itself.
76 CLASSES, TASKS & POLITICAL MECHANICS Ever since we have had a special species of "Red" profes- sors, who are frequently distinguished from the old reac- tionary professors not by a firmer backbone but by a profounder illiteracy, Lenin is now professorially trimmed and purged of all contradictions, that is, of the dynamics of his thought; standard quotations are threaded on a few thin strings, and then, according to the requirements of the "given moment", set in circulation serially.
It must not be forgotten for a moment that the problems of the revolution in a politically "virgin" country became acute after a great historical interval, after a lengthy re- actionary epoch in Europe and in the whole world, and by that alone already brought with them much that was obscure. In the formula "democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants", Lenin gave expression to the spe- cific social relationships in Russia. He put different con- structions upon this formula, but never rejected it without having exhaustively measured the peculiarity in the condi- tions of the Russian revolution. Wherein lay this peculiarity?
The gigantic role of the agrarian question and the peasant question in general, as the basis or substructure of all other problems, and the great number of the peasant intelligenzia and those who sympathized with the peasant, with their populist ideology, the "anti-capitalist" traditions and the revolutionary tempering all this in its entirety signified that if an anti-bourgeois revolutionary peasant party was at all possible anywhere, then it was precisely and primarily in Russia.
And as a matter of fact, out of the endeavor to create a peasant, or a worker and peasant in distinction from a liberal and proletarian party, every possible variation was attempted, illegal and parliamentary as combination: Zemlia i Volia (Land and naia Volia (People's Will), Tchorny construction), the legal Narodnitc ^'People's Socialists", Trudoviks, PERMANENT REVOLUTION " Left Social Revolutionists ", etc., etc. For half a cen- tury, we had, as it were, a huge laboratory for the creation of an " anti-capitalist " peasant party with an indepen- dent position towards the proletarian part. The largest size, as is known, was attained by the experiment of the S. R. party, which, for a time in 1917, actually constituted the party of the overwhelming majority of the peasantry. And then? It used its position only to betray the peasants completely to the liberal bourgeoisie. The S. R.s entered a coalition with the imperialists of the Entente and together with them conducted an armed struggle against the Russian proletariat.
This truly classic example shows that petty bourgeois parties on a peasant basis, even in everyday history, can maintain the appearance of an independent policy when secondary questions are on the agenda, but that when the revolutionary crisis of society puts the fundamental questions of property on the order of the day, the petty bourgeois " peasant " party automatically becomes an instrument of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
If my old differences of opinion with Lenin are consi- dered not from the cross-section of quotations torn out of this and that year, month and day, but in their correct historical perspective, then it becomes quite clear that the dispute, at least on my part, was not over whether democ- ratic tasks stand before Russia which require a revolu- tionary solution; not over whether an alliance of the pro- letariat with the peasants is required for the solution of these tasks, but over what party-political and state form the revolutionary cooperation of the proletariat and the peasantry could assume, and what consequences result from it for the further development of the revolution. I speak of course of my position in this dispute, not of the position of Bucharin-Radek of that time, for which they themselves must answer.
How close the formula of the " permanent revolution '* approached Lenin's formula is graphically illustrated by 78 CLASSES, TASKS & POLITICAL MECHANICS the following comparison. In 1905, that is, before the October strike and before the December uprising in Moscow, I wrote in the foreword to one of Lassalle's speeches: "It is self-understood that the proletariat, as in its time the bourgeoisie, fulfills its mission supported upon the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie. The proletariat leads the village, draws it into the movement, interests it in the success of its plans. The proletariat, however, absolutely remains the leader. This is not the ' dictator- ship of the ' peasantry and proletariat' but the dictator- ship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry* " (L. Trotsky, 1905, page 281.)
Now compare these words, written in 1905, and quoted by me in the Polish article of 1909, with the following words of Lenin, written in 1909, right after the party conference, under the pressure of Rosa Luxemburg, had adopted the formula " dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry" instead of the old Bolshevik formula. To the Mensheviks, who spoke of the radical change of Lenin's position, he replied: "...The formula which the Bolsheviks have chosen for themselves here reads: * the proletariat which leads the peasantry 9.
"...Is it not obvious that the idea of all these formu- lations is the same? That this idea expresses precisely the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, that the 6 formula ' proletariat supported by the peasantry remains entirely within the bounds of that very dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry}" 9 (Volume XI, Part 1, pages 219 and #. My emphasis.)
Thus Lenin puts a construction on the " algebraic " formula here which excludes the idea of an independent peasant party and even more of its dominant r61e in the revolutionary government: the proletariat leads the peasantry, the proletariat is supported by the peasantry, consequently the revolutionary power is concentrated into the hands of the party of the proletariat. But that; is 79 PERMANENT REVOLUTION just what the central point of the permanent revolution consisted of* The utmost that can be said today, that is, after the historical verification of the old differences of opinion on the question of the dictatorship, is the following: while Lenin, always proceeding from the leading r&le of the proletariat, emphasizes in every way, clears up and teaches us the necessity of the revolutionary collaboration of the workers and peasants, I, likewise always proceeding from this collaboration, emphasize in every way the necessity of proletarian leadership, not only in the bloc but also in the government which will be assembled to incorporate this bloc. No other difference can be read into the matter.
In connection with what has been adduced above, we would like to examine two quotations: one out of Results and Perspectives, which Stalin and Zinoviev utilized to prove the antagonism between my views and Lenin's, the other out of a polemical article by Lenin against ne, which Radek employs for the same purpose.
Here is the first question: " The participation of the proletariat in the government is objectively most probable and admissible in principle only as a dominant and leading participation. Naturally, this government can be called the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, dictatorship of the proletariat, peasantry and intelligenzia, or finally, coalition govern- ment of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. But the question still remains: to whom does the hegemony belong in the government, and through it, in the country? If we speak of a labor government, then by that alone we already answer that the hegemony will belong to the work- ing class." (Our Revolution, 1906, page 250.)
Zinoviev (in 1925) beat the drums mightily because (in 1905!) I had juxtaposed the peasantry and the intelli- 80 CLASSES, TASKS & POLITICAL MECHANICS genzia; the Mensheviks, as I wrote at that time, clutched at the heels of every radical intellectual in order to prove over and over again the blossoming of bourgeois democ- racy. I expressed myself hundreds of times in those days on the impotence of the intellectuals as an "independent " social group and on the decisive significance of the revolu- tionary peasantry. Moreover, it is certainly not a ques- tion of a single polemical sentence which I have no intention at all of defending. The heart of the quotation consists of the fact that I completely accept the Leninist content of the democratic dictatorship and only demand a more precise definition of its political mechanism, that is, the rejection of a coalition in which the proletariat would only be a hostage under a petty bourgeois majority.