The Permanent Revolution

Results and Prospects

Leon Trotsky

Results and Prospects

(1906)

Transcribed and HTML markup for the Trotsky Internet Archive , a subarchive of the Marxist writers’ Internet Archive , by Sally Ryan in 1996.

First publication of Results & Prospects was in St. Petersburg in 1906, shortly after the 1905 first Russian workers’ revolution, lead in large part by Trotsky himself.

The first English translation was published by the Communist International in 1921.

- Preface to the Re-Issue of This Work Published in Moscow in 1919

- [Introduction]

- 1. The Peculiarities of Russian Historical Development

- 2. The Towns and Capital

- 3. 1789 – 1848 – 1905

- 4. Revolution and the Proletariat

- 5. The Proletariat in Power and the Peasantry

- 6. The Proletarian Regime

- 7. The Prerequisites of Socialism

- 8. A Workers’ Government in Russia and Socialism

- 9. Europe and Revolution

- 10. The Struggle for Power

Permanent Revolution Index

Last updated on: 3.3.2007

Preface to the Re-Issue of This Work Published in Moscow in 1919

Leon Trotsky

Results and Prospects

Preface to the Re-Issue

of This Work

Published in Moscow in 1919

Transcribed and HTML markup for the Trotsky Internet Archive , a subarchive of the Marxists’ Internet Archive , by Sally Ryan in 1996.

T he character of the Russian Revolution was the fundamental question in relation to which the various ideological trends and political organizations of the Russian revolutionary movement grouped themselves. Even in the social-democratic movement itself this question aroused serious disagreements from the moment events gave it a practical character. From 1904 onwards these differences took the shape of two fundamental trends, Menshevism and Bolshevism. The Menshevik point of view was that our revolution would be a bourgeois revolution, i.e., that its natural consequence would be the transfer of power to the bourgeoisie and the creation of conditions for bourgeois parliamentarism. The point of view of Bolshevism, while recognizing the inevitability of the bourgeois character of the coming revolution, put forward as the task of the revolution the establishment of a democratic republic by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

The social analysis of the Mensheviks was extremely superficial and in essence reduced itself to crude historical analogies – the typical method of ‘educated’ philistines. Neither the fact that the development of Russian capitalism had created extraordinary contradictions at both its poles, reducing the role of bourgeois democracy to insignificance, nor the experience of subsequent events, restrained the Mensheviks from an indefatigable search for ‘true’, ‘real’ democracy, which would place itself at the head of the ‘nation’ and establish parliamentary and so far as possible democratic conditions for capitalist development. Always and everywhere the Mensheviks strove to find signs of the development of bourgeois democracy, and where they could not find them they invented them. They exaggerated the importance of every ‘democratic’ declaration and demonstration, at the same time belittling the forces of the proletariat and the prospects before its struggle. So fanatically did they strive to find this leading bourgeois democracy, in order to secure the ‘legitimate’ bourgeois character of the Russian Revolution alleged to be required by the laws of history, that during the Revolution itself, when no leading bourgeois democracy was to be found, the Mensheviks themselves undertook, with more or less success, to carry out its duties.

Petty-bourgeois democracy without any Socialist ideology, without any Marxian class preparation, could not, of course, have acted differently under the conditions of the Russian Revolution, than did the Mensheviks in the role of the ‘leading’ Party of the February Revolution. The absence of any serious social foundation for bourgeois democracy told on the Mensheviks themselves, because they very soon outlived themselves, and in the eighth month of the Revolution were thrown aside by the class struggle.

Bolshevism, on the contrary, was by no means imbued with faith in the power and strength of revolutionary bourgeois democracy in Russia. From the very beginning, it acknowledged the decisive importance of the working class for the coming Revolution, but as to the programme of the Revolution itself the Bolsheviks limited it at first to the interests of the many millions of peasants, without and against whom the Revolution could not have been carried through to the end by the proletariat. Hence their acknowledgment (for the time being) of the bourgeois -democratic character of the Revolution.

As regards the estimation of the inner forces of the Revolution and its prospects, the author, at that period, adhered neither to one nor to the other of the main trends in the Russian Labour movement. The standpoint he then supported can be outlined as follows: the Revolution, having begun as a bourgeois revolution as regards its first tasks, will soon call forth powerful class conflicts and will gain final victory only by transferring power to the only class capable of standing at the head of the oppressed masses, namely, to the proletariat. Once in power, the proletariat not only will not want, but will not be able to limit itself to a bourgeois democratic programme. It will be able to carry through the Revolution to the end only in the event of the Russian Revolution being converted into a Revolution of the European proletariat. The bourgeois-democratic programme of the Revolution will then be superseded, together with its national limitations, and the temporary political domination of the Russian working class will develop into a prolonged Socialist dictatorship. But should Europe remain inert the bourgeois counter-revolution will not tolerate the government of the toiling masses in Russia and will throw the country back – far back from a democratic workers’ and peasants’ republic. Therefore, once having won power, the proletariat cannot keep within the limits of bourgeois democracy. It must adopt the tactics of permanent revolution , i.e., must destroy the barriers between the minimum and maximum programme of Social Democracy, go over to more and more radical social reforms and seek direct and immediate support in revolution in Western Europe. This position is developed and argued in the work now reissued, which was originally written in 1904-1906.

In maintaining the standpoint of the permanent revolution during a period of 15 years, the author nevertheless fell into error in his estimation of the contending factions of the social-democratic movement. As both of them started out from the standpoint of bourgeois revolution, the author was of the opinion that the divergencies existing between them would not be so deep as to justify a split. At the same time, he hoped that the further course of events would clearly prove the weakness and insignificance of Russian bourgeois democracy, on the one hand, and on the other, the objective impossibility of the proletariat limiting itself to a democratic programme. This he thought would remove the ground from under factional differences.

Having stood outside both of the two factions in the period of emigration, the author did not fully appreciate the very important circumstance that in reality, along the line of the disagreement between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, there were being grouped inflexible revolutionaries on the one side and, on the other, elements which were becoming more and more opportunist and accommodating. When the Revolution of 1917 broke out, the Bolshevik Party constituted a strong centralized organization uniting all the best elements of the advanced workers and revolutionary intellectuals, which – after some internal struggle – frankly adopted tactics directed towards the socialist dictatorship of the working class, in full harmony with the entire international situation and class relations in Russia. As to the Menshevik faction, it had, by that time, just ripened sufficiently to be able to assume, as I said before, the duties of bourgeois democracy.

In offering to the public this reprint of his book at the present time, the author not only desires to explain the theoretical principles which rendered it possible for him and other comrades, who for many years had stood outside the Bolshevik Party, to join their fate with the fate of that party at the beginning of 1917 (such a personal explanation would not provide a sufficient reason for the reprinting of the book), but also to recall the social-historical analysis of the motive forces of the Russian Revolution from which followed the conclusion that the seizure of political power by the working class could and must be the task of the Russian Revolution, long before the proletarian dictatorship had become an accomplished fact. The fact that it is possible for us now to re-issue without alteration this pamphlet written in 1906 and conceived in its fundamental lines already in 1904, is sufficient proof that Marxist theory is not on the side of the Menshevik substitutes for bourgeois democracy but on the side of the party which actually carries out the dictatorship of the working class.

The final test of a theory is experience. Irrefutable proof of our having correctly applied Marxist theory is given by the fact that the events in which we are now participating, and even our methods of participation in them, were foreseen in their fundamental lines some 15 years ago.

As an appendix we reprint an article which was published in the Paris Nashe Slovo for October 17th, 1915, entitled The Struggle for Power . This article had a polemical purpose and was a criticism of the programmatic Letter addressed to ‘Comrades in Russia’ by the leaders of the Mensheviks. In it we drew the conclusion that the development of class relations during the ten years after the revolution of 1905 had yet further undermined the Menshevik hope for a bourgeois democracy, and that thereby, obviously, the fate of the Russian Revolution was more than ever bound up with the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat ... In the face of the battle of ideas of all these many preceding years, one must indeed be a blockhead to speak of the ‘adventurism’ of the October Revolution!

Talking of the attitude of the Mensheviks to the Revolution, one cannot but mention the Menshevik degeneration of Kautsky, who in the ‘theories’ of Martov, Dan and Tsereteli now finds the expression of his own theoretical and political decay. After October 1917, we heard from Kautsky that, although the conquest of political power by the working class should be regarded as the historic task of the Social-Democratic Party, nevertheless, as the Russian Communist Party had failed to come to power through the particular door and according to the particular timetable fixed for it by Kautsky, the Soviet Republic ought to be handed over for correction to Kerensky, Tsereteli and Chernov. Kautsky’s reactionary-pedantic criticism must have come the more unexpectedly to those comrades who had gone through the period of the first Russian Revolution with their eyes open and had read Kautsky’s articles of 1905-1906. At that time Kautsky (true, not without the beneficial influence of Rosa Luxemburg) fully understood and acknowledged that the Russian Revolution could not terminate in a bourgeois-democratic republic but must inevitably lead to the proletarian dictatorship, because of the level attained by the class struggle in the country itself and because of the entire international situation of capitalism. Kautsky then frankly wrote about a workers’ government with a social-democratic majority. He did not even think of making the real course of the class struggle depend on the changing and superficial combinations of political democracy.

At that time, Kautsky understood that the Revolution would begin for the first time to rouse the many millions of peasants and urban petty-bourgeoisie and that not all at once but gradually, layer by layer, so that when the struggle between the proletariat and the capitalist bourgeoisie reached its climax, the broad peasant masses would still be at a very primitive level of political development and would give their votes to intermediary political parties reflecting only the backwardness and the prejudices of the peasant class. Kautsky understood then that the proletariat, led by the logic of the revolution toward the conquest of power, could not arbitrarily postpone this act indefinitely, because by this self-abnegation it would merely clear the field for counter-revolution. Kautsky understood then that, once having seized revolutionary power, the proletariat would not make the fate of the revolution depend upon the passing moods of the least conscious, not yet awakened masses at any given moment, but that, on the contrary, it would turn the political power concentrated in its hands into a mighty apparatus for the enlightenment and organization of these same backward and ignorant peasant masses. Kautsky understood that to call the Russian Revolution a bourgeois revolution and thereby to limit its tasks would mean not to understand anything of what was going on in the world. Together with the Russian and Polish revolutionary Marxists, he rightly acknowledged that, should the Russian proletariat conquer power before the European proletariat, it would have to use its situation as the ruling class not for the rapid surrender of its positions to the bourgeoisie but for rendering powerful assistance to the proletarian revolution in Europe and throughout the world. All these world-wide prospects, imbued with the spirit of Marxian doctrine, were not made dependent either by Kautsky or by us upon how and for whom the peasants would vote at the elections to the so-called Constituent Assembly in November and December 1917.

Now, when the prospects outlined 15 years ago have become reality, Kautsky refuses to grant a birth-certificate to the Russian Revolution for the reason that its birth has not been duly registered at the political office of bourgeois democracy. What an astonishing fact! What an incredible degradation of Marxism! One can say with full justice that the decay of the Second International has found in this philistine judgment on the Russian Revolution by one of its greatest theoreticians a still more hideous expression than in the voting of the War credits on August 4, 1914.

For decades Kautsky developed and upheld the ideas of social revolution. Now that it has become reality, Kautsky retreats before it in terror. He is horrified at the Russian Soviet power and takes up a hostile attitude towards the mighty movement of the German Communist proletariat. Kautsky resembles to the life a miserable schoolmaster, who for many years has been repeating a description of spring to his pupils within the four walls of his stuffy schoolroom, and when at last, at the sunset of his days as a teacher, he comes out into the fresh air, does not recognize spring, becomes furious (in so far as it is possible for this schoolmaster to become furious) and tries to prove that spring is not spring after all but only a great disorder in nature, because it is taking place against the laws of natural history. It is well that the workers do not trust even to the most authoritative pedants, but trust the voice of spring!

We, disciples of Marx, together with the German workers, stand by our conviction that the spring of revolution has arrived fully in accordance with the laws of social nature, and at the same time in accordance with the laws of Marxist theory, for Marxism is not a schoolmaster’s pointer rising above history, but a social analysis of the ways and means of the historic process which is really going on.

I have left the text of the two works – that of 1906 and that of 1915 – without any alterations. Originally I intended to supply the text with notes which would bring it up to date; but on looking through the text I had to renounce this intention. If I wanted to go into details, I should have to double the size of the book, for which I have no time at present – and, besides, such a ‘two-storeyed’ book would hardly be convenient for the reader. And, what is more important, I consider that the train of ideas in its main ramifications very nearly approaches the conditions of our time, and the reader who takes the trouble to get more thoroughly acquainted with this book will easily be able to supplement the exposition it gives with the necessary data taken from the experience of the present Revolution.

L. TROTSKY

March 12, 1919

The Kremlin

Results & Prospects Index Page | Introduction

Last updated on: 3.3.2007

[Introduction]

Leon Trotsky

Results and Prospects

[Introduction]

Transcribed and HTML markup for the Trotsky Internet Archive , a subarchive of the Marxists’ Internet Archive , by Sally Ryan in 1996.

T he Russian Revolution came unexpectedly to everybody but the Social Democrats. Marxism long ago predicted the inevitability of the Russian Revolution, which was bound to break out as a result of the conflict between capitalist development and the forces of ossified absolutism. Marxism estimated in advance the social character of the coming revolution. In calling it a bourgeois revolution, Marxism thereby pointed out that the immediate objective tasks of the revolution consisted in the creation of “normal conditions for the development of bourgeois society as a whole.

Marxism has proved to be right, and this is now past the need for discussion or proof. The Marxists are now confronted by a task of quite another kind: to discover the ‘possibilities’ of the developing revolution by means of an analysis of its internal mechanism. It would be a stupid mistake to identify our revolution with the events of 1789-93 or 1848. Historical analogies, by which liberalism lives and is nurtured, cannot take the place of social analysis.

The Russian Revolution has a quite peculiar character, which is the result of the peculiar trend of our whole social and historical development, and which in its turn opens before us quite new historical prospects.

Preface | Results & Prospects Index Page | Next Chapter

Last updated on: 3.3.2007

The Peculiarities of Russian Historical Development

Leon Trotsky

Results and Prospects

I. The Peculiarities of

Russian Historical Development

Transcribed and HTML markup for the Trotsky Internet Archive , a subarchive of the Marxists’ Internet Archive , by Sally Ryan in 1996.

I f we compare social development in Russia with social development in the other European countries – bracketing the latter together in respect of that which their history has in common and which distinguishes it from the history of Russia – we can say that the main characteristic of Russian social development is its comparative primitiveness and slowness.

We shall not dwell here on the natural causes of this primitiveness, but the fact itself remains indubitable: Russian social life has been built up on a poorer and more primitive economic foundation.

Marxism teaches that the development of the forces of production determines the social-historical process. The formation of economic corporations, classes and estates is only possible when this development has reached a certain level. Estate [1] and class differentiation, which is determined by the development of the division of labour and the creation of more specialized social functions, presupposes that the part of the population employed on immediate material production produces a surplus over and above its own consumption: it is only by alienating this surplus that non-producing classes can arise and take shape. Furthermore, the division of labour among the producing classes themselves is possible only at a certain degree of development of agriculture, capable of ensuring the supply of agricultural produce to the non-agricultural population. These fundamental propositions of social development were already clearly formulated by Adam Smith.

Hence it follows that, although the Novgorod period of our history coincides with the beginning of the European Middle Ages, the slow pace of economic development caused by the natural-historical conditions (less favourable geographical situation, sparse population) was bound to hamper the process of class formation and to give it a more primitive character.

It is difficult to say what shape Russian social development would have taken if it had remained isolated and under the influence of inner tendencies only. It is enough to say that this did not happen. Russian social life, built up on a certain internal economic foundation, has all the time been under the influence, even under the pressure, of its external social-historical milieu.

When this social and state organization, in the process of its formation, came into collision with other, neighbouring organizations, the primitiveness of the economic relations of the one and the comparatively high development of the others played decisive parts in the ensuing process.

The Russian state, which grew up on a primive economic basis, entered into relations and came into conflict with state organizations built upon higher and more stable foundations. Two possibilities presented themselves: either the Russian State was to succumb in its struggle with them, as the Golden Horde had succumbed in its struggle with the Moscow State, or it was to overtake them in the development of economic relations and absorb a great deal more vital forces than it could have done had it remained isolated. The economy of Russia, however, was already sufficiently developed to prevent the former happening. The State did not break down but started growing under the terrible pressure of economic forces.

Thus, the main thing was not that Russia was surrounded by enemies on all sides. This alone does not explain the position. Indeed, this would apply to any other European country, except, perhaps, England. In their mutual struggle for existence, these states depended upon more or less identical economic bases and therefore the development of their state organizations was not subject to such powerful external pressure.

The struggle against the Crimean and Nogai Tatars called forth the utmost exertion of effort. But this was, of course, not greater than the exertion of effort during the hundred years’ war between France and England. It was not the Tatars who compelled Old Russia to introduce firearms and create the standing regiments of Streltsi; it was not the Tatars who later on forced her to form knightly cavalry and infantry forces, but the pressure of Lithuania, Poland and Sweden.

As a consequence of this pressure on the part of Western Europe, the State swallowed up an inordinately large part of the surplus produce; i.e., it lived at the expense of the privileged classes which were being formed, and so hampered their already slow development. But that was not all. The State pounced upon the ‘necessary product’ of the farmer, deprived him of his livelihood, caused him to flee from the land upon which he had not even had time to settle – and thus hampered the growth of the population and the development of the productive forces. Thus, inasmuch as the State swallowed up a disproportionately large part of the surplus product, it hampered the already slow differentiation between estates; inasmuch as it took away an important part of the necessary product it destroyed even those primitive production bases upon which it depended.

But in order to exist, to function, and therefore,a bove all, to alienate the part of the social product it required, the State needed a hierarchical organization of estates. This is why, while undermining the economic foundations of its development, it simultaneously strove to force the development of these foundations by Government measures, and – like any other State – strove to turn this development of estates to its own advantage. Milyukov, the historian of Russian culture, sees in this a direct contrast to the history of Western Europe. But there is no contrast here.

The estates-monarchy of the Middle Ages, which grew into bureaucratic absolutism, constituted a state form reinforcing certain definite social interests and relations. But this state form itself, once it had arisen and was in being, had its own interests (dynastic, court, bureaucratic ...) which came into conflict not only with the interests of the lower but even with those of the higher estates. The dominating estates, which constituted the socially indispensable ‘middle wall’ between the masses of the people and the State organization, exercised pressure on the latter and made their own interests the content of the State’s practical activity. At the same time, the State power, as an independent force, also looked upon the interests of the higher estates from its own point of view. It developed resistance to their aspirations and tried to subject them to itself. The actual history of the relations between State and estates proceeded along resultant lines, determined by the correlation of forces.

A process identical in fundamentals took place in Russia.

The State strove to make use of the developing economic groups, to subject them to its own specialized financial and military interests. The dominating economic groups, as they arose, strove to use the State to consolidate their advantages in the form of estate privileges. In this play of social forces, the resultant went much more in favour of the State power than was the case in the history of Western Europe. The exchange of services between the State power and the upper social groups, at the expense of the working masses, which finds its expression in the distribution of rights and obligations, of burdens and privileges, was less advantageous to the nobility and clergy in Russia than in the mediaeval estates-monarchies of Western Europe. This is beyond doubt. Nevertheless, it would be a great exaggeration and contrary to all sense of proportion to say that while in the West the estates created the State, in Russia the State power created the estates in its own interests (as Milyukov does).

Estates cannot be created by State action, by law. Before one or another social group can take shape as a privileged estate with the help of the State power, it must have developed economically with all its social advantages. Estates cannot be manufactured according to a previously established scale of ranks or according to the code of the Legion d’Honneur. The State power can but assist, with all its resources, the elementary economic process which brings forward higher economic formations. As indicated above, the Russian State consumed a comparatively large share of the forces of the nation, thus hampering the process of social crystallization, but it needed this process for its own purposes. It is natural, therefore, that under the influence and the pressure of its more differentiated Western milieu, a pressure that was transmitted through the military-state organization, the State in its turn strove to force the development of social differentiation on a primitive economic foundation. Furthermore, the very need for forcing, caused by the weakness of the social-economic formations, made it natural that the State in its efforts as guardian should have tried to use its preponderant power to direct the very development of the upper classes according to its own discretion. But on the way to the achievement of great success in this direction, the State first found itself baulked by its own weakness and the primitive character of its own organization, which was due, as we have seen, to the primitiveness of the social structure.

Thus, the Russian State, erected on the basis of Russian economic conditions, was being pushed forward by the friendly, and even more by the hostile, pressure of the neighbouring State organizations, which had grown up on a higher economic basis. From a certain moment – especially from the end of the seventeenth century – the State strove with all its power to accelerate the country’s natural economic development. New branches of handicraft, machinery, factories, big industry, capital, were, so to say, artificially grafted on the natural economic stem. Capitalism seemed to be an offspring of the State.

From this standpoint it could be said that all Russian science is the artificial product of government effort, an artificial grafting on the natural stem of national ignorance. [2]

Russian thought, like the Russian economy, developed under the direct pressure the higher thought and more developed economies of the West. Since, owing to the natural-economy character of economic conditions, i.e., the poor development of foreign trade, relations with other countries bore a predominantly State character, the influence of these countries found expression in fierce struggle for the existence of the State before expressing itself in direct economic competition. Western economics influenced Russian economics through the intermediary of the State. In order to be able to survive in the midst of better-armed hostile countries, Russia was compelled to set up factories, organize navigation schools, publish textbooks on fortification, etc. But if the general course of the internal economy of this enormous country had not been moving in this same direction, if the development of economic conditions had not created the demand for general and applied science, all the efforts of the State would have been fruitless. The national economy, which was naturally developing from natural economy to money-commodity economy, responded only to those measures of the Government which corresponded to its development and only to the extent that they corresponded to it. The history of Russian industry, of the Russian currency system, and of State credit, are the best possible evidence for the above opinion.

‘The majority of the branches of industry (metal, sugar, petroleum, distilling, even the textile industry),’ writes Professor Mendeleyev, ‘were originated under the direct influence of Government measures, sometimes even with the help of large Government subsidies, but especially because the Government always consciously followed the policy of Protection. In the reign of Alexander, the Government frankly inscribed this policy on its banner ... The higher Government circles, fully accepting the principles of Protection in application to Russia, proved to be more advanced than our educated classes as a whole.’ D. Mendeleyev, Towards the Understanding of Russia , St. Petersburg 1906, p.84).

The learned panegyrist of industrial Protection forgets to add that the policy of the Government was dictated not by any concern to develop industrial forces, but purely by fiscal and in part military-technical considerations. For this reason, the policy of Protection was often opposed, not only to the fundamental interests of industrial development but even to the private interests of various groups of businessmen. Thus, the cotton-mill owners openly declared that ‘the high duties on cotton are being maintained not with a view to encouraging cotton-growing but exclusively for fiscal interests’. As in the ‘creation’ of estates the Government was pursuing, above all, the aims of the State, so also in ‘planting’ industry, its main concern was directed towards the requirements of the State Exchequer. There is no doubt, however, that the autocracy played no small part in transplanting the factory system of production on to Russian soil.

At the moment when developing bourgeois society began to feel a need for the political institutions of the West, the autocracy proved to be armed with all the material might of the European States. It rested upon a centralized bureaucratic machine which was quite useless for establishing new relations but was able to develop great energy in carrying out systematic repressions. The enormous distances of the country had been overcome by the telegraph, which imparts confidence to the actions of the administration and gives relative uniformity and rapidity to its proceedings (in the matter of repressions). The railways render it possible to throw military forces rapidly from one end of the country to the other. The pre-revolutionary governments of Europe hardly knew railways and telegraphs. The army at the disposal of absolutism was colossal – and if it proved useless in the serious trials of the Japanese War, it was nevertheless good enough for internal domination. Not only the Government of France before the great Revolution, but even the Government of 1848, knew nothing similar to the Russian army of today.

While exploiting the country to the utmost by means its fiscal and military machine, the Government brought its yearly budget up to the huge figure of two milliard roubles. Supported by its army and its budget, the autocratic government made the European Stock Exchange its exchequer, and the Russian taxpayer thus became a hopeless tributary of this European Stock Exchange.

Thus, in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century, the Russian Government confronted the world as a colossal military-bureaucratic and fiscal – Stock-Exchange organization of invincible power.

The financial and military might of the absolute monarchy overwhelmed and blinded not only the European bourgeoisie but also Russian liberalism, which lost all faith in the possibility of trying conclusions with absolutism in an open measurement of strength. The military and financial might of absolutism seemed to exclude any chance whatever for the Russian Revolution. But in reality just the opposite proved to be the case.

The more a government is centralized and the more independent it is of society, the sooner it becomes an autocratic organization standing above society. The greater the financial and military forces of such an organization are, the longer and more successfully can it continue its struggle for existence. The centralized State with its budget of two milliards, its debt of eight milliards and its army of many millions of men under arms, could continue to exist long after it had ceased to satisfy the most elementary needs of social development – not only the needs of internal administration but even the needs of military security, for the maintenance of which it was originally formed.

The longer such a state of affairs dragged on, the greater became the contradiction between the needs of economic and cultural development and the policy of the Government, which had developed its mighty ‘milliard-fold’ inertia. After the epoch of the ‘great patchwork reforms’ – which not only did not eliminate these contradictions but on the contrary for the first time vividly revealed them – had been left behind, it became ever more difficult, and psychologically ever more impossible, for the Government voluntarily to take the path of parliamentarism. The only way out of these contradictions which its situation indicated to society was through the accumulation of sufficient steam within the boiler of absolutism to burst it.

Thus, the administrative, military and financial power of absolutism, thanks to which it could exist in spite of social development, not only did not exclude the possibility of revolution, as was the opinion of the liberals. but, on the contrary, made revolution the only way out; furthermore, this revolution was guaranteed in advance an all the more radical character in proportion as the great might of absolutism dug an abyss between itself and the nation. Russian Marxism can justly be proud of having alone explained the direction of this development and foretold its general forms [3] , while the liberals fed themselves on the most utopian ‘practicalism’ and the revolutionary ‘Narodniki’ lived on phantasmagoria and a belief in miracles.

The entire preceding social development made revolution inevitable. What, then, were the forces of this revolution?

1. i.e., a section of pre-capitalist society possessing formally laid down rights and duties. cf. the ‘third estate’, i.e., those who were neither nobles nor clergy, in pre-revolutionary France. – Trans.

2. It is sufficient to recall the characteristic features of the original relations between the State and the school to realize that the latter was, at the very least, just as ‘artificial’ product of the State as the factory was. The educational efforts of the State illustrate this ‘artificiality’. Pupils who played truant were put in chains. The whole school was in chains. Study was a form of service. Pupils were paid wages, etc.. etc. – L.T.

3. Even such a reactionary bureaucrat as Professor Mendeleyev cannot but admit this. Speaking about the development of industry, he observes: ‘The socialists perceived something here and even partly understood it, but went astray, following their Latinism [!], recommending resort to force, pandering to the brutal instincts of the mob and striving toward revolutions and power.’ ( Towards the Understanding of Russia , p.120)

Introduction | Results & Prospects Index Page | Next Chapter

Last updated on: 22 February 2009

The Towns and Capital

Leon Trotsky

Results and Prospects

II. The Towns and Capital

Transcribed and HTML markup for the Trotsky Internet Archive , a subarchive of the Marxists’ Internet Archive , by Sally Ryan in 1996.

U rban Russia is a product of very recent history; more precisely, of the last few decades. At the end of the reign of Peter I, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the town population numbered somewhat more than 328,000, i.e., about 3 per cent of the total population of the country. At the end of the same century, it amounted to 1,301,000, about 4.1 per cent of the total population. By 1812 the urban population had risen to 1,653,000, which was equivalent to 4.4 per cent of the total. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was still no more than 3,482,000 – 7.8 per cent of the total. Finally, according to the last census (1897) the population of the towns numbered 16,289,000, i.e., about 13 per cent of the total population. [1]

If we consider the town as a social-economic formation and not merely as an administrative unit, we must admit that the above figures do not give a true picture of urban development: the history of the Russian State shows us numerous instances where charters were granted to or withdrawn from towns for reasons which were far from scientific. Nevertheless, these figures do clearly show the insignificance of the towns in pre-Reform Russia and their feverishly rapid growth during the last decade. According to the calculations of Mikhailovsky, the increase in the urban population between 1885 and 1887 was equivalent to 33.8 per cent, i.e., more than double the increase in the population of Russia as a whole (15.25 per cent), and nearly three times the increase in the rural population (12.7 per cent). If we add to this the industrial villages and hamlets, the rapid growth of the urban (in the sense of non-agricultural) population appears more clearly still.

But the modern Russian towns differ from the old ones not only in the number of their inhabitants but also in their social type: they are centres of commercial and industrial life. The majority of our old towns played hardly any economic role; they were military and administrative centres or fortresses, their inhabitants were employed in one or another form of State service and lived at the expense of the exchequer, and in general the city was an administrative, military and tax-collecting centre.

When a non-service population settled within the precincts of the town or on its outskirts, for protection against enemies, this did not in the slightest degree interfere with their continuing with their former agricultural pursuits. Even Moscow, the largest town in old Russia, was, according to M. Milyukov, simply ‘a royal manor, a considerable portion of the population of which was connected in one way or another with the court, either as members of the suite, as guards, or as servants. Out of over 16,000 households, according to the census of 1701, not more than 7,000, that is, 44 per cent, were settlers and craftsmen, and even these lived in the State suburb and worked for the palace. The remaining 9,000 belonged to the clergy (1,500) and the ruling estate’. Thus, the Russian towns, like the towns under the Asiatic despotisms, and in contrast to the craft and trading towns of the European Middle Ages, played only the role of consumers. In the same period the towns of the West more or less successfully established the principle that craftsmen had no right to live in the villages, but the Russian towns never strove after such aims. Where, then, were manufacturing industry and the crafts? In the country, attached to agriculture.

The low economic level, with the intense depredations of the State, did not permit of any accumulation of wealth or social division of labour. The shorter summer in comparison with the West allowed a longer winter leisure. Owing to these factors, manufacturing industry was never separated from agriculture and was not concentrated in the towns, but remained in the countryside as an occupation auxiliary to agriculture. When, in the second half of the nineteenth century, capitalist industry began to develop widely, it did not encounter any urban crafts but, in the main, only village handicraft. ‘For the one and a half million factory workers, at the most, that there are in Russia’, writes M. Milyukov, ‘there are still not less than four million peasants engaged in domestic manufactures in their own villages, who continue to carry on at the same time their agricultural occupations. This is the very class from which ... the European factories arose, but which did not in the slightest degree participate ... in the setting up of Russia’s factories.’

Of course, the further growth of the population and of its productivity created a basis for the social division of labour. This naturally applied also to the urban crafts. As a result, however, of the economic pressure of the advanced countries, this basis was seized by large-scale capitalist industry, so that the town handicrafts had no time to develop.

The four million rural craftsmen comprised the very element which, in Europe, formed the nucleus of the town population, entered the guilds as masters or journeymen, and subsequently found themselves more and more left outside the guilds. It was precisely the craftsman class that constituted the bulk of the population in the most revolutionary quarters of Paris during the Great Revolution. This fact alone – the insignificance of our urban crafts – had immeasurable consequence for our revolution. [2]

The essential economic feature of the modern town lies in the fact that it works up raw materials supplied by the country. For that reason conditions of transport are decisive for it. Only the introduction of railways could so greatly widen the sources of supply for the town as to make it possible to concentrate such large masses of people. The necessity for concentrating the population arose out of the growth of large factory industry. The nucleus of the population of a modern town, at least of a town possessing some economic and political significance, is the sharply differentiated class of wage-workers. It was this class, as yet substantially unknown during the period of the Great French Revolution, that was destined to play the decisive role in our revolution.

The factory industrial system not only brings the proletariat to the forefront but also cuts the ground from under the feet of bourgeois democracy. In previous revolutions the latter found its support in the urban petty-bourgeoisie: craftsmen, small shopkeepers, etc.

Another reason for the disproportionately large political role played by the Russian proletariat is the fact that Russian capital is to a considerable extent of foreign origin. This fact, according to Kautsky, resulted in the growth of the number, strength and influence of the proletariat being out of proportion to the growth of bourgeois liberalism.

As we have said above, capitalism in Russia did not develop out of the handicraft system. It conquered Russia with the economic culture of the whole of Europe behind it, and before it, as its immediate competitor, the helpless village craftsman or the wretched town craftsman, and it had the half-beggared peasantry as a reservoir of labour-power. Absolutism assisted in various ways in fettering the country with the shackles of capitalism.

In the first place it converted the Russian peasant into a tributary of the Stock Exchanges of the world. The absence of capital within the country and the government’s constant need for money created a field for usurious foreign loans. From the reign of Catharine II to the ministry of Witte and Durnovo, the Amsterdam, London, Berlin and Paris bankers systematically strove to convert the autocracy into a colossal Stock-Exchange speculation. A considerable part of the so-called internal loans, i.e., loans realized through the home credit departments, were in no way distinguished from foreign loans, because they were in reality placed with foreign capitalists. Proletarianising and pauperising the peasantry by heavy taxation, absolutism converted the millions of the European Stock Exchange into soldiers and battleships, into prisons and into railways. The greater part of this expenditure was, from the economic point of view, absolutely non-productive. An enormous share of the national product was sent abroad in the form of interest, and enriched and strengthened the financial aristocracy of Europe. The European financial bourgeoisie, whose political influence in parliamentary countries during the last ten years has grown uninterruptedly and has forced the commercial and industrial capitalists into the background, converted, it is true, the Tsarist Government into its vassal; but it could not and did not desire to become a component part of the bourgeois opposition within Russia. It was guided in its sympathies and antipathies by the principles formulated by the Dutch bankers Hoppe and Co., in the conditions for the loan to Tsar Paul in 1798: ‘interest must be paid irrespective of political circumstances ’. The European Stock Exchange was even directly interested in the maintenance of absolutism, for no other government could guarantee such usurious interest. State loans, however, were not the only means whereby European capital was imported into Russia. The very money, payment of which absorbed a good part of the Russian State budget, returned to the territory of Russia in the form of commercial-industrial capital attracted by the untouched natural wealth of the country, and especially by the unorganized labour-power, which so far had not been accustomed to put up any resistance. The latter period of our industrial boom of 1893-99 was also a period of intensified immigration of European capital. Thus it was capital which, as before, remained largely European and which realized its political power in the parliaments of France and Belgium, that mobilised the working class in Russia.

By economically enslaving this backward country, European capital projected its main branches of production and methods of communication across a whole series of intermediate technical and economic stages through which it had to pass in its countries of origin. But the fewer obstacles it met with in the path of its economic domination, the more insignificant proved to be its political role.

The European bourgeoisie developed out of the Third Estate of the Middle Ages. It raised the standard of protest against the pillage and violence carried on by the first two estates, in the name of the interests of the people which it itself desired to exploit. The estates-monarchy of the Middle Ages, in its process of conversion into bureaucratic absolutism, relied on the population of the towns in its struggle against the pretensions of the clergy and the nobility. The bourgeoisie made use of this for its own political elevation. Thus, bureaucratic absolutism and the capitalist class developed simultaneously, and when these two came into conflict, in 1789, the bourgeoisie proved to have the whole nation behind it.

Russian absolutism developed under the direct pressure of the Western states. It copied their methods of government and administration much earlier than economic conditions here permitted the rise of a capitalist bourgeoisie. It already disposed of a tremendous standing army and a centralised, bureaucratic and fiscal machine, and had entered into irredeemable debt to the European bankers, at a time when the Russian towns still played an absolutely insignificant economic role.

Capital intruded from the West with the direct co-operation of absolutism, and in a short period converted a number of old archaic towns into centres of trade and industry, and even created, in a short time, commercial and industrial towns in places that previously had been absolutely uninhabited. This capital frequently appeared in the form of large impersonal shareholding companies. During the ten years of the industrial booms of 1893-1902 the total share capital increased by two milliard roubles, whereas during 1854-92 it had increased by only 900 millions. The proletariat immediately found itself concentrated in tremendous masses, while between these masses and the autocracy there stood a capitalist bourgeoisie, very small in numbers, isolated from the ‘people’, half-foreign, without historical traditions, and inspired only by the greed for gain.

1. The figures are taken from Milyukov’s Essays . The urban population of all Russia, including Siberia and Finland, was given by the 1897 census as 17,122,000 or 13.25 per cent of the total. (Mendeleyev, Towards the Understanding of Russia , St. Petersburg 1906, 2 vols., table on p.90)

2. At a time when uncritical comparison between the Russian revolution and the French revolution of 1789 had become commonplace, Parvus very sagaciously pointed out this fact as being responsible for the particular destiny of the Russian revolution. – L.T.