Chapter Seventeen Foreword to Karl Marx, Parizhskaya Kommuna (December 1905) Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky’s foreword to Marx’s account of the Paris Commune1 marks an important break with the naïve economic determinism that often characterised Second-International Marxism. In this article, even more than in his previous writings on permanent revolution, Trotsky emphasised the interaction bet- ween economic conditions and revolutionary con- sciousness. In 1871, he noted, the workers of Paris did not seize power because economic circumstances suddenly ‘matured’ at some particular moment; on the contrary, it was the logic of class struggle that dictated a revolutionary course of events. The French bourgeoisie betrayed the nation because it feared arming the proletariat more than it feared the armies of Bismarck:

1 St. Petersburg (Knigoizdatel’stvo Molot’, 1906). See Marx 1871. [Of special signifi cance is Engels’s concluding paragraph to his 1891 Introduction on the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune: ‘Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been fi lled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ Frederick Engels, London, on the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, 18 March, 1891 (CW, Vol. 27: 179–191, p. 191)]. 498 • Leon Trotsky

The proletariat saw that the hour had come when it must save the country and become master of its own destiny. It could not avoid seizing power; it was compelled to do so by a series of political events. Power took it by surprise.

In Russia, likewise, the precipitating condition for proletarian revolution was social paralysis, symbolised by the co-existence of soviets with the autocracy, from which the only escape was through a workers’ government. ‘The bourgeoisie,’ Trotsky wrote, ‘is incapable of leading the people to win a parliamentary order through the overthrow of absolutism. And the people, in the form of the proletariat, are preventing the bourgeoisie from achieving constitutional guarantees through any agreement with absolutism.’ In this impasse, the proletariat, as ‘the sole force leading the revolution and the principal fi ghter on its behalf’, must follow the example of the Communards by seizing power and taking responsibility for itself and the country. Russian liberals (together with many Social Democrats) understood Marxism to say that ‘Capitalism must “exhaust itself” before the proletariat can take state power into its own hands’. Trotsky replied that this mechanistic understanding ignored completely the dynamic of class struggle. Critics of permanent revolution had

. . . only managed to memorise a few isolated elements of the Marxist theory of capitalist development, but they have remained primitive bourgeois barbarians in everything that concerns class struggle and its objective logic. When they appeal to ‘objective social development’ in response to the idea of uninterrupted revolution, which for us is a conclusion following from social-political relations, they forget that this same development includes not merely economic evolution, which they so superfi cially understand, but also the revolutionary logic of class relations, which they cannot bring themselves even to consider.2

Given Russia’s peculiar combination of capitalist and precapitalist elements,3 the decisive factor in class relations was the relative weakness of the bourgeoisie

2 [Italics added.] 3 [Trotsky later interpreted this combination in terms of the laws of uneven and combined development. For a full statement, see L. Trotsky 1987, Chap. 2; also L. Trotsky 1977, Vol. 1: The Overthrow of Tzarism, Chap. 1: Peculiarities of Russia’s Development.]