Trotsky - The Revolution Betrayed.pdf - Mehring Books

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Introduction
only the beginning of the world socialist revolution. Its further
development and completion depended upon the efforts of the
world proletariat. The Communist International, in whose
founding the Bolsheviks played the decisive role, was to serve
as the strategical high command of the world struggle against
capitalism.
The Bolshevik victory was, indeed, the beginning of a
massive international upsurge of the working class. But in
no other country did there exist a leadership whose political
qualities approached those of the Bolshevik Party. The party
of Lenin was the product of years of irreconcilable theoretical
struggle against every current of opportunism in the Russian
workers' movement. The significance of the political divisions
within the socialist tendencies existing in Russia and
internationally in 1917 would not have been so clearly defined
had it not been for Lenin's previous labors. The split between
Bolshevism and Menshevism in 1903 anticipated by more
than a decade the split in the Second International produced
by the outbreak of the world war in 1914. Lenin's differentiation
between Marxism and all forms of petty-bourgeois
opportunism made possible the fruitful political struggle
waged by the Bolsheviks in 1917 against the reformist
(Menshevik) allies of the bourgeois Provisional Government.
Even in Germany, no such preparation had preceded the
outbreak of revolutionary struggles. There, the decisive
organizational break with the opportunists and the founding
of the Communist Party took place some six weeks after the
outbreak of the November 1918 revolution. And only two
weeks later, on January 15, 1919, the murder of Luxemburg
and Liebknecht, with the behind-the-scene approval of the
Social Democratic government, deprived the German working
class of its finest leaders. Between 1919 and 1923, the
working class suffered a series of major defeats — in
Hungary, Italy, Estonia, Bulgaria and, worst of all, in
Germany. In each case the cause of the defeat lay in the
treachery of the old Social Democratic parties, which still
commanded the support of a significant section of the working
class, and the political immaturity of the new Communist
organizations.