Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: CHAPTER 4 -- The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution
Leon Trotsky's
1905
CHAPTER 4
The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution
* * *
Apopulation of 150 million people, 5.4 million square kilometers of land in Europe, 17.5 million in Asia.
Within this vast space every epoch of human culture is to be found: from the primeval barbarism of the
northern forests, where people eat raw fish and worship blocks of wood, to the modern social relations of
the capitalist city, where socialist workers consciously recognize themselves as participants in world
politics and keep a watchful eye on events in the Balkans and on debates in the German Reichstag. The
most concentrated industry in Europe based on the most backward agriculture in Europe. The most
colossal state apparatus in the world making use of every achievement of modern technological progress
in order to retard the historical progress of its own country.
In the preceding chapters we have tried, leaving aside all de tails, to give a general picture of Russia's
economic relations and social contradictions. That is the soil on which our social classes grow, live and
fight. The revolution will show us those classes at a period of the most intensive struggle. But there are
consciously formed associations which intervene directly in a country's political life: parties, unions, the
army, the bureaucracy, the press and, placed above these, the ministers of state, the political leaders, the
demagogues and the hangmen. Classes cannot be seen at a glance -- they usually remain behind the
scenes. Yet this does not prevent political parties and their leaders, as well as ministers of state and their
hangmen, from being mere organs of their respective classes. Whether these organs are good or bad is by
no means irrelevant to progress and the final outcome of events. If ministers are merely the hired servants
of the "objective intelligence of the state," this by no means relieves them of the necessity of having a
modicum of brain inside their own skulls -- a fact which they themselves are too often apt to over look.
On the other hand, the logic of the class struggle does not exempt us from the necessity of using our own
logic. Whoever is unable to admit initiative, talent, energy, and heroism into the framework of historical
necessity, has not grasped the philosophical secret of Marxism. But, conversely, if we want to grasp a
political process -- in this case, the revolution -- as a whole, we must be capable of seeing, behind the
motley of parties and programs, behind the perfidy and greed of some and the courage and idealism of
others, the proper outlines of the social classes whose roots lie deep within the relations of production
and whose flowers blossom in the highest spheres of ideology.
The Modern City
The nature of capitalist classes is closely bound up with the history of the development of industry and of
the town. It is true that in Russia the industrial population coincides with the urban population to a lesser
extent than anywhere else. Apart from the factory suburbs which, for purely formal reasons, are not
included within the boundaries of towns, there exist several dozen important industrial centers in the
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