Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: CHAPTER 4 -- The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution
all its voracious glory, today poisoning with opium the Chinese craftsman whom it has ruined, tomorrow
enriching the Russian seas with new warships, the day after seizing diamond deposits in South Africa.
But when English or French capital, the historical coagulate of many centuries, appears in the steppes of
the Donets basin, it cannot release the same social forces, relations, and passions which once went into its
own formation. It does not repeat on the new territory the development which it has already completed,
but starts from the point at which it has arrived on its own ground. Around the machines which it has
transported across the seas and the customs barriers, it immediately, without any intermediate stages
whatever, concentrates the masses of a new proletariat, and into this class it instills the revolutionary
energy of all the past generations of the bourgeoisie -- an energy which in Europe has by now become
stagnant.
During the heroic period of French history we see a bourgeoisie which has not yet realized the
contradictions of its own position, a bourgeoisie upon which history has placed the leader ship of a
struggle for a new order, not only against the outdated institutions of France, but also against reactionary
forces in Europe as a whole. The bourgeoisie, personified by all its factions in turn, gradually becomes
conscious of itself and becomes the leader of the nation; it draws the masses into the struggle, gives them
slogans to fight for, and dictates the tactics of their fight.
Democracy unifies the nation by giving it a political ideology. The people -- the petty bourgeoisie, the
peasants and the workers -- appoint the bourgeoisie as their deputies, and the orders issued to these
deputies by the communes are written in the language of a bourgeoisie becoming conscious of its
Messianic role. During the revolution itself, although class antagonisms become apparent, the powerful
momentum of revolutionary struggle nevertheless consistently removes the most static elements of the
bourgeoisie from the political path. No layer is stripped off be fore it has handed its energy over to the
succeeding layers. The nation as a whole continues during all this time to fight for its objectives, using
increasingly more radical and decisive means. When the uppermost layers of the property-owning
bourgeoisie cut themselves off from the national nucleus which had thus been set in motion, and when
they entered into an alliance with Louis WI, the democratic demands of the nation, now directed against
the bourgeoisie as well, led to universal franchise and to the Re public as being the logically inevitable
form of democracy.
The great French Revolution was truly a national revolution. But more than that: here, within a national
framework, the world struggle of the bourgeois order for domination, for power, and for unimpaired
triumph found its classic expression.
By 1848 the bourgeoisie was already unable to play a similar role. It did not want to, and could not,
assume responsibility for a revolutionary liquidation of the social order which barred the way to its own
dominance. Its task -- and this it fully realized -- consisted in introducing into the old order certain
essential guarantees, not of its own political dominance, but only of co dominance with the forces of the
past. It not only failed to lead the masses in storming the old order; it used the old order as a defense
against the masses who were trying to push it forward. Its consciousness rebelled against the objective
conditions of its dominance. Democratic institutions were reflected in its mind, not as the aim and
purpose of its struggle, but as a threat to its well-being. The revolution could not be made by the
bourgeoisie, but only against the bourgeoisie. That is why a successful revolution in 1848 would have
needed a class capable of marching at the head of events regardless of the bourgeoisie and despite it, a
class prepared not only to push the bourgeoisie forward by the force of its pressure, but also, at the
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