Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October - Platypus

Leon Trotsky 11one must measure up not to old formulas but to the new reality. Is this realitycovered by Comrade Kamenev’s Old Bolshevik formula, which saysthat ’the bourgeois democratic revolution is not completed’?”It is not,” Lenin answers. ”The formula is obsolete. It is no good at all. Itis dead. And it is no use trying to revive it” 2To be sure, Lenin occasionally remarked that the soviets of workers’, soldiers’,and peasants’ deputies in the first period of the February revolutiondid, to a certain degree, embody the revolutionary democratic dictatorshipof the proletariat and the peasantry. And this was true insofar as these sovietsembodied power in general. But, as Lenin time and again explained,the soviets of the February period embodied only demi -power. They supportedthe power of the bourgeoisie while exercising semi-oppositionist”pressure” upon it. And it was precisely this intermediate position that didnot permit them to transcend the framework of the democratic coalition ofworkers, peasants, and soldiers. In its form of rule, this coalition tendedtoward dictatorship to the extent that it did not rely upon regulated governmentalrelations but upon armed force and direct revolutionary supervision.However, it fell far short of an actual dictatorship. The instabilityof the conciliationist soviets lay precisely in this democratic amorphousnessof a demi- power coalition of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Thesoviets had to either disappear entirely or take real power into their hands.But they could take power not in the capacity of a democratic coalitionof workers and peasants represented by different parties, but only as thedictatorship of the proletariat directed by a single party and drawing afterit the peasant masses, beginning with their semi-proletarian sections. Inother words, a democratic workers’ and peasants’ coalition could only takeshape as an immature form of power incapable of attaining real power-itcould take shape only as a tendency and not as a concrete fact. Any furthermovement toward the attainment of power inevitably had to explode thedemocratic shell, confront the majority of the peasantry with the necessityof following the workers, provide the proletariat with an opportunity torealize a class dictatorship, and thereby place on the agenda — along witha complete and ruthlessly radical democratization of social relations — apurely socialist invasion of the workers’ state into the sphere of capitalistproperty rights. Under such circumstances, whoever continued to cling tothe formula of a ”democratic dictatorship” in effect renounced power andled the revolution into a blind alley.The fundamental controversial question around which everything else centeredwas this: whether or not we should struggle for power; whether ornot we should assume power. This alone is ample proof that we were notthen dealing with a mere episodic difference of opinion but with two ten-2 CW-Vol.24, ”Letters on Tactics” (April 8-13, 1917), pp.44-50.