Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October - Platypus

Leon Trotsky 23if they were the organizing centers of our own forces and ofstate power. . . . Their very name shows that they constitute abloc of petty bourgeois and proletarian forces which are stillconfronted with uncompleted bourgeois democratic tasks. Hadthe bourgeois democratic revolution been completed, this blocwould no longer exist. . . and the proletariat would be waging arevolutionary struggle against the bloc. . . . And, nevertheless,we recognize these soviets as centers for the organization offorces. . . Consequently, the bourgeois revolution is not yet completed,it has not yet outlived itself; and I believe that all of usought to recognize that with the complete accomplishment ofthis revolution, the power would actually have passed into thehands of the proletariat.” 1The hopeless schematism of this argument is obvious enough. For the cruxof the matter lies precisely in the fact that the ”complete accomplishmentof this revolution” could never take place without changing the bearers ofpower. The above speech ignores the class axis of the revolution; it deducesthe task of the party not from the actual grouping of class forces butfrom a formal definition of the revolution as bourgeois, or as bourgeoisdemocratic. We are to participate in a bloc with the petty bourgeoisie andexercise control over the bourgeois power until the bourgeois revolutionhas been completely accomplished. The pattern is obviously Menshevik.Imitating in a doctrinaire fashion the tasks of the revolution by its nomenclature(a ”bourgeois” revolution), one could not fail to arrive at the policyof exercising control over the Provisional Government and demanding thatthe Provisional Government should bring forward a policy of peace withoutannexations, and so on. By the completion of the democratic revolutionwas understood a series of reforms to be effected through the ConstituentAssembly! Moreover, the Bolshevik Party was assigned the role of a leftwing in the Constituent Assembly. Such an outlook deprived the slogan”All power to the soviets!” of any actual meaning. This was best and mostconsistently and most thoroughly expressed at the April Conference by thelate Nogin, who also belonged to the opposition:”In the process of development the most important functions ofthe soviets will fall away. A whole series of administrative functionswill be transferred to the municipal, district, and other institutions.If we examine the future development of the structureof the state, we cannot deny that the Constituent Assemblywill be convoked and after that the Parliament. . . . Thus, it followsthat the most important functions of the soviets will grad-1 from the speech of Comrade Kamenev