03.30.08
Trotsky on Russian revolution, selling out the working class
Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution
By AMY MULDOON
Trotsky’s history is undoubtedly a classic, but that’s about all it is. Leftists need to stop feeding themselves fantasies and read a full spectrum of histories of the Russian revolution. There’s no other hope for the left. Trotsky might look good compared to Stalin, but in the final analysis he was a brutally violent member of the Bolshevik fiasco, whose other notable accomplishment was the extermination of the real socialist left to the point where to this day Lenists dunderheads claim the mantle of the left, socialism, and the nature of reality.
Lenin et al. did NOT spearhead the entry of the masses into the realm of their own destiny. These people, Trotsky included, completely sold out the working class.
“The history of a revolution is for us first of all the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of their own destiny.… The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. The fundamental political process thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of the problems arising from the social crisis—the active orientation of the masses by a method of successive approximations.”1
A new edition of Trotsky’s classic is being published by Haymarket Books this year. Here, we present part one of a two-part series outlining the main features of Trotsky’s work.
REVOLUTIONS, THE Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin wrote, “must not by any means be regarded as a single act…but as a series of more or less powerful outbreaks rapidly alternating with periods of more or less intense calm.”2 To understand and navigate this process, revolutionaries must understand both the objective possibility of working-class rule, and the specific opportunities and challenges at every given moment. Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution chronicles the revolutionary process of 1917, the challenges for the young working class, its “successive approximations,” as it forged a course through first overthrowing the ancient rotten monarchy of the tsar in February, then casting off the newborn, rotten bourgeois democracy of the Provisional Government in October.
Dozens of histories of the Russian Revolution have been written; what makes Trotsky’s History unique is its uncompromisingly working-class, Marxist account of the totality of the process, made all the more tangible from the point of view of a participant.