June 11, 2006: One of the myths about Lenin and Trotsky
There's a great deal of mythology emphasizing differences between Lenin's and Trotsky's views re the dynamics of the Russian context in the period before 1917. The myths obscure Lenin's views as well as Trotsky's, and are repeated as often by people on the intellectual left as by mainstream academic historians.
The truth is that their pre-1917 views were almost exactly identical. They both understood that the Russian capitalist class was in counterrevolutionary alliance with the autocracy, so that the "bourgeois revolution" in Russia would be opposed by the bourgeoisie. They therefore agreed that the revolution would necessarily be fought by a popular alliance of the working class and peasantry.
Their disagreement was solely over which class would lead that alliance. Lenin left the question open. Trotsky argued that peasant dispersion and other aspects of peasant life make peasants incapable of leading movements on a national scale. They must always be led by an urban class. This meant that the working class would necessarily dominate the alliance.
From this Trotsky additionally inferred that working class leadership of the revolution would necessarily lead to encroachments on capitalist property rights. The workers in power would be forced by the necessities of revolutionary self-defense into nationalizations on some scale or another. This is what he meant when he talked about the so-called "bourgeois" revolution "growing-over" or "bleeding into" the so-called "socialist" revolution.
That's really all there was to it. Lenin said so many times, and in 1917 he went over to Trotsky's views once he realized that the workers' Soviets were the organizational form which working class leadership of the revolutionary movement had assumed in practice.
Note that in this piece I'm discussing Lenin's and Trotsky's predictions about the class dynamics of the Russian situation. Until 1917, they held a much stronger and more difficult difference of opinion over the organizational forms of working class politics. In 1917, Trotsky realized under pressure of experience that Lenin had always wanted to build a mass party, and was now doing so. He led his small independent group into the Bolsheviks in August.
