The Essential Trotsky (Routledge Revivals) by Leon Trotsky

Author:Leon Trotsky [Trotsky, Leon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9781317744863
Google: j1XXAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-17T01:23:29+00:00

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST WAR AND DEFENSISM

The overthrow of Tsarism in February, 1917 signalized, of course, a gigantic leap forward. But if we take February within the limits of February alone, i.e. if we take it not as a step towards October, then it meant no more than this: that Russia had reached the stage of becoming a bourgeois republic of, say, the French type. The petty bourgeois revolutionary parties, as is their wont, considered the February revolution to be neither bourgeois nor a step towards a Socialist revolution, but as some sort of self-sufficing ‘democratic’ entity. And upon this they constructed the ideology of revolutionary defensism. They were defending, if you please, not the rule of any one class but ‘revolution’ and ‘democracy’. But even in our own party the revolutionary impetus of February engendered at first an extreme confusion of political perspectives. As a matter of fact during the March days, Pravda held a position much closer to revolutionary defensism than to the position of Lenin.

‘When one army stands opposed to another army,’ we read in one of its editorial articles,1 ‘no policy could be more absurd than the policy of proposing that one of them should lay down arms and go home. Such a policy would not be a policy of peace, but a policy of enslavement, a policy to be scornfully rejected by a free people. No; the people will remain intrepidly at their post, answering bullet with bullet and shell with shell. This is beyond dispute. We must not allow any disorganization of the armed forces of the revolution.’ We find here no mention of classes, of the oppressors and the oppressed; there is, instead, talk of a ‘free people’; there are no classes struggling for power but, instead, a free people are ‘remaining at their post’. The ideas as well as the formulas are defensist through and through! And further in the same article: ‘Our slogan is not the empty cry “Down with War!” which means the disorganization of the revolutionary army and of the army that is becoming ever more revolutionary. Our slogan is to bring pressure(!) to bear on the Provisional Government so as to compel it to make, without fail, openly and before the eyes of world democracy (!), an attempt (!) to induce (!) all the warring countries to initiate immediate negotiations to end the world war. Till then let every one (!) remain at his post (!).’ The programme of exerting pressure on an imperialist government so as to ‘induce’ it to pursue a pious course was the programme of Kautsky and Ledebour in Germany, Jean Longuet in France, MacDonald in England, but never the programme of Bolshevism. In conclusion, the article not only extends the ‘warmest greetings’ to the notorious Manifesto of the Petrograd Soviet addressed ‘To the Peoples of the World’ (a manifesto permeated from beginning to end with the spirit of revolutionary defensism) but underscores ‘with pleasure’ the solidarity of the editorial board with the openly defensist resolutions adopted at two meetings in Petrograd.

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