Theory as a guide to practice

For anyone wanting to dive straight into an exciting read about revolutionary events, the start of Trotsky’s ‘History’ can feel a bit dry. As the author himself notes in the Preface: “The early chapters of this book give a short outline of the development of Russian society and its inner forces. We venture to hope that these chapters will not repel the reader. In the further development of the book, (we) will meet these same forces in living action”.

Nevertheless, an understanding of the Marxist theory that helped guide Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks is essential to understand how and why they were able to successfully lead the working class to power.

Historical Materialism – a quick overview

One of the three fundamental ‘component parts’ of Marxism – explained in more detail in the separate Introduction to Marxism Course – is ‘Historical Materialism’. These bullet points summarise what it says:

• Karl Marx explained that history can only be understood as the history of class struggles.
• Those in control of the means of producing wealth in any society have exploited the labour of other classes for their own benefit.
• The development of capitalism had seen these processes reach new heights. The ‘bourgeoisie’ (the capitalist ruling class) had used their control of modern industry and finance to vastly expand global production and trade.
• Yet as capitalism dug its claws deeper into the planet, the limits of the system became more and more exposed. Increasingly the bosses found themselves without enough profitable markets in which to sell their goods. Economic crises set in more frequently. As new markets became harder to find, the capitalists' rivalry resulted in destructive wars, culminating in 1914 with World War One.
• Marx explained that capitalism could no longer bring society forward. Further expansion was being held back by the limits of both private property and the division of the world into competing nations.
• A socialist society, taking into public ownership the big companies that dominate the economy, and introducing conscious democratic planning internationally, was needed to bring an end to the anarchy of capitalism.
• Marx pointed to the working-class, ‘the proletariat’, created by capitalism as its own ‘grave-digger’, as being the force that could bring about a socialist change. Bound together in the workplaces, workers had the experience of working together needed for united action. They had a common interest in overcoming production for profit and the strength to take control of industry - and their own lives.
• However, no ruling class had ever given up its privileges without a fight. Society would not be taken forward by hopeful appeals to the capitalists but only by a revolution led by the working-class.
• Marxism, acting as the 'memory' of the proletariat, had learnt from the struggles of the past. The exploitation suffered under capitalism would provoke workers and the other oppressed masses to struggle to defend their living standards and fight for a better future. However, there was no certain workers' victory written in the rules of history. It was not enough simply to struggle but also to know how to win.
• A revolutionary party, steeled with the ideas of Marxism, built from the best elements of the working-class, would be needed to explain and guide their class to a successful revolutionary victory.

The Law of Combined and Uneven Development

Like every mass struggle, the Russian Revolution of 1917 not only confirmed the main ideas of Marxism but also sharpened and refined them.

Marxism had always expected the socialist revolution to first begin in an advanced capitalist country like France, Britain or Germany. In these nations, where the bourgeoisie had successfully developed industry to a high level, a revolutionary workers’ state, moving beyond the confines of capitalism, would be able to use this productive power to distribute sufficient goods to all in a planned socialist society.

Russia certainly hadn’t developed into a strong capitalist economy where such productive potential existed to form the basis of a socialist economy. Instead:

• Russia was still a poverty-stricken feudal regime where the mass of the population lived as poor peasants.
• Western cities had developed craft guilds based on artisans and small-scale manufacturing industry. From these, the radical bourgeoisie had grown, battling through the religious reformation and social revolution – such as the English Civil War or the great French Revolution - against the church and the feudal lords until their capitalist class had conquered power.
• Russia had not had any such struggle. Craft remained mainly linked to home industry, not really separated from agriculture and the peasantry.
• The small cities that had developed were mainly commercial and administrative centres, good at trade and consuming wealth, but not at producing it.
• The Tsarist state rose above both the feeble feudal lords and the feeble cities with no strong bourgeois class to challenge its rule. The clergy and the nobility all played their part in supporting the huge Tsarist bureaucracy which swallowed up huge proportions of the country's wealth.

However, Trotsky explained that such historical backwardness did not mean that Russia would then slavishly retrace the course of the advanced countries in an identical fashion, if a few hundred years late. In order to try and compete with their international rivals, feudal Russia was forced to adopt some of the advances of the capitalist West and so 'skip over' some of the intermediate stages of development that a mechanical view of Marxism might predict. Russia's lowly culture was forced to make leaps forward combining the most highly developed achievements of capitalist technique with the society of feudalism and Tsarism, so producing a unique relationship of classes.

In 1914, while 80% of the working population were still living on the land carrying out agriculture at the level of the seventeenth century, some of the most modern factories in the world were to be found in Moscow and the capital Petrograd. While in the USA at that time only 18% of industrial workers were employed in giant factories with a workforce of over 1000, in Russia the figure was 41%. In the Petrograd district 44% of industrial workers were to be found in these huge enterprises, in Moscow as many as 57%. Russia was certainly still far more backward - with a national income per head 8 to 10 times less than in the USA, - but this modern industrial development did not disprove backwardness, it dialectically completed it.

Huge foreign investment meant that Russian industry was largely under the control of European banks and shareholders, particularly those of England and France. About 40% of industrial stocks were controlled by foreign capital with the percentage far higher in the more modern sectors and in heavy industry.

The political consequences of Russia’s uneven development

Russia's uneven development had important political results. Trade and military pressure from the West strengthened the Tsarist bureaucracy that the possessing classes of Europe had to do business with. It became a tool of the wishes of the European money markets and the military interests of the West.

In their hunger for profits, these foreign capitalists not only did not support political change – a bourgeois revolution to overthrow the Tsar and the remnants of feudalism - but often actively opposed it. The belated and sudden growth of industry also meant that there was no strong Russian bourgeois class to oppose the feudal regime either.

The landlords owed the bankers millions of roubles in loans and mortgages. The capitalists could hardly risk default on these repayments by agreeing to redistribute land to the peasants! The industrialists themselves often had big landed estates of their own. The feudal landowners in turn had investments in industry. Both sections were also under pressure from foreign investors and military powers to hold back the revolution.

In a web of interests with the landlords, the bourgeois weren’t going to stir up the peasantry and carry out a thorough-going agrarian reform. However, this was precisely the main task of the 'bourgeois' revolution! Whereas the bourgeoisie of France and England had completed their revolutions without too great a threat from below – as the industrial working class were yet to appear on the scene of history - the Russian bourgeoisie looked over their shoulders at a youthful and revolutionary proletariat numbering in its millions. So, while frustrated by the power of the landlords and the Tsarist bureaucracy, the impotent Russian bourgeoisie had to content itself more or less with the status quo.

However, Russia’s sudden industrial development had produced the greatest change in political outlook in the newly forming working-class. In Britain, for example, the proletariat had grown gradually over the centuries, slowly adapting its ideas to the new environment and developing perhaps a rather conservative tradition. The Russian working-class on the other hand was shaped in a few decades of rapid change, going from  the countryside into the cauldron of huge factories, their new lives marking a sharp break with their past.

This was a working class fresh to the horrors of modern industrial labour, oppressed by the absolute rule of Tsarism, often working in huge factories. For example, the giant Putilov iron and steel works in Petrograd brough together a workforce of 40,000 in common struggle. It is not surprising that the Russian worker showed a freshness and openness to revolutionary ideas that was rarely found in other countries. In many cities the proletariat was constantly being added to by new reserves from the country, linking the proletariat with the peasantry. However, there was also another side to the coin. This sudden development also created difficulties for the workers’ movement like illiteracy, political backwardness and lack of organisational traditions.

The youthful Russian proletariat learnt its first steps in a harsh environment. Strikes were forbidden by law, democratic rights were virtually unknown. Small underground circles of revolutionists would attempt to hold illegal meetings and demonstrations, and distribute secretly printed or even handwritten leaflets and newspapers, only for the police to uncover them. Like Lenin, Trotsky and many others participating in the movement at this time, the arrested activists would be imprisoned or exiled. Most of their local newspapers rarely got as far as issue number two, never mind their third edition! From 1900 onwards Lenin, and other leaders of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) who had managed to escape from Russia, produced the newspaper ‘Iskra’ (‘The Spark’) from abroad and successfully smuggled it into Russia.

As in economics, ideas and organisation also followed the ‘Law of Combined Development’. Political strikes against government policy became a common weapon, yet it was still rare in Western Europe. The Russian proletariat adopted the weapons forged through long years of bitter experience by their European counterparts - trade unions, strikes, political parties. But it was ‘backward’ Russia that became the only European country in which a workers’ party supporting Marxism as a doctrine, the RSDLP, enjoyed powerful support. What's more, in 1905, it was the Russian proletariat that first invented that key weapon of revolutionary organisation - the workers' council or “soviet”.

It was in these peculiarities, this ‘combined and uneven development’, that Marxism found the key to explaining the paradox of the Russian Revolution.