“The masses must feel and understand, while in action, that the soviet is their organization, that it marshals their forces for the struggle, for resistance, for self-defence, and for the offensive. They can feel and understand this not through a one-day action and in general not through one act, but through the experience of several weeks, months and perhaps years, with intermissions or without. That is why only a bureaucratic leadership of epigones can restrain the rising and mutinous masses from the creation of soviets, under conditions when the country is passing through a period of revolutionary upheavals, and when the working class and the poor peasants see before them the prospect of capturing power, even if only in one of the later phases, and even if that prospect can be envisaged in the given phase only by a small minority.” (p 148)
As a transitional form, it embraces this combined and uneven development of class consciousness, within different layers of the working-class. At first, only a small minority hold a revolutionary consciousness, but, inside the soviet, as they struggle, each day, to implement even those basic reforms that the less class conscious elements recognise as necessary, they transform and develop those elements. This is the true nature, relevance and sphere of transitional demands, which, outside a revolutionary period, become just lifeless reforms, or worse, revolutionary phrase-mongering and deception.
Demands for workers' control, a sliding scale of wages and hours, etc., are only meaningful if workers can enforce them, which requires a condition of dual power in society, and the means for their enforcement is not pleas to bourgeois parliaments, but the direct action of an elected soviet. At best, a bourgeois parliament, in the form of a Workers' Government, is called upon to rubber stamp what the soviets have already imposed in action, and when that government fails to do so, so the time comes closer for its overthrow, and the creation of a soviet government.
“That was always our conception of the soviets. We valued the soviet as that broad and elastic organizational form which is grasped by the masses who have just awakened, in the very first phase of their revolutionary action, and which is capable of uniting the working class in its entirety, regardless of how large a section of it has, in the given phase, already matured to the point of understanding the task of capturing power.” (p 148)
Trotsky quotes Lenin to the same effect from the time of the 1905 revolution, in which he says the Bolsheviks never refused, during revolutionary periods, to utilise non-party organisations, such as soviets, to strengthen their position in the working-class. Indeed, it is the logical form of the United Front of workers' organisations, in action, as against the Popular Front, as the purely parliamentary bloc of political leaders.
But, the Stalinists turned the soviets into meaningless empty vessels as mere symbols of revolution to be administratively created at the appointed hour of insurrection.
“Such experiments must inevitably assume a fictitious character and the absence of the conditions necessary for the capture of power be marked by the external ceremonial of the soviet system. That is what happened in Canton, where the soviet was simply appointed to pay respects to the ritual. That is where the epigones’ formulation of the question leads to.” (p 149)
And, that adventurism, just as surely as the opportunist strategy of the Popular Front, led inexorably to disaster.
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