Trotsky sets out, again, that, in China, there had been the implementation of a Menshevist policy that had led to defeat. Such defeats are inevitable, in history, where the balance of forces are against you. There are a number of reasons why a revolutionary party, even with the correct ideas and strategy, may not be able to win a majority to its banner. The development of capital may not have been sufficient to create a sizeable, industrial proletariat; the weight of other established parties and ideologies may hold the workers in their thrall that the revolutionaries can only break them from over a long period, or under exceptional circumstances, and so on. Even where that is achieved, the bourgeoisie itself, and its state, particularly where supported by other states, may be simply too strong for the revolution to succeed.
All of these lessons could be learned from the Revolutions of 1848. Trotsky quotes Engels' comments from 1852, in which he says that, following such defeats, the revolutionary party necessarily disappears for an entire period. From Engels' later Prefaces to his The Condition of The Working Class, we know that, in the intervening period, the British working-class became simply the very long tail of the Liberal Party, which constituted the reservoir of social-democratic ideas in the service of the interests of the big, industrial bourgeoisie. When that tail broke away, and established the Labour Party, it simply took that existing bourgeois, social-democratic ideology with it, making it, as Lenin described, a bourgeois workers' party.
For a revolutionary party, in Britain, to win a majority, required not only correct Marxist ideas and strategy, but also to be able to overcome this huge counterweight of social-democratic ideology, and organisational strength of the Labour Party, resting upon the trades union bureaucracy that created a massive inertial force within the working-class.
In Europe, workers' parties were established, nominally, on the basis of Marxist ideas, but, as Draper sets out, in The Two Souls of Socialism, in reality, they never were. The largest, and most successful, the German SPD, owed more to Lassalle and Fabianism than to Marx. Marx had described that, in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, publication of which, itself, had been delayed until after his death. Engels took up the same ideas in a series of letters and writings, arguing against state socialism, nationalisation, welfarism and so on. Even in his Critique of the Erfurt Programme, which he described as the SPD's best effort, he attacked the inclusion of those ideas of state socialism and welfarism contained in it.
These parties of the Second International grew most strongly in the period of long wave upswing, from 1890-1914, when expanding economies put workers on the front foot, led to the unionisation of masses of unskilled workers, and so on. But, that very development, much as with the similar period from 1949-74, necessarily led to reformist and syndicalist, not Marxist, ideas. The ability of workers to win higher wages and better conditions, fostered the idea of simply bargaining within the system, and creating reformist parties, to translate that into reforms at the level of the state.
As Trotsky set out earlier, and as Lenin had described, there is a world of difference between partial reforms, demanded and implemented by a mobilised working-class, via its own organs of self-government (soviets/workers' councils, factory committees etc.) which take on a transitional character, as they raise the consciousness of workers, in the process of implementing them, leading to a revolutionary consciousness, as against reforms introduced via bourgeois parliaments, which simply soak up the rising revolutionary wave, and dissipate it, in order, later, to reverse those reforms, in so far as they contradict the interests of the ruling-class. The experience of the French Popular Front, in the 1930's, was a good example of that, but every social-democratic government, acts in this way.
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