Trotsky quotes Lenin on the experience of 1917, to show just to what extent this revolutionary/transitional approach differs from that of the opportunists, and their support for bourgeois-democracy.
““Even a few weeks before the victory of the soviet republic, even after this victory, the participation in a parliament of bourgeois democracy, far from injuring the revolutionary proletariat, helps it to prove to the backward masses that these parliaments deserve to be dissolved, facilitates the success of their dissolution, brings nearer the moment when it could be said that bourgeois parliamentarism had ‘had its day politically’.” (Lenin, Works, Vol.XVII, 1920; The Infantile Sickness of Communism, p.149.)” (p 188)
Trotsky describes the way Lenin ordered a contingent of Lettish infantry, composed of agricultural workers, to disband the Constituent Assembly, rather than rely on the Petrograd Garrison, comprised largely of peasants. The latter, Lenin feared, may have baulked at the task, and Trotsky explains why. The peasants had no history or reason to place confidence in an urban leadership, even one that is proletarian. The proletariat and peasantry are two different classes, with different class interests, and the same is true of the petty-bourgeoisie.
The strength of the proletariat, even in still largely agricultural economies, like Russia, in 1917, comes from its role in production, its concentration in the towns and cities, and mostly homogeneous class interest. Even where it does not form a numerical majority, its this which enables it to take a leading role. By contrast, the bourgeoisie is tiny. Its strength resides in its control of capital and the state. The peasantry, like the petty-bourgeoisie, has neither of those things, and its strength derives from its numerical size, which is most influential in terms of formal democracy.
Even today, in a developed country like Britain, where the petty-bourgeoisie comprises around 15 million voters, they have no economic power, nor industrial strength, nor resort to the state – indeed, even when they get a reactionary Tory government elected, its policies such as Brexit are resisted by that state, and where it challenges the interests of the ruling class more significantly, the ruling class can bring down the government, as it did with Truss's government in Autumn 2022.
The electoral power of that petty-bourgeoisie, was seen in its ability to get a reactionary, petty-bourgeois government elected, and the Brexit vote, and, indeed, its ability to seize control of the Tory Party, as it did with the Republican Party in the US, but the limits of that, and of bourgeois-democracy, are also illustrated by it. Fetishising bourgeois-democracy is, then, to limit the strength of the proletariat, and to play into the hands of its class enemies, particularly the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, which provides the shock troops of fascism.
“The Social Revolutionaries were the party with the greatest numbers in the Russian Revolution. In the first period, everyone who was not either a conscious bourgeois or a conscious worker voted for them. Even in the Constituent Assembly, that is, after the October Revolution, the Social Revolutionaries formed the majority. They therefore considered themselves a great national party. They turned out to be a great national zero.
We do not want to equate the Russian Social Revolutionaries with the German National Socialists. But there are, undoubtedly, similarities between them that are very important In clarifying the question under discussion. The Social Revolutionaries were a party of hazy popular hopes. The National Socialists are a party of national despair. The petty bourgeoisie has always shown the greatest capacity to pass from hope to despair, dragging a part of the proletariat along with it. The great bulk of the National Socialists is, as was the case with the Social Revolutionaries, human dust.”
It was the failure of the Stalinists to recognise that, in Germany, and Spain, in the 1930's, which led them to underestimate the strength of the proletariat, and overestimate the strength of the fascists, and, as in China in 1925-7, led them into a timid, opportunist and tailist strategy, based on an alliance with its untrustworthy class enemies. In all those cases, it led not only to the defeat of the workers, but also to the victory of reaction and counter-revolution.
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