Trotsky sets out the basis upon which Marxists advocate this consistent democracy, in conditions where it has not yet been achieved, and where a majority of the masses have still not broken with it. It has nothing to do with it being a necessary stage that must be passed through, or with it providing some kind of breathing space within which to operate, but with winning the support of those masses, and by engaging in such a struggle to expose its sham and corrupt nature.
The argument about “breathing space” is particularly duplicitous, because, if workers are strong enough to establish this bourgeois-democratic breathing space, which as Lenin and Trotsky describe, requires them to have engaged in self-organisation, and so on, to bring it about, they have already, in that process, established, for themselves, such “breathing space”, via their own proletarian methods. They do not require the sham bourgeois-democracy to legitimise what they have already established for themselves, and, in fact, such a straitjacket of bourgeois-democracy, would always be used to delimit the extent of any such “breathing space”, within bourgeois limits, not expand it.
All of those bourgeois-democratic rights, such as freedom of association, free speech, and so on, are always undermined, by the bourgeoisie, when it comes to the workers utilising them for the pursuit of their own interests, in opposition to those of the ruling-class. A consolidation of bourgeois-democracy, and its stabilisation, always implies an actual curtailment of the breathing space and freedoms that the workers create for themselves, via their own strength in the struggle for that bourgeois-democracy.
“Only such an agitation permits the Party to preserve the proletariat from the influence of petty-bourgeois democracy, to undermine its influence among the peasantry, to prepare the alliance of the workers and the peasants, and to draw into its ranks the most resolute revolutionary elements. Was all this nothing but opportunism?” (p 197)
But, it was not just parliamentary democracy that the Stalinists defined as opportunist, at this point. The resolution of the ECCI had argued that soviets, also, could not be called for until the last minute, and when victory was assured. It said,
“The creation of soviets obviously cannot be approached when victory is not yet absolutely guaranteed, for it might then happen that all attention is concentrated solely upon elections to the soviets and not upon the military struggle, as a consequence of which petty-bourgeois democratism might install itself, which would weaken the revolutionary dictatorship and would create a danger for the leadership of the Party.” (p 198-9)
As Trotsky points out, this is idiotic. Clearly, actively pursuing the establishment of soviets outside a revolutionary situation is just phrase-mongering. A significant development must have taken place, before soviets become a realistic prospect. But, when such a development has arisen, the demand for soviets is part of the way in which that development is carried forward: it is the precondition for victory, not something that can only be advocated when victory is assured.
“During the Hong Kong strike, during the Shanghai strikes, during all the subsequent violent progress of the workers and the peasants, soviets should and could have been created as organs of an open revolutionary mass struggle which, sooner or later and not at all at one blow, would lead to the insurrection and the conquest of power.” (p 199)
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