Leon Trotsky

Name: The Lessons of October — Chapter 2: : "The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry" in February and October
Author: Leon Trotsky

The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (1937)

Summary

“The Lessons of October — Chapter 2: : "The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry" in February and October”, published in 1937, is a work by Leon Trotsky. It explores elements such as dictatorship, Lenin and peasantry.

Quotes from The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (Leon Trotsky)

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (1937)

“ Any further movement toward the attainment of power inevitably had to explode the democratic shell, confront the majority of the peasantry with the necessity of following the workers, provide the proletariat with an opportunity to realize a class dictatorship, and thereby place on the agenda—along with a complete and ruthlessly radical democratization of social relations—a purely socialist invasion of the workers’ state into the sphere of capitalist property rights. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (1937)

“ The soviets had to either disappear entirely or take real power into their hands. But they could take power not in the capacity of a democratic coalition of workers and peasants represented by different parties, but only as the dictatorship of the proletariat directed by a single party and drawing after it the peasant masses, beginning with their semi - proletarian sections. In other words, a democratic workers’ and peasants’ coalition could only take shape as an immature form of power incapable of attaining real power—it could take shape only as a tendency and not as a concrete fact. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (1937)

“ Before the proletariat succeeded in organizing itself under its own banner and taking the leadership of the rural masses, the petty-bourgeois revolutionists found a natural support in the peasant army, which was rebelling against the war. By the ponderous weight of this multi-millioned army upon which, after all, everything directly depended, the petty-bourgeois revolutionists brought pressure to bear on the workers and carried them along in the first period. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (1937)

“ The course and the out come of the October Revolution dealt a relentless blow to the scholastic parody of Marxism which was very widespread among the Russian social democrats, beginning in part with the Emancipation of Labor Group and finding its most finished expression among the Mensheviks. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (1937)

“ It is precisely the revolutionary epoch - i.e...., the epoch when the accumulated capital of the party is put in direct circulation—that must inevitably broach in action and reveal divergences of such a nature. These two tendencies, in greater or lesser degree, with more or less modification, will more than once manifest themselves during the revolutionary period in every country. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (1937)

“ If by Bolshevism—and we are stressing here its essential aspect ‘we understand such training, tempering, and organization of the proletarian vanguard as enables the latter to seize power, arms in hand; and if by social democracy we are to understand the acceptance of reformist oppositional activity within the framework of bourgeois society and an adaptation to its legality—i.e., the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (1937)

“ For the peculiarity of the peasantry consists precisely in the fact that despite their great numbers it is difficult to form the peasants into an organized base, even when they are imbued with a revolutionary spirit. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (1937)

“ The awakening of the villages would have proceeded under the direct or indirect leadership of the city soviets, led by the Bolsheviks. This does not necessarily mean that the SRS would have immediately disappeared from the villages. No. In all probability the first stage of the peasant revolution would have occurred under the banner of the Narodniks [populists] . But with a development of events such as we have sketched, the Narodniks themselves would have been compelled to push their left wing to the fore, in order to seek an alliance with the Bolshevik soviets in the cities. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (1937)

“ If that policy had prevailed, the development of the revolution would have passed over the head of our party, and in the end the insurrection of the worker and peasant masses would have taken place without party leadership ”

Leon Trotsky

Summary

Quotes from The Lessons of October — Chapter 2… (Leon Trotsky)

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