Leon Trotsky

Name: The Lessons of October — Chapter 5: : The July Days; the Kornilov Episode; the Democratic Conference and the Pre-Parliament
Author: Leon Trotsky

The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (1937)

Summary

“The Lessons of October — Chapter 5: : The July Days; the Kornilov Episode; the Democratic Conference and the Pre-Parliament”, published in 1937, is a work by Leon Trotsky. It explores elements such as the Pre-Parliament, Lenin and the Democratic Conference.

Quotes from The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (Leon Trotsky)

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (1937)

“ It is not true that the road to power runs necessarily through bourgeois democracy. These are all naked abstractions, doctrinaire patterns, and they play only one political role, namely, to bind the proletarian vanguard hand and foot, and by means of the “democratic” state machinery turn it into an oppositionist political shadow of the bourgeoisie, bearing the name of social democracy. The policy of the proletariat must not be guided by schoolboy patterns but in accordance with the real flux of the class struggle. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (1937)

“ Through the channel of the Pre-Parliament, the political awareness of the masses was to be directed away from the soviets as ‘temporary” and dying institutions, to the Constituent Assembly as the crowning work of the democratic revolution. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were already in the majority in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets; our influence in the army grew, not from day to day, but from hour to hour. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (1937)

“ Many long years of a democratic regime must elapse in the interval between the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolution. The struggle for our participation in the Pre-Parliament was the struggle for the “Europeanization” of the working class movement, for directing it as quickly as possible into the channel of a democratic “struggle for power," i.e., into the channel of social democracy. Our fraction in the Democratic Conference, numbering over a hundred individuals, did not differ greatly, especially during those days, from a party congress. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (1937)

“ Has the mood of the masses outgrown the soviet superstructure? Are we running the risk of becoming hypnotized by soviet legality, and of lagging behind the mood of the masses, and of being severed from them? It is very probable that isolated and purely military operations during the July days were initiated by comrades who honestly believed that they were not diverging from Lenin’s estimate of the situation. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (1937)

“ In the right wing, a tendency manifested itself during those days to draw closer to the soviet majority on the basis of defending the revolution and, in part, the fatherland. Lenin’s reaction to this was expressed in his letter to the Central Committee at the beginning of September. “It is my conviction that those who become unprincipled are people who . . . slide into defencism or (like other Bolsheviks) into a bloc with the S.R.s, into supporting the Provisional Government. Their attitude is absolutely wrong and unprincipled. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (1937)

“ As early as April 10, Lenin came forward with a proposal to change the name of the party. All objections against the new name he characterized as follows: “It is an argument of routinism, an argument of inertia, an argument of stagnation.—. . It is time to cast off the soiled shirt and to put on clean linen” [CW, Vol.24, “Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution—a Draft Program for the Proletarian Party” (April 10,1917) , p.88] . ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (1937)

“ The downfall of the tsarist monarchy is viewed as revolutionary ‘and so it was - but the conquest of power by the proletariat is conceived in a parliamentary way, on the basis of a completely accomplished democracy. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (1937)

“ The opportunist attitude toward the question of power and the question of war determined, of course, a corresponding attitude toward the International. The rights made an attempt to draw the party into the Stockholm Conference of the social patriots. ”

Leon Trotsky

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Quotes from The Lessons of October — Chapter 5… (Leon Trotsky)

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