Leon Trotsky

“ How flimsy and unreliable is a “Leftism” that strains at a gnat and cooly swallows a camel.
Those who were wide awake to the situation and pushed the significance of the October defeat to the foreground, those who pointed out the inevitable subsequent lengthy period of revolutionary ebb and temporary consolidation (“stabilization”) of capitalism (with all the ensuing political consequences) , the leadership of the Fifth Congress endeavored to brand as opportunists and liquidators of the revolution. This is what Zinoviev and Bukharin set as their main task. ”

“ Not only the ruined petty bourgeoisie but also the average worker said to himself: since the communist party failed to achieve victory, then maybe the social democracy will bring us not victory (nobody expects that of it) , but a piece of bread through a revival of industry with the aid of American gold. It was necessary to understand that the vile fiction of American pacifism with the dollar lining—after the defeat of the German revolution—would and did become the most important factor in the life of Europe. ”

“ After every great and deep-going revolutionary crisis, in which the proletariat suffers a decisive and long-lasting defeat, the spurts of ferment still continue for a long time among the semi-proletarian urban and rural masses, as the circles spread in the water after a stone has fallen in. ”

“ One might say that the social democracy is the Left wing of bourgeois society and this definition would be quite correct if one does not construe it so as to over-simplify it and thereby forget that the social democracy still leads millions of workers behind it and within certain limits is constrained to reckon not only with the will of its bourgeois master but also with the interests of its deluded proletarian constituency. But it is absolutely senseless to characterize the social democracy as the “moderate wing of Fascism.” ”

“ We shall take the occasion later to dwell on the political consequences of the position adopted by the Fifth Congress. But isn’t it already clear that there cannot be serious talk of Bolshevik strategy without the ability to survey both the basic curve of our epoch as a whole, and its individual segments which are at every given moment of the same importance for the party leadership as railway curves are for the locomotive engineer? To open wide the throttle on a steeply banked curve is surely to run the train over the embankment. ”

“ In order to orient oneself in the most elementary manner in politics, one must not throw everything into a single heap but instead distinguish between the social democracy and Fascism which represent two poles of the bourgeois front—united at the moment of danger—but two poles, nevertheless. ”

“ Contrariwise, the bourgeoisie is forced to advance its Left, the social democratic shoulder, either in a period that precedes that of the civil war, so as to deceive, lull, and demoralize the proletariat, or in a period following upon a serious and lasting victory over the proletariat, i.e., when it is forced to lay hold of the broad masses of the people parliamentarily, among them also the workers disappointed by the revolution, in order to reestablish the normal regime. ”

“ For even a civil war in which the bourgeoisie is victorious undermines the conditions of capitalist exploitation. Already at that time, that is, at the end of 1923, we fought against the exaggeration of the strength and the danger of German Fascism. We insisted that Fascism would be relegated to the background while the political stage in the whole of Europe would be occupied for a certain period by the democratic and pacifist groupings: the Left bloc in France, the Labour party in England. ”

“ The Opposition maintained that the bourgeoisie advances its Fascist shoulder only at the moment when an immediate revolutionary danger threatens the foundations of its regime and when the normal organs of the bourgeois state prove inadequate. In this sense active Fascism signifies a state of civil war on the part of capitalist society waged against the rebelling proletariat. ”

“ This book, from beginning to end, is devoted to proving the idea that the English revolution, too, cannot avoid the portals of communism and that with a correct, courageous, and intransigent policy which steers clear of any illusions with regard to detours, the English Communist Party can grow by leaps and bounds and mature so as to be equal in the course of a few years to the tasks before it. ”

“ The task of a long and stubborn struggle of the proletarian vanguard against the bourgeoisie and pseudo-peasant demagoguery for influence over the most disinherited strata of the peasant poor was being more and more displaced by the hope that the peasantry would play a direct and an independent revolutionary role on a national as well as on an international scale. ”

“ In proportion as obvious and growing shifts to the night were going on in the proletariat, there began in the Comintern the phase of idealizing the peasantry, a wholly uncritical exaggeration of every symptom of its “break” with bourgeois society, an embellishment of every ephemeral peasant organization and a downright adulation of “peasant” demagogues. ”

“ A draft program which passes by without evaluating either the events of 1923 or the basic mistake of the Fifth Congress simply turns its back on the real questions of a revolutionary strategy of the proletariat in the imperialist epoch.
The “Democratic-Pacifist Era” and Fascism The capitulation of German communism in the Autumn of 1923, which removed the threatening proletarian danger with a minimum of civil war, inevitably had to weaken the position not only of the communist party but also of Fascism. ”

“ If the German social democracy still represents a force of many millions today, and this, too, within the working class, then there are two immediate causes for it. First, the defeat of the German party which capitulated in the Fall of 1923, and second, the false strategical orientation of the Fifth Congress. ”

“ The German proletariat did not achieve the victory but suffered a decisive defeat and in such a way as was bound to encourage and consolidate the German bourgeoisie to the highest degree. Faith in the revolution was shattered throughout Europe for a number of years. ”

“ Whenever a leadership ascribes an independent significance to these circles and, contrary to the processes within the working class, interprets them as symptoms of an approaching revolution, bear well in mind that this is an infallible sign that the leadership is heading towards adventures, similar to those in Estonia, or Bulgaria in 1924 or Canton in 1927. ”

“ For while Marx, owing to his foresight, occasionally perceived the impending revolution closer than it really was, he never had the occasion of failing to recognize the lineaments of revolution when it stood directly before him or of subsequently stubbornly accepting the backside for the face of the revolution, after the latter had already turned its rear. ”

“ The Leninist policy has nothing in common with liquidationism; but it has just as little to do with a disregard of the changes in the objective situation and with maintaining verbally the course towards the armed insurrection after the revolution has already turned its back upon us, and when it is necessary to resume the road of long, stubborn, systematic, and laborious work among the masses in order to prepare the party for a new revolution ahead. ”

“ The symptoms of the economic consolidation of the German bourgeoisie, which were already manifest, were either denied or ignored. Varga, who always dishes up the economic facts to conform with the current reigning political tendency, brought in a report this time, too, that “... there are no perspectives of the recovery of capitalism.” ”

“ During 1924, i.e., in the course of the basic gear of the “stabilization,” the communist press was filled with absolutely fantastic data on the strength of the recently organized Peasants’ International. ”