The Militant - January 14, 2008 -- Marxism is a school of revolutionary strategy

Vol. 72/No. 2 January 14, 2008

Marxism is a school of revolutionary strategy
(Books of the Month column)

Below is an excerpt from volume 2 of The First Five Years of the Communist International, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for January. This two-volume collection contains speeches and writings by the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky recording the efforts led by V.I. Lenin and other central leaders of the Bolshevik party to build a world movement of communist parties capable of leading workers and farmers to overthrow capitalist exploitation and colonial oppression. The excerpt below is from a July 1921 speech at a general membership meeting of the Moscow section of the Communist Party. Copyright © Pathfinder Press 1972. Reprinted by permission.

BY LEON TROTSKY
Comrades, the internal causation and lawfulness of historical development was formulated for the first time by Marxist theory. The theory of Marxism, as Marx himself wrote in the introduction to his work Critique of Political Economy, established approximately the following proposition with regard to revolution: No social system departs from the arena until it has developed the productive forces to the maximum degree attainable under the given system; and no new social system appears on the scene unless the economic premises necessary for it have already been prepared by the old social system. This truth, which is basic for revolutionary policy, unquestionably retains all its meaning as a guide for us to this very moment. But more than once has Marxism been understood mechanically, unilaterally and therefore erroneously. Wrong conclusions may likewise be drawn from the foregoing proposition.

Marx says that a social system must leave the scene once the productive forces—technology, man’s power over nature—can no longer develop within its framework. From the standpoint of Marxism, historical society, as such, is an organization of collective man—man in the aggregate—for the purpose of increasing man’s power over nature. Of course this goal is not posed extrinsically by human beings, but in the course of their development they struggle for it, adapting themselves to the objective conditions of their environment and constantly increasing their power over nature’s elemental forces.

The proposition that conditions for a revolution—for a deepgoing social revolution and not simply for superficial, though sanguinary, political overturns—conditions for a social revolution which replaces one economic system by another, are created only when the old social order no longer leaves room for the development of productive forces—this proposition does not at all mean that the old social order unfailingly collapses as soon as it becomes reactionary in the economic sense, that is, as soon as it begins to retard the development of the technological power of man. Not at all. For while the productive forces constitute the basic driving force of historical development, the latter nevertheless occurs not separate and apart from human beings, but through them. The productive forces—the means whereby social man dominates nature—take shape, it is true, independently of the will of any single individual and are only slightly dependent upon the common will of human beings alive to-day, because technology represents the accumulated capital inherited by us from the past.?.?.?. But when the productive forces, when technology become too restricted within an old framework, say that of slavery, or feudal or bourgeois society, and when a change of social forms becomes necessary for the further growth of mankind’s power, then this is not accomplished automatically, like the sun rises and sets, but must be accomplished through human beings, through the struggle of human beings welded into classes. To replace a social class, governing an old society that has turned reactionary, must come a new social class which possesses the program for a new social order meeting the needs for the development of productive forces, and which is prepared to realize this program in life. But it by no means always happens when a given social system has outlived itself, i.e., has turned reactionary, that a new class appears, conscious enough, organized enough and powerful enough to cast down life’s old masters and pave the way for new social relations… . On the contrary, more than once, it has happened in history that an old society exhausted itself, for example, the ancient slave society of Rome—and preceding it there were the ancient Asian civilizations whose foundation of slavery opened up no room for the development of productive forces. But within this outlived society there existed no new class strong enough to overthrow the slaveholders and institute a new, a feudal, system, because the feudal system was, compared to slavery, a step forward.

In its turn, within the feudal system there was not always to be found in the hour of need a new class, the bourgeoisie, to overthrow the feudalists and to open the road for historical development. It has more than once happened in history that a given society, a given nation, or people, or a tribe, or several tribes and nations, living under similar historical conditions, have run up against the impossibility of developing any further on a given economic foundation—slavery or feudalism—but inasmuch as no new class existed among them capable of leading them out to the main highway, they simply fell apart. The given civilization, the given state, the given society disintegrated. Mankind has thus not always moved upwards from below in a steady, rising curve. No, there have been prolonged periods of stagnation and there have been regressions into barbarism.

Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home