Glossary for Trotsky's "Three Conceptions"

Submitted by martin on 25 April, 2007 - 11:46

19O5: strikes broke out in December 1904 and January 1905. On 9 January workers marching to the Tsar's palace lo appeal for his help were shot down. The strike wave grew.

Strikes continued through the summer. Peasants withheld taxes. Sailors mutinied on the battleship 'Potemkin'.

In September a new strike wave exploded. A joint council of workers' delegates - a 'soviet' in Russian - was set up in St Petersburg (Leningrad).

In December the Tsar regained the initiative, arresting the Executive of the St Petersburg soviet. An armed workers' uprising in Moscow was put down.

Bourgeois revolution: by this term Marxists meant a revolution that would break the power of the Tsar (king) and the landed nobility, raising up a new ruling class from the industrialists, merchants and bankers. It would replace hereditary privilege as the keystone of society with profits made in the market place.

Populism, in Russia, meant revolutionary politics which looked to a revolution made by "the people" in general (not the workers particularly). The populists usually argued that Russia need not (or could not) go through capitalist development, but could instead go straight from Tsarism to a sort of peasant-based socialism. Tactically the populists often favoured conspiracies to assassinate leading figures of the Tsarist regime as a way to arouse the people.

Menshevik: the less revolutionary wing in the split in the Russian socialist movement after 1903. Although the split was originally about obscure organisational issues, it quickly gained political substance. The Mensheviks' strategy was to push the bourgeoisie (the industrialists, merchants and bankers) into leading the bourgeois revolution - and this meant the workers must be careful not to frighten the bourgeoisie off.

Bolshevik: the more revolutionary wing in the split the Russian socialist movement after I903. In contrast to the Mensheviks (qv), the Bolsheviks argued for the workers to fight to take the lead and to drive the revolution forward as far as possible Even though (before 1917) they calculated that it would be impossible for the workers to drive the revolution beyond the level of radical democratic measures within a society still based on private profit and private ownership of the means of production, they believed that if the workers did not lead the 'bourgeois revolution', the bourgeoisie would make no revolution at all.

Correspondingly the Bolsheviks argued for a tighter more clearly defined party organisation than the Mensheviks.

Social Democracy was the term used before 1917 to mean 'Marxian Socialist'. The Bolsheviks changed their name from Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) to Communist Party in 1917 to signal their break with the big 'Social Democratic' parties in other countries which had supported their own governments in World War 1. The German Revolution of 1918-19 started with rebellions in late 1918 as the German army went down to defeat in World War 1. The Emperor was quickly kicked out, and a Provisional Government of Social Democrats took over.

But the German Social Democrats were not the revolutionary party they had been. Over the years they had become dominated by party and trade union bureaucrats who looked to piecemeal reform within the capitalist system. lo World War I they supported the German government. And in 1918-19 they became the last prop of the capitalist order.

Workers' councils were set up all across Germany, but the Social Democrats were able to dominate them, attracting the support of newly-politicised workers for whom the Social Democrats were still the left. The revolutionaries led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were provoked into an ill-timed uprising (against Luxemburg's insistence) in January 1919, and bloodily suppressed. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by right-wing military detachments acting under the authority of the Social Democratic government.

Germany, however, remained in turmoil until 1923, when the Communist Party, misled by Moscow, botched a new revolutionary opportunity and allowed capitalism to re-establish itself.

Petty bourgeois - in Marxist analysis. means the class who are neither wage-workers nor capitalists exploiting substantial numbers of workers. It is the class of small shopkeepers, small business people employing only one or two workers, 'independent' professional people, doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc.

The 'Prussian Road' meant a transition from feudal or neo-feudal society (based on hereditary privilege) to capitalist society (based on market economics and free wage labour) by way of reform from above rather than revolution from below.

In Prussia (the largest of the cluster of states which were united in 1871 to form Germany), such a policy of reform from above was carried through by Otto von Bismarck. He helped the landlords (junkers) transform themselves into capitalist operators; he used the state to help develop capitalist industry; he introduced limited forms of parliamentary democracy under his own strict control.

Kulak was the term used in Russia for 'rich' peasants. They were rich only very relatively, but in contrast to other peasants they would own enough land to employ a few workers outside their family to work it. They might also own horses or ploughs which they hired out to poorer peasants. The Marxists saw them as the group from which a class of capitalist farmers might grow.

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