Our Political Tasks

Why did Trotsky write this pamphlet?

At the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 the 24-year-old Trotsky, delegate of the Siberian Union, sided with Martov over Paragraph One of the party rules and over the election of the Iskra editorial board. After the congress he joined Martov, Potresov, Axelrod and Dan in the leading body of the minority and clashed openly with Lenin. In May 1904 Lenin's One Step Forward, Two Steps Back reviewed the congress and charged the minority with opportunism; in his preparatory notes he classed Trotsky among the Martovites as an "opportunist".

Trotsky's answer was Our Political Tasks (subtitled Tactical and Organisational Questions), a book of 107 pages published in Geneva in August 1904 under the party imprint. The cover bore the pen name "N. Trotsky", and the book was dedicated to "my dear teacher Pavel Borisovich Axelrod". Martov, who read the manuscript, wrote to Axelrod that it was very good. Trotsky described it as an attempt to turn comrades worn out by half-scholastic organisational debates towards the questions of political tactics on which the party's future depended.

What is "substitutionism"?

The book's central idea is zamestitelstvo, the Russian for taking another's place, rendered in English as substitutionism. Trotsky held that in the Iskra period the party had grown used to thinking for the working class and acting in its place instead of awakening and educating it politically. Taking the Petersburg Committee as an example, he charged that the committee of "professional revolutionaries" had not marched at the head of the conscious workers but acted instead of them.

He paired substitutionism with Economism. The Economists trailed behind the workers' immediate economic demands and gave up politics; the substitutionists, armed with conclusions drawn from an analysis of historical development, acted in place of the class. Both, he argued, looked for a short cut past the hard task of making the working class a political actor in its own right, and both tried to "cheat" history.

He then described what happens when this method enters the party's internal politics: "The party organisation substitutes itself for the party, the Central Committee substitutes itself for the party organisation, and finally the 'dictator' substitutes himself for the Central Committee." Trotsky did not reject centralism as such. In Baruch Knei-Paz's analysis he wanted a strong Central Committee, but one that coordinated the local organisations rather than commanding them and served the party, whose strength had to come from drawing the workers into party life.

What did Lenin argue in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back?

Lenin's position was that Martov's wording of Paragraph One, by admitting as members people outside any organisation, opened the door to intellectuals who shied away from discipline and organisation. The party had to be bound not by the personal ties and vague trust of circles but by formal rules, and calling this "bureaucracy" was the "aristocratic anarchism" of intellectuals used to circle life. When the minority's editors denounced the majority's regime as bureaucratic centralism that mechanically suppressed individual initiative and independent activity, Lenin saw in the charge the organisational outlook of opportunism.

The passage Trotsky attacked most sharply was Lenin's Jacobin analogy. Lenin wrote that "a Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with the organisation of the proletariat, a proletariat conscious of its class interests, is a revolutionary Social-Democrat", and called those who sighed after professors and students and feared the dictatorship of the proletariat Girondists, that is, opportunists.

How did Trotsky see Jacobinism?

In the last part, "Jacobinism and Social Democracy", Trotsky turned Lenin's analogy around. The Jacobins believed absolutely in abstract truth and universal morality while distrusting real people, and so made suspicion their political method and called in the guillotine. Recalling Robespierre's words in his last speech that he knew only two parties, good citizens and bad, Trotsky mocked that the maxim was engraved on the heart of "Maximilien Lenin". Social Democracy, he argued, is as far from Jacobinism as from reformism: it rests not on an idea but on a real class, and differences within the class must be settled by political struggle, not by the guillotine.

Trotsky ridiculed Lenin's attempt to impose a "state of siege" on the party after the congress as a reign of terror impotent from the start, and warned that unless these methods were abandoned they would bring the party to political, moral and theoretical decomposition. The book was also full of biting personal attacks on Lenin. Lenin, in an October 1904 letter to Elena Stasova, called it "the most brazen lies, a distortion of facts", and nicknamed its author "Balalaikin-Trotsky" after a braggart in a novel by Saltykov-Shchedrin.

How was the "prophecy" read later?

Trotsky soon drifted away from the Menshevik leaders too and remained a Social-Democrat outside the factions until he joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and became a leader of the October Revolution and the Civil War. While in power he never reprinted the book or mentioned it in print or in speeches; it was the only major work of his treated this way.

It was his enemies who brought it back. In the succession struggle of the 1920s Stalin and the majority cited it as proof that Trotsky had always opposed Leninist principles of organisation, and in 1928 the party history commission Istpart reissued it in 20,000 copies as L. D. Trotsky on the Party in 1904, with a preface and notes by Emelyan Yaroslavsky. Trotsky himself wrote in the summer of 1927 that Lenin had been right about the continuity between Bolsheviks and Jacobins. In his autobiography My Life (1930) he recalled Lenin's break with the old editors at the Second Congress: "His behavior seemed unpardonable to me, both horrible and outrageous. And yet, politically it was right and necessary, from the point of view of organization."

After Trotsky's expulsion the chain of substitutions was widely read as a prophecy of a party history that ended in one man's dictatorship. Isaac Deutscher's trilogy and Knei-Paz's study (1978) brought the book back to attention, and Trotsky's biographers Yuri Felshtinsky and Georgy Chernyavsky called the passage a "prescient nightmare". Knei-Paz saw in the idea of bureaucratic centralism, first used here, the root of Trotsky's later analysis of Stalinism in The Revolution Betrayed.

The warning was not Trotsky's alone. Axelrod, Plekhanov ("Centralism or Bonapartism?"), Martov, Zasulich and Luxemburg criticised Lenin's dictatorial leanings at the same time; Trotsky's words stuck partly because he became, after 1917, the best-known figure to go over to Lenin's side. Knei-Paz noted that the pamphlet's conclusion that Lenin's methods were bound to collapse is not well connected with the rest of its argument, and the historian Antonio Carlo argued that the two men's organisational differences were in effect overcome in the revolution of 1905 to 1907.