The Transitional Programme: The Death Agony of Capitalism And the Tasks of the Fourth International by Leon Trotsky (1938)

“All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet “ripened” for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”

The History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky (1930)

VOLUME ONE: The Overthrow of Tzarism

• Preface
• Peculiarities of Russia’s Development
• Tzarist Russia in the War
• The proletariat and the Peasantry
• The Tzar and Tzarina
• The Idea of a Palace Revolution
• The Death Agony of the Monarchy
• Five Days
• Who Led the February Insurrection?
• The Paradox of the February Revolution
• The New Power
• Dual Power
• The Executive Committee
• The Army and the War
• The Ruling Group and the War
• The Bolsheviks and Lenin
• Rearming the Party
• The April Days
• The First Coalition
• The Offensive
• The Peasantry
• Shifts in the Masses
• The Soviet Congress and the June Demonstration
• Conclusion
• Chronological Table for Volume One
  
• APPENDIX I
• APPENDIX II
• APPENDIX III

VOLUME TWO: The Attempted Counter-Revolution

• Introduction to Volumes Two and Three
• The July Days: Preparation and Beginning
• The July Days: Culmination and Rout
• Could the Bolsheviks Have Seized the Power
• The Month of the Great Slander
• The Counter-Revolution Lifts Its Head
• Kerensky and Kornilov
• The State Conference in Moscow
• Kerensky’s Plot
• Kornilov’s Insurrection
• The Bourgeoisie Measures Strength with the Democracy
• The Masses Under Attack
• The Rising Tide
• The Bolsheviks and the Soviets
• The Last Coalition

VOLUME THREE: The Triumph Of The Soviets

• The Peasantry Before October
• The Problem of Nationalities
• Withdrawal from the Pre-Parliament and Struggle for the Soviet Congress
• The Military-Revolutionary Committee
• Lenin Summons to Insurrection
• The Art of Insurrection
• The Conquest of the Capital
• The Capture of the Winter Palace
• The October Insurrection
• The Congress of the Soviet Dictatorship
• Conclusion
  Appendix I: Some Legends of the Bureaucracy
  Appendix II: Socialism in a Separate Country
  Appendix III: Historic References on the Theory of Permanent Revolution

Reading Marx’s Capital Vol 2 – Class 2, Chapters 1-3 with David Harvey

Capital, Volume 2
Chapter 1: The Circuit of Money Capital
Chapter 2: The Circuit of Productive Capital
Chapter 3: The Circuit of Commodity Capital

The page numbers Professor Harvey refers to are valid for the Penguin Classics editions of Capital Volumes 2 and 3.

The Concept of the Ideal by Evald Ilyenkov (From Problems of Dialectical Materialism 1977)

Lenin On Dialectics
[taken from the philosophical notebooks unpublished in his lifetime]

Summary of Dialectics (1914)

A determination which is not a clear
one!!

1) The determination of the concept out
of itself [the thing itself must be consid-
ered in its relations and in its develop-
ment];

2) the contradictory nature of the thing
itself (das Andere seiner^[1]), the contra-
dictory forces and tendencies in each phe-
nomenon;

3) the union of analysis and synthesis.

Such apparently are the elements of
dialectics.

One could perhaps present these ele-
ments in greater detail as follows:

1. the objectivity of consideration
   (not examples, not divergencies, but
   the Thing-in-itself).
                          X
2. the entire totality of the manifold
   relations of this thing to others.
3. the development of this thing,
   (phenomenon, respectively), its own
   movement, its own life.
4. the internally contradictory tenden-
   cies (and sides) in this thing.
5. the thing (phenomenon, etc.) as the
   sum  and
         #
   unity of opposites.
6. the struggle, respectively unfold-
   ing, of these opposites, contradictory
   strivings, etc.
7. the union of analysis and synthesis—
   the break-down of the separate parts
   and the totality, the summation of
   these parts.
8. the relations of each thing (phenome-
   non, etc.) are not only manifold, but
   general, universal. Each thing (phe-
   nomenon, process, etc.) is connected
   with  every other.    X
9. not only the unity of opposites, but
   the transitions of every de-
   termination, quality, feature, side,
   property into every other [into its
   opposite?].
10. the endless process of the discovery
    of new sides, relations, etc.
11. the endless process of the deepening
    of man’s knowledge of the thing, of
    phenomena, processes, etc., from ap-
    pearance to essence and from less pro-
    found to more profound essence.
12. from co-existence to causality and from
    one form of connection and reciprocal
    dependence to another, deeper, more
    general form.
13. the repetition at a higher stage of
    certain features, properties, etc., of
    the lower and
14. the apparent return to the old (nega-
    tion of the negation).
15. the struggle of content with form and
    conversely. The throwing off of the
    form, the transformation of the con-
    tent.
16. the transition of quantity into quality
    and vice versa ((15 and 16 areexamples of 9))

In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of
the unity of opposites. This embodies the essence
of dialectics, but it requires explanations and develop-
ment.

On The Question of Dialectics (1915)

The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts (see the quotation from Philo on Heraclitus at the beginning of Section III, “On Cognition,” in Lasalle’s book on Heraclitus^[1]) is the essence (one of the “essentials,” one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristics or features) of dialectics. That is precisely how Hegel, too, puts the matter (Aristotle in his Metaphysics continually grapples with it and combats Heraclitus and Heraclitean ideas).

The correctness of this aspect of the content of dialectics must be tested by the history of science. This aspect of dialectics (e.g. in Plekhanov) usually receives inadequate attention: the identity of opposites is taken as the sum-total ofexamples [“for example, a seed,” “for example, primitive communism.” The same is true of Engels. But it is “in the interests of popularisation...”] and not as a law of cognition (and as a law of the objective world).

The identity of opposites (it would be more correct, perhaps, to say their “unity,”—although the difference between the terms identity and unity is not particularly important here. In a certain sense both are correct) is the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society). The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their “self-movement,” in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the “struggle” of opposites. The two basic (or two possible? Or two historically observable?) conceptions of development (evolution) are: development as decrease and increase, as repetition, and development as a unity of opposites (the division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation).

In the first conception of motion, self - movement, its driving force, its source, its motive, remains in the shade (or this source is made external—God, subject, etc.). In the second conception the chief attention is directed precisely to knowledge of the source of “self” - movement.

The first conception is lifeless, pale and dry. The second is living. The second alone furnishes the key to the “self-movement” of everything existing; it alone furnishes the key to “leaps,” to the “break in continuity,” to the “transformation into the opposite,” to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new.

The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.

NB: The distinction between subjectivism (scepticism, sophistry, etc.) and dialectics, incidentally, is that in (objective) dialectics the difference between the relative and the absolute is itself relative. For objective dialectics there is an absolute within the relative. For subjectivism and sophistry the relative is only relative and excludes the absolute.

In his Capital, Marx first analyses the simplest, most ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois (commodity) society, a relation encountered billions of times, viz., the exchange of commodities. In this very simple phenomenon (in this “cell” of bourgeois society) analysis reveals all the contradictions (or the germs of allcontradictions) of modern society. The subsequent exposition shows us the development (both growth and movement) of these contradictions and of this society in the Σ^[2] of its individual parts. From its beginning to its end.

Such must also be the method of exposition (i.e., study) of dialectics in general (for with Marx the dialectics of bourgeois society is only a particular case of dialectics). To begin with what is the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., with any proposition: the leaves of a tree are green; John is a man: Fido is a dog, etc. Here already we have dialectics (as Hegel’s genius recognised): the individual is the universal. (cf. Aristoteles, Metaphisik, translation by Schegler, Bd. II, S. 40, 3. Buch, 4. Kapitel, 8-9: “denn natürlich kann man nicht der Meinung sin, daß es ein Haus (a house in general) gebe außer den sichtbaren Häusern,” “ού γρ άν ΰείημεν είναί τινα οίχίαν παρα τχς τινάς οίχίας”).^[3] Consequently, the opposites (the individual is opposed to the universal) are identical: the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual. Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Every individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc. Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, processes) etc.Here already we have the elements, the germs, the concepts of necessity, of objective connection in nature, etc. Here already we have the contingent and the necessary, the phenomenon and the essence; for when we say: John is a man, Fido is a dog, this is a leaf of a tree, etc., we disregard a number of attributes as contingent; we separate the essence from the appearance, and counterpose the one to the other.

Thus in any proposition we can (and must) disclose as in a “nucleus” (“cell”) the germs of all the elements of dialectics,and thereby show that dialectics is a property of all human knowledge in general. And natural science shows us (and here again it must be demonstrated in any simple instance) objective nature with the same qualities, the transformation of the individual into the universal, of the contingent into the necessary, transitions, modulations, and the reciprocal connection of opposites. Dialectics is the theory of knowledge of (Hegel and) Marxism. This is the “aspect” of the matter (it is not “an aspect” but the essence of the matter) to which Plekhanov, not to speak of other Marxists, paid no attention.

*  *  *

Knowledge is represented in the form of a series of circles both by Hegel (see Logic) and by the modern “epistemologist” of natural science, the eclectic and foe of Hegelianism (which he did not understand!), Paul Volkmann (see his Erkenntnistheorische Grundzüge,^[4] S.)

“Circles” in philosophy: [is a chronology of persons
essential? No!] 
Ancient: from Democritus to Plato and the dialectics
of Heraclitus. 
Renaissance: Descartes versus Gassendi (Spinoza?)
Modern:   Holbach—Hegel   (via   Berkeley,  Hume, 
Kant). Hegel—Feuerbach—Marx

Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade)—here we have an immeasurably rich content as compared with “metaphysical” materialism, the fundamentalmisfortune of which is its inability to apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie,^[5] to the process and development of knowledge.

Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the stand-
point of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From
the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other
hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated,
überschwengliches (Dietzgen)^[6] development (inflation,
distension) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowl-
edge, into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature,

apotheosised. Idealism is clerical obscurantism. True. But
philosophical idealism is (“more correctly” and
“in addition”) a road to clerical obscurantism
through one of the shades of the infinitely com-
plex knowledge (dialectical) of man.

Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness—voilà the epistemological roots of idealism. And clerical obscrutantism (= philosophical idealism), of course, has epistemological roots, it is not groundless; it is a sterile flower undoubtedly, but a sterile flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge.

Notes

^[1] See p. 348 of this volume—Ed.

^[2] summation—Ed.

^[3] “for, of course, one cannot hold the opinion that there can be a house (in general) apart from visible houses.”—Ed.

^[4] P. Volkmann, Erkenntnistheorische Grundzüge der Naturwissenschaften, Leipzig-Berlin, 1910, p. 35.—Ed.

^[5] theory of reflection—Ed.

^[6] The reference to the use by Josef Dietzgen of the term “überschwenglich,” which means: exaggerated, excessive, infinite; for example, in the book Kleinere philosophische Schriften (Minor Philosophical Writings), Stuttgart, 1903, p. 204, Dietzgen uses this term as follows: “absolute and relative are not infinitely separated.”

“The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events. In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business - kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new régime. Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgement of moralists. We ourselves will take the facts as they are given by the objective course of development. The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.

“In a society that is seized by revolution classes are in conflict. It is perfectly clear, however, that the changes introduced between the beginning and the end of a revolution in the economic bases of the society and its social substratum of classes, are not sufficient to explain the course of the revolution itself, which can overthrow in a short interval age-old institutions, create new ones, and again overthrow them. The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which have already formed themselves before the revolution.

“The point is that society does not change its institutions as need arises, the way a mechanic changes his instruments. On the contrary, society actually takes the institutions which hang upon it as given once for all. For decades the oppositional criticism is nothing more than a safety valve for mass dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the social structure. Such in principle, for example, was the significance acquired by the social-democratic criticism. Entirely exceptional conditions, independent of the will of persons and parties, are necessary in order to tear off from discontent the fetters of conservatism, and bring the masses to insurrection.

“The swift changes of mass views and moods in an epoch of revolution thus derive, not from the flexibility and mobility of man’s mind, but just the opposite, from its deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and relations behind new objective conditions, right up to the moment when the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe, is what creates in a period of revolution that leaping movement of ideas and passions which seems to the police mind a mere result of the activities of “demagogues.

“The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old régime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. The fundamental political process of the revolution thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of the problems arising from the social crisis – the active orientation of the masses by a method of successive approximations. The different stages of a revolutionary process, certified by a change of parties in which the more extreme always supersedes the less, express the growing pressure to the left of the masses – so long as the swing of the movement does not run into objective obstacles. When it does, there begins a reaction: disappointments of the different layers of the revolutionary class, growth of indifferentism, and therewith a strengthening of the position of the counter-revolutionary forces. Such, at least, is the general outline of the old revolutions.

“Only on the basis of a study of political processes in the masses themselves, can we understand the rôle of parties and leaders, whom we least of all are inclined to ignore. They constitute not an independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.”

From the Preface to The History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky (1930)

Reading Marx’s Capital Vol II – Class 1, Introduction
by David Harvey

“This is the first class of a free semester-long open course consisting of a close reading of the text of Marx’s Capital Volume II (plus parts of Volume III) in 12 video lectures by Professor David Harvey. David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Anthropology and Geography PhD programs. This course was taught at Union Theological Seminary in Spring 2011, and was attended by graduate students and activists from across New York City.

Subsequent videos will be available every one to two weeks. Initially the videos will be available only on YouTube. Additional file formats and podcasts will be available soon.

The page numbers Professor Harvey refers to are valid for the Penguin Classics editions of Capital Volumes II and III.”

“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”

Vladimir Lenin, What is to be done? (1902)

Here is a collection of texts (and a by no means complete one) that I think are incredibly important to the understanding of Marxism; an understanding of which I think a fundamental necessity in intervening into the concrete actuality of the Class struggle toward bringing about the universal emancipation of all human kind from the exploitation degradation and humiliation of the Capitalist mode of production, that is, in bringing about the International Socialist Revolution. Listed in chronological order:

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848)

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1859)

Value, Price and Profit by Karl Marx (1865)

Capital: Vol. 1 by Karl Marx (1867)

Critique of the Gotha Programme by Karl Marx (1875)

Anti-Duhring by Frederick Engels (1877)

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Frederick Engels (1880)

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (1884)

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy by Frederick Engels (1886)

The Meaning of Hegel by Georgi Plekhanov (1891)

On Historical Materialism by Franz Mehring (1893)

The Materialist Conception of History by Georgi Plekhanov (1897)

On The Role of The Individual in History by Georgi Plekhanov (1898)

Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg (1900)

What is to be done? by Vladimir Lenin (1902)

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism by Vladimir Lenin (1908)

Elements of Dialectics/On Dialectics by Vladimir Lenin (1914)

The Right of Nations to Self-Determination by Vladimir Lenin (1914)

The Collapse of the Second International by Vladimir Lenin (1915)

Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin (1917)

The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin (1918)

The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin (1918)

Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder by Vladimir Lenin (1920)

The Third International after Lenin by Leon Trotsky (1928)

The Permanent Revolution by Leon Trotsky (1931)

Fascism: What it is and How to Fight it? by Leon Trotsky (1932)

The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky (1936)

The Transitional Program by Leon Trotsky (1938)

Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky (1938)

In Defense of Marxism by Leon Trotsky (1940)

Lenin and Trotsky: What they really stood for by Ted Grant and Alan Woods (1969)

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser (1970)

Dialectical Logic by Evald Ilyenkov (1974)

“With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history – only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
“To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.”
Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring (1878)