Russian revolutionary factions split over whether a workers’ or cross-class democracy should govern
Evidence
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was not really developed before his “Balances and Prospects” of 1906. However, in 1905 he had published a pamphlet called “The period up to 9 January” which was published with a preface by Parvus which stated that “The Revolutionary Provisional Government of Russia will be the government of a workers’ democracy … a coherent government with a social-democratic majority”. This position differed both from that of the Menshevilis, who believed that the revolution was necessarily bourgeois in character and that the social-democrats should adopt an abstentionist attitude, and from that of the Bolsheviks, who stood precisely for a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2173
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Institute staff spanned rival communist factions divided by attitude to Stalinized Soviet Russia. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 128