Combined and Uneven Development of Capitalism - 3

Combined and Uneven Development of Capitalism - 3

While creating a new belt of theory, Trotsky

was also true to the Marxist core. He defended

P2 when he wrote about the limits of absolutism

posed by its economic foundations, P3 when he

wrote about the fettering of forces of production

by absolutism, P4 when he said this would lead

to revolution, whose struggles could not be read

off from economic relations but would be shaped

by political and ideological factors. In anticipating

a socialist revolution in Russia, Trotsky was

not expectating stages of development to be

skipped (which would violate P.5 and P6) since

such a revolution would take place in the context

of an international capitalism that had exhausted

its potential for development in the core countries.

That he was wrong in his diagnosis of the situation

in the West does not detract from the fecundity

of his theory of combined and uneven

development of capitalism. Indeed, Lenin and

Gramsci in different ways would develop that

theory to explain the pacification of the Western

working class just as others have used it to explain

the radical character of the working class in

Third World industrializing countries today, such

as Brazil and South Africa (Seidman 1990).

Even Trotsky did not preclude the possibility

of the defeat of the working class in the West. In

Results and Prospects (1969) he wrote that failing

a revolution in the West the Russian revolution

would be aborted and would turn inward on

itself. He anticipated the broad outlines of what

actually happened after 1917. The tragedy of

Trotsky's life was that he was destined to be the

agent and the victim of his own accurate predictions

-the involution of a Russian Revolution

that was not followed by revolution in the West,

the process he analyzed with great acuity in

Revolution Betrayed ([I9361 1972).