Controversial Trotsky quote on proletarian demographic minorities

  1. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    At last, Lars Lih provides a controversial Trotsky quote in full from Kautsky on the Russian Revolution (1906):

    How can this conflict [with the 'strong' peasantry] be resolved? Of course, it will not be resolved through having representatives of the proletariat move from ministerial benches to those of the opposition. The issue will be much more serious than that. The conflict will end in civil war and the defeat of the proletariat. Within the confines of a national revolution, and given our social conditions, there is no other “way out” for the proletariat’s political domination.
    A comrade paraphrased Lih as follows: the peasantry, here, is a class with class interests and the proletariat is - according to Lenin and Kautsky - in dire need of this class ally in order to take and hold power; the proletariat, as a class, will, according to Trotsky however, come into conflict with "the 'strong' peasantry" and thus a civil war will be provoked. This would divide the class and end the class alliance.

    Someone has yet to prove that the context somehow refers to kulaks and not peasant activism in general. A contemporary paraphrase of my own, in opposition to this adventurism, is in order:

    How can this conflict with an urban and rural petit-bourgeois demographic majority be resolved? Of course, it will not be resolved through having representatives of the proletarian demographic minority move from ministerial benches to those of the opposition. The solution will be much earlier than that: staying out of the ministerial benches to be politically independent, but move from supporting People's Wars, Focoism, Breakthrough Military Coups, and other "national"/"pan-national"/"patriotic" petit-bourgeois power struggles to becoming "the most politically visible vigilantes in anti-bourgeois crusades by the national/socioeconomically ‘patriotic’ petty bourgeoisie."