In his booklet, Trotsky’s Theory of
Permanent Revolution: A Leninist Critique (Resistance Books, Sydney
1998) Geoff Lorimer, leader of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party
(DSP), attacks Trotsky’s theory and the policies which arose from
it as a grievous mistake. What Lorimer raises are not academic
historical questions. Lorimer and the Australian SDP were, and still
are, seeking to apply to the upsurges in the Far East today the same
policies with which Stalin opposed Trotsky’s Marxist (and Leninist)
internationalism in the 1920s. It was at this time that Stalin raised
his ‘theory’ that Socialism could be built in one country.
Lorimer’s attack on Trotsky and on Trotsky’s
theory repeats accusations that were made in 1923 by Stalin and his
supporters. As the Soviet state degenerated bureaucratically and Stalinism
arose on that degeneration, Trotsky conducted a struggle for Bolshevik
principles. It was in the beginning of this struggle in the early 1920s,
that the then leaders of the Soviet Communist Party — Stalin,
Zinoviev and Kamenev, known as the “troika” — deliberately
exaggerated the differences between Lenin and Trotsky before the Russian
Revolution.
They distorted the positions of Trotsky to divert discussion
from the real issues of the development of and chauvinism. These were
the issues that were worrying Lenin in the last period of his life.
He was concerned with bureaucratic dangers in the Soviet Union and how
Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet Communist Party were handling
the national question. He particularly attacked the Great-Russian chauvinism
of Stalin over Georgia. Lenin was preparing a struggle against Stalin
and, just before he died, he suggested to Trotsky that they wage a joint
battle.(1)
It was his own differences with Lenin that Stalin was
covering up, then and later. As the gulf between Stalinism and Leninism
grew wider and deeper in the 1920s and 1930s, so grew the slanders,
distortions and lies about Trotskyism. In 1926, Zinoviev and Kamenev
broke with Stalin and volunteered to make a public admission that Trotsky
had been right all along when he warned the party against its bureaucracy.
They revealed that the legend of Trotskyism, as a consistent anti-Marxist
trend against “Leninism”, was deliberately manufactured
in 1923. It was meant to obscure the real issues that divided Trotsky
from the ‘troika’, and most sharply from Stalin.
The criminal character of Stalin’s revision
of Marxism has been incontrovertibly proved by historical events in
the collapse of the Stalinist regime in 1991, when the Soviet Union
was eventually and tragically brought to an end by the ravages of a
privileged bureaucratic caste. Trotsky’s 1938 warning was fulfilled:
Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ
of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow
the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism,
or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to
socialism.(2)
Stalin’s so-called theory of ‘socialism in
one country’ was also indissolubly linked with an international
policy that turned away from proletarian internationalism to an adaptation
to national and bourgeois democratic forces. Stalin and his followers
issued the guidelines of two-stage revolutions to the Chinese and other
revolutions: first, the democratic revolution and then the socialist
proletarian revolution. This was not a genuine alliance of opponents
of semifeudal and colonial rule but was the cover for subordinating
the working class organisations and their independent class policies
completely to nationalist leaders and native capitalists.
In China, Stalin’s ‘guidance’ resulted
in the tragedy of the Chinese Revolution of 1923-27, when the Stalinist
leadership of the Communist International instructed the Chinese Communist
Party to dissolve its independent organisation into the Kuomintang of
Chiang-Kai-Shek.
Maurice Meisner, in a well-researched book, Mao’s
China and After, describes the Kuomintang-Chinese Communist Party alliance
against the old regime of tyrannical war-lords thus: “Beneath
the façade of the revolutionary rhetoric of the time, the concept
was reduced to include no more than the Kuomintang were willing to accept”.
Meisner goes on to give the essence of the alliance:
Only lip service was paid to the ideal of a democratic republic;
indeed, it was implicitly assumed from the beginning that China’s
new political order would be essentially a military one. And quite explicitly
excluded, or at least postponed, was a social revolution in the countryside.
China’s “bourgeois-democratic” revolution, in short,
was to achieve no more than purely nationalist goals...And for the leaders
of the isolated and beleaguered Soviet Union, being driven inexorably
to Stalin’s doctrine of “socialism in one country”
and now deeply involved in internal Chinese politics, a nationalist
revolution that would yield a friendly Chinese regime was the overriding
aim.(3)
The policy had tragic results, which consolidated the
dictatorship of Chiang-Kai-Shek, shattered the Chinese Communist Party,
and pushed back an enormous mass movement in towns and countryside.
Meisner describes the terrible debacle in 1927:
The break came when Chiang Kai-Shek had acquired the military power
(and the financial backing of the higher bourgeoisie of Shanghai) to
destroy the mass movement — and to cast off his Russian patrons
and Communist allies...
In an orgy of counterrevolutionary violence, Chiang
turned his Soviet-built army to the task of destroying all radical mass
organisations as well as the Chinese Communist Party. Trade unions and
student organisations were annihilated in the cities, but nowhere was
the slaughter greater than in the suppression of peasant associations
in the countryside. Organisations that had mobilised tens of millions
of peasants were brutally smashed, and within a few months bad vanished
from the political scene, leaving few traces of the great agrarian revolution
that had risen so swiftly, promising to transform the Chinese countryside.
The Chinese Communist Party was virtually wiped out. In
1924, the Communist Party had 500 members; at the end of 1925, its membership
was 20,000. By 1927, at the time of the Shanghai defeat, it had a membership
of 58,000 and its auxiliary organisations among students and peasants
were much larger. By the end of 1927, no more than 10,000 remained.
It is this two-stage theory that is so dangerous today.
In its call for an international conference for January 2000, the SDP
declared that it was meant to bring together “Marxist parties
around the world” and “all those activists engaged in struggles
for liberation and freedom.” As the conference showed, there is
a rising number of these ‘activists’ from fresh generations
of anti-capitalist fighters who are part of a new wave coming up from
workers and oppressed peoples of the world.
They are, however, facing old problems of the struggle
for the emancipation of humanity that show themselves in new forms.
Here the questions of theory and practice in the struggle for the leadership
of the Communist International so many years ago have a vital importance
today. There is also a need to study and understand the lessons of the
class processes and leadership in the revolutions in the former colonial
and semi-colonial countries in the post Second World War period during
which, the conservative bureaucratic machines of Stalinism and Social
Democracy were tested out on a grand scale.
In his history of the DSP, John Percy, one of its leaders, declares:
The Nicaraguan revolution toppled our Trotskyist theory, that socialist
revolutions were one stage affairs, and vindicated the two-stage strategy
of revolution developed by Lenin.
The opposite is true! Historical reality proved in Nicaragua
that the Theory of Permanent Revolution is a necessary strategic guide
for those building revolutionary leadership today. Such proof can also
be found in other national revolutions, which broke up the old empires.
The history of the post war world further underlines the truth of the
Theory of the Permanent Revolution. It gives us an invaluable strategical
guide by showing that, if the working class does not take the lead of
the national or democratic struggles and carry them forward into a socialist
revolution through the dictatorship of the proletariat, then it must
stop half way and be distorted. Furthermore, if the revolution is not
developed outside its own frontiers and linked with the world revolution,
sooner or later reaction must triumph. Today, this is an incontestable
conclusion if we study the development of the Soviet Union, Eastern
Europe, Cuba and Nicaragua.
The Permanent Revolution today is also an important strategical
guide in the heartlands of imperialism. In Britain, for example, the
decay of capitalism fuels a struggle against national oppression not
only in Ireland but also now, in Scotland and the question of a two
stage theory arises there.
To carry forward a successful struggle to end capitalism
it is necessary for those forces which are already beginning to show
themselves in various tendencies and currents in the world to be absolutely
convinced on the central role of the working class, its internationalism,
and the necessity of its independent political and revolutionary organisation.
This is the essence of the theory of the Permanent Revolution
and also of the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International.
We cannot develop the international vanguard and an authoritative International
with real roots in the working class world-wide unless we take issue
and conduct a theoretical and political struggle against all tendencies
that minimise the role of the working class and destroy the confidence
of revolutionaries in it.
Let us emphasise that the Bolshevik Party, the Left Opposition
and the most consistent fighters for Trotskyism and Marxism were those
who developed a struggle against these tendencies. The International
Workers League, of which the ISL is a section, stands firmly on that
programmatic basis. The decline of imperialism, the division of the
world by a handful of enormously wealthy and powerful groups of capitalists
means that there has been no period when international questions which
are an intrinsic part of Trotsky’s theory were posed so sharply
as they are today.
Why this Attack on Trotsky?
Although Stalinism has collapsed, the essential basic
ideology of Stalinism, its nationalist theory of “socialism in
one country” is carried on by groups like the DSP. They discourage
the independence of the working class and adapt to bourgeois nationalism.
It is no accident therefore that the DSP utilised Lorimer’s
attack on the Theory of Permanent Revolution in preparation for their
international conference in January 2000. This, they declared, was meant
to bring together “Marxist parties around the world” and
“all those activists engaged in struggles for liberation and freedom”.
A great number of those who came were from the Far East
where fresh generations are taking the road of struggle. In the inevitably
uneven development of international struggle, it is understandable that
there is confusion and a testing out of ideas. We are of the opinion
that a new International will be built by such forces, with principled
anti-capitalist positions~ but not necessarily supporting the Fourth
International. However, the International cannot be built without Marxist-Leninist
internationalism. In the struggle for this Trotskyism has made, and
will make, an invaluable contribution. Trotskyism was built on the foundation
of a principled and consistent opposition to the theory of ‘socialism
in one country” and a principled Marxist-Leninist approach and
policy towards national bourgeois and petty bourgeois leaders, going
back to the time of Marx. An international world party can have no firm
foundation without this.
The struggle against these ideas of the DSP, which is
developing as a modern centrist current, has a very real relevance for
revolutionary socialist practice today. Internationalism remains platonic
unless it is consummated in building a world party. This the DSP repudiates.
Through the weaknesses and betrayals of its leadership, the working
class has gone through a period where its international revolutionary
organisation has been at the weakest that it has ever been. Capitalism
has been able to continue despite its decay, and it now threatens both
civilisation and the earth itself. Yet never has there been a wider
recognition amongst the masses that capitalism is an international form
of exploitation.
This is particularly true of the Far East where the working
class is experiencing the sharpest effects of the structural crisis
of world capitalism. This is the context for Lorimer’s attack
on Trotsky’s greatest contribution to Marxism: his struggle against
Stalinism, his fight for internationalism and struggle to resolve the
crisis of working class leadership. At the centre of the Theory of Permanent
Revolution is the necessity to make the revolution permanent in the
under-developed countries through extending it.
It was this that guided the strategy of Lenin in the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Today’s attack on Trotsky and his theory of Permanent Revolution
goes hand in hand with refuting the struggle for the organisation of
a new workers’ International.
Marx and Engels and the Permanent Revolution
It was Marx and Engels who first introduced the premises of the theory
and laid them out before, during and immediately after the revolutionary
events in Germany in 1848—9. Four years before the German revolution,
Marx and Engels had already arrived at their main thesis: that the class
that should assume the mission of freeing the German people and of changing
the social order was the proletariat. It would fight together with the
democratic bourgeoisie but would carry forward its own revolutionary
aims.
In 1850, Marx and Engels wrote The First Address of the
Central Committee of the Communist League in Germany, giving the lessons
of the 1848 revolution, which by then had been defeated. They drew lessons
about the workers’ demands and the need for their independent
organisation and they declared the international nature of the revolution:
...it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent
until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from
their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power
and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently
far - not only in one country but in all leading countries of the world
- that competition between the proletariats of these countries ceases
and at least the decisive forces of prod action are concentrated in
the hands of the workers.
He declared: “There is no doubt that during the
further course of the revolution in Germany, the petty bourgeois democracy
will for the moment acquire a predominant influence.” He then
posed the question: “…what should be the attitude of the
proletariat, and in particular the League of Communists towards them?”
He drew very definite conclusions:
They must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’
governments either in the form of local executive committees and councils
or through workers clubs or committees, so that the ~ not only immediate
lose the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning
supervised and threatened &y authorities behind which stand the
whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the very moment of victory
the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the
defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the
party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself.
Marx and Engels ended their address with the declaration:
But they themselves [the workers] must contribute most to their
final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests,
by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible,
by not allowing themselves to be mislead by the hypocritical phrases
of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the
necessity of an independently organised party of the proletariat. Their
battle-cry must be, The Permanent Revolution.(4)
So it was Marx and Engels who first used the term ‘permanent
revolution’ half a century before Trotsky. It conveyed the conclusion
that the working class was in a permanent struggle for hegemony among
the classes involved in the democratic revolution in Germany. By the
end of the century, Germany had been united under the Prussian state
by the Bismarkian “revolution’ and emerged as a leading
capitalist country. Capitalism had entered its imperialist epoch. However,
bourgeois democratic revolutions remained unaccomplished in a large
part of the world, while class antagonisms between the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat had greatly increased since Marx’s time.
Thus in the enormous and extremely backward empire of
feudal Russia the relationship of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie
and the petty bourgeoisie (who saw the revolution solely in terms of
democracy) became an important problem for thinking revolutionaries.
The burning question was: what was the role of the working class in
the coming bourgeois democratic revolution?
Trotsky’s theory
Trotsky produced his theory of Permanent Revolution in
the first decade of the twentieth century. It was concerned with countries,
such as Russia, where capitalism and a working class had already developed
in a semi-feudal, or colonial society, dominated by imperialism. For
their liberation, these countries were facing an anti-imperialist, anti-feudal
revolution.
The native capitalist class, because of its links with other exploiting
classes, could not lead its own revolution through to the end and establish
an independent bourgeois democratic republic. Above all, it could not
lead a revolution for a radical redistribution of land to the advantage
of the peasantry.
The only class capable of leading the peasantry and solving
the tasks of the bourgeois revolution was the working class. However,
argued Trotsky, the working class would not be able to stop at the limits
of the bourgeois democratic revolution. Having reached power, the proletariat
would be compelled to encroach even more deeply upon the interests of
private property in general, that is, to take the road of socialist
measures.
He insisted that a workers’ government would have
no alternative but to secure the revolution by taking action against
capital. The barrier between the minimum and the maximum programme would
disappear immediately the proletariat came to power (that is to say
the minimum programme of bourgeois democratic demands and the maximum
programme of demands laying the basis for socialism).
For Trotsky, the only class capable of leading the peasantry
and solving the tasks of the bourgeois revolution was the working class.
He said that in its alliance with the peasantry~ the working class must
take the lead, because of the difficulties of peasant organisation owing
to its petty-bourgeois consciousness based on individual ownership.
If the working class did not take the lead of the bourgeois democratic
revolution and carry it forward in building the basis for socialist
transformation that revolution would stop half way and be distorted.
Furthermore, if the revolution was not made permanent by its development
outside its frontiers with revolutions in other countries, eventually,
reaction must triumph.
Trotsky did not argue that the working class could immediately
introduce socialism, as the Stalinists (and now Lorimer) alleged. Like
Rosa Luxemburg (see below), he believed that the Russian Revolution
would realise “in the particular affairs of absolutist Russia
the general results of internationalist capitalist development.”
He gave a clear summary of this in 1929 in his Introduction to the first
Russian edition of his book, Permanent Revolution:
‘But do you really believe,’ the Stalins, Rykovs, and
all the other Molotovs objected dozens of times between 1905 and 1917,
‘that Russia is ripe for a socialist revolution?’ To that,
I always answered: ‘No, I do not. But world economy as a whole,
and European economy in the first place, is fully ripe for the socialist
revolution. Whether the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia leads
to socialism or not, and at what tempo, and through what stages, will
depend upon the fate of European and world capitalism’.
Rosa Luxemburg and Permanent Revolution
It was not just Trotsky who at that time talked about
Permanent Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg (one of the leaders of the German
Social Democratic Party) also developed this theory, although her contribution
is now not very well known. Immediately after the 1905 revolution in
Russia she wrote:
In the great French revolution the still wholly underdeveloped internal
contradictions of bourgeois society gave scope for a long period of
violent struggles, in which all the antagonisms which first germinated
and ripened in the heat of the revolution raged unhindered and unrestrained
in a spirit of reckless radicalism. A century later the revolution of
the German bourgeoisie, which broke out midway in the development of
capitalism, was already hampered on both sides by the antagonism of
interests and the equilibrium of strength between capital and labour,
and was smothered in a bourgeois-feudal compromise, and shortened to
a brief miserable compromise ending in words. Another half century and
the present Russian revolution stands at a point of the historical path
which is already over the summit, which is on the other side of the
culminating point of capitalist society, at which the bourgeois revolution
will again be smothered by the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat,
but will expand into a new lengthy period of violent social struggles,
at which the balancing of the account with absolutism appears a trifle
in comparison with the many new accounts the revolution itself opens
up. The present revolution realises in the particular affairs of absolutist
Russia the general results of internationalist capitalist development,
and appears not so much as the last successor of the old bourgeois revolutions
as the forerunner of the new series of proletarian revolutions of the
West. The most backward country of all, just because it has been so
unpardonably late with its bourgeois revolution, shows ways and methods
of further class struggle to the proletariat of Germany and the most
advanced capitalist countries. . . The German workers should look upon
the Russian revolution as their own affair, not merely as a matter of
international solidarity with the Russian proletariat, but first and
foremost, as a chapter of their own social and political history.
In the writings of Rosa Luxemburg the emphasis was clearly
on the evolution of the world relations of capitalism, and the conception
of the uninterrupted ‘growing over’ (the term which Lenin
used later), of the democratic into the socialist revolution.
Lenin and Trotsky
Before 1917, Lenin and Trotsky had differences over the
coming revolution in Russia. It is the false Stalinist version of these
differences that Lorimer uses in his booklet. His theory was accepted
as a valuable contribution to Marxist theory after the experience of
the Russian Revolution up to the attack on Trotsky in 1924 by Stalin.
Trotsky, in a collection of his writings on the Permanent Revolution,
quotes the editors of the second part of Volume XIV of Lenin’s
collected works, declaring:
Even before the 1905 revolution he (Trotsky) advanced the original
and especially noteworthy theory of permanent revolution, in which he
asserted the bourgeois revolution of 1905 would pass directly over into
a socialist revolution, constituting the first in a series of national
revolutions(5)
Trotsky points out that this second part of Volume XIV
was published while Lenin was still alive and “Thousands and tens
of thousands of party members read this note. And nobody declared it
to be false until the year 1924.” The important historical truth
is that before 1917, Lenin and Trotsky had agreement over the leading
role of the working class. In that respect, they were both in opposition
to the Mensheviks. (Until 1917, when the Bolshevik Party was formed,
the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were the two major wings or factions
of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party).
Together with the majority of Russian Marxists, including
the Mensheviks, they saw the revolution developing as a bourgeois democratic
revolution with the working class fighting for democratic rights, agrarian
revolution and the ending of feudal land ownership and feudal barbarism
in the countryside. Lenin declared that the working class, together
with the peasantry could take this revolution no further than the end
of feudal relations and the institution of a bourgeois democratic republic,
which was necessary before the working class could develop the conditions
for a social revolution.
The famous pamphlet that gives Lenin’s position
is Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, which
was written just before the revolution of 1905. It was published in
July of that year, a few weeks after the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin
that began the revolutionary uprising.
At this time, Lenin did not believe that the coming revolution
would be socialist. He considered that there had to be a development
of capitalism and of the working class to make that possible. He wrote
— with a sideswipe at Trotsky — that it was an absurd semi-anarchist
idea, to believe
...that the maximum programme, the conquest of power for socialist
revolution can be immediately achieved.
The present degree of economic development of Russia
(an objective condition) and a degree of class consciousness and organisation
of the broad masses of the proletariat (a subjective condition indissolubly
connected with the objective condition) makes the immediate complete
emancipation of the working class impossible. Only the most ignorant
people can ignore the bourgeois character of the present democratic
revolution.(6)
Thus, at that time, it was his conviction that only after
the bourgeois revolution, could the working class evolve the organisation
and consciousness needed for the proletarian revolution.
The Mensheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Labour
Party agreed with this. However, they were part of the right-wing in
the big division in the international movement between opportunism and
reformism on the one hand, and Marxist principles and revolution on
the other. They advocated leaving the leadership in the coming Russian
Revolution in the hands of the liberal bourgeoisie with the perspective
that the workers’ party would become a “left opposition”
in the future democratic state. Lenin attacked them for capitulating
to the liberal capitalists.
In 1907, in an introduction to a collection of Marx’s
letters to Ludwig Kugelmann, he summarised the Menshevik position in
the following way:
From the fact that, in essence, the revolution is a bourgeois
revolution they draw the shallow conclusion that the bourgeoisie is
the driving force of the revolution, that the tasks of the proletariat
in this revolution are of an auxiliary and non-independent nature, that
the proletarian leadership of the revolution is impossible!
The aim of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the revolution
was a government of workers and peasants, a revolutionary democratic-dictatorship
of the proletariat and the peasantry”. This government would carry
out a programme giving democracy to the masses of workers and peasants,
instituting a republic in which capitalist enterprises would continue
under the control of the workers’ and peasants’ government
which would nationalise the land and distribute it, introduce the eight
hour day, and end trade union restrictions.
Lenin’s conclusions on the coming revolution were
firmly grounded on Marxist principles, including the independence of
the working class, internationalism and the development of the anti-capitalist
revolution in Europe. There was a unity of Lenin and Trotsky against
the Mensheviks in that both placed the emphasis on the working class
as the only consistent revolutionary force, and the only one that could
unite the peasantry.
Lenin in February 1917
In February 1917, Lenin and Trotsky were united against
the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary conciliationist leaders, who
had handed power to the representatives of capitalists and the old regime.
They both had the firm conclusion that the soviets had to take the power.
This was in line with Trotsky’s theory. Lenin, for his part, whilst
still in exile in Switzerland, reacted, in the first weeks of February,
with the demand of ‘All power to the Soviets’. Immediately
he stepped off the train in Petrograd when he returned to Russia at
the end of March, he began his sharp struggle that swung the Bolshevik
party behind his policy.
To call for power to the Soviets, and to attack the conciliators
and their illusions in the democratic revolution was no great step at
all for Lenin. He had worked over the experience of Soviets in the 1905
revolution where they were thrown up spontaneously by the masses. He
responded to the realities of the war and development of world relations,
and their effect on the consciousness of workers and peasants in uniform
and the tasks that were posed.
In 1922, while Lenin was still alive, and with the heat
of the revolution and the bitter struggle of civil war still fresh,
Karl Radek wrote about what the Soviets and the war crisis of imperialism
meant:
The new factor, which the Marxist analysis bad not foreseen, was
the form by which the working class spontaneously organised itself as
a revolutionary agent. Alongside political parties and alongside trade
unions, Soviets instinctively rose. During the days of October 1905,
at the time of the great shaking of Tsarism by the general strike, in
some cities the Soviets were the organs of power, and the bourgeoisie
had to capitulate before them in many places.
The revolution of February 1917 picked up again the
thread of the first revolution of 1905. A rapid victory was only possible
in February 1917 because the revolution of 1905 had already worked the
terrain in Russia. The opportunists of the Second International who
bad explained after the defeat of 1907 that the Russian Revolution had
been futile... once more appeared in the light of events of 1917 to
be short sighted.
The Russian popular masses were to begin the revolution
of 1917 with a store of political concepts which had been reinforced
and sharpened by two and a half years of experience of war; they were
therefore to push the revolution straight away much further than the
bourgeoisie wished to tolerate; the arrest of the Tsar, the checkmating
of the installation of the regency, and the proclamation of the republic
were not the least important results of the work of the first revolution.
At the same time, the worker and soldier masses spontaneously began
to form Soviets of Workers and Soldiers. The peasants initiated them
in the countryside and these mass organisations, formed spontaneously,
became, even before being conscious of the fact that they were, the
constituent organs of proletarian power, the organs, which would take
power ... the bourgeois Provisional Government from the first day of
its existence had to complain about “double government”,
for the soviets of workers and soldiers not only grabbed control over
the bourgeois Provisional Government, but even part of the executive
power.(7)
In February 1917, the workers, soldiers and peasants built
on their memories of these flexible and democratic organisations. Lenin
clearly now saw the Soviets as the instrument through which the working
class and the peasantry could end Tzarism and clear away the feudal
rubbish, creating the basis for the evolution of a socialist state.
The soviets united the working class and the peasantry, with the working
class in the leadership.
Lenin had realised their power and recognised that they
expressed a high “ . . .degree of consciousness and organisation
of the masses.’ Here in the Soviets was the “democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” with the working
class in the cities leading (as Trotsky had prophesied). The war had
further welded peasants and workers together as soldiers and, as 1917
progressed, they grew more united in their opposition to the profiteering
and slaughter.
The February Revolution had exploded in Russia as a result
of the international contradictions of capitalism. The chain of capitalism~
as Lenin remarked, had broken at its weakest link. Those like Lenin,
who were single-mindedly and firmly devoted to the defence of the February
revolution, understood that it had to go further. This meant a government
of Soviets making the revolution permanent with the assistance of the
world working class.
In his April Theses, of 1917, with which he began the
re-arming of the Bolshevik party, Lenin declared that the Russian working
class might come to power first, before the European proletariat —
but would still depend upon the revolutionary assistance of the latter.
Lenin and Trotsky had reached a fundamental agreement that only the
working class could unify the peasantry into a formidable force, and
lead the revolution to the defeat of Tsarism, feudalism and reaction,
and bring what the masses were demanding — Peace, Bread I and
Land. They were united in placing the development of internationalism
as the axis of their policy.
What were the stages?
Lorimer declares that Lenin had a theory of stages with
regard to the Russian Revolution, which saw the February revolution
as the first stage—a bourgeois democratic revolution. In fact,
Lenin saw the “stage” after February as a regime of dual
power. He defined it as that while he was still in exile in Switzerland,
before his return in March 1917.
The inner dynamics of the Russian Revolution in February
were moving towards a revolutionary state power, a dictatorship of the
proletariat supported by the peasantry — totally in accordance
with Trotsky’s understanding. The Soviets had the power in February.
Their Menshevik and Social Revolutionary leaders handed it to the Provisional
Government, and there followed a period of dual power.
1917 was dominated by the process, led by the Bolsheviks,
to the seizure of all power by the soviets.
The first stage of the revolution in Russia, was described
by Lenin writing in the second of his daily Letters from Afar,
which were addressed to Pravda, the Bolshevik daily:
The February-March revolution was merely the first stage of the revolution
... Russia is passing through a peculiar historical moment of transition
to the next stage of the revolution, or, to use Skobelev’s expression,
to a ‘second revolution’.(8)
If Lorimer wanted to describe this as a stage then we
would willingly agree that many revolutions in history have begun with
this stage. Trotsky devoted a whole chapter in his History of the
Russian Revolution to this “stage”, declaring that
dual power was a distinct condition of social crisis, and went on to
write that, “an illumination of it has never appeared in historic
literature”.
He went on to declare that it was by no means peculiar
to the Russian Revolution. In fact, in the French Revolution there was
at times a dual power between the Jacobins and the sanscullotes of Pans.
As Trotsky remarks:
It is not a constitutional but a revolutionary fact. It implies
that a destruction of the social equilibrium has already split the state
superstructure, It arises where the hostile classes are already each
relying upon essentially incompatible governmental organisations
— the one outlived, the other in process of formation —
which jostle against each other at every step of government. The amount
of power that falls to each of the struggling classes in such a situation
is determined by the correlation of forces in the course of the struggle.(9)
The revolutionary process was facing a government preparing
the counter-revolution. Lenin saw the conquest of February as the removal
of the Romanovs. The bourgeois liberals were the government, but the
state was the old Tzarist state, and landlordism remained in the countryside.
From his point of view the Provisional Government, or what he called
the “Guchkov-Milyukov government” was “no more than
an agent of the banking firm ‘England and France’, an instrument
for continuing the imperialist slaughter.” In a lecture in Switzerland,
while still in exile in March 1917, he said:
In 1917, a very exceptional conjuncture of circumstances
made it possible to merge together the attacks of the most diverse social
forces against Tsarism. First, Anglo-French finance capital, which more
than any other dominates and robs the whole world, opposed the revolution
in 1905 and helped the Tsar crush it (the 1906 loan). But it took a
very active and direct part in the present revolution, organising the
conspiracy of the Guchkovs, Milyukovs, and part of the army high command
to depose Nicholas II or force him to make concessions.
He wrote then of ‘double power’ and declared
in his lecture quoted above, that “we do not need a ‘ready
made’ state machine, such as exists in the most democratic bourgeois
republics, but direct power of the armed and organised workers That
is the state we need”.
This conception of Lenin’s was as different to Stalin’s
“two-stage” theory as it is to Lorimer’s. For Lenin
the central important aspect was the dual power expressed by these two
forces. The immediate questions for him were how to win the workers
and peasants in this second pole of the dual power, and destroy the
first power.
Permanent Revolution in the post-war world
No wonder that Lorimer gives confused statements on his
“stages”. His confusion exists because he has never thought
very deeply about the concrete development of the revolution. He has
suffered from impressionistic conclusions on the revolutionary developments
in the post-war and illusions in the apparent inevitable forward progress
of African and Latin American revolutions and a theory that objective
circumstances would overcome weaknesses of nationalist leadership.
The history of the colonial and semi-colonial countries
in the postwar period, decisively refutes the essentially Menshevik
two-stage theory (first, the democratic revolution and then the proletarian)
and underlines in a negative way the correctness of the strategy which
flows from the Theory of Permanent Revolution.
After World War II, the conclusions of Trotsky’s
theory became of central importance for tactics and strategy in the
imperialist empires. The struggle for colonial freedom gathered strength
as a powerful independent force in the world arena in this period. However,
the bourgeois and petty bourgeois leaderships were unable to ‘carry
the democratic revolutions to the end. In large areas of the globe,
in Africa, Latin America and the Far East, former colonies of great
powers which achieved their political independence, remained in various
degrees of semi-colonial status. In many of them, particularly in Africa,
the populations in the past two decades have been descending into an
abyss of hunger and misery.
Their economies are dominated by transnational combines
and the imperialist institutions — International Monetary Fund,
World Bank and World Trade Organisation. They are subordinate to the
economies of the leading imperialist nations, as the suppliers of raw
materials or manufacturing with cheap labour. The central reality of
this imperialist epoch, which was proved by the Russian Revolution and
whose truth has been underlined in the national and proletarian struggles
since, is that the winning of national independence can only be temporary,
can only be unstable and distorted, until the struggle extends to the
victory of the working class.
Nowhere under the leadership of the petty bourgeois nationalist
forces have the questions of national independence and development of
national freedom been resolved. The struggles were led by forces some
of whom paid lip service to socialism, many were close to Stalinism,
but nowhere were they led by the forces of proletarian internationalism
and thus their revolution was distorted, destabilised and open further
to imperialist exploitation. The truth lies in Trotsky’s summary:
Colonial and semi-colonial countries are backward countries by their
very essence. But backward countries are part of a world dominated by
imperialism. Their development therefore, has a combined character;
the most primitive economic forms are combined with the last word in
capitalist technique and culture. In like manner are defined the political
strivings of the proletariat of the backward countries: the struggle
for the most elementary achievements of national independence and bourgeois
democracy is combined with the socialist struggle against world imperialism.
Democratic slogans, transitional demands and the problems of the socialist
revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs in this struggle,
but stem directly from one another.
While the US SWP, out of whose tradition the DSP developed,
broke with Trotskyism, the very processes that Trotsky analysed and
the conclusions in his theory were being abundantly proved.
In the framework of its post-World War II agreements with
the capitalist powers at Yalta and Potsdam, the counter-revolutionary
policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy enabled European and US capitalism
to survive the post-war revolutionary upsurge. Imperialism was not only
able to rebuild the capitalist states in Europe, but entered a long
post-war boom. Then, from the 1970’s it exerted financial, economic,
and military pressure upon the workers’ states, which acutely
sharpened the difficulties and distortions of their economies arising
from their bureaucratic degeneration and distorted planning, and brought
them to stagnation and collapse. The course on which Stalinism set out,
to build socialism in a single country, led to failure and calamity.
Internationalism, or Socialism in One Country?
The DSP is the biggest of the revolutionary socialist
groups in Australia. It began as a collection of young students who
became the Socialist Workers League (SWL) in the 1970s. This was a section
of the Fourth International led by Pablo and Mandel, commonly known
as the United Secretariat (Usec), and it became closely linked with
the US SWP, led by Jack Barnes. Together they broke from the Usec in
the early 1980s with differences over Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Theory
of Permanent Revolution. Later in the 1980s the SWL split with the SWP.
It became the DSP. In John Percy’s history of the group (to be
found on their web site) he puts their difference with the SWP as follows:
Politically, the main difference that emerged between them and us
on Cuba was that we clearly recognised that the Castro leadership were
revolutionary Marxists even before taking power in Cuba, while the US
SWP wouldn’t come at that.
The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December
1979 was another world event that forced us to think things out more
for ourselves. A few months after the Nicaraguan revolution, Soviet
troops went in to Afghanistan to block a US-organised war to topple
a radical regime in Kabul. Our response was prompt — to give strong
support to the Soviet and Kabul government forces in the Afghan civil
war.
The DSP claims to have “carved out” its “political
space in Australia by defending a revolutionary perspective in opposition
to the reformist class collaborationist outlook of the Labour Party
and those in the Communist movement who have been infected by this position.”
Its policies and programme are, however, an eclectic amalgam, paying
Trotsky platonic tribute at times, but rejecting the heart of Trotskyism
and Trotsky’s principled struggle.
Trotsky summed up the vital question at stake when he
declared that the difference between Trotskyism and Stalinism was that
between Permanent Revolution and Socialism in One Country. To begin
with national programmes and not a world programme is to be deliberately
blind to the experiences of post war revolutions. A real conscientious
principled organisation that has unity of revolutionary theory, strategy
and practice, has to have much more than propaganda pledges like the
one of the SDP. Percy states that they have a “recognition”
that “the biggest challenge in the struggle for international
solidarity is to win the working class away from the racist, nationalist
ideology that still binds many workers to their imperialist bosses.”
Marxist internationalism, however, is not fulfilled only
by propaganda or expressions of solidarity, very necessary though these
may be. Internationalism is merely platonic if it is not marshalled
to building the International — “the workers’ motherland”
as Rosa Luxemburg called it. The DSP is opposed to the development of
an International — a world party. However, you cannot be a real
consistent and thorough fighter for revolutionary international solidarity
in the struggle against capitalism unless you take the organisational
conclusions that your international principles must be consolidated
in an International dedicated, not just to a national, but to the world
revolution.
How can you be an internationalist, if you fight only
for a national party, and do not believe that the working class should
have a world party? Your practice will be based on the belief that national
interests are higher than the international interests of the working
class. Of course, this brings you into support of the ideology that
was taught in the Communist Parties, which justified the theory of “socialism
in one country”, and which denied the heart of Leninist internationalism
Marx and Engels fought for the First International; Engels
also fought for the Second; Lenin and Trotsky fought for the Third and
Trotsky fought for the Fourth. They were not platonic internationalists.
They fought for a world party and a revolutionary world programme.
The DSP fights internationally, for what? It leaves vague
what it supports in the actual revolutionary programme on which Trotsky
fought. But, in practice, it repudiates Trotsky’s struggle for
Leninist proletarian internationalism and his struggle against “socialism
in one country”. It repudiates Trotsky’s irrefutable conclusion
about the task posed by our capitalist-imperialist world relations.
In attacking r the national socialist content of the Draft Programme
of the Comintern written by Stalin and Bukharin, he wrote in 1928:
In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e. of world economy
and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital, not a
single communist party can establish its programme by proceeding solely
or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own
country, This holds entirely for the party that wields state power within
the boundaries of the USSR. On August 4, 1914, the death knell sounded
for national programmes for all time.(10)
The essential nature of the present attack of the DSP
on Trotskyism, and indeed their whole separation from Trotskyism, is
an opposition to the principles of the proletarian internationalism
of Bolshevism, of Lenin and of Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg.
The building of an International is the greatest question that faces
the masses of the world, today. This is what the DSP repudiates in Trotskyism.
The DSP will make general statements about “globalisation”
and the great power of multi-nationals. But this is what makes the proletarian
internationalism proclaimed by the Communist Manifesto all that more
essential! There are a great number of people who talk about “globalisation”
today. E.g., the leaders of the International Confederation of Trade
Unions (ICFTU), but they are for “globalisation with a human face”.
In the last decades of the century the verdict on “socialism
in one country” has been delivered in the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the degeneration of social-democratic parties, and the crises
of the democratic revolutions in the former colonial countries. The
counterrevolutionary activities of Stalinism at the end of the World
War II allowed imperialism to rebuild itself on a world scale. The stage
of the bourgeois democratic revolution in a period of the decay of imperialist-capitalism
has been proved utterly wanting.
Understanding the struggle against capitalism and the
struggle for a leadership capable of taking those struggles to socialism
is only possible with a serious attitude to history and the great struggles
of the past.
NOTES
1. Lenin’s policies for the nationalities
were a complete break with the Russian nationalism of the old Czarist
regime and he clashed with Stalin and other Bolsheviks. The most severe
clash was over Georgia. An invasion of Georgia was decided behind the
backs of Lenin, Trotsky and the Political Bureau. In his last letters
in December 1922, just before he died, Lenin attacked Stalin and the
Peoples Commissars’ dealing with Georgia as Great Russian Chauvinists
declaring: “I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation
with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious
‘nalionalist socialism’, played a fatal role here, In politics
spite generally plays the basest of roles.” Lenin, Collected Works:
Vol. 36. Progress Publishers, 1966. For a more extensive account
see Leninism Under Lenin. Marcel Liebman. Merlin Press, 1985.
2. Transitional Programme in Documents
of the Fourth International (The formative Years). Pathfinder Press,
1973.
3. Mao’s China and After.
Maurice Meisner. The Free Press, 1986
4. Karl Marx the Revolutions of 1848.
Penguin, 1976.
5. The Permanent Revolution, Results
and Prospects (Granit, Berlin, 1930). New Park Ed. London, 1962.
6. Collected Works, Volume 9.
Progress Publishers, 1978.
7. The Paths of the Russian Revolution.
Written in 1922, republished in, In Defence of the Russian Revolution.
Porcupine Press, 1995.
8. ‘Tasks of the Russian Social Democratic
Labour Party in the Russian Revolution’. Report of a lecture in
1917. Lenin. Collected Works. Vol. 23. Progress Publishers,
1966.
9. History of the Russian Revolution.
Leon Trotsky. Gollanz, 1936.
10. The Third International after Lenin.
New Park Publications, 1974.