To mark the 71st anniversary of Leon Trotsky’s assassination at the hands of Stalin we are reprinting a part of Bill Hunter’s article that was published in 2001 in The Permanent Revolution, Battle Cry of the Twenty First Century which was a defence of Trotsky’s theory of the Permanent Revolution.
This question takes on a direct meaning for millions of workers because of the living example of the Arab revolution. That revolution is just beginning, the future of which depends on the struggle for the theory and practice of the permanent revolution if it is to succeed in defeating imperialism and its own native oppressors, the old dictators and any new leaderships that arise who want to maintain capitalism.
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 antiimperialist, 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.
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’.
Permanent Revolution in the post-war world
The history of the colonial and semi-colonial countries in the post war period, decisively refutes the essentially Menshevik twostage 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 ndependence, 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.
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 postwar 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?
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.
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 imperialistcapitalism 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.
These pages are crowded with thumbnail sketches of Trotskyist and working class fighters of the period before, during and after the second world war. Rank and file-file dockers, engineering workers, and miners in whose struggles Bill played a part, either directly as shop steward or as editor of the lively left-wing journal Socialist Outlook (1948-54).
Lifelong Apprentice shows Hunter’s part in the international struggles of the Fourth International against capitalism and Stalinism, and includes an inside account of the Trotskyists’ response to the 1956-57 crisis in the Communist Party. It ends with the launching of the Socialist Labour League in 1959.
Source: Socialist Voice n. 3, September 2011
