Thu Mar 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

The Permanent Revolution – part 2

You can read part 1 of this article by clicking  the following  link: The Permanent Revolution – Part1 

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To mark the 71st anniversary of Leon Trotsky’s assassination at the hands of Stalin last month we reprinted sections of Bill Hunter’s 2001 article from The Permanent Revolution, Battle Cry of the Twenty First Century in defence of Trotsky’s theory of the Permanent Revolution. This month we reprint other sections of the article dealing with theory and Lenin. The Arab revolution and mobilisations in Europe bring to the fore yet again, the need to study and apply the theory of the permanent revolution today.

Why is the Permanent Revolution important today?

Although Stalinism has collapsed, the essential basic ideology of Stalinism, its nationalist theory of “socialism in one country” is carried on to discourage the independence of the working class and adapt to bourgeois nationalism.

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 new forces, with principled anticapitalist 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.

Internationalism remains platonic unless it is consummated in building a world party. 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.

Trotsky’s greatest contribution to Marxism was 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.

Lenin and Trotsky

Before 1917, Lenin and Trotsky had differences over the coming revolution in Russia. Trotsky’s 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.

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, 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.

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 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’. 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.

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 and Land.

They were united in placing the development of internationalism as the axis of their policy.

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