Re: Permanent revolution

[Philip Ferguson <PLF13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jose G. Perez wrote:

> If the revolutionary leadership had proposed in 1959 as the central goal
> and main practical measure the expropriation of the bourgeoisie AS A CLASS
> (i.e., all of them), I doubt very much this could have gotten very far. It
> would take (not in calendar months, but in political time) quite a while
> before the working class came to understand that it was possible and
> necessary for them to take all the means of production away from the
> capitalists.
>
>     To many Trotskyists, saying something like what I've said in the last
> paragraph is heresy, a "stagist" theory. This is false. The "stagist" theory
> is that the revolution should, to all intents and purposes, STOP at the
> "democratic" stage. Yet this sort of thinking was prevalent enough in the
> Trotskyist movement that in his initial writings and reports on the Cuban
> revolution, SWP leader Joseph Hansen talked about the time that had been
> lost due to the Cuban leadership's lack of understanding of the dynamics of
> the revolutionary process, i.e., permanent revolution.


I agree fully.  This was a quite extraordinary (and ahistorical) view on
Hansen's part.

A Trotskyist leadership in Cuba in 1959, following this line, would have
been a disaster.

In reality it was Hansen and co. who came up short on understanding the
actual dynamics (at least initially).

And the fact that Trotskyists, supposedly armed with the superior theory
of permanent revolution, have not come within a country mile of leading
a revolution indicates there is no substitute for a concrete analysis of
a concrete situation.  And that the traditional Trotskyist attempt to
say PR was right and Lenin was wrong is useless.


>     This is based partly on a schematic misreading of the Russian
> revolutions of 1917, February and October, and the idea that the proper role
> of Bolsheviks is NOT to lead February, but ONLY October. This despite
> Trotsky's explanation in the History of the Russian Revolution that IN FACT,
> it had been the class-conscious workers trained in the school of Bolshevism
> who LED the February revolution. But if somehow, the Bolshevik party had
> managed to be more together in February, and wound up harvesting DIRECTLY
> the fruits of the victory, emerging as the recognized leading force in the
> revolutionary process, does this mean the revolution could have proceeded
> directly to October?
>
>     I believe not. I think it was still POLITICALLY NECESSARY to go through
> the February-October period. You HAD to go through Kerenskyism in one form
> or another and the whole series of intervening struggles BETWEEN the two
> revolutions. The masses need to go through the experience of exhausting the
> OTHER alternatives (again, whatever the form) before they would be
> sufficiently organized and conscious of the need to expropriate the
> capitalist class politically AND economically.


Yes, indeed.  And this is why I think that the Trotskyist attempt to
write off Lenin's 'Two tactics' was quite misguided.  'Two Tactics'
actually provided a quite flexible approach to the problem of revolution
in Russia.  Lenin *expected* a bourgeois-democratic revolution, a fairly
reasonable expectation in the actual conditions of 1905 and the years
thereafter, but his theory and practice did not artificially try to
restrict the revolution to that, the way the Mensheviks did.  And in
stressing the need for the working class (leading an alliance with the
peasantry) to LEAD the bourgeois-democratic revolution, he was
developing a perspective which opened up the road to a socialist revolution.

It was really WW1 which put this latter on the agenda in a more
immediate sense.

What happened in practice is, as Jose notes, that the class-conscious
workers trained in Bolshevism DID LEAD the bourgeois-democratic
revolution, while the balance of parties at the time enabled the
Mensheviks and SRs and Cadets to form the government.  AS these latter
forces obstructed the deepening of the revolutionary process, and tried
to roll it back, the Bolsheviks were able to argue effectively for a
seizure of power which would have a consciously socialist aim.

The world has moved on somewhat since 1917 and I think that the space
for a bourgeois-democratic stage in a revolutionary process is now much
more limited.   While, in an underdeveloped Third World country, it may
be madness to try to expropriate the bourgeoisie very rapidly, no
revolutionary leadership is going to be allowed to move at a slower,
more favourable pace after the initial taking of power.  The
imperialists these days will close in very quickly, as happened in
Nicaragua.  Which puts the onus on the Marxists and other radical left
in the imperialist countries to get a move on in developing the
revolutionary process here.