Re: Permanent revolution

["Johannes Schneider" <Johannes.Schneider@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since PR has been discussed recently here, listers may be be interested in
this article by Michael Loewy from International Viewpoint:

The relevance of permanent revolution
by Michael Lswy*

The theory of permanent revolution is not a metaphysical speculation but an
attempt to respond to one of the most dramatic questions of our epoch: how
to resolve the appalling social problems suffered by the dependent
capitalist countries - colonial and semi-colonial in the language of the
time - how can they escape pauperisation, dictatorship, oligarchical
regimes, foreign domination? This theory has undoubtedly been one of the
most significant and innovatory contributions to Marxism made by Trotsky in
the 20th century. How did it emerge and what is its meaning today, at the
dawn of a new century?

In Russia (1906-1917)
The idea of permanent revolution - initially uniquely related to the Russian
problematic - appeared for the first time in the writings of Lev Davidovitch
in the course of the revolutionary upheavals of 1905-1906 in Russia. Trotsky
's theses on the nature of this revolution constituted a radical rupture
with the dominant ideas in the Second International on the subject of the
future of Russia. Marx and Engels had not hesitated to suggest, in their
preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto (1892), that if
the Russian revolution gives the signal to a proletarian revolution in the
West, and the two complement one another, the existing commonly owned
property in Russia could serve as a point of departure for a communist
evolution. However, after their death, this line of thought - suspected of
affinity with Russian Populism - was abandoned. Soon it became a universal
premise - almost an article of faith - among "orthodox" Marxists, Russian or
European, that the futur!
e Russian revolution would necessarily, inevitably, have a strictly
bourgeois democratic character: abolition of Tsarism, establishing a
democratic republic, suppression of feudal vestiges in the countryside,
distribution of land to the peasants. All factions of Russian Social
Democracy took this presupposition as their incontrovertible point of
departure; if they argued with each other, it was on the different
interpretations of the role of the proletariat in this bourgeois revolution,
and its class alliances: who should be privileged, the liberal bourgeoisie
(Menshevik) or the peasantry (Bolsheviks)?
Trotsky was the first and for many years the only Marxist to question this
sacrosanct dogma. He was, before 1917, alone in envisaging not only the
hegemonic role of the workers' movement in the Russian revolution - a thesis
shared also by Parvus, Rosa Luxemburg and, in certain texts, Lenin - but
also the possibility of a growing over of the democratic revolution into
socialist revolution.
It was during 1905, in a number of articles for the revolutionary press,
that Trotsky woul formulate for the first time his new doctrine -
systematised later in the pamphlet Results and Prospects (1906). He was
undoubtedly influenced by Parvus, but this latter never went beyond the idea
of a workers' government accomplishing a strictly democratic (bourgeois)
programme: he wanted to change the locomotive of History but not its
rails.*1
The term 'permanent revolution' seems to have been inspired in Trotsky by an
article by Franz Mehring in the Neue Zeit in November 1905; but the sense
attributed to it by the German socialist writer was very much less radical
and vaguer than that it received in the writings of the Russian
revolutionary. Trotsky was alone in daring to suggest, from 1905, the
possibility of a revolution accomplishing the socialist tasks - that is the
expropriation of the big capitalists - in Russia, a hypothesis unanimously
rejected by the other Russian Marxists as utopian and adventurous.
An attentive study of the roots of Trotsky's political audacity and his
theory of permanent revolution shows that his positions were founded on an
interpretation of Marxism and the dialectical method which was very distinct
from the reigning orthodoxy in the Second International. This can be
explained, at least in part, by the influence of Labriola, the first Marxist
philosopher studied by the young Trotsky' Labriola's approach, of
Hegelian-Marxist inspiration, was the polar opposite of the vulgar
positivism and materialism so influential at the time. Here are some of the
distinctive characteristics of the Marxist methodology at work in the
writings of the young Trotsky and in his theory of the Russian revolution:
1. Partisan of a dialectical conception of the unity of opposites, Trotsky
criticised the rigid separation practiced by the Bolsheviks between the
socialist regime of the proletariat and the "democratic dictatorship of the
workers and peasants" as a "purely formal, logical operation". In the same
way, in an astonishing passage of a polemic against the Menshevik
Tscherewanin, he condemns the analytical- that is to say abstract, formal,
pre-dialectical - character of his political approach: 'Tscherewanin
constructs his tactics as Spinoza  did his ethics: that is to say,
geometrically'.*2
2. Trotsky explicitly rejects economism, one of the essential traits of
Plekhanov's Marxism. This rupture is one of the fundamental methodological
presuppositions of the theory of permanent revolution, as shown by this
well-known passage from Results and Prospects: "To imagine that the
dictatorship of the proletariat is in some way automatically dependent on
the technical development and resources of a country is a prejudice of
'economic' materialism simplified to absurdity. This point of view has
nothing in common with Marxism".*3
3. Trotsky's conception of history is not fatalistic but open: the task of
Marxists, he wrote, is "to discover the 'possibilities' of the developing
revolution by means of an analysis of its internal mechanism".*4 The
permanent revolution is not a result determined in advance, but an objective
possibility, legitimate and realistic, whose accomplishment depends on
innumerable subjective factors and unpredictable events.
4. Whereas most Russian Marxists tended, because of their polemic with
Populism, to deny any specificity to the Russian social formation, and
insisted on the inevitable similarity between the socio-economic development
of western Europe and the future of Russia, Trotsky formulated a new
dialectical position. Criticising equally the Slavophile particularism of
the Narodniki and the abstract universalism of the Mensheviks, he developed
a concrete analysis which explained simultaneously the specificities of the
Russian formation and the impact of the general tendencies of capitalist
development on the country.
It is the combination of all these methodological innovations which made
Results and Prospects - the famous pamphlet written by Trotsky in prison in
1906 - a unique text. Starting from a study of combined and uneven
development (the term does not yet appear) in Russia - which had as its
result a weak and half-foreign bourgeoisie, and a modern and exceptionally
concentrated proletariat - he came to the conclusion that only the workers'
movement, supported by the peasantry, could accomplish the democratic
revolution in Russia, by overthrowing the autocracy and the power of the
landowners. In reality, this perspective of a workers' government in Russia
was shared by other Russian Marxists - notably Parvus. The radical novelty
of the theory of permanent revolution was situated less in its definition of
the class nature of the future Russian revolution than in its conception of
its historic tasks. Trotsky's decisive contribution was the idea that the
Russian revolution could transc!
end the limits of a profound democratic transformation and begin to take
anti-capitalist measures with a clearly socialist content. His principal
argument to justify this iconoclastic hypothesis was quite simply that "the
political domination of the proletariat is incompatible with its economic
enslavement". Why should the proletariat, once in power, and controlling the
means of coercion, continue to tolerate capitalist exploitation? Even if it
wished initially to limit itself to a minimum programme, it would be led, by
the very logic of its position, to take collectivist measures. That said,
Trotsky was also convinced that, without the extension of the revolution to
western Europe, the Russian proletariat would face difficulty in holding
power for a long time.
The events of 1917 dramatically confirmed Trotsky's basic predictions of 12
years earlier. The inability of the bourgeois parties and their allies on
the moderate wing of the workers' movement to respond to the revolutionary
aspirations of the peasantry, and the desire for peace of the people,
created the conditions for a radicalisation of the revolutionary movement
from February to October. What were called "the democratic tasks" were
carried out, so far as the peasantry were concerned, only after the victory
of the soviets.*5 But once in power, the revolutionaries of October were not
able to limit themselves to simply democratic reforms; the dynamic of the
class struggle obliged them to take explicitly socialist measures. Indeed,
confronted with the economic boycott of the possessing classes and the
growing threat of a general paralysis of production, the Bolsheviks and
their allies were forced - much sooner than anticipated - to expropriate
capital: in June 1918, the Counci!
l of Commissars of the People decreed the socialisation of the main branches
of industry.
In other words: the revolution of 1917 had seen a process of uninterrupted
revolutionary development from its 'bourgeois-democratic' phase (unfinished)
of February until its 'proletarian-socialist' phase which began in October.
With the support of the peasantry, the Soviets combined democratic measures
(the agrarian revolution) with socialist measures (the expropriation of the
bourgeoisie), opening a 'non-capitalist road', a period of transition to
socialism. But the Bolshevik party was able to take the leadership of this
gigantic social movement that 'shook the world' only thanks to the radical
strategic reorientation initiated by Lenin in April 1917, according to a
perspective fairly close to that of permanent revolution. Useless to add
that Trotsky, in his role as president of the Petrograd soviet, leader of
the Bolshevik party and founder of the Red Army, had himself played a
determinant role in the socialist 'growing over' of the October revolution.
There remains the controversial question of the international extension of
the revolution: did events confirm the conditional prediction of Trotsky -
without revolution in Europe, was proletarian power in Russia doomed? Yes
and no. Workers' democracy in Russia did not survive the defeat of the
European revolution (in 1919-23); but its decline did not lead, as Trotsky
thought in 1906, to a restoration of capitalism (this would only take place
much later, after 1991) but an unforeseen development: the replacement of
workers' power by the dictatorship of a bureaucratic layer originating from
the workers' movement itself.

A strategy for the peripheral countries
In the second half of the 1920s Trotsky elaborated, in the course of heated
political and theoretical confrontations with Stalinism, the international
implications of the theory of the permanent revolution. His thought was
catalysed by the dramatic explosion of the class struggle in China in
1925-27, just as the first had been stimulated by the Russian revolution of
1905.
In the book Permanent revolution (1928) Trotsky for the first time presented
his theses on the dynamic of the social revolution in the colonial and
semi-colonial countries (to employ the terminology of the time) in a
systematic manner, as a theory which was valid on the world scale. It
amounted first to a polemic against the disastrous Chinese policy of the
Stalinised Comintern, which wished to impose on the Chinese communists the
doctrine of the revolution by stages - the bourgeois democratic revolution
as separate historical stage - and alliance with the national bourgeoisie,
represented by the Kuomintang of Chiang-Kai-Shek. Trotsky insisted that in
China as in Tsarist Russia the bourgeoisie, feeling itself threatened by the
socialist workers' movement, could no longer play a consequent revolutionary
and anti-imperialist role: it was only the proletariat, in alliance with the
peasantry, which could fulfil the democratic programme, agrarian and
national, in an uninterrupted p!
rocess of 'growing over' of the democratic into the socialist revolution.
The theoretical foundation of this analysis is undoubtedly the law of
combined and uneven development, already implicit in the writings of 1906 or
in the polemics of 1928, but formulated for the first time in explicit
fashion in his History of the Russian revolution (1930). It allowed Trotsky
to transcend the evolutionist conception of History which makes it a
succession of rigid and predetermined stages, and to elaborate a dialectical
interpretation of the historic process, which integrates the inequality of
rhythm - the 'backward' countries constrained from advancing - and 'combined
development', in the sense of the rapprochement of the distinct phases and
the amalgam of archaic forms with the more modern. From this approach flowed
decisive strategic and political conclusions: the fusion/articulation of the
most advanced socio-economic conditions with the most backward is the
structural foundation of the fusion or combination of the democratic and
socialist tasks in a proces!
s of permanent revolution. To present the problem another way, one of the
principal political consequences of combined and uneven development is the
inevitable persistence of unresolved democratic tasks in the peripheral
capitalist countries.
Rejecting the vulgar evolutionism of the Stalinist doctrine of revolution by
stages, Trotsky stresses, in Permanent revolution, that there could not be,
in China and the other 'Oriental' countries - Latin America or Africa were
as yet outside his field of interest - a separate and complete democratic
stage, in some way a necessary historic precursor to a second stage of a
socialist type. The only authentic revolutionary forces are the proletariat
and the peasantry, and once they had taken power, the democratic revolution,
in the course of its development, becomes directly transformed into the
socialist revolution and thus becomes a permanent revolution.*6
>From the point of view of metaphysical and abstract logic, it is perhaps
possible to distinguish two separate stages, but in the real logic of the
revolutionary process they would combine organically in a dialectic.*7 As
Trotsky wrote in his preface to the Harold Isaacs' book on China,
"revolutions, as has been said more than once, have a logic of their own.
But this is not the logic of Aristotle, and even less the pragmatic
demilogic of 'common sense'. It is the higher function of thought: the logic
of development and its contradictions, i.e. the dialectic".*8
The principal limitation of Trotsky's analysis is of a "sociological" rather
than strategic nature: to consider the peasantry uniquely as a "support" of
the revolutionary proletariat and as class of "small proprietors" whose
horizon did not go beyond democratic demands. He had trouble in accepting,
for example, a Chinese Red Army composed in its great majority of peasants.
His error - like that of most Russian and European Marxists - was to adopt,
without critical examination, Marx's analysis (in the 18th Brumaire) of the
French peasantry as an atomised and petty bourgeois class and to apply it to
colonial and semi-colonial nations with very different characteristics.
However, in one of his last writings, Three conceptions of the Russian
revolution (1939) he argued that the Marxist appreciation of the peasantry
as a non-socialist class had never had an "absolute and immutable"
character.
The theory of the permanent revolution has been verified twice in the course
of the history of the 20th century. On the one hand, by the disasters
resulting from stageism, from the blind application, by the Communist
parties in the dependent countries, of the Stalinist doctrine of the
revolution by stages and the bloc with the national bourgeoisie, from Spain
in 1936 to Indonesia in 1965 or Chile in 1973. On the other hand, because
this theory, such as it was formulated from 1906, has largely allowed us to
predict, explain and shed light on the revolutions of the 20th century,
which have all been 'permanent' revolutions in the peripheral countries.
What happened in Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam or Cuba has
corresponded, in its broad outlines to Trotsky's central idea: the
possibility of combined and uninterrupted revolution - democratic and
socialist - in a country of peripheral capitalism, dependent or colonial.
The fact that, overall, the leaders of the revolutionary mo!
vements after October 1917 have not recognised the 'permanent' character of
these latter (with some exceptions, like Ernesto Che Guevara), or have only
done it a posteriori and employing a different terminology, takes nothing
away from this historically effective relation.
The other dimension of the theory which has been confirmed - above all in
its negative form - is the concept of permanent revolution in opposition to
the Stalinist doctrine of socialism in one country. Trotsky's view that
socialism can only exist on a world scale, that a revolution in a peripheral
country could only begin the transition to socialism, and that a socialist
society worthy of the name could not be constructed inside the national
limits of a single country, has been verified by the inglorious demise of
the Soviet Union in 1991. Certainly things did not happen as he had hoped -
anti-bureaucratic political revolution - but the failure of the Soviet
bureaucratic experience is not least a confirmation of his main hypothesis.

The actuality
The theory of permanent revolution does not just allow us to make sense of
the great social revolutions of the 20th century; it remains of a surprising
relevance at the dawn of the 21st century. Why?
First, because in the great majority of the countries of peripheral
capitalism - whether it be in the Middle East, Asia, Africa or in Latin
America - the tasks of a true democratic revolution have not been fulfilled:
according to the case, democratisation - and secularisation! - of the state,
liberation from the imperial grip, the social exclusion of the poor
majority, or the solution of the agrarian question remain on the agenda.
Dependence has taken on new forms, but these are no less brutal and
constraining than those of the past: the dictatorship of the IMF, the World
Bank and soon the WTO over the indebted countries - that is to say
practically all the countries of the South - through the mechanism of
neoliberal 'adjustment' plans and Draconian conditions for payment of the
foreign debt. One can say that, in many respects, the power exerted by these
institutions of the global financial system - in the service of the
imperialist powers in general and the USA in particular !
- over the economic, social and political life of these countries is still
more direct, authoritarian and total than that of the old neo-colonial
system.
The revolution in these countries can only, then, be a complex and
articulated combination between these democratic demands and the overthrow
of capitalism. Today as yesterday, the revolutionary transformations which
are on the agenda in the societies at the periphery of the system are not
identical with those of the countries of the centre. A social revolution in
India could not be, from the point of view of its programme, strategy and
motor forces, a pure 'workers' revolution' as in England. The decisive
political role - certainly not envisaged by Trotsky! - played in many
countries today by the indigenous and peasant movements (the FZLN in Mexico,
the Brazilian MST, the CONAIE in Ecuador) shows the importance and social
explosiveness of the agrarian question, and its close link with national
liberation.
One cannot imagine, for example, a social revolution in Brazil which did not
take in hand the effective democratisation of the state, national
liberation, radical agrarian reform, the search for a road of autonomous
economic development, orientated towards the social needs of the majority.
And vice-versa: only a social - that is to say anti-capitalist - revolution
can fulfil this democratic programme, in a process of 'uninterrupted' social
transformation.
In the struggle of the countries of the South against neoliberal
globalization, against the world financial institutions, against the
inhumanity of the foreign debt system, against the imposition by the IMF of
'adjustment' policies with dramatic social consequences, the national
question regains a burning relevance. In this context, one sees a new
flourish - with or without the participation of the parties of Stalinist
origin - of illusions of a nationalist type on the possibility of a
'national development' (capitalist), of a vigourous policy of promotion of
national industry (capitalist), of a strategic alliance with the nationalist
military, or again a vast coalition of all the classes supporting an
'independent economic path', turned towards the internal market. The theory
of permanent revolution allows us - while giving a decisive place to the
aspirations for national liberation and the fight against new forms of
imperialist domination - to go beyond this kind of illusion!
 in keeping a hold on the inseparability of the national democratic and
socialist struggles in a single historic movement.
In many countries of peripheral capitalism - as well as in the ex-USSR and
the countries of eastern Europe - the national question is also taking a
new, particularly disturbing, form: bloody inter-ethnic conflicts,
inter-communal, inter-religious, promoted by reactionary, often
fascist-type, forces, whether manipulated by the western empires or not.
There again, only a socialist/internationalist revolution can break the
infernal cycle of murders and reprisals, community vendettas, by proposing
genuinely democratic federal or confederal solutions, which guarantee the
national rights of minorities and create conditions for the unity of workers
of all nations. This goes in particular for South-east Asia, the Middle East
and the Balkans.
We have often, in this article, employed the conditional: it is the only
grammatical tense which corresponds to the conception of the revolution as
objective possibility (suggested by Trotsky from 1906). Whatever the
profound social contradictions of the dependant countries, the revolution is
never 'inevitable', the 'necessary' product of the crisis of capitalism or
the aggravation of poverty. All that one can advance is a conditional
proposition: as an authentic socialist/democratic revolution - in a
'permanent' process - has not taken place, it is unlikely that the countries
of the South, the nations of peripheral capitalism can begin to carry a
solution to the 'Biblical' ( the expression comes from Ernest Mandel)
problems which afflict them: poverty, misery, unemployment, crying social
inequalities, ethnic discriminations, lack of water and bread, imperialist
domination, oligarchical regimes, monopolisation of the land by the
latifundistas...

* Michael Lswy is the author of many studies, in particular Combined and
Uneven Development: The Politics of Permantent Revolution (Verso).
1. On the differences between Parvus and Trotsky, see Alain Brossat, Aux
origines de la rZvolution permanente : la pensZe politique du jeune Trotsky,
Paris, Maspero, 1974. On the convergences and divergences between Lenin,
Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky, see the remarkable book by Norman Geras, The
Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, London, New Left Books, 1976.
2. Trotsky, 1905, Penguin, London, 1973.
3. Trotsky, Results and Prospects, in The Permanent Revolution, Pathfinder
Press, New York, 1969, p. 63.
4. Trotsky, Results and Prospects, op. cit., p. 36.
5. As Lenin would later write, "it was the Bolsheviks. who, thanks to the
victory of the proletarian revolution, helped the peasants to lead the
bourgeois democratic revolution to the end".
6. L.Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, op cit.
7. Ibid.
8. L.Trotsky, preface to The Tragedy of The Chinese Revolution, Harold
Isaacs, Secker and Warburg, London, 1938.