RE: [Marxism] Lenin, Trotsky and Permanent Revolution (was Bolivia Discussion)

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Luko writes:  "I think one can say in hindsight, that both Lenin and
Trotsky were well prepared for this unexpected course of events and came
to the same conclusions for what to do in that situation, and this
formed the basis for the merger of Trotsky's Meshrayonka with the
Bolshevik party, or Trotsky and his followers joining the Bolshevik
party, however one may want to look at it."

The whole discussion around "permanent revolution" looms large *for us.*
Perhaps it shouldn't, however. We should reflect on what role this
discussion is playing on the politics of the left in the United States.
I'll come back to that in a little bit.

"Permanent Revolution" as such was NOT a big issue or huge debate inside
Russian Social Democracy prior to 1917! 

For one thing Lenin and Trotsky took up the coming revolution from two
different angles in their main works on it, Lenin looking at it
politically as the working class was heading into the revolution, how
did it present? Trotsky was looking at that coming revolutionary process
*as a whole.* 

Even then we should also remember that although Russia was facing a
belated bourgeois-democratic revolution, it was itself something of an
imperialist power, with a very large modern industrial proletariat. You
can't just take what Lenin or Trotsky wrote about Russia after 1905,
cross out the Russian names, fill in Bolivian ones, and expect it to
work. 

A good way to understand the differences between the Lenin and Trotsky
on perspective for the revolution is to look at Cuba.

If you look at Cuba, from the perspective of Jan 1, 1959, what seems to
be posed is a national, democratic revolution. If you look at it from
the perspective of three or four years later, after the expropriations,
the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, it looks like just a socialist
revolution, part of the world revolution initiated in October, 1917,
that just happened to, among many other things, take care of some tasks
historically associated with the rise of the bourgeoisie, mostly
revolving around consolidation of the nation into an independent state
and elimination of pre-capitalist forms of exploitation that had now
become a hindrance to the further development of the productive forces. 

Both views are valid, both are true, both are important in orienting
yourself politically. 

IF however you stick ONLY with "this is a socialist revolution" --as
some comrades on this list want to do in relation to Bolivia and
Venezuela-- you're going to make mistakes, sectarian and workerist
mistakes. It is NOT "just" a socialist revolution, we HOPE it is a
revolutionary process which is beginning, but this today is a democratic
and anti-imperialist revolution, and not YET a socialist revolution. 

And the art of leading such a process is that the masses through their
own experience, by waging the battles that are posed, come to the
conclusion that only a government of the working people can guarantee
those conquests. What Trotsky points out quite correctly is that such a
government will be essentially anticapitalist, that is, in a case like
Cuba's, that the consolidation and culmination of the national
revolution is the beginning of the socialist revolution. 

That is MOSTLY a question of class forces, alliance and their dynamics,
of bringing together the protagonists of the revolution into a solid
front and getting them to see who their enemies are and fight them. It
is mostly NOT a problem of getting the masses to attach the right label
to things. 

That "solid front" arises as a multiclass *national* movement because
the real rulers of Bolivia are the imperialists. Within that national
movement is where the fight for hegemony takes place. Why within the
national movement and not simply within "the nation" as such? Because
the problem is precisely that "the nation" doesn't control "the nation,"
that Bolivia doesn't control its own affairs. Thus what are at bottom
class issues present themselves as "national" issues. The fight for
hegemony in the national movement in the fight over the class content of
the national demands.

In Cuba, they actually carried out the socialist revolution without
socialism being hardly discussed. It was several months AFTER the last
big capitalist had been expropriated that Fidel said, hey, you know this
socialism you hear so many bad things about? This is it. And millions of
toilers looked around in Cuba and said, well, it isn't so bad after all.
But they had been brought together into a solid front against the
imperialists and their allies in a process of political struggles that
*began* in January 1959 by placing virtually all cabinet posts in the
hands of bourgeois forces. It was the resistance of the bourgeois forces
to needed revolutionary measures (most of all the agrarian reform) that
exposed them for what they were, allies of imperialism and essentially
anti-national forces, and in that process what was revealed was that the
only *independent* Cuba that was possible was a workers and peasant's
Cuba, a revolutionary Cuba, a socialist Cuba.

I believe a revolutionary process in Bolivia will in the end show
exactly the same thing, but it is much more complicated, because when
the Cuban Revolution happened, there was already the material basis for
such a small and backward country to undertake the path of socialist
development in the Soviet Union. That's not the case today. A new union
of republics of working people needs to arise as part of this process. 

Lenin never engaged at all with Trotsky on "Permanent Revolution,"
there's no evidence he even read Trotsky's writings on this. And even
though both of them dealt with the same subject, they attacked them from
different sides. In 1905, the MAIN difference was that Lenin was
sectarian towards the Soviet, whereas Trotsky was the head of it. Lenin
counterposed the party to the Soviet, *NOT* the Bolshevik Party, BTW,
that didn't exist yet, the party Lenin wanted to counterpose to the
Soviets was the RSDLP that BOTH he and Trotsky identified with. 

Both Lenin and Trotsky were opponents of the Menshevik view that since
the coming revolution was democratic, the role of the proletariat was to
let the bourgeoisie lead it. The difference between Lenin and Trotsky
was that Trotsky insisted on party unity with the Mensheviks, whereas
Lenin (after 1912 or so) rejected it, he said it wasn't possible to
follow a revolutionary policy in a joint organization with the
Mensheviks, and before 1912 he said it was necessary to defeat that line
in the (common) party. Whereas even before 1912, Trotsky followed a
pretty consistent pattern of blocking with the Mensheviks against the
Bolsheviks, he was a conciliationist.

The essential political difference was class political independence,
refracted through the party question. Lenin was hard as nails on it.
Trotsky was, in effect, mushy-soft on it, through his hoped-for
inclusion of Mensheviks in a united party with Bolshevism.

In 1917, Lenin had long since gotten over his anti-Soviet sectarianism,
so THAT was the difference between the (pre-1917) Trotskyists and
Bolsheviks that was overcome as a result of the February revolution. And
it was overcome because what for Trotsky may have been a judgment like,
well neither the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks recognized the socialist
character of the coming revolution so it was much of a sameness, the
February revolution gave flesh and blood to the necessarily algebraic
formulations of the past. 

And when the two lines --Menshevik and Bolshevik-- were put to the test
of practice, the Mensheviks went WITH a bourgeois government but the
Bolsheviks fought for a Soviet government, a government of the workers
and rural toilers. Lenin in his speeches and articles around the April
theses makes this point repeatedly, the old formulas were to help us get
HERE, now that we're IN the actual revolutionary process, you have to
forget the formulas describing in general and abstract terms what the
class dynamics would be like, because you have before you the actual
open struggle of living social forces whose complexity and permutations
formulas can't fully capture. And from everything I can tell, Trotsky's
reaction was *exactly* the same, he approached and oriented himself to
the living reality of clashing social forces.

And that showed Trotsky not only that Lenin's vision had in fact been
much more like his own than he thought, it also showed him that Lenin
had been *right* on the party question, the RSDLP that the Mensheviks
were building was for practical *political* purposes a bourgeois
"workers" party; Lenin and his friends were the ones who had seen the
more clearly that it wasn't possible to both build a revolutionary
workers party with a strategic line of creating a government of working
people AND be in a united party with the Mensheviks, the two were headed
in diametrically *opposite* directions. 

This should ALSO give us a clue about the extreme fragmentation that
exists among revolutionary socialists in advanced capitalist countries
and most of all in the United States. The existing division into a
multiplicity of nanogrouplets: Solidarity, FRSO, ISO, WWP, PSL, LRNA,
BWL, etc., is politically unjustified. 

The differences that exist on strategic perspectives IN THE UNITED
STATES do not justify this fragmentation. It may well be that a lot of
us consider ISO or WWP to be tactically obnoxious in various aspects of
antiwar work; or that many believe the work of Solidarity's people in
the unions to be too narrowly focused; or that LRNA's theory about a new
Communist class is mistaken. 

But again, on the level of strategic political perspectives, I don't
believe the differences justify the existence of the different groups.
All these groups share a largely common perspective of "winning the
battle for democracy," i.e., replacing the current capitalist minority
government with a working class majority government; all of us agree
that this isn't something that happens just by voting, viewing the
electoral arena is one of many arenas of struggle and not at all the
primary or central one; all of them recognize that a central role in
this fight will be played by Black and other specially oppressed peoples
within the United States, both as workers and as groups that are victims
of special oppression, and that Blacks, etc., have the right to control
their own destiny as peoples; all of them oppose sexism and patriarchy
and view the fight against it as a central component of the struggle;
all of them view the building of a strong revolutionary organization,
and one that is strongly multiracial or multinational, and strongly
rooted among the working people, as being a central task.

Sure there are tons of differences on all sorts of political things but
nothing essential that could not be compromised on or left for further
joint work to help illuminate future discussions on it. To turn your
back on unity is to turn your back on trying to build a strong
revolutionary organization with the cadre that actually exists. It may
be in many ways a very deficient cadre, but that is what there is. To do
otherwise is to continue the course we have been on since the early
1960's, with a variety of different groups all fighting for market share
like we were so many brands of detergent. 

Yes, there are differences in theories and programs and analysis, on who
the good guys are in Brazil and so on.

If we were in Bolivia, or Venezuela, or Cuba, yes, those differences
would be very important. But then I assume if some magic device were
invented that could transform, say, a bunch of the ISO comrades into
Cubans, they would soon see that the LAST thing they want to do is
overthrow the revolution. 

What is lacking, frankly, is the *political will* to unite; the
*understanding* that the unity of revolutionary forces is not an option,
something nice but really quite unessential, an understanding of how our
LACK of unity is an OBSTACLE to doing what we all claim to be trying to
do.

And *this* comes from the party question. Trotsky wanted a party with
everyone and their sister in it, and Lenin after 1912, and especially
after 1914, said no, the two approaches are just too incompatible, we're
heading in two opposite directions. 

I suspect the same thing would be found if one tried to combine the
collection of groups I just named and others that exist, with the wing
of the movement that takes the approach of orienting toward the
Democratic Party, like the CPUSA and the Committees of Correspondence.
(But even there, I would not a priori rule out some sort of alliance or
"big tent" party, though my own opinion is that the two basic sides
would soon part ways around the Democratic Party question. This based on
my assessment that in reality, we're not in 1905 or 1912 or 1914 or
1917, but somewhere in the late 1800's in Russian terms, with the
formation of the workers party still AHEAD of us, and not behind us.)

Modern-day Leninists, and not just of the Trotskyist variety but of ALL
flavors, have learned Trotsky's lesson from early in 1917, but only too
well, and the wrong side of that lesson. Not only don't they want unity
with the Mensheviks, they don't want unity with anyone, period. 

They're looking at Trotsky's 1917 lesson all wrong, IMHO. The important
thing FOR US to understand isn't that unity with forces in the working
class movement that are strategically oriented to subordinating the
class  movement to a wing of the bourgeoisie isn't going to work out; it
is that the unity of the revolutionary forces is absolutely essential. 

And in forging that unity, the precise formulations of theoretical and
general programmatic works ARE NOT DECISIVE. It is when reality fills
those abstract and general formulas with an actual content and you see
it in real life that the rubber hits the road. Before then, as Marx
explained in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, a concrete plan of
action for the common organization is *enough* to *start.*

Also, we have to remember that the Bolsheviks, like German Social
Democracy of Marx's time, were not "Leninist" parties as that word has
come to be understood and applied. Everybody did not say *exactly* the
same thing; everybody did not vote *exactly* the same way down to
questions like whether to take a bathroom break at some meeting. 

Even in the April 1917 debates, it wasn't held in private, but discussed
quite openly with this Bolshevik committee and that one voting and
taking differing positions. The reason we can't maintain a strong
"multitendency" organization like that is that in reality a lot of the
organizational principles applied on the "Leninist" Left resemble much
more those of the Borg than the Bolsheviks. Even the language is
Borg-like: after someone draws near or joins, Leninist groups talk about
"assimilating" them. The problem is of course we lack the Borg's
specialized equipment to make resistance futile; worse, there's a bunch
of people around that all want to be Queen of the Borg (actually, mostly
King...) and then there's a bunch of us folks in places like Soli who
are Jacobins on the "dear great respected and beloved leader" question.
You know, Lenin wasn't "the Marx of his times," he was just Lenin. 

It's all well and good to discuss 1917 and Lenin and Trotsky and all
that, but perhaps we should focus a little less on how the lessons from
that apply to someone else's revolution --which in reality has a
subtext, which is that we in the U.S. should remain divided along these
lines of what should be done IN BOLIVIA--, and a little more on what
they mean for our own situation. 

Joaquín



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