{"id":579,"date":"2019-09-04T11:25:05","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T09:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marxistworkersparty.org.za\/?page_id=579"},"modified":"2019-09-05T13:51:53","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T11:51:53","slug":"chapter-one","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/?page_id=579","title":{"rendered":"Chapter One"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Theory of the Permanent Revolution<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Leon Trotsky came to adulthood in Russia at the turn of this century \u2013 when\nthe working class was rising to its feet in a struggle to end the semi-feudal\ndictatorship of the Russian Tsar (emperor). He was a member of the Russian\nworkers’ party, the Social Democratic Labour Party.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was the role of the working class in this struggle to overthrow\nthe Tsar? What would be its outcome? These were questions that were under\nfierce debate within the RSDLP to which Trotsky’s answer was the theory of\npermanent revolution. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Bourgeois and proletarian revolution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Britain in the seventeenth\ncentury, in France in the eighteenth, feudalism had been overthrown by mass\nrevolutions. The old feudal order in these countries was obstructing the\ndevelopment of the capitalist forces of production growing up in their womb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mass of the people fought in\nthese revolutions to end their oppression and secure the power to transform\ntheir conditions of life. But the result of these revolutions was to replace\none system of exploitation by another. In place of a society based on the\nextraction of tribute from peasants by feudal lords there arose one in which\ncapitalists extracted profit from the labour of the working class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These were bourgeois<\/strong> (capitalist) revolutions. Today the capitalists claim\nthese revolutions were ‘unnecessary’. But, as Marx and Engels explained, these\nrevolutions reflected a fundamental law of human development that, “at a\ncertain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society\ncome in conflict with the existing relations of production…Then begins an\nepoch of social revolution.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bourgeois revolutions are\noften referred to as \u2018democratic revolutions\u2019. But, for the bourgeois, the establishment\nof political democracy was not the essential aim. The aim was to carry through\nfundamental changes to clear the way for capitalist advance: emancipating the\npeasantry from the rule of the landlords; replacing the castes, estates and\nregionalism of feudal rule with unified nation-states; and replacing the rule\nof hereditary monarchs by forms of political rule reflecting the interest of\nthe capitalist class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Britain, this revolution ended\nwith the re-establishment of a monarchy (which exists to this day), though\nsubject to the constitutional control of parliament. In the revolution in\nFrance, fought under the slogans of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”,\na period of (qualified) democracy gave way to the dictatorship of Napoleon\nBonaparte.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The establishment and maintenance\nof political democracy<\/strong> under\ncapitalism, from its earliest times, has been achieved not by the bourgeoisie,\nbut against<\/strong> it, by the struggle of\nthe working class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bourgeois revolutions merely\nreplaced the rule of one class by another: the state’s defence of one system of\nproperty relations by another. Even within the framework of capitalism, a\nvariety of forms<\/strong> of rule have\nexisted \u2013 from bourgeois democracy to the totalitarian dictatorship of Fascism.\nWithin capitalism there is an ongoing struggle between political counter-revolution\nand revolution, depending on the balance of forces between the main contending\nclasses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capitalism revolutionised\nsociety. But capitalism itself, as Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto<\/em> (1848), is subject\nto the same law of social development as the feudal society it had replaced.\nCapitalist relations of production, they showed, would come to obstruct the\ndevelopment of the forces of production \u2013 preparing the way for a new social\nrevolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This would be a proletarian<\/strong> revolution. It would be a\nrevolution by the working class (formed by capitalism as the producers of\nsocial wealth) to overthrow the capitalist state and establish workers’\ndemocratic rule. It would be a socialist<\/strong>\nrevolution: with private<\/strong> ownership\ngiving way to social ownership of the means of production (that of the working\nclass), and with the capitalist system of nation-states giving way to the\ninternational rule of the proletariat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On this basis, there would be a\nperiod of transition from capitalism to communism, a period which they called\nsocialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the working class\n“sweeps away by force the old conditions of production”, anticipated\nMarx and Engels,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.<\/p>

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Such an “association”\nwas what they meant by communism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Manifesto<\/em> was written as the program of the Communist League, which\nMarx (aged 29) and Engels (aged 27) had participated in forming as the first\nparty of the international proletariat. The theoretical principles of the Manifesto<\/em>, of scientific socialism,\npassed down through the First International (1864-1876) to the Second\nInternational, founded in 1889, the first association of mass workers’ parties.\nThe Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was a part of the Second\nInternational. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Russia at the turn of the\ncentury, as we have said, had not yet experienced a bourgeois revolution. It\nwas a backward country. Yet already in France, in 1871, the working class had\nbriefly taken power in the Commune of Paris, before it was defeated. For\nrevolutionary Marxists in the Second International, it was clear that \u2013 in the\nmost advanced capitalist countries at least \u2013 proletarian<\/strong> revolution was on the order of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What, in Russia, was the relation\nbetween bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution? This was the main\nquestion of debate within the RSDLP. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky’s standpoint<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky, in 1904-6, advanced a\nbold answer to this question. Put in condensed fashion, it was as follows. The\nforemost tasks of the revolution in Russia were those of bourgeois revolution.\nBut the bourgeois were incapable of carrying them out: indeed, would stand in\nthe way of this. Though Russia was a backward country, the working class would\nhave to take state power to carry out those tasks. Having done so, it could not\nand would not stop there. It would come into inevitable conflict with the\ncapitalist class, and be compelled to end capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, he anticipated, in Russia\nbourgeois and proletarian revolution would become fused together into what he \u2013\nfollowing Marx and Engels \u2013 called a permanent\nrevolution<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor would matters stop there. As\nTrotsky in 1929 summarised the idea of permanent revolution:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, it embraces the problem of the transition from the democratic revolution to the socialist. This is in essence the historical origin of the theory… <\/p>

The second aspect of the ‘permanent’ theory has to do with the socialist revolution as such. For an indefinitely long time and in constant internal struggle, all social relations undergo transformation. Society keeps changing its skin. Each stage of transformation stems directly from the preceding… Revolutions in economy, technique, science, the family, morals and everyday life develop in complex reciprocal action and do not allow society to achieve equilibrium….<\/p>

The international character of the socialist revolution… constitutes the third aspect of the theory of the permanent revolution…. The socialist revolution begins on national foundations \u2013 but it cannot he completed within those foundations…. Viewed from this standpoint, a national revolution is not a self-contained whole: it is only a link in the international chain. The international revolution constitutes a permanent process, despite temporary declines and ebbs.<\/p> The Permanent Revolution<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky’s theory applied the\nideas of Marx and Engels to the concrete conditions of the world and Russia in\nthe early twentieth century. It was confirmed in practice in 1917, when it\nformed the perspective and program on which the working class came to power in\nRussia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under modern conditions \u2013 re-applied<\/strong> again \u2013 it remains an\nessential weapon in the struggle of workers and peasants throughout the\n“Third World” against oppression and exploitation, including our\nmovement in South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways, in fact, it sums up\nthe strategy and tasks of the transition from capitalism to socialism in the\nmodern epoch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Stalinism rejects permanent revolution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Usurping power from the working\nclass in Russia in the 1920s, Stalin and the bureaucracy launched an ideological\noffensive against the theory of permanent revolution. They did so to try to\ndiscredit Trotsky as a ‘deviant’ from the traditions of Marx, Engels and the\nrecently-deceased Lenin, to try to claim this authority for themselves. More\nimportantly, they did so because the theory of permanent revolution was totally\nirreconcilable with their false ideas of achieving \u201csocialism in one country\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To this day the bureaucracy and\nthose who support them try to repudiate the theory of permanent revolution. The\nSouth African ‘Communist’ Dialego, for example, writing in the African Communist<\/em> (4th Quarter, 1988) on\n“What is Trotskyism?<\/em>“, does\nexactly this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However in his argument there is\none difference from what was said by the Stalinists in the 1920s. He claims to\naccept a<\/strong> theory of permanent revolution\n\u2013 but maintains that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is not one theory of permanent revolution but two. Marx and Engels themselves elaborated a theory of permanent revolution in The Communist Manifesto<\/em>, but their theory differs fundamentally from the version of permanent revolution championed by Leon Trotsky.<\/p>

Permanent revolution for Marx and Engels”, he continues, “presented a perspective in which (in the words of the Manifesto<\/em>), the bourgeois revolution is \u2018the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution\u2019. Lenin reaffirmed this perspective in 1905 when he declared that \u2018from the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength…begin to pass to the socialist revolution\u2019. In other words, as far as the Marxist classics are concerned, the permanent or \u2018uninterrupted\u2019 revolution proceeds in phases<\/strong>. The phases are of course linked since one is a prelude or precondition for the other. But \u2013 and this is the decisive point \u2013 the democratic revolution comes first<\/strong>.<\/p>

It is this proposition [\u2013 adds Dialego \u2013] which Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution rejects. Trotsky took the view that unless the revolution is socialist in character and immediately establishes ‘a dictatorship of the proletariat’, it will fail.<\/p>

…His [Trotsky’s] mystical belief was that workers can somehow or other pole-vault themselves into socialism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Needless to say, neither Trotsky\nnor any other Marxist has \u201cthe mystical belief\u201d that “workers can somehow\nor other pole-vault themselves into socialism” \u2013 that they can leap over\nall the material obstacles to achieving a classless society. The possibilities\nfor socialism are prepared by material conditions world-wide \u2013 though a pre-condition<\/strong> for socialism is state\npower in the hands of the working class. Revolution, moreover, does proceed\nthrough phases<\/strong>, depending on the relation\nof forces between, and above all the consciousness of, the different classes.\nNeither Trotsky nor any other Marxist would deny this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, as we shall see, Dialego’s\nchildish caricature of “Trotskyism” masks his real intention. Like\nthe Stalinists in the 1920s, he accuses Trotsky of “jumping stages”.\nHe wants to try to put the authority of Marx, Engels and Lenin behind, not<\/strong> an ‘alternative’ version of\npermanent revolution, not<\/strong> inevitable\n‘phases’ in a revolution, but the discredited Stalinist idea of ‘two-stage’\nrevolution \u2013 of a “democratic revolution” in late-developing\ncountries in the modern world which inevitably precedes and is separate from proletarian\nsocialist revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To sustain this fiction, Dialego,\nlike the Stalinist “theoreticians” of the 1920s, turns Marxism from a\nmethod<\/strong> for analysing the real\nprocesses of history into a dogmatic\nreproduction of formulae<\/strong> from texts. To understand his distortions, it will\nbe necessary to disentangle the quotations that he employs, and place them in\ntheir historical context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Marx and Engels on permanent revolution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The extract which Dialego quotes\nfrom the Manifesto<\/em> is not, for\nexample, a general<\/strong> prescription\nabout revolution. It is a concrete<\/strong>\nperspective for impending revolution in Germany at that time. Let us quote it\nin full:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Britain and France,\nGermany in 1848 had not yet experienced a bourgeois revolution. The\nsignificance of the Manifesto’s<\/em>\nperspective for Germany was its claim that \u2013 without a whole intermediate period\nof capitalist development \u2013 bourgeois revolution could lead “to an\nimmediately following proletarian revolution\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego draws from this passage\nan emphasis on “phases” in the revolution. But Marx and Engels had a\ndifferent purpose. At the time of the bourgeois revolutions in England and\nFrance, the objective<\/strong> conditions for\nsocialist revolution were not yet in existence. Modern industry was not yet\nsufficiently developed. The proletariat barely existed. It was not concentrated\ninto large factories, with the power to halt production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Marx and Engels were\nconcerned to show in 1848, for Germany, was the objective interconnection<\/strong> that was already developing between\nbourgeois and proletarian revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1848 was a year of revolution in\nEurope \u2013 but the revolutions were defeated. In Germany the bourgeois recoiled\nfrom their own revolution into an alliance with reaction. As Marx and Engels\nexplained, “the German bourgeoisie had developed so sluggishly, so\npusillanimously and so slowly, that it saw itself threateningly confronted by\nthe proletariat, and all those sections of the urban population related to the\nproletariat in interests and ideas, at the very moment of its own threatening\nconfrontation with feudalism and absolutism\u201d. (Neue Rheinische Zeitung<\/em>, 15\/12\/1848, in Marx, The Revolutions of 1848<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The emergence of the proletariat,\nin other words, was changing the attitude of the bourgeoisie towards championing\nits ‘own’ revolution. Therefore, Marx and Engels anticipated that “a\npurely bourgeois revolution<\/strong>, along\nwith the establishment of bourgeois\nhegemony<\/strong> in the form of a constitutional\nmonarchy<\/strong>, is impossible in Germany. What is possible is either the feudal\nand absolutist counter-revolution or the social-republican\nrevolution<\/strong>.” (NRZ<\/em>,\n31\/12\/1848, in ibid<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By a “social-republican\nrevolution” they meant a revolution which would establish a democratic\nrepublic, with political rights for all \u2013 or at least, in the conditions of the\ntime, for all males. Such a revolution, bourgeois-democratic<\/strong>\nrather than merely bourgeois, would, they expected, be led at first by the\ndemocratic petty bourgeois: the urban middle class, small industrial merchants,\nmaster craftsmen, together with the mass of peasants \u2013 those with an interest\nin the fullest possible democracy under capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was in this<\/strong> connection (and not, as Dialego would have it, in the Communist Manifesto<\/em>) that they first\nused the idea of permanent<\/strong>\nrevolution:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

while the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible…it is our interest and our task [i.e. that of the working class] to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has progressed sufficiently far \u2013 not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world \u2013 that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.\u201d <\/p>

“Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.<\/p> Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League<\/em>, March 1850<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In other words, in Germany\nbourgeois-democratic and socialist revolution had already become fused together\nas one<\/strong> revolution. It was the\n“interest and task” of the working class to push forward without\ninterruption to socialist revolution. If there were “phases” in this\nrevolution, it would be only because the working class had not yet developed\nthe consciousness and organisation to lead the revolution \u2013 thus allowing the\n“democratic petty bourgeoisie” to “bring it to an end as quickly\nas possible.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These were the ideas which\nTrotsky would elaborate in his theory of permanent revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Imperialism and reformism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world situation did not develop\nprecisely as Marx and Engels anticipated. By the time that Lenin and Trotsky\nwere applying Marxism in Russia at the end of the century, there had been\nimportant changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Central to these was the\ntransition, in the major capitalist powers, from competitive to monopoly\ncapitalism. The anarchistic competition of capitalism drove out less efficient\ncapitalists. Their businesses were swallowed up by their rivals. In the biggest\ncountries, the main branches of industry became dominated by a few gigantic firms:\nmonopolies. This did not abolish competition, but projected it, in more violent\nform, from the national market to the world market. Monopoly capitalism gave\nrise to modern imperialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the 1870s the biggest\ncapitalist powers fought to carve and recarve the whole planet among\nthemselves, competing to establish colonies and semi-colonies in a ruthless\nsearch for sources of raw materials, new markets, and fields for profitable\ninvestment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paradoxically backward Germany,\nwith bourgeois revolution “from below” \u2013 under the driving force of\nthe masses \u2013 defeated in 1848, leapt ahead to become a major imperialist power.\nA bureaucratically-managed “revolution from above” under the lead of\nthe Prime Minister Bismarck, unified Germany and cleared away other obstacles\nto the development of capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rise of monopoly capitalism\nand imperialism bound together the world economy as a single integrated whole\nfar more than had ever previously been the case. This transition also was an\nexpression of the fact that private ownership and national boundaries had\nbecome fetters to the development of production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Lenin put it in his classic\nwork, Imperialism: the highest stage of\ncapitalism<\/em> (1916):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the economic quintessence of imperialism is monopoly capitalism. This very fact determines its place in history, for monopoly that grew up on the basis of free competition, and precisely out of free competition, is the transition from the capitalist system to a higher social-economic order…<\/p>

Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination instead of the striving for liberty, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by an extremely small group of the richest or most powerful nations \u2013 all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism….<\/p>

…private economic relations and private property relations constitute a shell which is no longer suitable for its contents, a shell which must inevitably begin to decay if its destruction be delayed by artificial means; a shell which may continue in a state of decay for a fairly long period…but which will inevitably be removed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

 – removed, that is, by proletarian revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marx and Engels in the Manifesto<\/em> had anticipated that working class\nrevolution would take place first in the countries where industry and the working\nclass were most advanced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The possibilities for this were\nrevealed when the working class briefly took power in Paris in 1871. They were\nrevealed also in the increasing strength of the working class, its\norganisation, and its consciousness in the biggest countries. The Second\nInternational adopted the principles of Marxism at its birth, and grew into a\nmighty organised force, particularly in Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, on the basis of monopoly\ncapitalism and imperialism, there was a revival of capitalism \u2013 a more-or-less\nsustained economic upswing in the most advanced countries for 40 years from the\n1870s. It took place on the basis of increasing unevenness<\/strong> in world development, and of capitalist parasitism and speculation.\nIt gave rise to conflicts and an arms-race between the big imperialist powers\nwhich culminated in the First World War. It took place on the basis of the\nincreasing super-exploitation<\/strong> of the\nrest of the world by the monopolies in the major imperialist powers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This economic growth resulted in\nthe formation of a layer of privileged workers in the most advanced countries \u2013\nwhat Lenin described as an “aristocracy of labour”. These provided a\nbasis of support for a bureaucracy of officials which developed in a privileged\nposition in the mass workers’ organisations, insulated from the pressures of\nthe rank and file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The material interest of these\nlayers found ideological expression in reformism<\/strong>:\nthe idea that socialism could be implemented gradually, by winning concessions\nfrom the capitalists, without the need to overthrow the capitalist class. In\npractice, large sections of the leadership of the Second International\nabandoned the struggle for socialist revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing an introduction to an\nAfrikaans translation of the Communist\nManifesto<\/em> in 1937, Trotsky summed up the changes in the world situation\nbetween 1848 and the turn of the century:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The revolution of 1848 did not turn into a socialist revolution as the Manifesto<\/em> had calculated, but opened up to Germany the possibility of a vast future capitalist ascension. The Paris Commune proved that the proletariat, without having a tempered revolutionary party at its head, cannot wrest power from the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the prolonged period of capitalist prosperity that ensued brought about not the education of the revolutionary vanguard, but rather the bourgeois degeneration of the labour aristocracy, which became in turn the chief brake on the proletarian revolution. In the nature of things, the authors of the Manifesto<\/em> could not possibly have foreseen this \u2018dialectic\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The full bankruptcy of reformism\nwas revealed with the outbreak of the First World War. In a shameful betrayal\nof the workers’ international struggle, the reformist leaders of the Second\nInternational in the different countries threw themselves behind the war effort\nof their ‘own’ imperialist bourgeoisies. Workers were sent into war by these\nleaders \u2013 to massacre the workers of other countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The First World War brought\nsharply to the surface all the contradictions of capitalism, and led, before\nits end, to a revolutionary polarisation between the classes in every country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was all this which made it\npossible for the working class to take power first, not in one of the most\nadvanced capitalist countries, but in backward\nRussia<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Trotsky put it in 1936:\n“Marx expected that the Frenchman would begin the social revolution, the\nGerman continue it, the Englishman finish it; and as to the Russian, Marx left\nhim far in the rear. But this conceptual order was upset by the facts,” (The Revolution Betrayed<\/em>). This\npossibility was what Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution had\nanticipated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The permanent revolution and Russia<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though early twentieth century\nRussia was still a semi-feudal empire, capitalism had developed rapidly,\nlargely on the basis of foreign investment by the imperialist powers. Peasants\nwere pulled from the land into big factories and transformed almost overnight\ninto an industrial working class. The developing forces of production were\nstraining against the chains imposed by the old social order \u2013 creating objective\nconditions for revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The character of this revolution,\nand the relation of forces in it, was enormously clarified in 1905, when the\nRussian working class rose up as an independent force trying to overthrow the Tsar’s\ndictatorship. This revolution was defeated. But it proved to be a “dress\nrehearsal”, in Trotsky’s words, for the revolution in 1917.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky played a major role in\nthe 1905 revolution. Returning from enforced exile, he was elected President of\nthe St Petersburg soviet. The soviets were councils of factory delegates formed\nto co-ordinate the strike movement, but soon became the main political organs\nof the working class, and, as Lenin explained, “the embryo of a\nrevolutionary government.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In December Trotsky and other\nleaders of the St Petersburg soviet were arrested, and later put on trial on\ncharges of treason. In the trial Trotsky boldly defended the actions of the\nsoviet in organising the armed self-defence of workers and preparing the\noverthrow of the Tsar’s dictatorship, in front of the Tsar’s own judges! The state’s\ncase collapsed \u2013 though the leaders of the soviet were banished to Siberia,\nfrom where Trotsky escaped, again into exile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 1905 revolution sharpened the\npolitical differences between two main tendencies in the RSDLP. The right-wing,\nthe Mensheviks, had much in common with the reformists in the Second International.\nThey spoke of “revolution”. But, they added: “The social\nrelations of Russia have ripened only for a bourgeois revolution” \u2013 in the\nwords of Axelrod, a Menshevik leader, in 1908. “We must not even so much\nas mention the direct fight of the proletariat against other classes for\npolitical power…. Objective historical conditions doom our proletariat to an\ninevitable collaboration with the bourgeoisie in the struggle against our\ncommon enemy.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Mensheviks claimed to be\n‘Marxists’. Yet, in insisting that, for objective reasons, ‘the bourgeois\nrevolution comes first’ they had not even absorbed the lessons that Marx and\nEngels had drawn from the experiences of 1848 \u2013 that the bourgeoisie would betray their ‘own’ revolution<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky, together with Lenin and\nthe Bolsheviks, the revolutionary wing of the Russian workers’ movement,\nvehemently opposed this standpoint. Yes, they agreed, the revolution was bourgeois<\/strong> in its tasks, or, more\nprecisely, bourgeois-democratic<\/strong>. It\nwas first and foremost a question of ending feudalism and the Tsar’s dictatorship,\nachieving democracy, and liberating the nationalities oppressed by Russian\nimperialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the Russian bourgeoisie was\neven weaker than that in Germany in 1848 and more bound up with the landlords,\nthe whole Tsarist order \u2013 and imperialism. At the same time, as the 1905\nrevolution showed, the working class in Russia \u2013 though still a small minority\nin society \u2013 was stronger in numbers and concentration, more conscious of its power,\nthan in Germany in 1848.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Lenin put it later, the 1905\nrevolution “was a bourgeois-democratic<\/strong>\nrevolution in its social content, but a proletarian<\/strong>\nrevolution in its methods of struggle.” (Lecture on the 1905 Revolution<\/em>, February 1917).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Russian bourgeoisie was bound\nto recoil from the revolution \u2013 but the Menshevik policy of ‘restraining’ the\nrole of the proletariat was futilely intended to try to prevent this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Against the Mensheviks, Lenin\nwrote scathingly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we are even in part, even for a moment, guided by the consideration that our participation [i.e. that of the RSDLP] may cause the bourgeoisie to recoil, we thereby simply hand over leadership of the revolution entirely to the bourgeois classes. We thereby place the proletariat entirely under the tutelage of the bourgeoisie… compelling the proletariat to be moderate and meek, so that the bourgeoisie should not recoil. We emasculate the most vital needs of the proletariat, namely its political needs…so as not to make the bourgeoisie recoil. We go over completely from the platform of revolutionary struggle for the achievement of democracy to the extent required by the proletariat to a platform of chaffering with the bourgeoisie, buying the bourgeoisie’s voluntary consent (‘so that it should not recoil’) at the price of our principles, by betraying the revolution.<\/p> Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution<\/em>, 1905<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky was the first to draw out\nthe implications of all this to their full conclusion. Lenin later came to the\nsame position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his first exposition of the\nideas of permanent revolution, Results\nand Prospects<\/em> (1905), Trotsky explained: “it is possible to limit the\nscope of all the questions of the revolution by asserting that our revolution\nis bourgeois<\/strong> in its objective aims\nand therefore in its inevitable results, closing our eyes to the fact that the\nchief actor in this bourgeois revolution is the proletariat, which is being impelled\ntowards power by the entire course of the revolution.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the bourgeois would inevitably\nrecoil, in other words, the working class would have to lead the democratic\nrevolution. Even though Russia was a backward country, the working class would have to take power.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky continued in the same\npassage: “We may reassure ourselves that the social conditions of Russia\nare not ripe for a socialist economy, without considering that the proletariat,\non taking power, must, by the very logic of its position, inevitably be urged\ntowards the introduction of state management of industry. The general\nsociological term bourgeois revolution<\/strong>\nby no means solves the politico-tactical problems, contradictions, and\ndifficulties which the mechanics of a given<\/strong>\nbourgeois revolution throw up.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky was well aware that, in\nbackward Russia, conditions were “not ripe” for a fully socialist\neconomy \u2013 a favourite argument of the Mensheviks. As a matter of fact, the same\nargument held true for any<\/strong> single\ncountry, even the most advanced. A fully socialist economy, as we have seen,\ncan come into existence only on an international basis: when “the proletariat\nhas progressed sufficiently far \u2013 not only in one country, but in all the\nleading countries of the world\u201d. (Marx and Engels)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was true also that, seen in isolation, and abstractly,<\/strong>\ncapitalism had not ‘exhausted its historical mission’ in Russia. “No\nsocial formation disappears before all the productive forces have developed for\nwhich it has room”, was a popular formula of Marx’s also favoured by the\nMensheviks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But (as Trotsky later put it) this\nidea needed to be understood,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

not from the country taken separately, but from the sequence of universal historical stages (slavery, medievalism [feudalism], capitalism). The Mensheviks, however, taking this statement from the point of view of the single state, drew the conclusion that Russian capitalism has still a long road to travel before it will reach the European or American level. But productive forces do not develop in a vacuum! You cannot talk of the possibilities of a national capitalism, and ignore on the one hand the class struggle developing out of it, or on the other its dependence upon world conditions.<\/p> History of the Russian Revolution<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

“The class struggle” \u2013 this\nwas why Trotsky, in Results and Prospects<\/em>,\nlaid emphasis on not “closing our eyes to the fact that the chief actor<\/strong> in this bourgeois revolution is\nthe proletariat, which is being impelled\ntowards power<\/strong> by the entire course of the revolution.” He added:\n“the day and the hour when power will pass into the hands of the working\nclass depends directly not upon the level attained by the productive forces but\nupon relations in the class struggle, upon the international situation, and, finally,\nupon a number of subjective factors: the traditions, the initiative and the\nreadiness to fight of the workers.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Very concrete questions were\ninvolved, Trotsky explained. The working class was impelled towards power. In\npower, it would be impelled to act against capitalism. What if the working\nclass wanted to legislate to shorten the hours of work? What if it wanted to\nprovide state benefit to the unemployed? The capitalists would resist this.\nThey would lock workers out of factories. Could a workers’ government stand\naside? No, it would have to intervene, and re-establish production. It would\nhave to take over the control and management of production. On every question,\na real workers’ government would come into conflict with the economic power of\ncapitalism, and be compelled to end it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego ridicules Trotsky for his\n“mystical belief… that workers can somehow or other pole-vault\nthemselves into socialism\u201d. The theory of permanent revolution did<\/strong> involve a “pole-vault”, a\nleap. But it was not a leap into classless society, or into socialism. It was a\nleap beyond what had been achieved by the working class in the most advanced\ncapitalist countries: the establishment of a workers’ state, and the overthrow\nof capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was, as Trotsky was later to put\nit, a leap out of necessity:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history of recent decades very clearly shows that, in the conditions of capitalist decline, backward countries are unable to attain that level which the old centres of capitalism have attained. Having themselves arrived in a blind alley, the highly civilised nations block the road to those in the process of civilisation. Russia took the road of proletarian revolution, not because her economy was the first to become ripe for a socialist change, but because she could not develop on a capitalist basis. Socialisation of the means of production had become a necessary condition for bringing the country out of barbarism.<\/p>The Revolution Betrayed<\/em>, our emphasis<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, as regards\nconditions within Russia, it was not a leap. As Trotsky explained against the\nStalinist theoreticians in the 1920s: “The permanent revolution is no isolated\nleap of the proletariat, rather, it is the re-building of the nation under the\nleadership of the proletariat. That is how I conceived and interpreted the prospect\nof the permanent revolution, beginning with 1905.” (The Permanent Revolution<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego claims to have a theory\nof permanent revolution \u2013 derived from Marx, Engels and Lenin, but not from\nTrotsky. But what answers does he have to these arguments? He can only\nmechanically assert: “But \u2013 and this is the decisive point \u2013 the democratic\nrevolution comes first<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It is this proposition\nwhich Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution rejects. Trotsky took the view\nthat unless the revolution is socialist in character and immediately\nestablishes a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ it will fail.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is evident how Dialego is falsifying\nTrotsky’s position. Trotsky “took the view” that the working class\nmust take state power (i.e. establish a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) to carry out the democratic revolution\nitself.<\/strong> Having taken state power, it would be propelled to move against\ncapitalism. This perspective was confirmed when the Russian working class did\ntake state power in 1917 \u2013 and ended capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The state, for Marxism, is an\ninstrument of class rule. The state in Russia was in the hands of an\nessentially feudal and autocratic ruling class. Dialego rejects the idea that\nthe working class needed to take state power to carry out the democratic\nrevolution. But he never addresses the question of which class then, if not the proletariat, would hold state power<\/strong> in\nhis ‘democratic revolution’, that must \u2018come first\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In words, Dialego talks of\n“permanent”, “uninterrupted” revolution, in “phases<\/strong> [which] are of course linked\nsince one is the prelude or precondition for the other.” But his argument\nreduces to the same mechanical schematism as the Mensheviks. The\n“democratic revolution” is not the “socialist revolution”:\ntherefore, the working class must subordinate itself to the bourgeoisie in the\ndemocratic revolution. This is not an ‘alternative’ theory of permanent revolution,\nbut of inevitable objective “stages”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He uses concepts to try to\nsqueeze history into an abstract scheme, rather than to illuminate its\ncontradictory dialectic. He is oblivious to the fact that real societies do not\ndevelop uniformly, from a preconceived model, but unevenly, combining together\n“advanced” and “backward” features in concrete and unique\nways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky long ago identified and\nsummed up the errors of Dialego’s “vulgar ‘Marxist'” method,\nreferring to leaders of the Second International:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vulgar ‘Marxism’ has worked out a pattern of historical development according to which every bourgeois society sooner or later secures a democratic regime, after which the proletariat, under conditions of democracy, is gradually organized and educated for socialism. The actual transition to socialism has been variously conceived: the avowed reformists pictured this transition as the reformist filling of democracy with a socialist content (Jaures): the formal revolutionists acknowledged the inevitability of applying revolutionary violence in the transition to socialism (Guesde). But both the former and the latter considered democracy and socialism, for all peoples and all countries, as two stages in the development of society which are not only entirely distinct but also separated by great distances of time from each other…<\/p>

The theory of permanent revolution, which originated in 1905, declared war upon these ideas and methods.”<\/p>Permanent Revolution<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Dialego on Trotsky in 1905<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not content with falsifying\nTrotsky’s ideas, Dialego also falsifies his account of Trotsky’s life.\nRegarding Trotsky in 1905, he writes: “he made dramatic speeches to the\nPetrograd Soviet during the 1905 Revolution, but (like the Mensheviks) he\nopposed the call for armed revolution and played no part in the bitter street\nbattles in Moscow.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Into this one sentence he manages\nto mix a series of downright lies, and distortions, to try to turn Trotsky from\na revolutionary into a reformist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Dialego well knows, Trotsky\ndid not merely “make speeches” to the Petrograd (St Petersburg)\nsoviet, like some demagogic windbag. At the age of 25, he was its President and\none of its leading strategists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Like the Mensheviks”,\nsays Dialego, Trotsky “opposed the call for armed revolution\u201d. Far from\nopposing such a call, Trotsky was a leader in initiating it. That was why he\nwas arrested, imprisoned, and put on trial for high treason!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In mid-November Trotsky was\nexplaining in the newspaper he produced that the way forward from the October\ngeneral strike was for the working class to link up with the peasantry, establish contact with the army, and arm\nitself:<\/strong> “that is the simple and main conclusion the proletariat must\ndraw from the October struggle and October victory. On this conclusion will\ndepend the future of the revolution.” (Quoted from A. Asher, The Revolution of 1905<\/em>, 1988, pp. 285-6)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky “played no part in\nthe bitter street battles in Moscow”, complains Dialego. This is\nlaughable. Trotsky was arrested and imprisoned on December 3. He was held in\nprison for 57 weeks, and tried in June-November 1906. Whilst the struggles in\nMoscow were taking place \u2013 between December 9 and 17, 1905 \u2013 Trotsky was imprisoned\nhundreds of miles away, in the Peter Paul Fortress in Petrograd. Even Houdini\nmight have found it a bit of a problem to join the street fighting in Moscow in\nthese circumstances!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lenin’s perspectives<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To support his “version”\nof permanent revolution, Dialego also calls, as we have seen, on the authority\nof Lenin: “Lenin reaffirmed this perspective in 1905 when he declared that\n\u2018from the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance\nwith the measure of our strength… begin to pass to the socialist\nrevolution.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More fully, this extract reads:\n“From the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in\naccordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organised proletariat<\/strong>,\nbegin to pass to the socialist revolution. We\nstand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop halfway.<\/strong>” (Social Democracy’s attitude towards the\npeasant movement<\/em>, 1905. Our emphasis)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taken in itself, this passage\nappears to support Dialego’s standpoint. But here, again, Dialego quotes some\nphrases from a Marxist text as a general prescription on revolution, without\npresenting his readers with the context in which they were put forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Trotsky, Lenin’s writings in\n1905 and after, notably Two Tactics of\nSocial-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution<\/em>, all vehemently rejected the\nMenshevik conception of the impending Russian revolution: the idea that the\nworking class should submit to bourgeois leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Against the Menshevik position, Lenin\nadvocated an alliance of the working class with the peasantry (nine tenths of\nthe population), against the Tsarist state and the big bourgeoisie, in a revolution\nto establish a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the\npeasantry”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This formula was, as we shall\nsee, imprecise, and Lenin later abandoned it. It was intended to emphasise the\nneed for the working class to struggle as far as possible to take state power\nin its own hands and exercise that power without being fettered by its class\nenemy, the bourgeoisie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far as it went against the\nMensheviks, this position was entirely at one with Trotsky’s. This is the\nopposite of what Dialego would have us believe. He quotes Lenin on\n“democratic revolution”. But he completely fails to mention the\nconcept of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and\npeasantry” which is the key to distinguishing Lenin’s standpoint from that\nof Menshevism. By this means, he leaves the door open to the idea that when\nLenin writes of a “socialist revolution” following a “democratic\nrevolution”, he is putting forward the same “vulgar ‘Marxist'”\nposition as Dialego himself adopts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In reality Dialego’s position \u2013 that\nit was not the task of the working class to struggle for state power in the\nRussian revolution, would have been rejected by Lenin as mere Menshevism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within the general framework of\n“bourgeois-democratic revolution”, Lenin drew a complete contrast between\nhis program of a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and,\nfor example, the half-hearted “bourgeois revolution from above” led\nby Bismarck in his rule of Germany from 1860 to 1890.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In actual fact [Lenin wrote in Two Tactics<\/em>] the Russian revolution will begin to assume its real sweep, and will really assume the widest revolutionary sweep possible in the epoch of bourgeois-democratic revolution, only when the bourgeoisie recoils from it<\/strong> and when the masses of the peasantry come out as active revolutionaries side by side with the proletariat.\u201d<\/p>

“It is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie to rely on certain remnants of the past, as against the proletariat, for instance, on the monarchy, the standing army, etc… On the other hand it is more advantageous to the working class for the necessary changes in the direction of bourgeois democracy to take place by way of revolution and not by way of reform, because the way of reform is one of delay, procrastination, the painfully slow decomposition of the putrid parts of the national organism.<\/strong>” (Our emphasis)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Together with this, Lenin\nemphasised the integral links between the Russian revolution and the Western\nEuropean socialist revolution. The victory of a revolutionary democratic\ndictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry in Russia “will enable\nus to rouse Europe; after throwing off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, the\nsocialist proletariat of Europe will in its turn help us to accomplish the\nsocialist revolution.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1905, however, Lenin had not\nas yet reached Trotsky’s further<\/strong>\nconclusion: that, in government with the peasantry, the working class in Russia\nwould come immediately into conflict with the capitalist class and be compelled<\/strong> to end capitalism. As he then\nunderstood the question, the working class needed to hold back from this because\nof Russia’s backwardness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Lenin put it in Two Tactics<\/em>, “The degree of Russia’s\ndevelopment (an objective condition<\/strong>),\nand the degree of class-consciousness and organisation of the broad masses of\nthe proletariat (a subjective condition<\/strong>\ninseparably bound up with the objective condition) make the immediate and\ncomplete emancipation of the working class impossible.” (Our emphasis)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was operating with the idea\nnot only that it was still possible for capitalism to develop the backward\ncountries, but that it was necessary<\/strong>\nfor their development. Russia, he maintained in Two Tactics<\/em> suffered from \u201ctoo little capitalism\u201d. But he was\narguing for a government in which the mass of the population \u2013 the workers and\npeasants \u2013 would be able to exercise the maximum degree of control over the\nform which this capitalist development took.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Lenin had a rough historical\nanalogy in mind, it was the Jacobin period of the French revolution \u2013 the\nperiod in which the revolutionary masses had established the most democratic\nregime then possible on the basis of capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the advance towards socialism\nin Russia, Lenin relied on the differences in the international balance of\nforces from the time of the French revolution. In France, the bourgeois\nrevolution had been surrounded, for the most part, by backward feudal regimes.\nNow Russia was surrounded by advanced capitalist countries, in which conditions\nwere ripe for socialist revolution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin thus believed the Russian\nworking class would be constrained for a “transient, temporary”\nperiod (his words) from ending capitalism. But, instead of being propelled\nbackwards into a capitalist dictatorship like that of Napoleon Bonaparte, the\ndemocratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry could be propelled in\nthe direction of socialism by workers’ revolution in the West. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego also ignores this other,\nkey, internationalist<\/strong> element in\nLenin’s argument: that the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the\nproletariat and peasantry in Russia would “enable us to rouse\nEurope”, stimulating proletarian revolution in the West, and thereby\nsocialist revolution in Russia. This, too, cannot be reconciled with Dialego’s\n“vulgar ‘Marxist'” standpoint that the conditions for, first,\ndemocratic, and then, socialist revolution are prepared in every single country\nin isolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, Lenin’s position at\nthis time did<\/strong> differ from that of\nTrotsky. Perspectives are not blueprints. Marxism is not an exact science.\nBefore the test of the revolution, different viewpoints openly contended in the\nRussian labour movement, polemicising sharply against one another. The proof of\nthe perspectives of Trotsky, of Lenin, and indeed of the Mensheviks, lay in the\ncourse of the Russian revolution itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The implication in Dialego’s\nargument is that the Russian Revolution of 1917 bore out Lenin’s perspective of\n1905 rather than Trotsky’s. But this is not the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In October 1917 the working\nclass, through the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Trotsky, took power, established\nits own democratic rule (\u2018the dictatorship of the proletariat\u2019) and in the\ncourse of the next months, ended capitalism<\/strong>.\nEven Dialego cannot dispute this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1917, Russia had not overcome\nthe backwardness which formed the basis for Lenin’s perspective in 1905. The\npeasantry remained the overwhelming majority in society. The working class had\nnot carried through the socialist revolution in any country in the West. Yet\nLenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks led the working class, supported by the poor\npeasants, to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and overthrow capitalism in Russia<\/strong> \u2013 something\nLenin had maintained in 1905 would be impossible, short of workers’ revolution\nin Europe. Between 1905 and 1917, Lenin\nclearly changed his position. He had, in fact, adopted the position of the\npermanent revolution.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, Lenin’s\nperspective of 1905 was proved in 1917 to be incorrect, or, more precisely,\nincomplete. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was verified. But it is\nentirely misleading to exaggerate<\/strong>\nthe differences between these two perspectives. These were entirely secondary\nin comparison to their common opposition\nto Menshevism<\/strong>. The exaggeration, and falsification, of these differences\nwas the work of the Stalinist ‘theoreticians’ in the 1920s, in their own\nself-interest. It is faithfully echoed by Dialego.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What, in terms of the practical tasks<\/strong> of the working class,\ndid the differences amount to? As Trotsky later explained:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difference between the ‘permanent’ and the Leninist standpoint expressed itself politically in the counterposing of the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat relying on the peasantry to the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. The dispute was not concerned with whether the bourgeois-democratic stage could be skipped and whether an alliance between the workers and peasants was necessary…”<\/p>

“Insofar as [Lenin’s] formula of the democratic dictatorship left half-open the question of the political mechanics of the alliance of workers and peasants, it thereby remained up to a certain point… an algebraic formula, allowing of extremely divergent political interpretations in the future… The reasons are to be sought in the fact that this algebraic formula contains a quantity, gigantic in significance, but politically extremely indeterminate: the peasantry.<\/p>The Permanent Revolution<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Why did Lenin have these\nincomplete perspectives in 1905? It is necessary to see the context in which\nhis thought developed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The context of Lenin’s position<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Russian Marxism evolved in a\nstruggle against the utopianism of the Narodniks (or Populists), who argued\nthat, on the basis of the “primitive communalism” of peasant\nvillages, Russia could “leap over” capitalism into socialism. Against\nthis Plekhanov, the pioneer of Russian Marxism, remorselessly stressed that\ncapitalism was a developing reality in Russia which could not be bypassed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin learnt his Marxism from\nPlekhanov, and put forward similar arguments against the Narodniks \u2013 for\nexample, in his early, detailed study of The\nDevelopment of Capitalism in Russia<\/em> (1899).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plekhanov subsequently went over\nto Menshevism, interpreting the need for capitalism in Russia to require the\npolitical domination of the big bourgeoisie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin’s Two Tactics<\/em> was a polemic against this mechanical and schematic\npolitical strategy of Menshevism \u2013 but without abandoning the idea that\ncapitalism could not be “leaped over” in Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marxism [he wrote in Two Tactics<\/em>] teaches us that at a certain stage of its development a society which is based on commodity production and has commercial intercourse with civilised capitalist nations must inevitably take the road of capitalism. Marxism has irrevocably broken with the Narodnik and anarchist gibberish that Russia, for instance, can bypass capitalist development, escape from capitalism, or skip it in some way other than that of the class struggle, on the basis and within the framework of this same capitalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

At this time, however, he had an\ninsufficient appreciation of the fundamental transformations taking place in\nthe world<\/strong> economy that he would\nlater analyse so brilliantly in Imperialism<\/em>:\nhe did not see that the transition to imperialism meant that backward countries\nwould become blocked off<\/strong> from\ndeveloping on a capitalist basis. With this, he did not see that this would\nrequire the working class to end capitalism in Russia, even without workers’\nrevolution in the West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this period, Lenin’s principal\nfocus of analysis was on the conditions\nof production within Russia<\/strong>, particularly in agriculture, to hammer home\nthe fact that capitalism had established deep indigenous roots. The Development of Capitalism in Russia<\/em>,\nfor example, does not examine the character of Russia’s foreign trade, foreign\nrelations, or the extent of foreign investment and its implications for the\nindustrial concentration of the proletariat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Together with this, all the\nrevolutionaries in Russia were affected by the fact that (as Trotsky later put\nit):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the first Russian revolution [of 1905] broke out more than half a century after the wave of bourgeois revolutions in Europe and thirty-five years after the episodic rising of the Paris Commune. Europe had had time to grow unaccustomed to revolutions. Russia had not experienced any.<\/p>

All the problems of the revolution were posed anew. It is not difficult to understand how many unknown and conjectural magnitudes the future revolution held for us in those days. The formulae of all the groupings were, each in their own way, working hypotheses. One must have complete incapacity for historical prognosis and utter lack of understanding of its methods in order now, after the event, to consider analyses and evaluations of 1905 as though they were written yesterday. <\/p>The Permanent Revolution<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It was with the outbreak of the\nFirst World War that Lenin was brought abruptly face to face with the significance\nof the transition to imperialism \u2013 particularly in terms of the abject\ntreachery of the leaders of the Second International. When he first heard the\nnews that the nominally ‘Marxist’ leaders of the German worker’s party (the\nSPD) had voted in parliament in support of the war, he believed this was a\nfalsehood put out by the German military general staff!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin had previously had enormous\nrespect for the left-wing leaders of the Second International, such as the\nGerman Karl Kautsky, because they came from a more advanced country, with a\nstronger working class and Marxist tradition. Now he realised he had placed too\nmuch faith in them. In a series of writings, including Imperialism<\/em>, he set out to reappraise the whole international\nsituation. This, in turn, brought gradual modification in his definition of the\ntasks of the working class in the Russian revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A clear example of this \u2013 dealt\nwith in more detail later in this pamphlet \u2013 was his reappraisal of the Paris\nCommune of 1871. In Two Tactics<\/em>\n(1905) he describes it as “a government that was unable, and could not at\nthat time, distinguish between the elements of a democratic and a socialist\nrevolution, a government that confused the tasks of fighting for a republic\nwith those of fighting for socialism…. In short… it was a government such\nas ours should not be.” Yet in State\nand Revolution<\/em>, his classic work on the state written in the midst of the\n1917 revolution, it is from the Paris Commune above all that he draws out the\nprinciples for the workers’ state that needs to be established in Russia!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Equally, until 1917, Lenin\ncriticised the agrarian program of the Narodnik-like Social Revolutionaries for\nredistributing the land to the peasantry as utopian. He believed the democratic\ndictatorship and the peasantry would need to allow the development of\nlarge-scale agriculture on a capitalist basis. Yet, when the working class took\npower in October 1917, one of the first acts of the Bolsheviks was to adopt the\nagrarian program of the Social Revolutionaries: expropriation of the landowners\nand democratic redistribution of the land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though it is not evident in all\nhe wrote before 1917, events were driving Lenin towards the ideas of permanent\nrevolution held by Trotsky. Thus, in 1915 he stated:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

History seems to be repeating itself [in Russia]: again there is a war, as in 1905, a war Tsarism has dragged the country into with definite, patently annexationist, predatory and reactionary aims. Again there is military defeat, and a revolutionary crisis accelerated by it. Again the liberal bourgeoisie \u2013 in this case even in conjunction with large sections of the conservative bourgeoisie and the landowners \u2013 are advocating a programme of reform and of an understanding with the Tsar…<\/p>

There is, however, actually a vast difference, viz., that this war has involved all Europe, all the most advanced countries with mass and powerful socialist movements. The imperialist war has linked up<\/strong> the Russian revolutionary crisis, which stems from a bourgeois-democratic revolution, with the growing crisis of the proletarian socialist revolution in the West. This link is so direct that no individual solution of revolutionary problems is possible in any single country \u2013 the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution is now not only a prologue to, but an indivisible and integral part of, the social revolution in the West.<\/strong><\/p>

In 1905, it was the proletariat’s task to consummate the bourgeois revolution in Russia so as to kindle the proletarian revolution in the West. In 1915, the second part of this task has acquired an urgency that puts it on a level with the first part.<\/strong> A new political division has arisen in Russia on the basis of new, higher, more developed and more complex international relations. This new division is between the chauvinist revolutionaries, who desire revolution so as to defeat Germany, and the proletarian internationalist revolutionaries, who desire a revolution in Russia for the sake of the proletarian revolution in the West, and simultaneously with that revolution.<\/p> “The Defeat of Russia and Revolutionary Crisis<\/em>“, Collected Works<\/em>, XXI. Our emphasis .<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Lenin was saying the Russian\nrevolution, though bourgeois-democratic in its tasks, was now “an\nindivisible and integral part of the socialist revolution in the West\u201d. He was\nsaying that to kindle the socialist revolution in the West was as urgent for\nthe Russian proletariat as its own ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution. This\nrepresents a definite and conscious revision of Lenin’s perspectives in Two Tactics<\/em>, and is hardly\ndistinguishable from the idea of permanent revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lenin and Trotsky: political differences<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1905-1917 Lenin and Trotsky\nboth conducted their main polemics against Menshevism. At the same time, they\noccasionally polemicised against each other. Thus Trotsky wrote in Results and Prospects<\/em>, regarding the\ndemocratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We simply think that it is unrealisable \u2013 at least in a direct immediate sense.<\/p>

Indeed, such a coalition presupposes either that one of the existing bourgeois parties commands influence over the peasantry or that the peasantry will have created a powerful independent party of its own, but we have attempted to show that neither the one nor the other is possible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Equally, Lenin made occasional\ncriticisms of Trotsky’s perspectives. Dialego, like the Stalinist “theoreticians”\nwho compiled their “indictment” against Trotsky in the 1920s, seizes\non such criticisms to try to sustain his argument that Trotsky’s theory of\npermanent revolution is “non-Leninist” and invalid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus Dialego writes:\n“Trotsky’s ‘major mistake’ \u2013 as Lenin commented \u2013 was his failure to\ndevelop a ‘clear conception’ of the transition from the bourgeois revolution to\nthe socialist revolution.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego takes this phrase from an\narticle of Lenin’s titled The Aim of the\nProletarian Struggle in our Revolution<\/em>, (1909). More fully, this is what\nLenin wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for Trotsky, whom Comrade Martov has involved in the controversy of third parties which he has organised \u2013 a controversy involving everybody except the dissentient \u2013 we positively cannot go into a full examination of his views here. A separate article of considerable length would be needed for this. By just touching upon Trotsky’s mistaken views, and quoting scraps of them, Comrade Martov only sows confusion in the mind of the reader, for scraps of quotations do not explain but confuse matters. Trotsky’s major mistake is that he ignores the bourgeois character of the revolution and has no clear conception of the transition from this revolution to the socialist revolution. This major mistake leads to those mistakes on side issues which Comrade Martov repeats<\/strong> when he quotes a couple of them with sympathy and approval.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky’s “major mistake is\nthat he ignores the bourgeois character of the revolution”… Trotsky\n“has no clear conception of the transition from this revolution to the\nsocialist revolution”. This does indeed appear<\/strong> to support Dialego’s idea that Trotsky was guilty of\n“jumping stages”, of refusing to recognise that “the bourgeois\nrevolution comes first”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, as any comrade who has\naccess to this article can judge for themselves, the concrete<\/strong> issues raised by Lenin against Trotsky are not at all\nconcerned with this issue. Its major purpose is to reaffirm, against Menshevism<\/strong>, that Marxism in Russia\nstood for “(1) recognition of the guiding role of the proletariat, the\nrole of leader, in the revolution, (2) recognition that the aim of the struggle\nis the conquest of power by the proletariat assisted by other revolutionary\nclasses, (3) recognition that the first and perhaps the sole\n“assistants” in this matter are the peasants\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In all this, there is nothing\nthat Trotsky would have disagreed with. Lenin then defends the idea of the\ndemocratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry against Trotsky’s\ncriticism of its “unrealisability” on the grounds that (a) there can\nand has been cooperation in action between the Russian proletariat and\npeasantry, regardless of whether or not the peasantry is organised in its own\nparty and (b) that the peasantry is likely to constitute itself into a party in\nthe course of the revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus the concrete issues that\nLenin disputes with Trotsky are precisely those later summed up by Trotsky\nhimself: “the dispute was not concerned with whether the\nbourgeois-democratic stage could be skipped and whether an alliance between the\nworkers and peasants was necessary… it concerned the political mechanics<\/strong> of the collaboration of the proletariat and the\npeasantry in the democratic revolution.” (The Permanent Revolution<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this 1909 article Lenin uses\nonly phrases of Trotsky’s taken from writings by Martov. Moreover, Lenin never\ndid write a \u201cseparate article of considerable length” to criticise\nTrotsky. When Trotsky after Lenin’s death came to re-examine the polemics of\nthis period, he concluded that Lenin never had access to the only full exposition\nof his theory, in Results and Prospects<\/em>.\nIndeed, had Lenin, who was precise and meticulous in criticism, actually read Results and Prospects<\/em>, he could not have\ndrawn the sweeping conclusion that Trotsky “ignored” the bourgeois\ncharacter of the revolution. As we have seen, this was simply not the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lenin and Trotsky: organisational differences<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, magnifying and distorting\nthe pre-1917 differences between Lenin and Trotsky, Dialego draws the further\nconclusion that it was the theory of permanent revolution which “explains\nwhy Trotsky was unable to work with Lenin before the Russian revolution and\nwith the new Soviet Government after it”!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is another falsification\ninvented by the Stalinists in the 1920s. In reality, after 1917, Lenin and\nTrotsky worked in the closest collaboration until Lenin’s death. Lenin\nconducted his last political campaign together with Trotsky against the\nbureaucracy which was rising in the Soviet workers’ state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even after 1917, Lenin and\nTrotsky had their occasional differences. There was not then the totalitarian\nclimate of enforced unanimity imposed by the political counter-revolution of\nthe Stalinist bureaucracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, Trotsky remained a part\nof the Soviet government until he was thrown\nout of it<\/strong> and expelled from the Soviet Union by Stalin and the bureaucracy\n\u2013 because of his defence of Marxism and Leninism against its perversion by\nStalinism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before 1917, Trotsky did not\n“work with Lenin”, not principally because of the question of\npermanent revolution, but because he differed with Lenin on questions regarding\nthe nature of Bolshevik organisation. In 1917 Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and\nadmitted he had been in error on these questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These organisational differences\nmay well have heightened the tone of the political debate between Lenin and\nTrotsky. But Dialego’s claim that political<\/strong>\ndifferences would have prevented them working together is typically Stalinist.\nIn contrast to Stalinism, Bolshevism did not mean the stifling of political\ndifferences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what were the organisational\ndifferences? The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party split in 1903 between\nthe Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) wings, over secondary\norganisational issues. Trotsky went with the Mensheviks at this time on these\norganisational points. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two wings, however, rapidly\ncrystallised as opposing political<\/strong>\ntendencies. At this point Trotsky broke with the Mensheviks. As he wrote later:\n“I remained politically and organisationally associated with this minority\nonly until the autumn of 1904… when my irreconcilable conflict with\nMenshevism upon the questions of bourgeois liberalism and the perspectives of\nthe revolution defined itself.” (“Letter to the Bureau of Party\nHistory\u201d, 7\/2\/1930, in L. Trotsky, The\nStalin School of Falsification<\/em>, 1932)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he continued to resist\nLenin’s ideas on party organisation, and on how the differences within the\nRSDLP should be overcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego says: “Trotsky\ndenounced Lenin’s view of the party in What\nis to be Done?<\/em> as elitist and authoritarian. Identifying Lenin as ‘the\nleader of the reactionary wing of our party’, he sided with the Mensheviks when\nthe Russian socialists divided in 1903… Thereafter [after 1905] he became an\n‘independent’ vainly seeking to persuade the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks to sink\ntheir differences.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego here fails to differentiate\nbetween the organisational and political\nquestions<\/strong> involved. But he is correct that Trotsky at first sided with the\nMensheviks in criticising Lenin’s conception of the party, and that, later, he\nbecame an ‘independent’, trying to recreate a united RSDLP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin had argued in What is to be Done?<\/em> (1902) that, to\nsustain a revolutionary program, it was necessary to weld the Bolsheviks into a\nfirm revolutionary organisation. On this basis, they could conduct a struggle\nto win those workers who adhered to Menshevism away from their reformist\nleaders. Trotsky felt that it was necessary to unite the factions of the party\nfirst, despite the political differences, as the only way by which\nrevolutionaries could gain the ear of the Menshevik workers. Lenin correctly\ncondemned this as “conciliationism.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Trotsky explained later:\n“Not the permanent revolution but conciliationism was what separated me,\nin Lenin’s opinion, from Bolshevism.” He added:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believed that the logic of the class struggle would compel both factions to pursue the same revolutionary line. The great historical significance of Lenin’s policy was still unclear to me at that time, his policy of irreconcilable ideological demarcation and, when necessary, split, for the purpose of welding and tempering the core of the truly revolutionary party….<\/p>

It is impermissible and fatal to weaken a political line for purposes of vulgar conciliationism; it is impermissible to paint up centrism when it zig-zags to the left; it is impermissible, in the hunt after the will-o’-the-wisps of centrism to exaggerate and inflate differences of opinion with genuine revolutionary co-thinkers. These are the real lessons of Trotsky’s real mistakes.<\/p>The Permanent Revolution<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This was how Trotsky honestly\nsummed up the lessons he had learned from experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego paints a rather different\npicture of the nature of these differences:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whereas Lenin insisted that socialist ideas have to be brought in ‘from the outside’ in the sense that an overall revolutionary strategy needs to be coherently worked out by professional revolutionaries, Trotsky tended to ascribe revolutionary initiative to the \u2018will\u2019 of the working class.<\/p>

He was committed in other words to what Marxists call a \u2018spontaneist\u2019 view of the political process: a belief that workers have a kind of innate ‘instinct’ for revolution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Dialego here misrepresents both\nLenin and Trotsky. Lenin was committed to building a party of professional\nrevolutionaries, but working class\nrevolutionaries<\/strong>. What is to be Done?<\/em>\nwas a powerful statement of the need for such an organisation. But Lenin\nhimself later admitted that some of the formulations in it, drawn from the German\nworkers’ leader Kautsky, were “one-sided”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Replying in 1903 to criticisms\nthat What is to be Done?<\/em> “takes\nno account whatever of the fact that the workers, too, have a share in the\nformation of an ideology”, Lenin wrote: “Have I not said time and\ntime again that the shortage of fully class-conscious workers, worker leaders,\nand worker-revolutionaries is, in fact, the greatest deficiency in our\nmovement. Have I not said there that the training of such worker-revolutionaries\nmust be our immediate task.” (Collected\nWorks<\/em>, VI)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that Dialego holds the\nelitist position that socialism must come to the workers from\n“outside” is in fact an indictment of his so-called\n“Marxism-Leninism\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky was never a\n“spontaneist”. His adult life was dedicated to revolutionary\nparticipation in the struggle of the working class, and clarifying the\nprogramme on which it should conduct the fight for power. If he had really held\nthe views Dialego ascribes to him he would have been quite happy to sit back\nand leave all this to the workers’ “innate ‘instinct’ for\nrevolution”!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky’s decision to join the\nBolshevik Party in 1917 was an open recognition of his mistake. For the rest of his life, until his\nassassination in 1940, he dedicated himself to building a revolutionary\nleadership of the working class on the basis of Bolshevik methods, in Russia\nand internationally. Indeed, for Stalin and the bureaucracy, this was in\nreality his principal “crime”.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Trotsky joined the\nBolsheviks, Lenin immediately understood that he had admitted his errors. Generously,\nLenin welcomed this. For example, at a meeting of the Petrograd committee of\nthe Bolsheviks (1\/11\/1917), Lenin said: “As for conciliation [with the\nMensheviks and Social Revolutionaries] I cannot even speak about that\nseriously. Trotsky long ago said that unification is impossible. Trotsky\nunderstood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This remark of Lenin’s was such\nan embarrassment to Stalin and the bureaucracy that, when the minutes of this\ncommittee were printed in 1927, all record of this meeting was expunged from the\nbook. Even the table of contents were reset and the pages renumbered, to try\nand hide all trace of the truth! (See “The lost document” in L.\nTrotsky, The Stalin School of\nFalsification<\/em>, 1932)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego conceals all this. Like\nthe Stalinists in the 1920s, he tries to invalidate Trotsky’s theory of permanent\nrevolution, and drive a wedge between Lenin and Trotsky, on the basis of scraps\ntorn from Lenin’s writings before 1917, on distortions, and on falsifications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To this one can only reply, as Trotsky\ndid himself in the 1920s: “Since that time such great events have taken\nplace and we have learned so much from these events that, to tell the truth, I\nfeel an aversion to the epigones [i.e. the Stalinists] present manner of\nconsidering new historical problems not in the light of the living experience\nof the revolutions already carried out by us, but mainly in the light of\nquotations that relate only to our forecasts regarding what were then future\nrevolutions.” (The Permanent\nRevolution<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real test of the theory of\npermanent revolution lies not in formulae extracted from the writings of either\nLenin or Trotsky, but in the experience of the 1917 Russian revolution itself, when\nLenin and Trotsky stood together, side by side, in the leadership of the Bolsheviks.\nIt is to this that we now turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The permanent revolution in 1917<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In February 1917 a mass uprising\nspearheaded by the Russian working class overthrew the Tsar. The troops, mostly\npeasants, came over to the side of the revolution. As in 1905, the working\nclass in the main cities established soviets, embryonic organs of its own\npower. But the leadership of the soviets fell into the hands of the reformist\nMensheviks and equally reformist Social-Revolutionaries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consistently with their idea that\nthe “democratic revolution” must be led by the bourgeoisie, these supported\nthe formation of a “Provisional Government” of capitalist parties.\nThis government proved incapable of expropriating the landlords and\nredistributing the land to the peasants, of liberating the oppressed national\nminorities, or of convening a Constitutional Assembly to establish a democratic\ngovernment \u2013 the democratic tasks of the revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite mass desertions from the\narmy, the government continued Russia’s participation in the hugely unpopular\nimperialist First World War. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the government paralysed,\nand proving incapable of implementing their demands, the mass of the working\nclass swung within months to the Bolsheviks. In the countryside the peasants\nwere taking matters in their own hands, and seizing the land from the\nlandlords. In October 1917, led by the Bolsheviks, the working class overthrew\nthe Provisional Government and established its own state power, on a program\nfor implementing the democratic tasks of the revolution, under the slogans of\n\u201cBread, Peace, and Land\u201d. Within months it was driven to bring the major means\nof production in the cities into control and management by the workers’ state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Returning from exile in early\nMay, Trotsky was, with Lenin, at the centre of all these developments,\nagitating for the Bolshevik program among workers and soldiers. In July he was\nelected to the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee with the fourth highest\nvote. In August he was imprisoned, with other Bolshevik leaders, but released\nunder the pressure of the revolution. On 23 September he was re-elected\nPresident of the Petrograd Soviet and, with Lenin in hiding, assumed the\norganisational leadership of the revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Military Revolutionary\nCommittee was set up, with Trotsky as its President, to organise for an\ninsurrection which could place power in the hands of the All-Russian Congress\nof Soviets, representing the workers, peasants and soldiers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky’s role in the month which\nfollowed is captured by a lifelong opponent of his, the Menshevik Sukhanov:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tearing himself from the work in revolutionary headquarters he would fly from the Obukhovsky factory to the Trubocheny, from the Putilov to the Baltic shipyards, from the Riding Academy to the barracks, and seemed to be speaking simultaneously in all places.<\/p>

Every Petrograd worker and soldier knew him and heard him personally. His influence \u2013 both in the masses and headquarters \u2013 was overwhelming. He was the central figure of those days and the chief hero of this remarkable page of history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky modestly remarked that\nfar more important than his contribution was the \u201cmolecular agitation carried\non by nameless workers, sailors, soldiers, winning converts one by one, breaking\ndown the last doubts, overcoming the last hesitations\u201d. (History of the Russian Revolution<\/em>) But no individual did more than\nhim in this respect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Dialego on the 1917 revolution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experience of 1917 was a\nconfirmation of Trotsky’s perspective of permanent revolution. But Dialego\ntries to deny this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The socialist revolution in October” claims Dialego, “was made possible by the democratic revolution in February. Even though the democratic stage only lasted around six months, it proved vital in enabling the Bolsheviks to win a majority of the population to their side. Despite his claim to the contrary, the Russian Revolution proved to be a practical refutation of Trotsky’s theory, and it is not surprising that no revolution has ever taken place in accordance with the mystifying principles of Trotskyist logic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The 1917 Russian revolution, for\nDialego, proceeded in “stages”. This is another of the falsifications\nof history invented by Stalin’s lackeys in the 1920s to discredit Trotsky, and\ntry to separate him from Lenin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let Lenin answer Dialego. In 1918\nhe summed up the nature of the Provisional Government, and contrasted its role\nwith what the workers’ revolution in October achieved:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These poltroons, gas-bags, vainglorious Narcissuses and petty Hamlets [i.e. the Provisional Government] brandished their wooden swords”, he explained, “but did not even destroy the monarchy! We cleansed out all that monarchist muck as nobody has ever done before. We left not a stone, not a brick of that ancient edifice, the social-estate system… standing… the fact cannot be denied that the petty-bourgeois democrats “compromised” with the landowners, the custodians of the traditions of serfdom, for eight months, while we completely swept the landowners and their traditions from Russian soil in a few weeks.<\/p> Collected Works<\/em>, Vol 33<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

“Monarchist muck…the social-estate system…the landowners”: sweeping these away were among the central bourgeois-democratic<\/strong> tasks of the revolution. But who achieved these tasks, in Lenin’s estimation? Not the February revolution, not the Provisional Government<\/strong>, but “we”, i.e., the working class, allied with the mass of the peasantry, in the revolution in October. The Provisional Government compromised<\/strong> with the landowners throughout its eight months in office. The revolution in October swept away<\/strong> the landowners within weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin’s retrospective summary of\nthe processes in 1917-18 confirms the fact that there was not a “democratic”\nrevolution followed by a “socialist” revolution, but one<\/strong> revolution, a permanent revolution,\nin which it was necessary for the working class to take state power to\naccomplish even the democratic tasks. It confirms also that Lenin had changed\nhis perspective from that of 1905.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the basis of his 1905\nperspective, Lenin could not have argued for the working class to carry through\na “socialist revolution” in October. He had excluded<\/strong> the possibility of socialist revolution in Russia \u2013 until\nthe working class took power in Western Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, on his return to Russia\nfrom exile in April 1917, Lenin had to wage a struggle against the internal\nleadership of the Bolshevik party, including Stalin, who were claiming that the\nperspective of a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and\npeasantry” warranted critical support<\/strong>\nby the Bolsheviks for the Provisional Government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“No support for the\nProvisional Government”, Lenin declared, “the utter falsity of all\nits promises should be made clear… The masses must be made to see that the\nSoviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government”.\n(The tasks of the proletariat in the\npresent revolution<\/em>, April 1917)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Provisional Government’s\n“democratic” promises are false. The Soviets, organs of working class\npower, are the only possible form of revolutionary government. This standpoint\nof Lenin’s was the standpoint of the permanent revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In explaining this, Lenin\nexplicitly abandoned the idea that there were objective<\/strong> barriers to ending capitalism in Russia \u2013 the idea\ncontained in his 1905 perspective. “The specific feature of the present situation\nin Russia”, he wrote in the same article, \u201cis that the country is passing<\/strong> from the first stage of the\nrevolution \u2013 which, owing to the insufficient class consciousness and\norganisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie \u2013\nto its second<\/strong> stage, which must\nplace power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the\npeasants\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin uses the word “stages<\/strong>“. But these are not a\nconsequence of the backwardness of Russia’s economic development, or the\npreponderance of the peasantry. It is not a question \u2013 as Dialego tries to\nmaintain \u2013 of an objective need for “democratic revolution” prior to<\/strong> and separate from<\/strong> “socialist revolution”. Power remained in\nthe hands of the bourgeoisie because, and only because, of the\n“insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the\nproletariat”. The revolution, for Lenin, is passing through “phases”\nor “stages” which are subjectively<\/strong>\ndetermined by the degree of consciousness and organisation of the proletariat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between April and October, the\nstrategy and tactics of the Bolsheviks were directed to transforming this situation,\nto exposing the false promises of the Provisional Government, and convincing\nthe working class of its need to take power \u2013 to carry through the democratic\nrevolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1918 the German workers’\nleader Karl Kautsky published a pamphlet attacking the Soviet workers’ state.\nIn 1905 Kautsky had written an article explaining that the Russian revolution\nwas neither wholly bourgeois nor wholly\nsocialist<\/strong> \u2013 an article warmly endorsed by both Lenin and Trotsky. Kautsky\nhad here put his finger on the contradiction that was resolved by the theory of\npermanent revolution. But, since that time, Kautsky had moved away from\nMarxism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1918 the essence of Kautsky’s\ncritique of the Russian revolution was the same as the Mensheviks, that, by\ntaking power in October, the Bolsheviks were “jumping stages” in the\nrevolution. Lenin replied with vigour:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beginning with April 1917<\/strong>, however, long before the October Revolution, that is, long before we assumed power, we publicly declared and explained to the people: the revolution cannot now stop at this stage, for the country has marched forward, capitalism has advanced, ruin has reached fantastic dimensions, which (whether one likes it or not) will demand<\/strong> steps forward, to socialism<\/strong>. For there is no other way of advancing, of saving the war-weary country and of alleviating<\/strong> the sufferings of the working and exploited people.<\/p>

Things have turned out just as we said they would. The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning. First<\/strong>, with the ‘whole’ of the peasants against the monarchy, against the landowners, against medievalism (and to that extent the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic). Then<\/strong>, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism<\/strong>, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise an artificial Chinese Wall between the first and second, to separate them by anything else than the degree of preparedness of the proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor peasants, means to distort Marxism dreadfully, to vulgarise it, to substitute liberalism in its place. It means smuggling in a reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the socialist proletariat by means of quasi-scientific references to the progressive character of the bourgeoisie in comparison with medievalism.<\/strong>\u201d (Our emphasis)<\/p>

…it is the proletariat alone that has really carried the bourgeois-democratic revolution to its conclusion, it is the proletariat alone that has done something really important to bring nearer the world proletarian revolution, and the proletariat alone that has created the Soviet state, which, after the Paris Commune [of 1871], is the second step towards the socialist state.<\/p> The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Again, Lenin is not excluding\n“stages”, i.e. phases in the process of the revolution. But these are\n“separated” by nothing else than the “degree of preparedness of\nthe proletariat” (i.e. its consciousness) and \u201cthe degree of its unity with\nthe poor peasants\u201d. And it is the proletariat that has “carried the\nbourgeois-democratic revolution to its conclusion” by creating “the\nSoviet state”, which is, at the same time a \u201cstep towards the socialist\nstate\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The phases are of course\nlinked”, Dialego has told us, “since one is a prelude or precondition\nfor the other. But \u2013 and this is the decisive point \u2013 the democratic revolution\ncomes first<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It is this\nproposition”, he adds, “which Trotsky’s theory of permanent\nrevolution rejects. Trotsky took the view that unless the revolution is\nsocialist in character and immediately establishes ‘a dictatorship of the proletariat’,\nit will fail.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky, we have seen, maintained\nthat the working class needed to establish the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’\nto \u201ccarry the bourgeois-democratic revolution to its conclusion\u201d. Now we see\nthat, contrary to what Dialego would have us believe, Lenin is holding the\nidentical position. Though there are phases in the process of the revolution, without the working class taking state\npower there would have been no democratic revolution in Russia in 1917.<\/strong>\nThis is the essential point that Dialego rejects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1920 Lenin drafted theses\nwhich were adopted by the 3rd Congress of the Communist International as its\nprogram for revolution in the colonial world. These included the following passage:\n“The policy of the Communist International on national and colonial\nquestions must be chiefly to bring about a union of the proletarian and working\nmasses of all nations and countries for a joint revolutionary struggle leading to the overthrow of capitalism,\nwithout which national inequality and oppression cannot be abolished.<\/strong>”\n(Our emphasis)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

National inequality and\noppression in the colonial world cannot be abolished without the overthrow of\ncapitalism. That expressed the theory of permanent revolution. It was a generalisation<\/strong> by Lenin of the lessons\nof the 1917 Russian revolution to every economically under-developed country.\nIt is a vital lesson for our own movement in South Africa today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Revolution or counter-revolution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the overthrow of the\nTsar, a “democratic revolution” was not carried through in February\n1917. But, it could be argued, at least the working class created for itself in\nFebruary the necessary “democratic space” within which it could develop\nthe class-consciousness and organisation necessary to take power. “Even\nthough the democratic stage only lasted around six months, it proved vital in\nenabling the Bolsheviks to win a majority of the population to their side”,\nasserts Dialego.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between February and October 1917\nthere was a period of “dual power”: divided between the state power\nstill in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and the power of the working class in\nthe soviets. But this was a highly unstable\nand contradictory<\/strong> situation, which could be resolved only by workers’ revolution\n\u2013 or by counter-revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor was this situation in any way\ninevitable. It existed only because the\nMensheviks and Social Revolutionaries still commanded a majority in the soviets,\nwhich they used to prop up the tottering rule of the bourgeoisie.<\/strong> Had the\nBolsheviks been in the majority in February, and with Lenin’s leadership, the\nworking class could have taken power forthwith. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego’s claim implies that, up\nto 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had reconciled themselves to the idea that\nthey would have to “allow” the Mensheviks and other compromisers to\nretain majority support, so as to have a “democratic stage” in Russia\nduring which the Bolsheviks could in turn become a majority. The idea only\nneeds to be stated to see how ridiculous it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin and the Bolsheviks fought\nimplacably against the Mensheviks to\ndevelop the class consciousness and independent political organisation<\/strong> of\nthe proletariat throughout the period before 1917, in underground conditions, because they saw the fatal dangers for the\nworking class of compromises with the bourgeoisie. <\/strong>In 1912, on this basis,\nthe Bolsheviks won majority support in the working class in the major industrial\ncentre of Petrograd \u2013 only to lose this again as a result of the outbreak of\nthe First World War. In 1917 Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks campaigned to\nbring to an end as rapidly as possible the pseudo-democratic stage of dual\npower under the Provisional Government, in favour of the democratic rule of the\nworking class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Trotsky put it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Political [bourgeois] democracy is an essential phase in the development of the working masses \u2013 with the important proviso that in some cases the working masses may remain in this phase for several decades, whereas in another case [e.g. in Russia in 1917] the revolutionary situation may enable the masses to liberate themselves from the prejudices of political [bourgeois] democracy even before its institutions have come into being.<\/p>

The state regime of the socialist revolutionaries and Mensheviks (March-October 1917) completely and utterly compromised democracy, even before it had time to be cast in any firm bourgeois-republican mode. <\/p>(1922 Preface to his collection titled 1905<\/em>.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Attempting to generalise the idea\nof a ‘necessary democratic stage’, Dialego writes, “This is why Lenin always\ninsisted that socialism can come only through democracy. It is only through democratic<\/strong> struggle that workers\nacquire the experience, the confidence and the wider popular support necessary\nif they are to become the ruling class of the new society.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego is here mixing up two\nseparate ideas: the correct<\/strong> idea\nthat the working class has to struggle for democracy as part of equipping\nitself to take power and carry through the transition to socialism; and the false<\/strong> idea of a (capitalist)\nconstitutional democracy as a necessary or inevitable social stage before the\nworking class can take power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marxism has always insisted that\nthe working class should be the most consistent fighter for democracy. But,\nequally, Marxism has always insisted that the working class should never limit\nor hide its socialist aims. Dialego wants the working class “first”\nto participate in the struggle for democracy and “then” to struggle\nfor socialism. In reality, it is not “only<\/strong>\nthrough democratic struggle”, but through struggle for its combined<\/strong> democratic and social class\naims that the working class acquires the confidence, experience, and\norganisation to lead all the oppressed in a struggle for workers’ democratic\nrule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin, in fact,\n“insisted” on this, even in the period when he believed that the\nRussian revolution, taken in isolation, would have to confine itself within the\nframework of capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The revolution in our country is one of the whole people, the Social-Democrats [Marxists] say to the proletariat”, he wrote in Two Tactics<\/em>. “As the most progressive and the only thoroughly revolutionary class, you should strive to play not only a most active part in it, but the leading part as well. Therefore you must not confine yourself within a narrowly conceived framework of the class struggle, understood mainly as the trade union movement; on the contrary, you must strive to extend the framework and the content of your class struggle so as to make it include not only all the aims of the present, democratic Russian revolution of the whole people, but the aims of the subsequent socialist revolution as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, in Russia in 1917, had\nthe Bolsheviks not taken power in October, the\nconsequence would not have been the extension of some peaceful “democratic\nstage” under the rule of the Provisional Government \u2013 but the victory of\ncounter-revolution in the form of vicious military dictatorship.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In August 1917, Kerensky \u2013 the\n‘socialist revolutionary’ lawyer who headed the Provisional Government \u2013 imprisoned\nBolshevik leaders, smashed up their press and began plotting the military\nsuppression of the revolution with the reactionary General Kornilov. Kornilov’s\nfirst attempt at counter-revolution failed. The skilful tactics of the\nBolsheviks enabled them to turn it to their advantage, win support, and prepare\nthe way for the working class to conquer power in October. But Kornilov\nremained waiting in the wings, to take advantage of any faltering of the\nrevolution. Even in power, the Russian working class had to fight and win a\nthree-year civil war against the forces of counter-revolution, supported by the\nimperialist powers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Trotsky took the\nview”, Dialego tells us, “that unless the revolution is socialist in\ncharacter and immediately establishes ‘a dictatorship of the proletariat’ it\nwill fail. The capitalists (in alliance with the bourgeois minded peasantry)\nwill inevitably sabotage the democratic revolution”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego ridicules these ideas,\nwhich are in fact his rather imprecise summary of a passage from an article\npublished in Trotsky’s collection 1905.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But let us accept Dialego’s\nsummary, and even his false hypothesis that February 1917 was a democratic\nrevolution. In that case, Trotsky’s advance warning was shown absolutely\ncorrect. So long as they were able to, the capitalists and the “bourgeois\nminded peasantry” did<\/strong> try to\nsabotage this “revolution” with all the means at their disposal. All\nthat stood against them was the proletariat, leading the mass of the peasantry,\nin its struggle to establish and defend its rule. The choices were workers’ rule\nor counter-revolution. Trotsky, as well as Lenin and the Bolsheviks, had understood\nthis well before 1917. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Russian revolution in 1917\nconfirms the theory of permanent revolution \u2013 in what Trotsky called its\n“first” aspect \u2013 that of the “transition from the democratic\nrevolution to the socialist” in a backward country in the modern world.\nThe subsequent fate of the revolution in Russia also confirms the further\naspects of the permanent revolution: that “the socialist revolution begins\non national foundations \u2013 but it cannot be completed within those\nfoundations…. Viewed from this standpoint, a national revolution is not a\nself-contained whole: it is only a link in the international chain\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Lenin, Trotsky and the\nBolsheviks in the period after 1917, the fate of the Russian revolution was\nintegrally linked with the fate of the workers’ revolution in Western Europe.\nWithout the spreading of the revolution to more advanced countries, they firmly\nbelieved, the working class in Russia would once again lose power through capitalist<\/strong> counter-revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These perspectives were not borne\nout precisely. Instead, with the turning back of the first wave of revolution\nin Western Europe and the isolation of the revolution in Russia, there was<\/strong> a counter-revolution, but of a\ndifferent sort. It was a political\ncounter-revolution<\/strong> spearheaded by Stalin and the bureaucracy, usurping\npower from the working class, though preserving the framework of nationalised\nand planned economy brought into being through the 1917 revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We turn to Trotsky’s role in the struggle against this political counter-revolution, and the way that this has been falsified by Stalinism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue to Chapter Two<\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Theory of the Permanent Revolution Leon Trotsky came to adulthood in Russia at the turn of this century \u2013 when the working class was […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":574,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-579","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"acf":[],"_hostinger_reach_plugin_has_subscription_block":false,"_hostinger_reach_plugin_is_elementor":false,"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":592,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/579\/revisions\/592"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}