The relevance of Permanent Revolution today

[Kadir Ateş]

What do comrades among the communist left and anarchist tendencies think about the relevance of Trotsky's expansion on the idea of "permanent revolution"? Would be curious to hear why or why not you feel it is relevant.

Trotskyists are also welcomed to voice their thoughts on this issue as well!

[Die Neue Zeit]

It's irrelevant except for countries like Afghanistan. Even then, Trotsky's take had a number of holes.

[Q]

The basic conclusions of Permanent Revolution - that international revolution within the capitalist system, most vitally in its core, is needed for a successful alternative to develop - is common ground by most socialists. Trotsky argued, within a much broader debate in his time that was held between many "greats" of the day, from a specific Russian context of that time, in Results and prospects, which you could indeed argue that is somewhat outdated.

[Jimmy Haddow (SPS)]

The Permanent Revolution today

Introduction to new Urdu edition of ‘Permanent Revolution’ by Leon Trotsky

Peter Taaffe


We publish below a new introduction by Peter Taaffe to Leon Trotsky’s ‘Permanent Revolution’, which the comrades of Socialist Movement Pakistan (CWI) are to translate into Urdu and publish.

The Permanent Revolution today
What relevance does Trotsky’s Theory of the Permanent Revolution have to the problems of the workers’ cause or the peasants’ (small farmers) movement today? After all, it was formulated more than 100 years ago during the first Russian revolution of 1905-07. The same kind of question could be posed - and it is - regarding the ideas of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. But no matter how ‘old’ is an idea - a method of analysis upon which mass action is based - if it more accurately describes the situation today than ‘new’ theories, it retains all its relevance in the modern era. This is particularly the case for the masses in the neo-colonial world - and especially today in the vital country of Pakistan with more than 200 million inhabitants - confronted as they are with all the terrible problems flowing from the incomplete capitalist-democratic revolution.

A similar situation as exists in Pakistan today confronted Russia also in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Russia had not completed the capitalist-democratic revolution: thoroughgoing land reform, purging of the countryside of feudal and semi-feudal remnants, unification of the country, the solution of the national question, and freedom from the domination of foreign imperialism. At the same time there was no democracy - the right to vote for a democratic parliament, a free press, trade union rights, etc. This system was crowned by the brutal, autocratic, age-old tsarist state. How to solve the capitalist-democratic revolution? This was the question of questions posed before the young Russian workers’ movement. The different theories exploring this issue were tested out in practice in the three Russian revolutions of 1905-1907, the February revolution of 1917 and the October 1917 revolution itself. The latter, for the first time in history, brought the working class to power and it remains to this day the most important single event in human history.

The bourgeois revolution
Both Lenin and Trotsky differed fundamentally from the Mensheviks (the original minority in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party) who believed the task of the working class in economically undeveloped countries such as Russia at that stage was to tail-end, give ‘critical support’, to the liberal capitalists in completing ‘their’ revolution. This was because they considered the liberal capitalists to be the main agents of the capitalist-democratic revolution. However, the belated development as a class of the capitalists - already revealed in 1848 by the German capitalists, who did not press through the German revolution at that stage - meant that they were incapable of completing this historic task.

Firstly, the capitalists invested in land and the landlords invested in industry and both were united, particularly in the modern era, to bank capital. Therefore any thoroughgoing bourgeois-democratic revolution would come up against the opposition not just of the landlords but also the capitalists themselves and their political representatives, the liberal capitalist parties. Above all, they were afraid that the masses, the main agency of change in all revolutions, including capitalist ones, inevitably pressed forward with their own demands, thereby challenging the position of the capitalists themselves. Even in the bourgeois French revolution of the eighteenth century, the plebeian sans-culottes (literally ‘without trousers’) were the main agency in clearing French society of all feudal rubbish. But they then went on to demand in 1793-94 measures in their own interests such as ‘maximum wages’ and ‘direct democracy’ which the newly empowered representatives of the bourgeoisie correctly understood as a threat. The sans-culottes were suppressed, first of all by the Directory and then by Bonaparte himself.

A similar, although even more pronounced, fear of the rising bourgeoisie in Germany occurred in the 1848 revolution. Then, the fear of the masses trumped the desire of the bourgeois to establish their own untrammelled political rule. Hence the compromise of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties with feudalism and its representative, the monarchy. In the case of Germany, it took the intervention of Bismarck, basing himself on the Junkers - the former representatives of landlord-feudal reaction - to carry through belatedly the capitalist-democratic revolution ‘from above’ in the late nineteenth century. Even then, it was not fully completed and only the 1918 working-class revolution in passing following the First World War completed this process.

Lenin’s idea of the ‘Democratic Dictatorship’
Therefore, Lenin and Trotsky opposed the Menshevik idea that the liberal capitalists could carry though their own revolution in Russia. The capitalists had come onto the scene too late and were afraid of the masses. Arising from this, Lenin formulated his idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. ‘Dictatorship’ for Lenin - as with Marx - meant the rule of a definite class. ‘Dictatorship of the working class’ meant the democratic rule of the working masses and not military rule or bonapartist ‘dictatorship’ over the masses, as opponents of Marxism argue. Because Stalinism - a one-party dictatorship of a bureaucratic elite resting on a planned economy - blighted the understanding of the masses, Marxism today does not use the term ‘dictatorship’. The phrase ‘workers’ democracy’ explains better Marx and Lenin’s idea today. Lenin’s idea was, in effect, a proposed democratic alliance of the working class and the peasantry as the main forces in a mass movement to complete the capitalist-democratic revolution. Trotsky agreed with Lenin that these were the only forces that could complete the process.

However, the weakness of Lenin’s formula was who would be the dominant force in such an alliance: the working class or the peasantry? Trotsky pointed out that history attests to the fact that the peasantry had never played an independent role. Scattered in the countryside with scarce access to the culture of the towns - with their literature, theatres, large collected populations - the peasants were always destined to seek for a leader in the urban areas. They could support the bourgeois, which would mean ultimately the betrayal of their own interests. This flowed from the foregoing fact that the capitalists could not complete thoroughgoing land reform benefiting the mass of the peasants. Or they could find a leader in the working class.

Lenin, in effect, left open which class would dominate in the alliance between the working class and the peasantry. His formula was an ‘algebraic formula’ and he left history to give it a concrete form. Trotsky went further than Lenin in his famous ‘Theory of the Permanent Revolution’. It was Karl Marx himself who first spoke about the ‘permanent’ character of the revolution drawing lessons from the 1848 revolutions. He wrote in 1850: “It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions.” But Trotsky went further and concluded that once having drawn the mass of the peasantry behind its banner and taken power, the working class would be compelled to go over to the socialist tasks, both on a national and an international scale.

This brilliantly anticipated the October 1917 revolution. The working class took power in Petrograd, the seat of the revolutionary upheavals of the time, and Moscow. They then made an appeal to the rural masses, initiated ‘land to the tillers’, which won over the peasantry. But the dispossessed landlords joined hands with the capitalists, both the ‘liberal’ and reactionary wings, in an attempt to try to snuff out the Russian revolution. The peasantry through the travails of the three-year civil war rallied behind the workers and their party, the Bolsheviks, because they came to understand in action that they were the only ones who would give them the land. Even the intervention of 21 imperialist armies, which reduced the revolution at one stage to the old province of Muscovy, around Petrograd and Moscow, could not stop the revolution triumphing.

Another feature of the theory is the idea of ‘combined and uneven development’, particularly as applied to underdeveloped countries even today. Russia itself prior to 1917 illustrated this phenomenon very clearly. It combined extreme backwardness in relations on the land - feudal, semi-feudal, etc - with the latest word in technique in industry, achieved largely through massive imperialist intervention by French and British capital. The consequences in Russia were the development of a young and dynamic working class organised in big factories alongside archaic economic and cultural forms. A similar development has taken place in other countries in the neo-colonial world since.

Attacks on the theory of permanent revolution
Therefore, the permanent revolution has been borne out, not just in the theory formulated over 100 years ago, but also in the triumphant action itself of the Russian revolution. But this has not prevented continued attacks both on the author of this idea and the idea itself. The bureaucracy that arose in Russia, following the isolation of the Russian revolution and personified by the figure of Stalin, launched an attack on this theory. In effect, they borrowed the Menshevik idea of ‘stages’. First, so this theory argues, must come the capitalist stage, followed some time in the future by the ‘socialist’ stage. In the first stage, the workers’ parties are compelled to give ‘critical support’ to the capitalist parties, particularly the liberals, up to and including support for and even participation in bourgeois liberal governments. This idea, when put into practice by Stalinist parties, without exception has led to unmitigated disasters, particularly in the neo-colonial world.

The Chinese revolution of 1925-27 had a greater possibility of victory under the banner of the working class and the young Chinese Communist Party than in Russia itself less than 10 years earlier. A working class super-exploited, kept at the level of pack animals, rose in one of the most magnificent movements in history, created a mass Communist Party and drew behind it the majority of the peasants in a war against landlordism and capitalism. Even though the masses had barely-formed trade unions, they also attempted to create soviets, workers and peasants’ councils, as the organ of the revolution in a movement which sought to emulate the Russian revolution. Unfortunately, the rising Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia itself determined that the rhythm of the Chinese revolution could continue only under the Menshevik baton, this time wielded by Stalin himself. The consequence of this led to support for the ‘radical’ Kuo Min-Tang of Chiang Kai-shek, including recognising it as a sympathising section of the Communist International. This ended in disaster. The revolution was drowned in blood and on its bones rose the monstrous dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek.

This, by the way, gave a vision of what would have happened in Russia if the Mensheviks’ ideas had been followed in the revolution. It would have led, as in other situations, to an aborted revolution. General Kornilov, who was defeated in September 1917 (or a similar military figure) would have imposed a bloody dictatorship on the bones of the Russian revolution itself. This was prevented by the intervention of the Bolshevik party led by Lenin and Trotsky and their ideas. The disasters in the neo-colonial world, of Indonesia, of the setbacks in Vietnam following the Second World War and many others resulted from the Menshevik policy of ‘stages’ in the revolution, implemented by the Stalinists, in place of Trotsky’s clear ideas which were shared by Lenin in October 1917.

Yet despite this, there are some ‘Marxists’, who professed adherence in the past to the ideas of Trotsky, who now attack his theory of the permanent revolution. Others even support the idea of the ‘permanent revolution’ but in practice put forward a Menshevik position, supporting workers’ organisations participating in coalition governments with capitalist parties. In the first category of those who reject Trotsky are the two wings - which are separate organisations - of the now-disbanded Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) in Australia. They have gone to great lengths to attack Trotsky’s idea of the permanent revolution. In the process of attacking our pamphlet written in the 1970s, one of their leaders, Doug Lorimer, counterposed Lenin’s ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ to Trotsky’s idea of the permanent revolution. To achieve this admittedly difficult task, he engaged in a policy of deception, consistent misquotation, half quotations of Trotsky’s ideas and innuendo which sought to counterpose to Trotsky Lenin’s ‘more correct’ idea of the ‘democratic dictatorship’.

He was not at all original in his endeavours as Karl Radek, once a leading member of the ‘Trotskyist’ Russian Left Opposition, after he capitulated and made his peace with Stalin, had also earlier attacked the theory of the permanent revolution. In answering him, Trotsky pointed out the Radek “did not pick up a single new argument against the theory of the permanent revolution”. He was, said Trotsky, an “epigone” (a slavish unthinking adherent) of the Stalinists. Lorimer acted in the same way. Speaking about the 1905 Russian revolution, Lorimer argued: “Lenin argued that the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution by an alliance of the workers and peasants, led by the Marxist party, would then enable the working class, in alliance with the poor, semi-proletarian majority of the peasantry, to pass uninterruptedly to the socialist revolution.”

But Lenin only occasionally mentioned about moving “uninterruptedly” towards the socialist revolution when he adhered to his “democratic dictatorship” idea. This idea of “uninterrupted” or “permanent” revolution had first been put forward by Trotsky in the book ‘Results and Prospects’. Lenin’s main idea was that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could have led to, could “stimulate” the revolution in western Europe, which would then come to the aid of the workers and peasants in Russia, and only then place ‘socialism’ on the agenda. If Lenin had consistently advanced the idea, as some like Lorimer have suggested, there would have been no fundamental differences between him and Trotsky on the revolution. But clearly Lenin envisaged a period of time, a development of society and the working class between the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” and their coming to power and socialism. There is nothing “uninterrupted” in this.

Role of the peasantry
Another legend perpetuated by the Stalinists and by some like the former DSP is that Trotsky “underestimated the peasantry”, believing that the working class alone could carry through the revolution in Russia. He was therefore against a real alliance of the peasantry with the working class. On the attempts to find a fundamental difference with Lenin, Trotsky wrote: “The devil can quote scripture to his purpose.” He admitted there were “gaps” in his original theory of the permanent revolution, published, it must be understood, in 1906. History, particularly the great experience of the February and October revolutions of 1917, filled in these “gaps” but in no way did they falsify Trotsky’s general idea but rather reinforced and strengthened it.

Look at the honesty with which Trotsky deals with the evolution of his ideas against the shameful misrepresentation of them by Stalin, later by Radek and other latter-day critics. He wrote in answer to Radek: “I do not at all want to say that my conception of the revolution follows, in all my writings, one and the same unswerving line ... There are articles [of Trotsky] in which the episodic circumstances and even the episodic polemical exaggerations inevitable in struggle protrude into the foreground in violation of the strategic line. Thus, for example, articles can be found in which I express doubts about the future revolutionary role of the peasantry as a whole ... and in connection with this refused to designate, especially during the imperialist war, the future Russian Revolution as ‘national,’ for I felt this designation to be ambiguous.” He goes on: “Let me also remark that Lenin - who never for a moment lost historical sight of the peasant question in all its gigantic historical magnitude and from whom we all learnt this - considered it uncertain even after the February revolution whether we should succeed in tearing the peasantry away from the bourgeois and drawing it after the proletariat.”

Lorimer said much in the past about Trotsky, in his early writings, looking towards an alliance between the working class and the poor peasants rather than the “peasantry as a whole”. Lenin himself sometimes spoke in the manner that Trotsky did of the proletariat linking up with the poorer layers in the villages, etc. But in 1917 the working class in the revolution led the peasantry to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution but did not stop there. It then passed in an “uninterrupted” fashion to begin the socialist tasks in Russia and to spreads the revolution internationally.

Fantastical schemas have been worked up by the opponents of this theory that the October revolution was not a socialist revolution but represented the victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution through the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”. This was separated as the “first stage” (in accordance with the ‘two-stage’ theory) from the socialist revolution which was only carried through in the summer and autumn of 1918. This is a false, mechanistic idea which seeks to artificially separate the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution from socialist tasks. It is completely inaccurate when applied to October 1917. Moreover, it would be absolutely fatal if, as in the past, it was applied to the current situation existing in many of the countries in the neo-colonial world, including Pakistan.

China and Cuba
Some, like the former DSP, even argue that the Chinese and Cuban revolutions are a vindication of the original position of Lenin of the ‘democratic revolution’, of “first the democratic phase and then the socialist”. On the contrary, these revolutions were an affirmation of the correctness of Trotsky’s permanent revolution although in a caricatured form. A social revolution did indeed take place in China and Cuba (see ‘Cuba: Socialism and Democracy’ by Peter Taaffe) but not with the soviets and workers’ democracy of the 1917 Russian revolution. In China, a Maoist/Stalinist one-party regime was established from the outset, albeit with a planned economy. In Cuba, it is true that the revolution saw elements of workers’ control but not the full workers’ democracy of Russia. This limited the attraction of both revolutions - particularly to the working class internationally - which was not the same as the mesmeric effect of the Bolshevik revolution in the ‘Ten Days that Shook the World’.

Some even argue that there can be ‘independent’ peasant parties which can come together in a coalition government with the ‘workers’ parties’ to carry through the bourgeois revolution. Some even drag in isolated quotes from Lenin in which he suggests this: “A provisional revolutionary government is necessary ... [The RSDLP] emphatically declares that it is permissible in principle for Social-Democrats to participate in a provisional revolutionary government (during the period of a democratic revolution, the period of struggle for a republic).” [V.I. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Chapter 2.]

Commenting on this, Trotsky conceded that Lenin did indeed formulate an idea like this. But Trotsky described this as “incredible” and, moreover, contradicting everything that Lenin stood for subsequently, including in the period of the February revolution right up to the October revolution. Lenin in his ‘Letters from Afar” condemned even the slightest ‘critical’ support for the Provisional Government and demanded total class independence, both of the Bolshevik party and the working class. Moreover, the arguments of many such as Radek in his latter-day imitators like the DSP, the very history of Russia, attests to the fact that prior to 1917 there was no stable independent peasant party or parties.

It has been suggested that the Social Revolutionaries fell into this category of independent peasant parties. But all of these organisations claiming to represent the peasantry “as a whole” and existing in relatively stable periods then flew apart, divided along class lines - the upper layers looking towards the bourgeoisie, the lower layers merging and acting with the working class - in periods of social crisis. The Social Revolutionaries in 1917 reflected this. After February 1917 they were a prop of the bourgeois coalition together with the Mensheviks and opposed giving land to the peasants. In action, they were repudiated by the majority of the peasants. The Left Social Revolutionaries who split from the SRs, it is true, shared power for a short period with the Bolsheviks after the October revolution. They occupied a minority position compared to the Bolsheviks, which was not clearly envisaged in Lenin’s original idea of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Trotsky, from the beginning, in his theory argued that the working class would dominate and lead the peasantry. Subsequently, the Left SRs separated from the government, which itself was a reflection of the growing class conflict at their base amongst the peasantry as well as an indication of their inchoate, middle-class character.

Pakistan and the permanent revolution today
What is the relevance of this to Pakistan and the neo-colonial world today? Firstly, where the mistaken ideas of Menshevism - the two-stage theory of the revolution - have been put into practice, it has resulted in catastrophe for every mass movement fighting for power. Secondly, the bourgeois-democratic revolution remains to be completed in Pakistan. The fact that feudal and semi-feudal relations dominate the countryside and, in a sense, the whole of society is something that is almost taken for granted by the working masses of Pakistan. There is no other country - even in the neo-colonial world - which demonstrates more the intractability, the impossibility, of the bourgeois solving the accumulated problems of their regime. Very few other countries have such a concentration of wealth in the hands of a feudal/semi-feudal ruling class of landlords and capitalists as does Pakistan. Twenty families, as is commonly understood by the mass of the Pakistani population, dominate society. The main political parties, the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) led by Asif Zardari, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) of Nawaz Sharif, the army and the state machine, the overwhelming majority of large industrial and commercial combines and companies: all are dominated by this very narrow super-rich ruling class.

However, an additional special feature of feudal and semi-feudal Pakistan is the domination of the army, which has held a controlling hand right from the state’s inception over 60 years ago. It is an extreme example of the corrupt ‘crony capitalism’ which blights the ruling classes in the neo-colonial world and increasingly in the ‘developed’ world too. In 2007, a book demonstrating the colossal private business interests of the Pakistani military, ‘Military Incorporated’, was written by Dr Ayesha Siddiqua. She claimed that this internal military ‘empire’ could be worth as much as £10 billion. Officers run secret industrial conglomerates, manufacturing everything from corn flakes to cement and actually own 12 million acres of public land. The generals have ruled Pakistan directly for more than 30 of the 62 years since independence in 1947. They still control the government, despite the existence of ‘civilian rule’ in the last three years. There has not been one day of ‘peace’ in the country since then, highlighted by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the leader of the PPP, the catastrophe of Swat Valley - hard on the heels of the ‘Talibanisation’ of parts of Pakistan - and now the monstrous ‘suicide bombings’, which plague not just Afghanistan but Pakistan as well, even affecting the urban centres such as Lahore.

There is a false impression - particularly from abroad - that Pakistan, following Afghanistan, is in the unstoppable grip of the right-wing Islamic fundamentalists. Yet, as the Socialist Movement Pakistan (SMP) has pointed out, the fundamentalists have never had mass support up to now. Moreover, the mass, indiscriminate bombing campaign of the Taliban and other murderous terrorists is calculated to alienate the masses even further. At the same time, the indiscriminate counter-terrorism of sections of the Pakistani state and American imperialism armed with its ‘drones’ raining death from the sky can enrage the population and could drive them, at least temporarily, into the arms of the Taliban. However, the Taliban’s murderous rule in Swat, after the Pakistani state had negotiated a truce and withdrawn, was so vicious that the local population rose up against them. They had met with terrible repression from the Taliban. This led to the intervention of the army and a new pacification campaign against the Taliban, which in effect ripped up their previous agreement, signed only a matter of months before. This underlines the highly unstable, catastrophic position that is developing in Pakistan. In fact, so linked together is Afghanistan with Pakistan that they are now referred to as ‘AfPak’ by observers.

One thing is clear; the Pakistani army tops will never tamely adhere to imperialism’s plans in Afghanistan so long as there is no agreement between India and Pakistan, involving the issue of Kashmir. The Pakistani military considers Kashmir as part of its ‘hinterland’, a source of pressure on and a ‘buffer’ against India. Commenting on this, David Gardner wrote in the Financial Times: “Notwithstanding the offensive against the Pakistan Taliban in South Waziristan, the Pakistani military’s mindset has not fundamentally changed. They do not simply regard the jihadis as a greater security threat than India.” He goes on: “The army would need at least three times the troop strength it has deployed to take and hold South Waziristan. This operation looks more like an attempt to punish the Pakistan Taliban for straying off the reservation”! Compelled by its increased effectiveness, the army has recently been forced to go after the Pakistani Taliban, whereas it previously tolerated the Punjabi jihadis, Laskhar-i-Janghvi. Moreover it still supports and uses against India the original Kashmiri-orientated jihadi group, Laskhar-i-Taiba, thought to be behind November 2008’s bloody assault on Mumbai. Again, Gardner states: “The group’s mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, has a revolving door relationship with Pakistani jails.”

Pakistan, in effect, holds down half a million Indian troops in the valley of Kashmir with just a few thousand jihadis. Its support for the Afghan jihadis is based on the same reasoning, as a counter-weight - amongst other things - against India. India, for its part, is suspected of abetting insurgents in Pakistani Baluchistan. A top general commented: “Definitely we want Afghanistan to be the strategic depth of Pakistan.”

The national question in Pakistan
At the same time, the military has not given up hope of stepping in and once more openly seizing the reins of power in Pakistan. To this end, it has conducted a systematic unauthorised campaign of intervention in the political and judicial processes. Moreover, it has brutally repressed and ‘disappeared’ hundreds of its opponents in the rebellious state of Baluchistan. As Khalid Bhatti pointed out on the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) website in November 2009, the uprising in Baluchistan is more serious than that in the tribal areas. Although in the latter the Pakistani state has lost control to the Taliban, there is not a national opposition as such to the Pakistani state. Things stand differently in Baluchistan, which only adhered to the Pakistani ‘federation’ in 1969. As Khalid pointed out: “The majority of the people do not have any positive feelings towards the state. More and more young Baluchi people are taking up the armed struggle. The nationalist insurgency not only continues, but is expanding into more areas of the province.”

There are now numerous Baluchi armed insurgent groups fighting the Pakistani army. Unfortunately, ‘targeted killings’ have also taken place against non-Baluchis with three thousand non-Baluchi people losing their lives with thousands fleeing the province for fear of meeting a similar fate. By one estimate, 50,000 non-Baluchi families have so far emigrated from Baluchistan and thousands more have applied for transfers out of the region. The university remained closed for more than three months, there is growing sentiment for separation from Pakistan, with Baluchi nationalists claiming: “We want an independent Baluchistan as it was before 1948, when it was annexed by Pakistan through military force.” These sentiments are particularly strong amongst youth, with university students in the lead, and, as a symptom of the depth of the movement, with women playing a prominent role.

The Pakistan regime, however, is prepared to wade through as much blood as is necessary to hold onto this strategically important province. It is important not just for Pakistan but for all the regional powers, with the jockeying for influence by the US, China, Iran and Afghanistan with even the ‘footprint’ of India present in the area. It is important for its rich natural resources of energy, natural gas and minerals, for its fishing and also for the strategic importance of Gawadar, the newly-built port overlooking the Straits of Hormuz, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf and, therefore, a vital stopping-off point for naval vessels in the area. China, in particular, sees this facility as vital for its interests and is the reason why it contributed the lion’s share of the capital and labour to build the port.

Yet Baluchistan is just the most extreme expression of the brewing national discontent in the non-Punjabi provinces which make up the ‘federation’. Even in Sind, resentment at ‘Punjabi domination’ - in effect, the control exercised by the landlord-capitalists of the Punjab, especially in the army - is fuelled by the grinding and growing poverty throughout Sind and Pakistan as a whole. The national question forms a crucial aspect of Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution. Without Lenin’s position on the national question - defended and added to by Trotsky’s analysis of this issue in many countries and many situations - the Russian revolution would have been impossible. That is a thousand times more the case today, especially in the neo-colonial world and particularly given the multinational character of Pakistan.

Yet, unbelievably, the basic demand for the right of self-determination of the oppressed nationalities of Pakistan is, in practice, rejected by the alleged ‘Trotskyists’ in the present crisis-riven ‘Class Struggle’ tendency in Pakistan. Only the SMP has pursued a consistent, principled and sensitive position on this issue. It stands, as Lenin and Trotsky did, for the rights of all oppressed peoples, for equality and against discrimination on racial, ethnic, religious or national lines. This does not mean advocating the right of self-determination, including the right to secede, without taking into account the mood of the masses. It is the right of peoples in the distinct national areas of Pakistan outside of Punjab, and even in Punjab itself, to choose their own path.

The ideal position from the standpoint of the workers’ movement in Pakistan would be a socialist confederation. This would provide full rights of autonomy, allow all legitimate national rights, down to the elimination of the slightest expression of nationalism or national superiority of one ethnic or national group over another. However, if oppressed nationalities wished to separate from even a democratic workers’ state, then the workers’ movement must accept that, as Lenin consistently argued and, in effect, carried out in the case of Finland in 1918. ‘Class Struggle’, led up to now internationally by the Alan Woods group, has consistently opposed such a policy in Pakistan. This has alienated them from some of the best fighters and leaders of the oppressed workers and peasants in the non-Punjabi parts of the country, many of whom have consequently gravitated in the direction of the SMP.

Crisis in the International Marxist Tendency
At the same time, they have a totally false position of sticking to the so-called ‘traditional organisations of the working class’ - without taking into account the concrete circumstances as to whether these organisations still represent the working masses. This policy now lies in ruins as a big split has developed in the Woods ‘International’, the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), on the consequences of this amongst other issues. It has had disastrous consequences for their organisation in Pakistan, as shown by the voluminous documentation detailing the bureaucratic methods of the Woods group, which split from the CWI in 1991.

Very few class-conscious workers now entertain any illusions that the PPP - led by ‘Mr Fifty Per Cent’ Asif Zardari - remotely represents in practice the working masses and the poor farmers of Pakistan. It is flooded out with the influence of the feudals, both in the towns and the rural areas. It is a party which has opposed strikes, called for and tried to organise strike-breaking, of the telecoms workers, for instance. The position of the PPP from what it was under its founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a ‘populist’ party capable of responding to the demands of the masses, has long gone. Therefore the same task is posed in Pakistan, as in other countries throughout the world, the development of a new mass party of the Pakistani workers and peasants, which the SMP has consistently argued for. The Woods group - which its leaders boasted was immune from the processes of ‘splits’ that allegedly condemned other organisations to ‘marginal’ influence in the workers’ movement - is seriously divided.

Ironically, it is on the very issues which formed the main ‘political’ reasons for their break from the CWI in 1992. Then it was the alleged existence of a ‘clique’ at the ‘top of the CWI’. This was rejected by 93% of the members of the British organisation and also by a majority of the CWI. Yet this is the same charge, in effect, now levelled against Alan Woods and his circle. There was absolutely no substance in this charge made by Woods and Co in 1992 about the CWI and its internal methods. The proof of this lies in the subsequent development of the national sections of the CWI with independent and thinking leaderships, capable of responding to the concrete circumstances in each country, which collaborates internationally but acts without waiting for ‘instructions’ from an international centre. The CWI operates on the basis of democratic centralism with full rights for all its members and sections with, in fact, a greater emphasis at this stage on the need for discussion and debate rather than the formal aspects of centralism.

The present split in the IMT has been kept under wraps - hidden from some of their members - up to the present time of writing. Yet all the political disputes in the CWI on a number of issues in the 1990s and the ‘noughties’ were public discussions, and documents were made public while the discussion was going on. Current debates are publically aired, for instance, in our journal ‘Socialism Today’ on such issues as China. This is done in order to allow all workers to see and, if needs be, to participate in the discussion of vital issues. Nothing like these democratic discussions takes place in the IMT.

An opposite picture is presented of the IMT, its internal life, its ideas and especially of its leadership in the incredible documents emanating from Pakistan, Spain and others who have fallen out with Woods and his closest circle. The Pakistani ‘dissidents’ around Manzoor Khan - the former PPP MP - paint a tragic picture of where Ted Grant and Alan Woods’s false position on the dogmatic insistence on undeviating work in the PPP and the ex-workers’ parties can lead. Manzoor justifies his opposition - on behalf of the PPP leadership - to strikes in Pakistan by wanting to remain in the PPP “at all costs”. Woods objected to this and promptly expelled Manzoor and his supporters. But a similar approach to that of Manzoor in Pakistan was adopted by Grant and Woods in Britain over our Militant MPs’ stand against the poll tax in 1991-92. We, the leadership and overwhelming majority of Militant (now the Socialist Party), stated that Terry Fields and Dave Nellist (our two MPs) could not pay the poll tax. This was because they and we had successfully urged millions of workers not to pay it and, faced with a similar situation, we declared they should take a similar principled stand. Grant and Woods argued that the MPs should pay as a means of staying inside the Labour Party!

Socialists were ‘dead’ outside of this ‘traditional organisation’, they argued, much as they had miseducated Manzoor and others in ‘Class Struggle’ in continued work in the PPP. We would have been ‘politically dead’ if the MPs and we had followed their advice. The Labour Party has since degenerated like the PPP into a bourgeois formation. Grant and Co were trapped in a false outmoded perception: that all political life of the working class was restricted to the Labour Party; to go outside meant ‘going over a cliff’. What is the result of this? They are insignificant in Britain while the Socialist Party has grown in numbers and influence. The same applies on an international scale with the IMT losing influence in many countries with Woods increasingly reduced to the role of a ‘benevolent advisor’ to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. They reacted to the opportunist and indefensible actions of Manzoor - which was but the logical conclusion of their own ossified position on the ‘traditional organisations - by expelling him!

There are still sincere Marxists and Trotskyists within its ranks that we hope will cut through the thicket of lies and misrepresentations that have been particularly levelled by Alan Woods and his leading organising group against the CWI, its organisations, its leadership and its policies. A conscientious examination of the ideas of the CWI will, it is hoped, lead the best of these comrades to re-examine their past policies, and those of the CWI’s, and hopefully find a path back to a consistent Trotskyist position.

Socialist Movement Pakistan and the way forward for the masses
Genuine Trotskyism is destined to play a key role in the forthcoming battles of the Pakistani working class. And a vital aspect in the political armoury of the forces that will develop is the ideas and methods of Leon Trotsky, particularly his brilliant anticipation of the character of the revolution in the neo-colonial world, represented by the ideas of the permanent revolution, as outlined in this tremendous book. Despite the terrorism, the nationalism and ethnic divisions, the potential power of the Pakistani working class has also been visible in the number of strikes, mass demonstrations - including those in Baluchistan, of workers of all ethnic backgrounds and all religions - who march together in defence of workers’ organisations and their rights. The future of Pakistan is not in the hands of the mindless right-wing jihadis nor of American imperialism, nor of sectarian groupings but the mighty force of the Pakistani working class organised on socialist lines. The best hope for achieving this is in the ideas and methods of Leon Trotsky married to the contemporary analysis and programme of the Socialist Movement Pakistan.

The capitalist press speculates about another attempt of the military to seize power from the discredited ‘democratic’ politicians. But the alternative of Nawaz Sharif to that of the Zardari-dominated PPP is no real alternative at all. Nor is a coup - perhaps this time led by ‘colonels’ coming from a fundamentalist background - capable of offering a solution to the problems of Pakistan and the region. On the contrary, it conjures up a nightmare scenario of a fundamentalist or fundamentalist-backed regime, armed this time with nuclear weapons. This development, if it was to come about, would in no way represent the people of Pakistan because the fundamentalists have never received more than 10-15% of the vote in elections. Only a democratic and socialist road offers liberation from the nightmare of landlordism and capitalism for the long-suffering Pakistani masses. This book can help lay the basis for the emergence of a force that can lead them in this direction.

Peter Taaffe is General Secretary of the Socialist Party (CWI in England and Wales) and member of the International Secretariat of the Committee for a Workers’ International

[Martin Blank]

What do comrades among the communist left and anarchist tendencies think about the relevance of Trotsky's expansion on the idea of "permanent revolution"? Would be curious to hear why or why not you feel it is relevant.

First of all, I would say that Trotsky's "permanent revolution" was not an expansion, but a revision, of Marx and Engels' concept. Where Trotsky's concept was about "a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule" (The Permanent Revolution, Introduction), Marx and Engels' concept was about a revolutionary (communist) movement and working class "which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule", including that of the petty bourgeoisie -- be they reactionary, "democratic" or socialist.

This differences become clearer the further you study the so-called "lesser" works of Marx and Engels. For example, in Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany, written as a series of articles for The New-York Tribune in 1851-1852, there are two passages that I think are important and speak to this difference in what permanent revolution (as Marx and Engels saw it) means for communists:


The working class entered upon this insurrection as they would have done upon any other which promised either to remove some obstacles in their progress towards political dominion and social revolution, or, at least, to tie the more influential but less courageous classes of society to a more decided and revolutionary course than they had followed hitherto. The working class took up arms with a full knowledge that this was, in the direct bearings of the case, no quarrel of its own; but it followed up its only true policy, to allow no class that has risen on its shoulders (as the bourgeoisie had done in 1848) to fortify its class-government, without opening, at least, a fair field to the working classes for the struggle for its own interests, and, in any case, to bring matters to a crisis, by which either the nation was fairly and irresistibly launched in the revolutionary career, or else the status quo before the Revolution restored as nearly as possible, and, thereby, a new revolution rendered unavoidable. In both cases the working classes represented the real and well-understood interest of the nation at large, in hastening as much as possible that revolutionary course which for the old societies of civilized Europe has now become a historical necessity, before any of them can again aspire to a more quiet and regular development of their resources. ("The Petty Traders"; boldface mine)and...


The organization of the advanced Communist party in Germany was of this kind. In accordance with the principles of the Manifesto (published in 1848), and with those explained in the series of articles on Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, published in the New York Daily Tribune,
this party never imagined itself capable of producing, at any time and at its pleasure, that revolution which was to carry its ideas into practice. It studied the causes that had produced the revolutionary movement in 1848, and the causes that made them fail. Recognizing the social antagonism of classes at the bottom of all political struggles, it applied itself to the study of the conditions under which one class of society can and must be called on to represent the whole of the interests of a nation, and thus politically to rule over it. History showed to the Communist party how, after the landed aristocracy of the Middle Ages, the monied power of the first capitalists arose and seized the reins of government; how the social influence and political rule of this financial section of capitalists was superseded by the rising strength since the introduction of steam, of the manufacturing capitalists, and how at the present moment two more classes claim their turn of domination, the petty trading class and the industrial working class. The practical revolutionary experience of 1848-1849 confirmed the reasonings of theory, which led to the conclusion that the Democracy of the petty traders must first have its turn, before the Communist working class could hope to permanently establish itself in power and destroy that system of wage-slavery which keeps it under the yoke of the bourgeoisie. Thus the secret organization of the Communists could not have the direct purpose of upsetting the present Governments of Germany. Being formed to upset not these, but the insurrectionary Government, which is sooner or later to follow them, its members might, and certainly would, individually, lend an active hand to a revolutionary movement against the present status quo in its turn; but the preparation of such a movement, otherwise than by spreading of Communist opinions by the masses, could not be an object of the Association. So well was this foundation of the Society understood by the majority of its members, that when the place-hunting ambition of some tried to turn it into a conspiracy for making an ex tempore revolution, they were speedily turned out. ("The Late Trial at Cologne"; boldface mine)


This article was originally written separately by Engels, but later incorporated into Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany as the final chapter. -- Miles

In case anyone's not clear on this, the "petty traders" are the petty bourgeoisie -- the shopkeepers, independent producers, peasants, etc.

The boldfaced passages give a better indication of what Marx and Engels meant when they said their "battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution" -- it meant that the role of the working class was not to combine with or "lead" the petty bourgeoisie (which actually means carrying the petty bourgeoisie on its shoulders, if history is any guide) in a struggle against the bourgeoisie, but, in the absence of the petty bourgeoisie not holding a place as a ruling class (either in its own name or as a partner with the bourgeoisie, as we see in modern capitalist society), of working to politically arm itself for the time when the "Democracy of the petty traders [has] its turn", and the battle is between the petty bourgeoisie (either alone or in partnership with the bourgeoisie) and the proletariat for power. If the working class was to enter into the conflict between bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, it does so on its own terms, fighting for, at least, "a fair field to the working classes for the struggle for its own interests, and, in any case, to bring matters to a crisis".

This method and understanding is a far cry from Trotsky's "permanent revolution", which is chiefly characterized, in words and, more importantly, in action, by combining with and "leading" the petty bourgeoisie -- the exact opposite of what Marx and Engels argued.

Looked at in this respect, Trotsky's "permanent revolution" was a theory made safe for the petty-bourgeois socialists who were being ejected from the CI for not fulfilling their role in the bureaucracy. (I am immediately reminded here of James P. Cannon writing about himself in The First Ten Years of American Communism, when he was reflecting on himself after reading Trotsky's critique of the Comintern program and came to the realization that he had let himself become a bureaucrat in a "swivel chair".) If it had been an "expansion" on Marx and Engels, there would have been no talk about the role of the petty bourgeoisie, except as an impediment and obstacle to the revolution ... and certainly not as a "yeast" for the development of a proletarian party!

All things considered, I think Trotsky's "permanent revolution", when taken as a whole, is anathema to that of Marx and Engels' permanent revolution.

Dixi et salvavi animam meam.

[graymouser]

I don't think you can get much further in distorting Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution than Miles has here. Trotsky's theory was the overturning of the philistine concept in the Second International that history was going through certain foreordained stages, drawn by quote-mining like Miles has done above from Marx and Engels, that it needed to reach before the rule of the proletariat would be on the agenda. In opposition to this, Trotsky said that all the democratic classes would no longer be able to take the stage, that they had been hopelessly compromised and divided between international capital and the combined and uneven development in more backward countries. The democratic tasks would need to be achieved by the working class, which in a country like Russia was a minority. He specifically ruled out the class rule of any petty-bourgeois class such as the peasantry, and it is a distortion of his theory to say that he saw any potential for class rule of the peasantry in Russia. On the contrary he saw that the working class would be the ruling class, but saw it as necessary for it to win the support of the peasantry by holding up and implementing the traditional democratic demands. This is no more the class rule of the peasantry than the Second Empire in France was the class rule of the lumpenproletariat, who gave their support to Louis Napoleon; in other words, not at all.

As for today, the theory has burning relevance. In a country like Nepal or Egypt, we see yet again an attempt at a democratic revolution - yet there are no classes in either country that can create a stable, economically sound independent and democratic state. These failures can only be addressed by the working class taking the lead and implementing both the democratic tasks and beginning the socialist tasks of economic reconstruction. Yet, as Trotsky pointedly noted, neither could stand as an isolated socialist country - Marx as far back as 1850 had noted that France could not have stood as a socialist nation on its own when capitalist Britain sat right to its north. And this is no less true in the underdeveloped world today, where all the problems of development need to be addressed through proletarian internationalist revolution. I've said in the past that permanent revolution would mean that a socialist revolution in Nepal would necessarily be the precursor to and staging ground for a similar revolution in India; likewise, in Egypt it would be the first phase of a socialist revolution across the Maghreb and throughout the Arab world. You can't get more relevant than that.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Trotsky's theory was the overturning of the philistine concept in the Second International that history was going through certain foreordained stages, drawn by quote-mining like Miles has done above from Marx and Engels, that it needed to reach before the rule of the proletariat would be on the agenda.You don't have to do much "mining," as they made the same case several times.

"The Address (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm), composed by Marx and myself, is still of interest today, because petite-bourgeois democracy is even now the party which must certainly be the first to come to power in Germany as the savior of society from the communist workers on the occasion of the next European upheaval now soon due (the European revolutions, 1815, 1830, 1848-52, 1870, have occurred at intervals of 15 to 18 years in our century)." - Engels

Marx and Engels argued for the revolution in permanence, i.e. that in any and all stages of development the working class must independently pursue it's own interests.

"....to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world - 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." - Marx (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/com-leag.htm)

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

He specifically ruled out the class rule of any petty-bourgeoisRight.

What percentage of the Bolshevik CC was made up of proletarians once the party was in power?


he saw that the working class would be the ruling class

Right.

"The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship...regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class...The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy..." - Trotsky

"The working class cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers. Compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism. Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps." - Trotsky

[vyborg]

You cannot understand what is going on in every country except G-7 without permanent revolution. How national bourgeoisie acts, why it will never have an independent political position, stalinist and maoist success, the role of Nasser or Nehru or even Park etc., without this theory.

It is a pity that PT uses the introduction to such an important book only to attack Alan and the IMT. I understand that CWI has nothing in Asia, but this is not a good reason to attack others.

It is comical that the CWI conceives its theoretical effort as a critic of what Alan and the IMT writes. But this is very revealing about PT himself. It is a sin as in the CWI there are very good comrades.

[graymouser]

Right.

What percentage of the Bolshevik CC was made up of proletarians once the party was in power?
This has been up for debate in several threads, and frankly it's a boring one. The Bolshevik party's central committee was made up of men and women who had spent decades as leaders of the revolutionary movement, and as a result didn't reflect the composition of the party itself which had a large base in the working class. A party of size to contest for power cannot afford to have a leadership who can't devote their full time to the party. It's simply not feasible.


Right.

"The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship...regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class...The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy..." - Trotsky
There is evidently a flaw in Maurice Brinton's screed "The Bolsheviks and Workers Control" as this quotation appears without a footnote, and it doesn't appear in the printed works of Trotsky nor in the MIA archives of his work. It appears to be from the 1921 congress but his speeches there are not reprinted, so it's impossible to get a contextual look at this.


"The working class cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers. Compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism. Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps." - Trotsky
Again, Brinton failed to give a direct cite. There is a citation shortly after that to Trotsky's works in Russian, which we must assume was translated by or for Brinton as English versions of Trotsky's speeches at the 9th and 10th congresses (which these quotations would presumably come from given their context in Brinton's work) are not available and to my knowledge have never been produced.

The circumstances that the Soviet republic faced in 1920 and 1921 are not enviable for anyone, and the truth is that much of the working class had been physically destroyed in the civil war. The people who had manned the factories before 1916 were in many cases literally gone, and the Bolsheviks as a leadership were groping for solutions to get "everyday life" up and running.

Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks didn't blink from what they needed to do to survive. The alternative was that they would have died and become martyrs for the revolutionary cause, like so many before them and after them. They made no secret that their goal was to survive until the revolutionary movement in Europe could succeed and take the leadership in socialist construction - this is what was betrayed by Stalin, who made a virtue of autarky and repression. And precisely what Trotsky was defending in his works on the permanent revolution.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

This has been up for debate in several threads, and frankly it's a boring one. The Bolshevik party's central committee was made up of men and women who had spent decades as leaders of the revolutionary movement, and as a result didn't reflect the composition of the party itself which had a large base in the working class. A party of size to contest for power cannot afford to have a leadership who can't devote their full time to the party. It's simply not feasible.You didn't answer the question.

How about this one: how can the workers rule when all the reigns of power are in the hands of people who are not workers?

How can you say Trotsky ruled out any rule by the petty-bourgeoisie if you look at the composition of the Bolshevik's CC after the revolution?

Workers' rule without workers in charge that is definitely not petty-bourgeois rule... even though the vast majority of people in charge were petty-bourgeois. Sounds like you're trying to square a circle to me.


There is evidently a flaw in Maurice Brinton's screed "The Bolsheviks and Workers Control" as this quotation appears without a footnote, and it doesn't appear in the printed works of Trotsky nor in the MIA archives of his work. It appears to be from the 1921 congress but his speeches there are not reprinted, so it's impossible to get a contextual look at this.I guess you never read Deutscher's 3 volume biography of Trotsky. I thought that was a must read for all of the Old Man's followers. From The Prophet Armed:

"The Workers' Opposition has come out with dangerous slogans. They have mad a fetish of democratic principles. They have places the workers' right to elect representatives above the party, as it were, as if the party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy .... It is necessary to create among us the awareness of the revolutionary birthright of the party. The party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship, regardless of temporary wavering in the spontaneous moods of the masses, regardless of the temporary vacillations even in the working class. This awareness is for us the indispensable unifying elements. The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principles of a workers' democracy...." - Trotsky, on page 509 of the Vintage Edition (1965). The footnote for this quote is Desyatyi Syezd RKP, pp. 192.


Again, Brinton failed to give a direct cite. There is a citation shortly after that to Trotsky's works in Russian, which we must assume was translated by or for Brinton as English versions of Trotsky's speeches at the 9th and 10th congresses (which these quotations would presumably come from given their context in Brinton's work) are not available and to my knowledge have never been produced.How's this?

"We are now headng towards the type of labour [he stated] that is socially regulated on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker. This is the basis of socialism.... The militarisation of labour, in this fundamental sense of which I have spoken, is the indispensable basic method for the organisation of our labour forces.... Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive?.... This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive.... Compulsory serf labour did not grow out of the feudal lords' ill-will. It was a progressive phenomenon." On page 501 of the same edition. The foot note indicates it was made in a report to the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions. The source given is [I]Tretii Vserossiskii Syezd Profsoyuzow pp 87-96.

There are many, many things like from Trotsky. Ever read Terrorism and Communism?


The circumstances that the Soviet republic faced in 1920 and 1921 are not enviable for anyone, and the truth is that much of the working class had been physically destroyed in the civil war. The people who had manned the factories before 1916 were in many cases literally gone, and the Bolsheviks as a leadership were groping for solutions to get "everyday life" up and running.

Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks didn't blink from what they needed to do to survive. The alternative was that they would have died and become martyrs for the revolutionary cause, like so many before them and after them. They made no secret that their goal was to survive until the revolutionary movement in Europe could succeed and take the leadership in socialist construction - this is what was betrayed by Stalin, who made a virtue of autarky and repression. And precisely what Trotsky was defending in his works on the permanent revolution."We proceed from trust for the class instinct, to the active class initiative of the proletariat. It cannot be otherwise. If the proletariat does not know how to create the necessary prerequisites for socialist organisation of labour, no-one can do this for it and no-one can compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the workers, will find itself in the hands of a social force which is either under the influence of another social class or is in the hands of the soviet power; then the soviet power will be forced to seek support against the proletariat from another class (e.g. the peasantry), and by this it will destroy itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism and socialist organisation must be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all...." - ‘On the Building of Socialism', Kommunist n°2, April 1918.

"The proletarian Russia cannot yet oppose its will to the tendencies of liquidation of the conquests of the October Revolution—tendencies come from the bureaucracy degenerated in the New Economic policy, and, therefore, a very great danger threatens the achievements of the Russian proletarian revolution, not so much from outside as from inside itself.....

"To the Xllth. Party Congress of the Communist Party of (Russia, the comrade Zinoviev had announced, under the acclamation of the party and Soviet bureaucrats, a new formula of suppression of every critique of the working class. He said: “my and every criticism of the central office of the Communist Party of /Russia, whether it comes from the right or left side, is Menshevism.” (Read his speech to the Xllth. Congress of the Communist Party of Russia.) What does it mean? It means the following: If the conduct of the central office does not appear right to a workman-communist, and, he, in his proletarian simplicity, begins to criticise, then he will be excluded from the party and from the trade union; will finally declare him ‘a Menshevik, and will thrust him into the G.P.U. (political police department). The central of the party does not tolerate any criticism...." - Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)

[graymouser]

I actually am going to have to decline your invitation to play tendency war here; you are not discussing permanent revolution at all but trying to retread Maurice Brinton's "The Bolsheviks and Workers Control," a terrible pamphlet that has no bearing on Trotskyist theory. Do you have anything to say that bears on the theory of permanent revolution?

[Jimmie Higgins]

You don't have to do much "mining," as they made the same case several times.

"The Address (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm), composed by Marx and myself, is still of interest today, because petite-bourgeois democracy is even now the party which must certainly be the first to come to power in Germany as the savior of society from the communist workers on the occasion of the next European upheaval now soon due (the European revolutions, 1815, 1830, 1848-52, 1870, have occurred at intervals of 15 to 18 years in our century)." - Engels

Marx and Engels argued for the revolution in permanence, i.e. that in any and all stages of development the working class must independently pursue it's own interests.

"....to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world - 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." - Marx (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/com-leag.htm)

So you agree with a stagiest view of development?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

It's not stageism. It's a materialist assessment. Stageism is a dogmatic approach that says that all societies everywhere at all times must pass through predetermined stages. Marx and Engels specifically criticized that bastardization.


"The materialist conception of history has a lot of them nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history... In general, the word 'materialist' serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is labeled without further study, that is, they stick on this label and then consider the question disposed of. But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce them from the political, civil law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them. Up to now but little has been done here because only a few people have got down to it seriously. In this field we can utilize heaps of help, it is immensely big, anyone who will work seriously can achieve much and distinguish himself. But instead of this too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase historical materialism (and everything can be turned into a phrase) only in order to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge " - Engels

Of course for some folks even the idea that the means of production need to be developed sufficiently to abolish capitalism is "mechanism." Never mind that Marx and Engels specifically said that was the case many times, and that reality has bared that out.


"All the socialist founders of sects belong to a period in which the working class themselves were neither sufficiently trained and organized by the march of capitalist society itself to enter as historical agents upon the world’s stage, nor were the material conditions of their emancipation sufficiently matured in the old world itself. Their misery existed, but the conditions of their own movement did not yet exist." - Marx


“With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms, come in collision with each other. The various quarrels in which the representatives of the industrial factions of the continental party of order now indulge and mutually compromise themselves, far from providing the occassion for new revolutions are, on the contrary, possible only because the basis of the relationships is momentarily so secure and, what the reaction does not know, so bourgeois. From it all attempts of the reaction to hold up bourgeois development will rebound just as certainly as all moral indignation and all enthusiastic proclamations of the democrats”. - Marx


"But what purpose this organization should serve depended very substantially on whether the prospects of a renewed upsurge of the revolution were realized. And in the course of the year 1850 this became more and more improbable, indeed impossible. The industrial crisis of 1847, which had paved the way for the Revolution of 1848, had been overcome; a new, unprecedented period of industrial prosperity had set in; whoever had eyes to see and used them must have clearly realized that the revolutionary storm of 1848 was gradually spending itself." - Engels

"This 'alienation' (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an 'intolerable' power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity 'propertyless,' and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the 'propertyless' mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones." - Marx

And none of this really has anything to do with the point, which is that what Marx meant by "making the revolution permanent" was that in any and all stages of development the working class must independently pursue it's own interests.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Do you have anything to say that bears on the theory of permanent revolution?Obviously. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not there on the screen. Apparently, the only things acceptable for you are old "Trotskyist" standby regurgitations about the theory's "burning relevance."

I guess that's why you avoided the questions about workers' rule without workers in the ruling positions.

I got exactly what I expected.

Carry on.

[graymouser]

Obviously. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not there on the screen. Apparently, the only things acceptable for you are old "Trotskyist" standby regurgitations about the theory's "burning relevance."

I guess that's why you avoided the questions about workers' rule without workers in the ruling positions.

I got exactly what I expected.

Carry on.
You are attacking the composition and actions of the Bolshevik Party in 1917-1921, not the theory of permanent revolution. They are different things, and you are trying to have this degenerate into a long, boring internet thread of quotations back and forth, so that you don't actually have to deal with any questions of theory and its relevance today.

This is tendentious and an attempt to derail a potentially useful thread on permanent revolution today by diverting it into a completely different discussion on Russia 90 years ago. You clearly don't have anything of value to say on how combined and uneven development in the period of imperialism have changed how proletarian revolutions work, so you are throwing around quotations that you dug up from a piece of semi-anarchist hackwork.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Back on topic:



The practical revolutionary experience of 1848-1849 confirmed the reasonings of theory, which led to the conclusion that the Democracy of the petty traders must first have its turn, before the Communist working class could hope to permanently establish itself in power and destroy that system of wage-slavery which keeps it under the yoke of the bourgeoisie.In case anyone's not clear on this, the "petty traders" are the petty bourgeoisie -- the shopkeepers, independent producers, peasants, etc.

The boldfaced passages give a better indication of what Marx and Engels meant when they said their "battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution" -- it meant that the role of the working class was not to combine with or "lead" the petty bourgeoisie (which actually means carrying the petty bourgeoisie on its shoulders, if history is any guide) in a struggle against the bourgeoisie, but, in the absence of the petty bourgeoisie not holding a place as a ruling class (either in its own name or as a partner with the bourgeoisie, as we see in modern capitalist society), of working to politically arm itself for the time when the "Democracy of the petty traders [has] its turn", and the battle is between the petty bourgeoisie (either alone or in partnership with the bourgeoisie) and the proletariat for power. If the working class was to enter into the conflict between bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, it does so on its own terms, fighting for, at least, "a fair field to the working classes for the struggle for its own interests, and, in any case, to bring matters to a crisis".

<sarcasm>But Trotsky insisted on proletarian leadership by proletarian demographic minorities!</sarcasm>

On a more serious note, comrade, how does that stack up to the more reasonable but non-"bourgeois-democratic" theories in the Second International, or conversely how do they stack up to that?


The democratic tasks would need to be achieved by the working class, which in a country like Russia was a minority. He specifically ruled out the class rule of any petty-bourgeois class such as the peasantry, and it is a distortion of his theory to say that he saw any potential for class rule of the peasantry in Russia.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/trotskys-permanent-revolution-t149111/index.html


My feeling is that Trotsky kept to the letter but violated the spirit of the axiom of the class ally. He thought that in the first part of the democratic revolution the peasants would support you and in the second part, when you go on to socialism, they would not support you. Therefore, unless you have an international revolution, there will be (and this is his own phrase) ‘a civil war with the peasantry’. He agrees that you can’t have socialist government without majority support. But, in a rather peculiar way, he says you can’t have socialism because there will be a civil war with the peasantry. He says we will be discredited if we do not make the provisional government long-lasting.

But to me a civil war with the peasantry seems fairly discrediting, and the idea that a socialist government should end in civil war with the peasantry was blasphemy among Russian social democrats.

And:

"It's true that the peasantry is forced to decide between the fundamental classes. But it's not true that, because the peasantry is forced to decide between the fundamental classes, it cannot find political representation or act in support of autonomous peasant goals, that is to say, patriarchalism, the setting up of an absolute ruler, a cult of personality whether it's of Lenin or Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe." (Mike Macnair) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/peoples-histories-blocs-t142332/index.html)

Of course, peasant patrimonialism by itself is not in the interests of proletarian demographic minorities at all. However, when combined with urban petit-bourgeois democratism and politico-ideological class independence, that's a different story.

[Jimmie Higgins]

It's not stageism. It's a materialist assessment. Stageism is a dogmatic approach that says that all societies everywhere at all times must pass through predetermined stages. ... Yes or no was what I was looking for, I'm aware of these concepts, just not your view of them.


And none of this really has anything to do with the point, which is that what Marx meant by "making the revolution permanent" was that in any and all stages of development the working class must independently pursue it's own interests.Which is the starting point of Trotsky's theory. He was arguing against the idea that in Russia, where the majority of the population was semi-peasant (petty bourgeois), that the worker's movement should support the liberals in creating a parliamentary style government to modernize Russia to full capitalism. Lenin's earlier view of a peasant-worker democracy is more like what Miles seems to be describing.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

You are attacking the composition and actions of the Bolshevik Party in 1917-1921, not the theory of permanent revolution. They are different things, and you are trying to have this degenerate into a long, boring internet thread of quotations back and forth, so that you don't actually have to deal with any questions of theory and its relevance today.

I'm just trying to find out how you can have workers' rule without any workers in ruling positions. And yeah, it's quite relevant since the question being discussed is how Marx's "permanent revolution" differed from Trotsky formulation.

Marx was arguing for the working class to independently pursue it's own interests, against all the propertied classes (which includes the petty-bourgeoisie), until they controlled the advanced countries.

Trotsky was arguing for the peasantry to follow his party's lead.


This is tendentious and an attempt to derail a potentially useful thread on permanent revolution today by diverting it into a completely different discussion on Russia 90 years ago.

If you don't have any answers, you should consider simply not posting anything, instead of this sort of sanctimonious pissing and moaning.


You clearly don't have anything of value to say on how combined and uneven development in the period of imperialism have changed how proletarian revolutions work, so you are throwing around quotations that you dug up from a piece of semi-anarchist hackwork.

You said that Trotsky specifically ruled out the class rule of the petty-bourgeoisie. I showed, with his own words, that he was quite fine with it. The reality is that the Bolshevik leadership was dominated by the petty-bourgeoisie, and post revolution, petty-bourgeois functionaries took up leading positions in the government (e.g. ministers), economy (e.g. factory managers) and state (e.g. military).

Your answers so far have been (1) to rule out the relevance of the actual class of people in power to which class ruled, (2) to try to discredit the quotes (which I provided via Isaac Deutscher's 3 volume biography of Trotsky, with sources), (3) to ignore the main issues.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Yes or no was what I was looking for, I'm aware of these concepts, just not your view of them.If you're aware, why did you misapply the stagist label to Engels's argument?


Which is the starting point of Trotsky's theory.No, sorry. Your fantasies aside, Trotsky didn't advocate that the working class independently pursue its own interests "until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions."

He supported the rule of petty-bourgeois party bureaucrats against the will of the working class, one man management by petty-bourgeois shopmen, Czarist officers in the military, etc. He invited them to back to positions they are often already been out of.

"I consider that if the civil war had not plundered our economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent. most endowed with initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management in the sphere of economic administration much sooner and much less painfully". - Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism

As early as 1918, factory committees were being replaced with management by petty-bourgeois "specialists."

At the end of the civil war Czarist officers accounted for more than 70 percent of the command of The Red Army of Workers and Peasants; and they were enjoying all the perks of being military commanders.

This all flies in the face of what Marx was arguing for, that the workers drive all of these types of people from power and establish their own forms of rule on their own terms.

[graymouser]

Your answers so far have been (1) to rule out the relevance of the actual class of people in power to which class ruled,
This is correct. I do not fetishize whether the leader of a working class party has been a factory worker his or her whole life, as it would rule out reading or understanding almost any socialist theory from 1848 onward. You don't either, except to use this as a club to bash the Bolsheviks. You wouldn't be arguing the line of Maurice Brinton, a medical doctor, and follower himself of Cornelius Castoriadis, himself an academic, if you actually cared about this.

Khrushchev was a genuine metalworker, does that mean the working class regained control of the state in the USSR after Stalin's death? If not, I consider this whole line of argumentation illegitimate.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

as it would rule out reading or understanding almost any socialist theory from 1848 onward.This is the common refrain form the left. It's bullshit.

The guiding principle of the IWMA was "The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves."

Marx specifically rejected official leadership positions time and time again.


"'Victor Le Lubez … asked if Karl Marx would suggest the name of someone to speak on behalf of the German Workers.’ Marx himself was far too bourgeois to be eligible so he recommended the emigre tailor Johann Georg Eccarius…"” – Karl Marx: A Life. Francis Wheen.

“Citizen Marx has just been mentioned; he has perfectly understood the importance of this first congress, where there should be only working-class delegates; therefor he refused the delegateship he was offered in the General Council.” – Geneva Congress of the First International, James Carter.

“Lawrence moved that Marx be President for the ensuing twelve months; Carter seconded that nomination. Marx proposed Odger: he, Marx, thought himself incapacitated because he was a head worker and not a hand worker.” – The General Council of the First International: Minutes.

Marx and Engels argued against members of the petty-bourgeoisie leading workers.


"The International Working Men's Association, based upon the principle of the abolition of classes, cannot admit any middle class Sections.'” - Engels, Resolutions of the Hague Congress of the International Working Men's Association

"... the I.W.M.A., according to the General Rules, is to consist exclusively of 'workingmen's societies' .... the General Council was some months ago precluded from recognizing a Slavonian section exclusively composed of students ... the General Council recommends that in future there be admitted no new American section of which two-thirds at least do not consist of wage laborers." - Resolution of the IWMA on the Split in the U.S. Federation

"If people of this kind from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first condition is that they should not bring any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices with them but should whole-heartedly adopt the proletarian point of view. But these gentlemen, as has been proved, are stuffed and crammed with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas. In such a petty-bourgeois country as Germany these ideas certainly have their own justification. But only outside the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. If these gentlemen form themselves into a Social-Democratic Petty-Bourgeois Party they have a perfect right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, form a bloc according to circumstances, etc. But in a workers’ party they are an adulterating element. If reasons exist for tolerating them there for the moment, it is also a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in the Party leadership and to remain aware that a break with them is only a matter of time. The time, moreover, seems to have come." - Engels

And others after them continued to fight for this principle:
"How long it will be until the Socialists realize the folly and inconsistency of preaching to the workers that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves, and yet presenting to those workers the sight of every important position in the party occupied by men not of the working class." – James Connolly
The question still remains how you can say the working class rules when none of the rulers are of the working class.

Workers' rule = petty-bourgeois politicos managing the state, petty-bourgeois bureaucrats managing the economy, petty-bourgeois shopmen managing the factory, petty-bourgeois officers managing the army :confused:

Trotsky wanted to keep the petty-bourgeoisie from power, so he supported bringing members of the petty-bourgeoisie in to fill nearly every leadership role?

That's what permanent revolution means?


Khrushchev was a genuine metalworker, does that mean the working class regained control of the state in the USSR after Stalin's death? If not, I consider this whole line of argumentation illegitimate.Nope, because:

1. Khrushchev was one figure in a vast apparatus.

2. Khrushchev left the working class when he became a state bureaucrat, just like workers who become cops.

3. The workers as a class didn't have control over the means of production under any of the various leaderships.

It's not like Khrushchev was elected as a delegate on the shop floor by his coworkers. He became a political commissar in 1919 and left the working class behind. He didn't become First Secretary until 1953.

[graymouser]

This thread is NOT about the class composition of the Bolshevik party, and NHIA's attempts to undermine the thread by diverting it should be split off into a separate thread, in which I have no interest in participating.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Of course not, because you can't square that circle.

Leaving aside the relevance of the emancipation of the proletariat to real life -- where it should have primacy over all other questions -- it is precisely relevant to this conversation.

You said: "[Trotsky] specifically ruled out the class rule of any petty-bourgeois"

I asked: How can you say Trotsky ruled out any rule by the petty-bourgeoisie if you look at the composition of the Bolshevik's CC after the revolution?

You said: "he saw that the working class would be the ruling class"

I pointed out: That every facet of society was controlled by members of the petty-bourgeoisie. If Trotsky's permanent revolution means, as you say, that the petty-bourgeois would be excluded from the reigns of power, then what happened in Russia was not Trotsky's permanent revolution.

[Martin Blank]

I don't think you can get much further in distorting Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution than Miles has here.

Don't throw something like this out there without any evidence to back it up.


Trotsky's theory was the overturning of the philistine concept in the Second International that history was going through certain foreordained stages, drawn by quote-mining like Miles has done above from Marx and Engels, that it needed to reach before the rule of the proletariat would be on the agenda.

I think NHIA handled the "quote-mining" canard fairly well. Personally, if there is anything really positive to Trotsky's theory, it is that it took on directly the catechism of "stage-ism" that was common in that abomination called the Second International (incidentally, an "International" neither Marx nor Engels actually thought should have existed.)


In opposition to this, Trotsky said that all the democratic classes would no longer be able to take the stage, that they had been hopelessly compromised and divided between international capital and the combined and uneven development in more backward countries. The democratic tasks would need to be achieved by the working class, which in a country like Russia was a minority.

It's all well and good that he would say and write such things, but that's not really the point. The point here is that, in spite of any formally correct statements made by Trotsky in either Results and Prospects or The Permanent Revolution, his theory was not an "expansion" of Marx and Engels' concept.


He specifically ruled out the class rule of any petty-bourgeois class such as the peasantry, and it is a distortion of his theory to say that he saw any potential for class rule of the peasantry in Russia. On the contrary he saw that the working class would be the ruling class, but saw it as necessary for it to win the support of the peasantry by holding up and implementing the traditional democratic demands. This is no more the class rule of the peasantry than the Second Empire in France was the class rule of the lumpenproletariat, who gave their support to Louis Napoleon; in other words, not at all.

I never said that Trotsky "saw any potential for class rule of the peasantry in Russia", as you put it. What I did say is that Trotsky's theory "is chiefly characterized, in words and, more importantly, in action, by combining with and 'leading' the petty bourgeoisie." Any cursory look at Trotsky's writings from the 1930s demonstrates this. For example:


In the epoch of the rise, the growth, and the bloom of capitalism, the petty bourgeoisie, despite acute outbreaks of discontent, generally marched obediently in the capitalist harness. Nor could it do anything else. But under the conditions of capitalist disintegration, and of the impasse in the economic situation, the petty bourgeoisie strives, seeks, attempts to tear itself loose from the fetters of the old masters and rulers of society. It is quite capable of linking up its fates with that of the proletariat. For that, only one thing is needed: the petty bourgeoisie must acquire faith in the ability of the proletariat to lead society onto a new road. The proletariat can inspire this faith only by its strength, by the firmness of its actions, by a skillful offensive against the enemy, by the success of its revolutionary policy.

But, woe, if the revolutionary party does not measure up to the height of the situation! The daily struggle of the proletariat sharpens the instability of bourgeois society. The strikes and the political disturbances aggravated the economic situation of the country. The petty bourgeoisie could reconcile itself temporarily to the growing privations, if it arrived by experience at the conviction that the proletariat is in a position to lead it onto a new road. But if the revolutionary party, in spite of a class struggle becoming incessantly more accentuated, proves time and again to be incapable of uniting the working class about it, if it vacillates, becomes confused, contradicts itself, then the petty bourgeoisie loses patience and begins to look upon the revolutionary workers as those responsible for its own misery. ("Bourgeoisie, Petty Bourgeoisie, and Proletariat", The Only Road, September 1932; boldface mine)

But not only did Trotsky advocate combining with the petty bourgeoisie in the revolutionary movement, but also within the so-called "proletarian party":


The party has only a minority of genuine factory workers ... The non-proletarian elements represent a very necessary yeast, and I believe that we can be proud of the good quality of these elements ... But ... Our party can be inundated by non-proletarian elements and can even lose its revolutionary character. The task is naturally not to prevent the influx of intellectuals by artificial methods, ... but to orientate practically all the organization toward the factories, the strikes, the unions ...

A concrete example: We cannot devote enough or equal forces to all the factories. Our local organization can choose for its activity in the next period one, two or three factories in its area and concentrate all its forces upon these factories. If we have in one of them two or three workers we can create a special help commission of five non-workers with the purpose of enlarging our influence in these factories.

The same can be done among the trade unions. We cannot introduce non-worker members in workers’ unions. But we can with success build up help commissions for oral and literary action in connection with our comrades in the union. The unbreakable conditions should be: not to command the workers but only to help them, to give them suggestions, to arm them with the facts, ideas, factory papers, special leaflets, and so on.

Such collaboration would have a tremendous educational importance from one side for the worker comrades, from the other side for the non-workers who need a solid re-education.

You have for example an important number of Jewish non-worker elements in your ranks. They can be a very valuable yeast if the party succeeds by and by in extracting them from a closed milieu and ties them to the factory workers by daily activity. I believe such an orientation would also assure a more healthy atmosphere in side the patty. (Letter to Cannon and Shachtman, October 10, 1937, cited in "From a Scratch -- to the Danger of Gangrene", In Defense of Marxism; italics in original, boldface mine)Here we see one of the fundamental differences between Trotsky's view, and that of Marx and Engels. Beginning in the 1850s, and especially accelerating after the experience of the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels repeatedly sought to distance the proletarian movement from that of the petty bourgeoisie. This is apparent in not only the actions taken in the final years of the IWMA, but also in their letters to the German Socialists (passages of which have been posted on RevLeft numerous times, either by me or NHIA). Unfortunately, the so-called "heirs of Marx" in the German party were little more than opportunists and sought to revise the writings and program of Marx and Engels to suit their needs, mainly by robbing it of its sharp class content. That social-democratic revisionism is what led to the Second International, both on its left and right, embracing the petty bourgeoisie as an ally.

Thus, we see where Trotsky's theory is only a break from social-democratic teaching in a formal sense -- i.e., that it formally recognizes that the bourgeois-democratic (and petty-bourgeois-democratic) revolution is not what self-described communists fight for. However, it maintains a continuity with social-democratic teaching by continuing to recognize the petty bourgeoisie as a natural ally and "necessary yeast" for the movement and party.

And as I noted in my original post, history shows that the concrete reality of this mongering for support from the petty bourgeoisie, described as "leading" the petty bourgeoisie, generally manifests itself not in the working class rising on the shoulders of the petty bourgeoisie, but the other way around. It's not a conscious decision on the part of Trotsky or his adherents, but more of a natural one, given the relationship of forces.


As for today, the theory has burning relevance. In a country like Nepal or Egypt, we see yet again an attempt at a democratic revolution - yet there are no classes in either country that can create a stable, economically sound independent and democratic state. These failures can only be addressed by the working class taking the lead and implementing both the democratic tasks and beginning the socialist tasks of economic reconstruction.

Two things here:

First, you contradict yourself in the above statement. You say, "there are no classes in either country that can create a stable, economically sound independent and democratic state", and then follow it up with, "These failures can only be addressed by the working class taking the lead and implementing both the democratic tasks and beginning the socialist tasks of economic reconstruction". I'm sure that, in the first passage, you meant to say "there are no OTHER classes in either country...", but I need you to confirm that before I say anything else about it.

Second, one thing that both Marx and Engels were concerned about, in terms of the communist party (in the broad sense), was that historical events might push them into power ahead of their time:


I have a feeling that one fine day, thanks to the helplessness and spinelessness of all the others, our party will find itself forced into power, whereupon it will have to enact things that are not immediately in our own, but rather in the general, revolutionary and specifically petty-bourgeois interest; in which event, spurred on by the proletarian populus and bound by our own published statements and plans — more or less wrongly interpreted and more or less impulsively pushed through in the midst of party strife — we shall find ourselves compelled to make communist experiments and leaps which no-one knows better than ourselves to be untimely. One then proceeds to lose one’s head — only physique parlant I hope — , a reaction sets in and, until such time as the world is capable of passing historical judgment of this kind of thing, one will be regarded, not only as a brute beast, which wouldn’t matter a rap, but, also as bête [silly, stupid -- Miles], and that’s far worse. I don’t very well see how it could happen otherwise. In a backward country such as Germany which possesses an advanced party and which, together with an advanced country such as France, becomes involved in an advanced revolution, at the first serious conflict, and as soon as there is real danger, the turn of the advanced party will inevitably come, and this in any case will be before its normal time. However, none of this matters a rap; the main thing is that, should this happen, our party’s rehabilitation in history will already have been substantiated in advance in its literature. (Engels, Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer in New York, April 12, 1853; italics in original, boldface mine)

I find this passage to be important because, in many respects, it speaks directly to those who wish to hasten the coming to power of the proletariat before it is ready to actually take power.

It is true that in both Nepal and Egypt, and in many other countries, there is a burning need for a proletarian communist alternative to the existing movements and organizations that currently exist. However, the one important question is not being asked: Is the working class ready to take power in these countries, or are we being asked to place a "vanguard organization" at the summit of society that would rule over the working class, much as we saw in the development of the Russian Revolution?

This is not to say that the proletariat should aid any of the other classes in their rise to power. Quite the opposite! What I'm saying here is that, as communists, our task right now, in Egypt, Nepal, Tunisia, Libya, Palestine, Europe, the U.S. and everywhere else, is to prepare for our class to take power, not seek power for ourselves or our organizations, merely for the sake thereof. We have to think, not merely react. We need to be scientific, not atavistic.


Yet, as Trotsky pointedly noted, neither could stand as an isolated socialist country - Marx as far back as 1850 had noted that France could not have stood as a socialist nation on its own when capitalist Britain sat right to its north. And this is no less true in the underdeveloped world today, where all the problems of development need to be addressed through proletarian internationalist revolution.

Well, good on Trotsky for remembering his ABCs. It's great he did, but it's not worthy of being recognized as some great "elaborator" of Marx and Engels' method.


I've said in the past that permanent revolution would mean that a socialist revolution in Nepal would necessarily be the precursor to and staging ground for a similar revolution in India; likewise, in Egypt it would be the first phase of a socialist revolution across the Maghreb and throughout the Arab world. You can't get more relevant than that.

This is the problem. This idea that "a socialist revolution in Nepal would necessarily be the precursor to and staging ground for a similar revolution in India" is mere wishful thinking. If a socialist revolution in one country would be some kind of automatic "precursor" to other successful revolutions in neighboring states, then there would have been a red Germany, Poland, Hungary, etc., back in 1918-19, and they would have survived and, later, continued to expand internationally.

The only thing that can be a precursor for other successful revolutions in countries neighboring Nepal or Egypt is a revolutionary movement in those states. There is no guarantee, outside of the development of a truly worldwide mass communist movement, that a successful revolution in one country will necessarily spread beyond its borders. Ultimately, this is a question that goes well beyond the specific issue of permanent revolution, so I'll leave it at that.

Finally, you may think I'm nit-picking in some of my criticisms, but the fact is that, apart from your actions, all I have to go on, in terms of understanding your view, is what I read in your posts. So that necessarily means reading and analyzing those formulations you use. I can't read minds. I can't be everywhere at all times. So I have to go with what's in front of me. If there are formulations you think I'm unfairly criticizing, please point them out and explain in greater detail.

[DaringMehring]

There's a lot of huffing and puffing but there are some simple questions.

ONCE we get past the idea of Trotsky as some god or demon -- I don't care what Trotsky thought on the militarization of labor in 1921 when discussing Permanent Revolution, they are separate debate -- and the distractions of "were the Bolsheviks a petit-bourgeois Party," we can focus on the issue.

WHICH ISN"T whether Marx & Engels and Trotsky's ideas were related. Or how they are related. Intellectual genealogy is a nice game for academics, but the question is -- is Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution true, and is it useful.

WHAT does the theory say? That the lesser countries of world capitalism, that retain some feudal features, can go straight to socialism without first capitalism. That said countries can also act as catalysts and material bastions for more advanced countries revolutions. No alliance with any bourgeoisie, expropriate them. --- Russia 1917. Proved TRUE.

We can add, Trotsky's theory was proved true by an actual revolution which it guided and which he participated in. CAN'T say the same for Marx and Engels.

WHATEVER you think about Trotsky, Permanent Revolution as compared to New Democracy, Menshevism, and Stagism, is a winner. But go ahead, diss the theory of the best socialist revolution history has yet provided.

[S.Artesian]

What is going on here? What do Trotsky's statements about the "authority" of the party have to do with the content of the theory of permanent revolution? PR went through several elaborations and revisions as the struggle in Russia developed, and it probably gets its best explanation when it isn't even referred to as permanent revolution, but rather uneven and combined development. And uneven and combined development is clearly an extension of Marx's and Engel's work, with significance far beyond Trotsky's own use of it, which is an indication of the congruity of this theory with historical reality.

What was the essence of the theory of permanent revolution-- that in the midst of the backwardness of Russia, capitalism had created, and introduced the most advanced technical elements of production and the most advanced class relationships. Russia's lack of "bourgeois, democratic, liberal" form, should not be mistaken for the absence of capitalism. The bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie, the peasantry, all of those were so circumscribed by the allegiance to private property, that they were socially incapable of reorganizing the social basis of production which could address the issues of social and economic development.

Only the proletariat, through the abolition of capitalist property, could do that. And because the condition of capital in Russia was not "isolated," was not simply a product of badkwardness, but was in fact an "extrusion" of the advanced capitalist countries, there was no way the Russian proletariat could resolve these issues, alone, separate and apart from an international revolution.

OK, that's the objective, material basis for the theory. Does anyone disagree with that? Does anyone disagree with the fact that this theory leads directly to the programmatic, revolutionary demand in 1917 of "All Power to the Soviets"?

I don't. Do I think the Bolshevik concept of the party sucked? For most of its existence, yes. For the period from April-Nov 1917, I don't think so, as the connection between the workers rank and file and the Bolsheviks was expressed in the growing power of factory committees were Bolshevik workers were most active. In answer to NHIA's question regarding the composition of the Bolshevik party-- in Moscow after June 1917, it was decidedly proletarian.

But uneven and combined development goes beyond Marx's analysis of the relations between "advanced" and "less advanced" capitalist countries, finding in the organization of the social relations of the latter, the organization of land and labor, and particularly landed labor that shows the impracticality of nationalism, of "popular unity" government a la Allende, of Peronism, of the MNR in Bolivia then, and Morales and the MAS now etc etc etc. Moreover, with a grasp of uneven and combined development, you know who's theory about what gets tossed out the window, is shown to be the real abomination to Marxism? Lenin's "theory" of imperialism.

Now you can argue that "oh we don't need that analysis, all we need is to argue for proletarian independence." Go right ahead, argue for proletarian independence as a sort of moral compass. But you know what? That will isn't going to play too well in the midst of revolutionary struggles as it offers no mediations, no transitions for the workers themselves who, believe it or not, don't wake up automatically with demands for all power to the soviets. So uneven and combined development points us to certain programmatic actions-- like the creation of councils, or factory committees that have been historically verified-- and that provide that form, that mediation where the workers act as a class for itself, where in fact the most militant workers can function, organize, argue, win over less militant workers, eschewing sect and sectarianism by advancing a class program. That's kind of what happened in Russia with the soviets, and the slogan "All Power to the Soviets." In truth, what soviets represent is a united front of the entire class, and a united front of the entire class around the program of class rule is the class for itself.

I challenge anybody to produce an economic, historical analysis of the development of Mexico and the Mexican Revolution, of Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador that is at one and the same time, accurate and Marxist, but does not base itself on, and confirm the validity of uneven and combined development.

Doesn't change anything about Trotsky's role in advocating the militarization of labor [ a view supported by Lenin until he sensed a change in the wind]; the dispossession of the workers and the soviets from power by the Bolsheviks; the fact that the Bolshevik leadership upon taking power did almost everything wrong-- except conduct its debates out in the open, and the need to get out of WW1 immediately--

but uneven and combined development? That stands as great contribution.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Personally, if there is anything really positive to Trotsky's theory, it is that it took on directly the catechism of "stage-ism" that was common in that abomination called the Second International (incidentally, an "International" neither Marx nor Engels actually thought should have existed.)

Comrade, I think you're overreacting here with regards to worker institutions. Marx died before the original Socialist International was born, and I don't know where Engels expressed a negative attitude.


This is apparent in not only the actions taken in the final years of the IWMA, but also in their letters to the German Socialists (passages of which have been posted on RevLeft numerous times, either by me or NHIA). Unfortunately, the so-called "heirs of Marx" in the German party were little more than opportunists and sought to revise the writings and program of Marx and Engels to suit their needs, mainly by robbing it of its sharp class content. That social-democratic revisionism is what led to the Second International, both on its left and right, embracing the petty bourgeoisie as an ally.

Thus, we see where Trotsky's theory is only a break from social-democratic teaching in a formal sense -- i.e., that it formally recognizes that the bourgeois-democratic (and petty-bourgeois-democratic) revolution is not what self-described communists fight for. However, it maintains a continuity with social-democratic teaching by continuing to recognize the petty bourgeoisie as a natural ally and "necessary yeast" for the movement and party.

There needs to be a sharp distinction between the "necessary yeast" part and the "ally" part. The former was downright wrong, but the latter remains very complicated to this day. It can lead and has led to blatant opportunism, prioritizing petit-bourgeois support over class independence, yet can be and has been realistic when demographics are taken into account properly.


This is not to say that the proletariat should aid any of the other classes in their rise to power. Quite the opposite! What I'm saying here is that, as communists, our task right now, in Egypt, Nepal, Tunisia, Libya, Palestine, Europe, the U.S. and everywhere else, is to prepare for our class to take power, not seek power for ourselves or our organizations, merely for the sake thereof. We have to think, not merely react. We need to be scientific, not atavistic.

Again, there are varying degrees of support that should be considered. Participating in a petit-bourgeois uprising is quite different from entering into a victorious petit-bourgeois coalition government.


Nope, because:

1. Khrushchev was one figure in a vast apparatus.

2. Khrushchev left the working class when he became a state bureaucrat, just like workers who become cops.

3. The workers as a class didn't have control over the means of production under any of the various leaderships.

It's not like Khrushchev was elected as a delegate on the shop floor by his coworkers. He became a political commissar in 1919 and left the working class behind. He didn't become First Secretary until 1953.

Khrushchev didn't lose his working-class status until he became a regional first secretary. Just because working-class party members become full-fledged party workers doesn't mean they've hopped into new classes altogether. He was still a working-class activist when he was a political commissar.

[Jose Gracchus]

Political commissars in Stalin's USSR are more comparable to beat cops than any authentically proletarian status. If you think Khrushchev as political commissars represents Soviet workers, you're out of it.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Khrushchev became a political commissar during Lenin's time, though (not Stalin's), and it ended in 1920. :confused:

His career as a secretary and/or department head began in 1925. Between 1920 and 1925 he was a "commissar to a labour brigade in the Donbas, where he and his men lived in poor conditions" (wiki). Plus, with his technical program as belated high school studies, I'm sure that commissars for labour brigades were more like the later zampolit than the stereotypical political commissar with military command authority, but do correct me if I'm woefully wrong on this detail.

[Geiseric]

perminant revolution is needed for the success of any revolution. If we don't keep things moving, we will face failure under the pressure of the capitalist states who seek to destroy any scent of socialism. If we don't continue the revolution and finish it, untill the world is red, what would the point of been starting a workers revolution in the first place? If a revolutionary doesn't want to extend outside his or her own country, then he or she is a nationalist, thus not a socialist.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

In answer to NHIA's question regarding the composition of the Bolshevik party-- in Moscow after June 1917, it was decidedly proletarian.

Actually the question was about the leadership. The majority of the Democratic Party's supporters are proletarian.

And yeah, folks can complain that's there's no relation between that and the question at hand, but it's really just a dodge. If Trotsky's Permanent Revolution means the working class takes power directly instead of supporting the rule of other classes or forming a bloc with them, then we need to know if the working class did take direct power in Russia, where the theory was supposedly proven in practice.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

ONCE we get past the idea of Trotsky as some god or demon -- I don't care what Trotsky thought on the militarization of labor in 1921 when discussing Permanent Revolution, they are separate debate -- and the distractions of "were the Bolsheviks a petit-bourgeois Party," we can focus on the issue.

The issue is what Trotsky's Permanent Revolution means. His followers claim it means the working class takes power instead of supporting the rule of other classes or forming blocs with them.


WHICH ISN"T whether Marx & Engels and Trotsky's ideas were related. Or how they are related. Intellectual genealogy is a nice game for academics, but the question is -- is Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution true, and is it useful.

It is relevant to the discussion. Trotsky claimed to be a "Marxist" through his life, but his Permanent Revolution was not an extension of Marx's permanent revolution, but rather a revision.


WHAT does the theory say? That the lesser countries of world capitalism, that retain some feudal features, can go straight to socialism without first capitalism. That said countries can also act as catalysts and material bastions for more advanced countries revolutions. No alliance with any bourgeoisie, expropriate them. --- Russia 1917. Proved TRUE.

But what about the petty-bourgeoisie? What does it mean in a "workers state" when the military is run by Czarist officers, factories are run by managers, the economy is run by specialists, etc.? Is that workers' socialism?

And yeah, it wasn't anything new to say that a revolution on the periphery of capitalism could be the spark of an international revolution that extends to the capitalist heartlands.

"Just as the period of crisis began later on the Continent than in England, so also did prosperity. The process originated in England, which is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos. On the Continent the various phases of the cycle repeatedly experienced by bourgeois society assume a secondary and tertiary form. First, the Continent exports to England disproportionately more than to any other country. This export to England, however, depends on the latter's position, especially in regard to the overseas market. England exports disproportionately more to overseas countries than to the whole Continent, so that the quantity of continental exports to those countries is always dependent on England's foreign trade. Hence when crises on the Continent produce revolutions there first, the bases for them are always laid in England. Violent outbreaks naturally erupt sooner at the extremities of the bourgeois body than in its heart, because in the latter the possibilities of accommodation are greater than in the former. On the other hand, the degree to which continental revolutions affect England is at the same time the thermometer that indicates to what extent these revolutions really put into question bourgeois life conditions, and to what extent they touch only their political formations." - Marx


WHATEVER you think about Trotsky, Permanent Revolution as compared to New Democracy, Menshevism, and Stagism, is a winner.

Are those our only choices?

I don't think any are "winners."

The working class has won a few battles, but it has yet to win the war.

[Jimmie Higgins]

And yeah, folks can complain that's there's no relation between that and the question at hand, but it's really just a dodge. If Trotsky's Permanent Revolution means the working class takes power directly instead of supporting the rule of other classes or forming a bloc with them, then we need to know if the working class did take direct power in Russia, where the theory was supposedly proven in practice.

Yes it did, but it failed pretty quickly. Workers also took over means of production in Iran and the two Red years in Italy and many other failed revolutions and uprisings. Does that mean that Marx's theory that workers can run society is inherently flawed, or do you have to consider the historical context and the conditions? If a plane crashed does that mean that the theories of aerodynamics are flawed or was there a mechanical failure, a bird that flew into the engine?

What part of the permanent revolution theory caused it to fail in Russia in your opinion? The part of the argument you are discussing wasn't should workers take power directly or should they team-up with bureaucrats, the question at the time this theory was developed was: does the Russian worker's movement need to support a bourgeois government which will then modernize Russia and eventually allow for the worker's movement to develop? It was the stagiest view that argued that the workers movements needed to support a bourgeois rule and then later that workers movements should support Chinese nationalists etc.

I'd still like to know what your alternative for the worker's movement would be given all the hindsight we have now. Should they have waited for a bourgeois to establish its rule and modernize? Should they have just had worker's power in the towns and ignored the majority peasant population?

[Die Neue Zeit]

I'd still like to know what your alternative for the worker's movement would be given all the hindsight we have now. Should they have waited for a bourgeois to establish its rule and modernize? Should they have just had worker's power in the towns and ignored the majority peasant population?

Here's what a comrade had to say on the matter in another thread:


If you had a dictatorship of the proletariat in a country which was 90% peasant it would not be progressive. The idea that the only progressive force is the proletariat is the same sort of nonsense that lead to very poor policies in Russia during the revolution. You can't substitute some section of the population for the entire population and constitute your politics on this basis.

Even if the approach is state directed capitalism with a populist government of the peasant and proletariat, you'd still be better off than such a totally undemocratic arrangement.

Note the order of "peasant" and "proletariat" in terms of who should have been the leading class. The bourgeoisie is still out of the picture.

[S.Artesian]

The issue is what Trotsky's Permanent Revolution means. His followers claim it means the working class takes power instead of supporting the rule of other classes or forming blocs with them.

Not just his followers. His opponents claimed that, and still claim that. Other Marxists, who disagree with Trotsky on many things acknowledge that PR means the working class takes power instead of supporting the rule of other classes or forming blocs with them.




It is relevant to the discussion. Trotsky claimed to be a "Marxist" through his life, but his Permanent Revolution was not an extension of Marx's permanent revolution, but rather a revision.



No it is not relevant to the content, and the material relations, that form the basis for the theory. You might as well claim that everything since Marx has been a revision of Marxism. Rosa's Accumulation of Capital is a revision; Preobrazhensky's New Economics is a revision. Hell, soviets are a revision.

As historical materialists we look at the social conditions, the organization of labor, the conflict between means and relations of production when evaluating the accuracy, content, and applicability of a theory. We don't, a la Maoists, Hoxhaists etc. dismiss a theory as "revisionist" because it doesn't conform to "orthodoxy." That type of argument is religious not Marxist.

We base our analysis, rejection, or acceptance of the theory of its accuracy in predicting, explaining, material events; and the accuracy of that explanation makes the theory a tool for practice, for itself advancing class struggle.

So.... so those who reject PR as "revisionist" have a task-- that is to explain the nature of Russian economic and social development to 1917; what prospects there were for class struggle within that development; and what class could take power to confront the tasks of development, of social reproduction.

Did PR do all those things? Yep, it sure did. Did it then become a tool for advancing class struggle. Yep, it sure did, as embodied in and by soviets.


But what about the petty-bourgeoisie? What does it mean in a "workers state" when the military is run by Czarist officers, factories are run by managers, the economy is run by specialists, etc.? Is that workers' socialism?


Is that the theory of permanent revolution-- or is that the legacy of uneven and combined development, in the absence of the critical aspect, the essential condition for the permanence-- international revolution?


And yeah, it wasn't anything new to say that a revolution on the periphery of capitalism could be the spark of an international revolution that extends to the capitalist heartlands.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing... isn't it? 100 years after the debates... yeah it's easy to say.. "hey there's nothing new in that." Well, there was then to those Marxists on all sides of the debate about PR.


The working class has won a few battles, but it has yet to win the war.

No doubt. Did it win a battle in 1917? Did that battle confirm what PR anticipated?

[chegitz guevara]

I would argue that the TPR has no relevance any longer. The entire world is capitalist. There is no need for bourgeois revolutions.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I would argue that the TPR has no relevance any longer. The entire world is capitalist. There is no need for bourgeois revolutions.

How is it bourgeois?

[S.Artesian]

I would argue that the TPR has no relevance any longer. The entire world is capitalist. There is no need for bourgeois revolutions.

WTF? PR argues that there is no historical necessity, nor possibility for bourgeois revolutions, and it made that argument more than a century ago.

[chegitz guevara]

TPR argued that in countries where the capitalist class was too weak to carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution on its own, that task would have to be carried out by the workers, and that, once having taken power, they should not then hand power to the bourgeoisie, but make the revolution permanent, and carry forward to socialism.

Capitalism is everywhere now. The old feudal or slave owning classes are gone or have become capitalists. All social relations are capitalist relations. The tasks of the bourgeois revolution have been completed. Thus, there is no need for the proletariat to carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolutions. The only task before them is to overthrow capitalism.

[RedTrackWorker]

It is true that in both Nepal and Egypt, and in many other countries, there is a burning need for a proletarian communist alternative to the existing movements and organizations that currently exist. However, the one important question is not being asked: Is the working class ready to take power in these countries, or are we being asked to place a "vanguard organization" at the summit of society that would rule over the working class, much as we saw in the development of the Russian Revolution?

I think this is a good way to summarize the question of the relevance of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution for today: Can the Egyptian working class take power? If so, how?

But asking it in this way ""one important question is not being asked" suggests Miles does not understand Trotsky's theory, as to ask the question of Trotsky's theory is to ask the question of can the working class take power in Egypt today for example. I like Harold Isaacs's writing about this on China of the 20's at http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/isaacs/1938/tcr/ch02.htm for an extended take.

Miles "pure proletarian", "don't lead the petty bourgeoisie" approach (please correct me if I misunderstand you Miles) would suggest that the workers in Egypt cannot take power today, whereas the Trotskyist PR theory suggests they can.

What does Miles's perspective mean for China today? China has the world's largest concentration of industrial proletarians in history, but those same proletarians also exist in a country riven by regional and national and ethnic divisions with an even larger rural and peasant population. It would seem the Chinese working class must mark time, no? I think that, in fact, China will soon show us the great working class uprising in history.

Or take Israel/Occupied Palestine. The imperialist domination of the Middle East is one of the keys to the current world system, and Israel is the prison warden. A "pure proletarian" approach would seem to suggestion revolution is more likely to come from the Israeli Jewish settler colonial working class than the Palestinian and Arab masses--whereas an analysis and perspective based on PR can point to the regional working class as the driving force for the Palestinian revolution, but based on what Miles has said on this thread, his perspective points to the Israeli Jewish working class "taking the lead."

Or take the world situation as a whole now, as oppressed masses and workers in the Middle East rise up in courageous struggles for "bread and freedom"--Miles's "pure proletarian" approach would seem to suggest that the workers of the dominant imperialist countries are closer to taking power!

Miles and NHIA, other than proof-texts from Marx and Engels, what do you have to offer in terms of analysis, theory and strategy to the workers of Egypt today? Of China? Of Palestine? Of the world?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

What part of the permanent revolution theory caused it to fail in Russia in your opinion?

I used to wonder whether you have problems comprehending what I write here, but then I realized that you and are just talking entirely different languages.

I don't think Trotsky's theory "caused it to fail."

You can read Lenin's State and Revolution and then you can look at what actually happened with Lenin's party in power.

The same goes for the Old Man. You can look at his arguments about the workers needing to take power, and then you can look at what actually happened with his party in power. You can see the guy who supposedly was pushing for the working class to rule arguing for forced labor, work camps for uppity workers, petty-bourgeois management and more.


The part of the argument you are discussing wasn't should workers take power directly or should they team-up with bureaucrats, the question at the time this theory was developed was: does the Russian worker's movement need to support a bourgeois government which will then modernize Russia and eventually allow for the worker's movement to develop? It was the stagiest view that argued that the workers movements needed to support a bourgeois rule and then later that workers movements should support Chinese nationalists etc.

Right. I know what happened, the arguments involved, etc. What I'm saying is that while Trotsky's strategy and tactics differed from those of the Mensheviks and some of the more meek/conservative Bolsheviks, it was never about the working class taking power in its own name and exercising it for its own ends.

I'm not limited to "Stalinism" or "Trotskyism." They're two wings of the same bird. Neither represents the fight for self-emancipation by the working class.


I'd still like to know what your alternative for the worker's movement would be given all the hindsight we have now. Should they have waited for a bourgeois to establish its rule and modernize? Should they have just had worker's power in the towns and ignored the majority peasant population?

I'm not really interested in playing the "What if?" game. I'll leave that to the historical role players. I think it's much more important, for our purposes, to examine what actually happened, and try to to figure out why.

I think Myasnikov's Workers’ Group had the right idea more or less. Unfortunately, it was much too little, far too late.

I also think making "the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world - 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" as Marx said was key.

How could that have looked in practice in post-October Russia? We can imagine some basics..

- The working class could have held and exercised power directly through the committees and councils. When representation was necessary it could have been via instantly recallable delegates elected at each level, via open voting. Not petty-bourgeois politicos, specialists, etc. Not party rule but class rule.

- A break with class society and the division of labor should have been made, with all required to work. Individual elements of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie could have been removed from their positions and put to work alongside everyone else. Those who refused could have been denied access to the social product and/or be dealt with further as necessary. Not petty-bourgeois elements retaining their positions, control, privilege, etc.

- A drive could have been made to industrialize agriculture. Until the peasantry had dissolved into the proletariat, it could have elected representatives with consultative voice privileges.

- The economy, from the shop to the nationwide level, could have been run by the workers themselves, directly, according to plan decided on by the workers themselves. No petty-bourgeois managers. The necessary labor time required to meet the plan could have been divided up according to individual ability. Not dictates from petty-bourgeois ministers and party bureaucrats disconnected from the process of production.

- The armed forces of the state could have been abolished in favor of an armed populace, organized in militias with recallable leadership elected directly from among the ranks when need be. Not Czarist officers. No unaccountable secret police to sweep you away in the middle of the night.

- The press should have been open to all working people and closed to the propertied classes. Not controlled by functionaries, not limited to political parties.

Have would such a course have fared? It's impossible to know. But that's what should have happened if the working class took power, held on to it, and pushed forward. To paraphrase Debs, it's better to fight for what you want and fail than to settle for something else and succeed.

Ultimately, the main point for me is that every major advance made by the working class in history was either drown in blood, hijacked by false friends, or some combination thereof. Since that's happened every single time, I think that it is a serious danger and obstacle that needs to be examined and pointed out, so that the working class won't get fucked again. The answer is what it has always been: the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the workers themselves.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Is that the theory of permanent revolution-- or is that the legacy of uneven and combined development, in the absence of the critical aspect, the essential condition for the permanence-- international revolution?

Petty-bourgeois specialists, managers, officers, bureaucrats, etc., were taking the reigns of power long before the revolution was off the table in Europe. Factory committees were being replaced with one man management in 1918. Let's not pretend Trotsky's brand of socialism involved every leadership position being in the hands of the petty-bourgeois because Rosa was murdered or Bela Kun couldn't hold onto power.


Yep, it sure did, as embodied in and by soviets.

So the workers created councils because Trotsky concocted a theory?


Hindsight's a wonderful thing... isn't it? 100 years after the debates... yeah it's easy to say.. "hey there's nothing new in that." Well, there was then to those Marxists on all sides of the debate about PR.

Nope, there wasn't. Marx already argued it long before. See the quote I provided. It's one of many.

If that (with nearly everything else) was buried in the muck of the Second International that the Bolsheviks came out of, it doesn't mean it never existed. It means the Second International was a revisionist shit hole.


As historical materialists we look at the social conditions, the organization of labor, the conflict between means and relations of production when evaluating the accuracy, content, and applicability of a theory. We don't, a la Maoists, Hoxhaists etc. dismiss a theory as "revisionist" because it doesn't conform to "orthodoxy."Nice try, but no one has done that here.

I never said Marx's writings are dogma set in stone. In fact I said the exact opposite.

That doesn't change the fact that there is a difference between building on something and revising it into something else.

If I have a block house foundation on a piece of property, I can construct a house upon it. That would be building onto it. If I string barbwire along the top and turn it into an animal pen, that would be a revision.


That type of argument is religious not Marxist.And I, like Marx, am neither.

[S.Artesian]

Nice try, but no one has done that here. You claim the theory of PR, or uneven and combined development, is revisionism of Marx's work. Please explain what you mean by revisionism. Is it anti-Marxist, a la Bernstein's revisionism? Is it pseudo-Marxist a la Kautsky's "imperialism"? Is it class-collaborationist a la "popular front," "national democracy," "new democracy" etc?

As far as your block house foundation analogy-- see, this is where I doubt people's understanding of Marx and their understanding of Marx's analysis of history. On the one hand, you say Marx's work "isn't written in stone," and then at the same time, you start using analogies of blocks, and foundations that make it clear that you do think some things are written in stone.

So let's cut out the stuff about not being dogmatic. About some things, you are dogmatic. About some things, I am. About some things, Marx was. I happen to think no class-collaboration with the bourgeoisie is one of the things to be dogmatic about. I think dogmatically failing to distinguish, economically, between poor peasants and rich peasants, despite the fact that both are peasants, both are "petty-bourgeoisie" is a tactical, and strategic mistake. But maybe that's just me.

But where does PR becomes that "barbed wire fence.' Where does the argument about Russia's economic development, and which class contained the capability of transforming the relations of production, becomes the prison for the working class.


How does the theory of uneven and combined development amount to revising Marx's theory as opposed to building on it?

As for this:


The working class could have held and exercised power directly through the committees and councils. When representation was necessary it could have been via instantly recallable delegates elected at each level, via open voting. Not petty-bourgeois politicos, specialists, etc. Not party rule but class rule. Agree, and absolutely.


- A break with class society and the division of labor should have been made, with all required to work. Individual elements of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie could have been removed from their positions and put to work alongside everyone else. Those who refused could have been denied access to the social product and/or be dealt with further as necessary. Not petty-bourgeois elements retaining their positions, control, privilege, etc.
Yes... except... to complete that process to carry that through requires a level of economic and social development that requires internationalization of the revolution. That internationalization, of capital in adapting, manifesting uneven and combined development, and in the proletariat expanding the revolution to overcome the limits of uneven and combined development is the critical component of PR, so critical perhaps even Trotsky didn't truly grasp all its implications. Hey, the theory is NOT the man.


- A drive could have been made to industrialize agriculture. Until the peasantry had dissolved into the proletariat, it could have elected representatives with consultative voice privileges.See above. This is where the crunch comes. Are you aware of the absolute material devastation of the Russian economy during the Civil War; the implosion of its transportation network; the inability to barely moving the troops and materiel from point to point, much less industrial goods, which were not being produced, to the countryside for agriculture?

The only way such a drive could have happened was through international revolution or......significant imports of capitalist goods with expropriation of the peasantry and reduction of its living standards to pay for the imports............hey wait a minute, that sounds awfully much like Stalin's first five year plan.


- The economy, from the shop to the nationwide level, could have been run by the workers themselves, directly, according to plan decided on by the workers themselves. No petty-bourgeois managers. The necessary labor time required to meet the plan could have been divided up according to individual ability. Not dictates from petty-bourgeois ministers and party bureaucrats disconnected from the process of production. Sure it could have been. So why wasn't it? Because the Bolsheviks were "bad people"? Because the Bolsheviks had a class interest separate and apart and opposed to the workers? Because the Bolsheviks represented a different class? Well, if that's the case, then a really new theory, much more revisionist than PR better be developed, because we need to know what new mode of production the Bolsheviks were introducing-- you don't get classes without specific modes of production. So what was the Bolshevik's unique, specific mode?

See above about importance of internationalization of the revolution.


- The armed forces of the state could have been abolished in favor of an armed populace, organized in militias with recallable leadership elected directly from among the ranks when need be. Not Czarist officers. No unaccountable secret police to sweep you away in the middle of the night.
Agree mostly. But let's be clear, workers militias do not contain or maintain the logistical ability to sustain combat across an extended theater of operations. That's what the Bolsheviks faced, with dwindling capabilities of resupply. So honestly, I think workers militias were not going to do the trick.

What is the old saying? Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics? Logistically, you cannot continue combat without command and control of the resources and lines of resupply. You can try it, and you know what? You lose. See above comments about importance of internationalization.



- The press should have been open to all working people and closed to the propertied classes. Not controlled by functionaries, not limited to political parties.
Agreed. But give credit, the Bolsheviks did close the presses to propertied classes.
and political parties... except theirs.


Have would such a course have fared? It's impossible to know. But that's what should have happened if the working class took power, held on to it, and pushed forward. To paraphrase Debs, it's better to fight for what you want and fail than to settle for something else and succeed.
Agree, and absolutely. Although I think the Lenin and Trotsky were dead right to pull Russia out of WW1, make peace at any price, I think the Bolsheviks needed to subordinate themselves to the soviets and take the risk of being a minority party in a soviet government in which the Left SRs, the maximalists predominated. The revolution was about soviet, not party, power. Better to risk everything to maintain that self-organization of the working class, than to, in essence, concede the issue from the getgo and dispossess the working class from the organs of its own power.


Ultimately, the main point for me is that every major advance made by the working class in history was either drown in blood, hijacked by false friends, or some combination thereof. Since that's happened every single time, I think that it is a serious danger and obstacle that needs to be examined and pointed out, so that the working class won't get fucked again. The answer is what it has always been: the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the workers themselves. __________________

That's fine, but what part has the theory, and the practice of PR, played in that "great betrayal"?



This:


So the workers created councils because Trotsky concocted a theory?



OTOH, is just infantile. I explained perfectly clearly how we "measure" a theory. The importance of PR is that it recognized the historical significance of the soviets as organs of class power, a class that would be propelled to break with notions of "stages" of "capitalist development," and political alliances, collaborations with the bourgeoisie. The importance of PR is that is did not propose abandoning soviets in favor of a constituent assembly, or for a government of bourgeois development.

[Die Neue Zeit]

- A drive could have been made to industrialize agriculture. Until the peasantry had dissolved into the proletariat, it could have elected representatives with consultative voice privileges.

Again, this political disenfranchisement of the peasantry is hardly democratic.


- The economy, from the shop to the nationwide level, could have been run by the workers themselves, directly, according to plan decided on by the workers themselves. No petty-bourgeois managers. The necessary labor time required to meet the plan could have been divided up according to individual ability. Not dictates from petty-bourgeois ministers and party bureaucrats disconnected from the process of production.

The Bolsheviks tried this, but there were so many industrial inefficiencies. It's what historian Lars Lih called the "cultural deficit" of the Russian working class.

I don't like one-management either, but there could have been short-term-based rotatable and recallable workplace manager positions. Similar positions could have been in place in the industrial ministries yet to be established, while still acknowledging the need for a ministerial system.


The working class could have held and exercised power directly through the committees and councils. When representation was necessary it could have been via instantly recallable delegates elected at each level, via open voting. Not petty-bourgeois politicos, specialists, etc. Not party rule but class rule.

[...]

Ultimately, the main point for me is that every major advance made by the working class in history was either drown in blood, hijacked by false friends, or some combination thereof. Since that's happened every single time, I think that it is a serious danger and obstacle that needs to be examined and pointed out, so that the working class won't get fucked again. The answer is what it has always been: the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the workers themselves.

And what I'm saying is that ad hoc councils are ill-equipped to do the job.


If that (with nearly everything else) was buried in the muck of the Second International that the Bolsheviks came out of, it doesn't mean it never existed. It means the Second International was a revisionist shit hole.

The workers were more organized during the time of the Second International than at any time in history, particularly where the party-movements had demographically working-class leaderships.


I never said Marx's writings are dogma set in stone. In fact I said the exact opposite.

But the fetish for ad hoc councils and similar "organs of immediate action" is itself a dogma.


Is it pseudo-Marxist a la Kautsky's "imperialism"?

You're confusing Kautsky's outline of the Marxist position on imperialism, predating Hilferding and even Hobson, with his later "super imperialism."


I think the Bolsheviks needed to subordinate themselves to the soviets and take the risk of being a minority party in a soviet government in which the Left SRs, the maximalists predominated. The revolution was about soviet, not party, power. Better to risk everything to maintain that self-organization of the working class, than to, in essence, concede the issue from the getgo and dispossess the working class from the organs of its own power.

Wait a minute! Just mere posts ago and many more posts prior, you insisted that the workers should have been the leading class, and now you've just double-talked here or made a Freudian slip by supporting a sort of "democratic dictatorship of the peasantry and proletariat" led by the parties of the peasantry! Such parties would undoubtedly have empowered peasant soviets and such in accordance with equal suffrage.

[Martin Blank]

So, I had to skip a day on here (work for the Party comes first). But now I have some free time to respond.


There's a lot of huffing and puffing but there are some simple questions.

Woe to those who try to reduce everything to simple questions! Some things are just not reducible to anything simple without the loss of political content. This issue of Trotsky's permanent revolution is a good example.


ONCE we get past the idea of Trotsky as some god or demon -- I don't care what Trotsky thought on the militarization of labor in 1921 when discussing Permanent Revolution, they are separate debate -- and the distractions of "were the Bolsheviks a petit-bourgeois Party," we can focus on the issue.

Already we run into a problem. It is a major flaw of Trotskyists in general that they try to compartmentalize the Old Man's politics, instead of seeing them as a connected whole. Many "Marxist-Leninists" of different stripes do similar with Lenin. The problem is that the development of political positions flows from a general world outlook, and that outlook serves as the wellspring for an entire body of political viewpoint. Thus, there is a connection between Trotsky's "permanent revolution" and his other positions, insofar as they share a common outlook on the world and society.


WHICH ISN'T whether Marx & Engels and Trotsky's ideas were related. Or how they are related. Intellectual genealogy is a nice game for academics, but the question is -- is Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution true, and is it useful.

Actually, here you are just plain wrong. The OP framed the discussion in the context of Trotsky's "expansion" of Marx and Engels' slogan of permanent revolution. That is what prompted my initial post in this thread, and why this aspect of the discussion is taking place.


WHAT does the theory say? That the lesser countries of world capitalism, that retain some feudal features, can go straight to socialism without first capitalism. That said countries can also act as catalysts and material bastions for more advanced countries revolutions. No alliance with any bourgeoisie, expropriate them. --- Russia 1917. Proved TRUE.

Ooh! A lot here....

1. "[T]he lesser countries of world capitalism, that retain some feudal features, can go straight to socialism without first capitalism" -- I have to admit, I cringe a little at the description of the Global South as "lesser countries of world capitalism", but I see what you're getting at. The problem here is that this is not what Trotsky wrote; it is a poor shorthand. Trotsky's view was that, in such countries, the solution of the outstanding democratic tasks (e.g., agrarian reform) could only be carried out by the proletarian party coming to power, and would be resolved in the larger context of socialist development.

2. "That said countries can also act as catalysts and material bastions for more advanced countries revolutions" -- A catalyst, maybe (if there are stong revolutionary workers' movements in those more advanced capitalist countries). But a "material bastion"? No. Russia tried to be that and failed. Expecting one of these "lesser countries" to act as a "material bastion" for revolution in the "advanced countries" is like relying on your unemployed friend for financial assistance. It's an ass-backward concept.

3. "No alliance with any bourgeoisie, expropriate them" -- Any bourgeoisie? Does that include the petty bourgeoisie? If so, you're running counter to Trotsky. If not, you're running counter to Marx and Engels. Your pick.

4. "Russia 1917. Proved TRUE" -- Really? See, this goes back to my previous comment on compartmentalizing. You can argue that the October Revolution "proved" the power of Trotsky's view on permanent revolution, but you can only do so by ignoring everything that happened following the seizure of power, especially the systematic dismantling of workers' control of production, the political liquidation of the soviets, the annihilation of the best sections of the working class, etc.


We can add, Trotsky's theory was proved true by an actual revolution which it guided and which he participated in. CAN'T say the same for Marx and Engels.

If the Russian Revolution is your "proof" of the validity of Trotsky's permanent revolution, then you're really little more than an apologist for the bureaucracy and police-state apparatus that was the USSR, and your "revolution" is nothing but state ownership and control -- a dictatorship over the working class. No thanks. I'll take Marx and Engels over Trotsky and Stalin any day of the week.


WHATEVER you think about Trotsky, Permanent Revolution as compared to New Democracy, Menshevism, and Stagism, is a winner. But go ahead, diss the theory of the best socialist revolution history has yet provided.

Ah, Trotskyist evangelism at its finest! No one here that I know of is advocating either New Democracy, Menshevism or Stagism. This is a discussion over Trotsky's "permanent revolution" compared to Marx and Engels' concept of permanent revolution. The fact that you respond this way to any kind of criticism is embarrassing for all of us. You are so accustomed to battling "Stalinists" over this question, that you cannot think about what your interlocutors are writing. You should seek out a Russian Civil War re-enacting group; it seems to be more your speed.

[tir1944]

I don't even see this Bronstein's "permanent revolution theory" as a real ideological question,i see it as an ad-hoc quasi-ideological construction invented solely for the purpose of attacking Stalin and the Soviet Union on the basis of some faux "internationalism".

[Martin Blank]

What is going on here? What do Trotsky's statements about the "authority" of the party have to do with the content of the theory of permanent revolution? PR went through several elaborations and revisions as the struggle in Russia developed, and it probably gets its best explanation when it isn't even referred to as permanent revolution, but rather uneven and combined development. And uneven and combined development is clearly an extension of Marx's and Engel's work, with significance far beyond Trotsky's own use of it, which is an indication of the congruity of this theory with historical reality.

This is a much more sensible and political response to the issue, and I can credit the comrade for sticking to the politics, but the reply is still a problem and runs counter to fact. We see it later in S.Artesian's post:


But uneven and combined development goes beyond Marx's analysis of the relations between "advanced" and "less advanced" capitalist countries, finding in the organization of the social relations of the latter, the organization of land and labor, and particularly landed labor that shows the impracticality of nationalism, of "popular unity" government a la Allende, of Peronism, of the MNR in Bolivia then, and Morales and the MAS now etc etc etc. Moreover, with a grasp of uneven and combined development, you know who's theory about what gets tossed out the window, is shown to be the real abomination to Marxism? Lenin's "theory" of imperialism. (Boldface mine)

Contrary to Trotskyist mythology (and, by extension, the "Marxist-Leninist" mythos, too), Marx and Engels understood and repeatedly wrote about uneven and combined development. The passages from Marx and Engels that both NHIA and I have posted here demonstrate this. Their writings about the relationship between the revolutions in France (an "advanced" country) and Germany (a "less advanced" country) were classic expositions on combined and uneven development ... decades before Lenin's "uneven development" theory and Trotsky's "combined and uneven development" theory. If Trotsky can be crediting with anything involving this theory, it is giving it a distinguishable name. But that hardly qualifies as a significant contribution to communist theory or practice.

[Martin Blank]

Comrade, I think you're overreacting here with regards to worker institutions. Marx died before the original Socialist International was born, and I don't know where Engels expressed a negative attitude.

Marx strongly opposed the 1881 Zurich conference, the conference that set the stage for the formal launching of the Second International in 1889, calling it a "mistake" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_22.htm). He ended his letter on the subject with the following:


It is my conviction that the critical juncture for a new International Workingmen's Association has not yet arrived and for this reason I regard all workers' congresses, particularly socialist congresses, in so far as they are not related to the immediate given conditions in this or that particular nation, as not merely useless but harmful. They will always fade away in innumerable stale generalised banalities.

I'll have to find the Engels' quotes and send them to you separately.

[S.Artesian]

Contrary to Trotskyist mythology (and, by extension, the "Marxist-Leninist" mythos, too), Marx and Engels understood and repeatedly wrote about uneven and combined development. The passages from Marx and Engels that both NHIA and I have posted here demonstrate this. Their writings about the relationship between the revolutions in France (an "advanced" country) and Germany (a "less advanced" country) were classic expositions on combined and uneven development ... decades before Lenin's "uneven development" theory and Trotsky's "combined and uneven development" theory. If Trotsky can be crediting with anything involving this theory, it is giving it a distinguishable name. But that hardly qualifies as a significant contribution to communist theory or practice.

I invite the comrade to show where, other than in the analysis of 1848-1849, Marx and Engels utilized uneven and combined development to explore actual economic development.

I think it's a problematic claim, particularly given Engels' ringing endorsement of the US in the Mexican-American war, a war fought for and on behalf of slaveholders; and Engels' urging the IMWA to endorse Bismarck and Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War.

Did they do so in analyzing Bismarck's unification of Germany? And if so where? Did they do so in analyzing the US Civil War? India? Poland? Poland's relations with Russia and Prussia?

The Austrian-Hungarian empire? The Ottoman empire-- in serious decay by the 19th century to put it mildly?

Been a real long time since I read M&E's analyses of these conflicts and conditions. Maybe I just don't recall it. So in all seriousness I'd love to see how they applied it.

And... the challenge still stands to any comrade to provide an analysis of the so-called "underdeveloped" countries, and the struggle in them, that is viable, accurate, and explains the relations of class and that does NOT incorporate "uneven and combined" development as explained, and yes, demonstrated by Trotsky.

[S.Artesian]

I don't even see this Bronstein's "permanent revolution theory" as a real ideological question,i see it as an ad-hoc quasi-ideological construction invented solely for the purpose of attacking Stalin and the Soviet Union on the basis of some faux "internationalism".

You don't know what you are talking about. And let's not turn this into another tendency war jamboree

[tir1944]

You don't know what you are talking about.
That's indeed more than possible comrade.I can't say i'm too knowledgeable on the subject (that's why i just gave my own opinion,which is BTW likely to be faulty anyway).
Maybe you can spare a few moments and properly criticize what i wrote?

[S.Artesian]

That's indeed more than possible comrade.I can't say i'm too knowledgeable on the subject (that's why i just gave my own opinion,which is BTW likely to be faulty anyway).
Maybe you can spare a few moments and properly criticize what i wrote?


Not on this thread. If you want to start a separate thread.....maybe, but I probably won't. There are plenty of threads in the archives dealing with this.

[Martin Blank]

Miles "pure proletarian", "don't lead the petty bourgeoisie" approach (please correct me if I misunderstand you Miles) would suggest that the workers in Egypt cannot take power today, whereas the Trotskyist PR theory suggests they can.

First, I'd like to thank RTW for making this post, primarily because he has exposed one of the fundamental differences between Marx and Engels' permanent revolution, and that of Trotsky: the relationship between the subjective and the objective.

Objectively speaking (that is, from the perspective of objective material conditions), Egypt's working class is confronted by a capitalist system where the petty bourgeoisie, in the form of the military and bureaucracy, has ascended to become a junior partner in the capitalist system and has left an indelible mark on society as a whole. Thus, there exists all of the objective prerequisites for a proletarian revolution.

On the other hand, from the perspective of the subjective needs, Egyptian workers are not ready to take power in their own name as a class for itself. They do not have a sufficient level of organization, political or economic, to directly challenge and defeat capitalist rule, nor do they have the knowledge and skills needed to administer society in the transition from capitalism to communism. Calling for a revolution today, based on these subjective conditions, would necessarily mean the proletariat's dependence on the petty bourgeoisie for administrative, managerial and technical leadership. That would condemn the proletariat to a fate akin to what happened in Russia.

If you wish to call this a "'pure proletarian', 'don't lead the petty bourgeoisie' approach", so be it. I'd be willing to accept that bulky description, especially since its practical outcome is the proletariat taking power in its own name as a class for itself, instead of a so-called "proletarian party" taking power in its own name and ruling "on behalf of" the proletariat.


What does Miles's perspective mean for China today? China has the world's largest concentration of industrial proletarians in history, but those same proletarians also exist in a country riven by regional and national and ethnic divisions with an even larger rural and peasant population. It would seem the Chinese working class must mark time, no? I think that, in fact, China will soon show us the great working class uprising in history.

Political Lesson No. 43: If you're trying to bait your opponent into taking an untenable position, don't tip your hand.

China has seen the petty bourgeoisie in power since 1949. Today, they share it more with the bourgeoisie than at any point since the overthrow of the Guomindang regime, so China more than meets the objective prerequisites. Again, it is in the area of the subjective where there is disagreement. The Chinese working class does not need to "mark time", but prepare itself to take power, along the lines stated above in regards to Egypt.


Or take Israel/Occupied Palestine. The imperialist domination of the Middle East is one of the keys to the current world system, and Israel is the prison warden. A "pure proletarian" approach would seem to suggest revolution is more likely to come from the Israeli Jewish settler colonial working class than the Palestinian and Arab masses--whereas an analysis and perspective based on PR can point to the regional working class as the driving force for the Palestinian revolution, but based on what Miles has said on this thread, his perspective points to the Israeli Jewish working class "taking the lead."

Political Lesson No. 17: Moralism is no substitute for scientific analysis.

To begin with, let me say I would be inclined to spend a while on RTW's flippant approach here, but I don't have that much time on my hands. Suffice to say that, yet again, RTW misunderstands everything. The Palestinian working class has lived under the administration of the petty bourgeoisie, whether in the form of the Israeli military or the Palestinian Authority/Hamas regimes, for decades. Similar can be said of the workers who live in Israel. We communists do not accept the national socialist concept of "reactionary peoples", so we recognize that the liberation of the proletariat in the regions called Israel and Palestine will come about as a result of the united effort by the workers from both areas, and they will resolve together the outstanding democratic tasks of the region. I tend to believe that, out of both necessity and objective reality, it will be Palestinian workers who "take the lead" in this united movement, but it will be a struggle, since nationalism and theocracy stand as the two largest obstacles to building a fighting unity among Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking workers.


Or take the world situation as a whole now, as oppressed masses and workers in the Middle East rise up in courageous struggles for "bread and freedom"--Miles's "pure proletarian" approach would seem to suggest that the workers of the dominant imperialist countries are closer to taking power!

Actually, if the development of the world capitalist system, especially in the period of "globalization", has offered up any historical lessons, it is that the "'pure proletarian', 'don't lead the petty bourgeoisie' approach" (as you put it so sneeringly) is the path to liberation for workers in all countries. On a world scale, the petty bourgeoisie has left its mark on capitalist society, and has become a partner and ally of the bourgeoisie in ruling over society. Taylorism and Fordism raised the petty bourgeoisie into partnership with the bourgeoisie in the advanced capitalist countries (and also, to a large degree, the Russian Soviet Republic). "Globalization" internationalized that phenomenon through the standardizing of industrial supply chains and management.

Today, it is only through a "pure proletarian" approach that the working class can, objectively speaking, take power in its own name. It is through Marx and Engels' concept of permanent revolution, which recognizes that the "final conflict" is between the proletariat and the capitalist system administered by the petty bourgeoisie, that the proletariat takes power and establishes a genuine workers' republic, expropriates both the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, and is able to administer and rule society as a class.

Whether this revolutionary wave begins in the Global South or in the Great Power imperialist centers first is of little relevance. Either way, the proletarian revolution must expand internationally if the transition from capitalism to communism is to begin in earnest. The growth of interdependency and its codification in "globalization" has made it necessary for successful revolutions in the Great Power states to rely on their expansion to the industrial powerhouses of the world economy -- China, Brazil, India, etc. -- for the revolutions to move forward, and vice versa. The road to a successful revolution is now a two-way street, with both the Global North and South needing each other to continue the path to communism.


Miles and NHIA, other than proof-texts from Marx and Engels, what do you have to offer in terms of analysis, theory and strategy to the workers of Egypt today? Of China? Of Palestine? Of the world?

Didn't we go through this before?

[RedTrackWorker]

I don't even see this Bronstein's "permanent revolution theory" as a real ideological question,i see it as an ad-hoc quasi-ideological construction invented solely for the purpose of attacking Stalin and the Soviet Union on the basis of some faux "internationalism".

I don't want to derail the thread either but as this is germane to "permanent revolution", here is a link to the first written explanation of the theory...written in 1904-6, meaning it could not possibly have been invented to attack "the Soviet Union": http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/rp-index.htm.

[RedTrackWorker]

On the other hand, from the perspective of the subjective needs, Egyptian workers are not ready to take power in their own name as a class for itself. They do not have a sufficient level of organization, political or economic, to directly challenge and defeat capitalist rule, nor do they have the knowledge and skills needed to administer society in the transition from capitalism to communism. Calling for a revolution today, based on these subjective conditions, would necessarily mean the proletariat's dependence on the petty bourgeoisie for administrative, managerial and technical leadership. That would condemn the proletariat to a fate akin to what happened in Russia.

Marx famously said that the working class fits itself for power by making the revolution. Of course that doesn't mean that one can answer the question of every particular situation by referring to that quote, but I would argue that's the case in Egypt today. If you only answer one question, please answer this: how can the working class fit itself for power in Egypt today by not putting itself forward to rule society?


Egypt's working class is confronted by a capitalist system where the petty bourgeoisie, in the form of the military and bureaucracy, has ascended to become a junior partner in the capitalist system and has left an indelible mark on society as a whole. Thus, there exists all of the objective prerequisites for a proletarian revolution.
[snip]
China has seen the petty bourgeoisie in power since 1949. Today, they share it more with the bourgeoisie than at any point since the overthrow of the Guomindang regime, so China more than meets the objective prerequisites.
[snip]
The Palestinian working class has lived under the administration of the petty bourgeoisie, whether in the form of the Israeli military or the Palestinian Authority/Hamas regimes, for decades. Similar can be said of the workers who live in Israel.
[snip]
On a world scale, the petty bourgeoisie has left its mark on capitalist society, and has become a partner and ally of the bourgeoisie in ruling over society. Taylorism and Fordism raised the petty bourgeoisie into partnership with the bourgeoisie in the advanced capitalist countries (and also, to a large degree, the Russian Soviet Republic).
[snip]
It is through Marx and Engels' concept of permanent revolution, which recognizes that the "final conflict" is between the proletariat and the capitalist system administered by the petty bourgeoisie, that the proletariat takes power and establishes a genuine workers' republic, expropriates both the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, and is able to administer and rule society as a class.

I have no idea what any of the above means. The petty bourgeois rules Egypt? What does that even mean?

Fordism made the petty bourgeois partners with the big bourgeois in the U.S.? I like to think I try to give the best interpretation of an opponent's argument, but I can't figure this one out. So my grocery store franchise manager rules with Obama because of Fordism?

We have to expropriate the petty bourgeoisie? I request a proof-text please from Marx on that.

How is a capitalism different when ruled by the petty bourgeoisie and what does that have to do with the workers taking power?

[Martin Blank]

Before I answer your last post (the whole thing, not just the one question), I'd like the "proof-text" on the Marx quote you cite below:


Marx famously said that the working class fits itself for power by making the revolution.

I'd like to read the context of the quote, just for my own educational purposes. Thanks in advance.

[RedTrackWorker]

Before I answer your last post (the whole thing, not just the one question), I'd like the "proof-text" on the Marx quote you cite below:

I'd like to read the context of the quote, just for my own educational purposes. Thanks in advance.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm#d4
It's from the German Ideology, Part 1, Section D, "The Necessity of the Communist Revolution", item 4:

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.

[DaringMehring]

Already we run into a problem. It is a major flaw of Trotskyists in general that they try to compartmentalize the Old Man's politics, instead of seeing them as a connected whole. Many "Marxist-Leninists" of different stripes do similar with Lenin. The problem is that the development of political positions flows from a general world outlook, and that outlook serves as the wellspring for an entire body of political viewpoint. Thus, there is a connection between Trotsky's "permanent revolution" and his other positions, insofar as they share a common outlook on the world and society.


The problem comes, when you take that "common outlook" and turn it into one static picture -- connecting Lenin 1905 with Lenin 1917 with Lenin 1923, and saying it's all "Lenin's world view," when in reality dialectics teaches us that all things are constantly changing.

You want to discuss Militarization of Labor -- a heated and controversial issue which Trotsky changed position on. Well, you've got some work to show the common thread with Permanent Revolution, and not just rely on some "eternal Trotsky" like a vulgarian.



2. "That said countries can also act as catalysts and material bastions for more advanced countries revolutions" -- A catalyst, maybe (if there are stong revolutionary workers' movements in those more advanced capitalist countries). But a "material bastion"? No. Russia tried to be that and failed. Expecting one of these "lesser countries" to act as a "material bastion" for revolution in the "advanced countries" is like relying on your unemployed friend for financial assistance. It's an ass-backward concept.


The USSR was not bad off materially compared to some of the tasks it could help with. For instance, it did act as a material bastion to Spain -- the arms they sent were a big addition to the Republican side -- and it could have done much more before hitting material constraints. USSR also sent weapons to East Asia.



3. "No alliance with any bourgeoisie, expropriate them" -- Any bourgeoisie? Does that include the petty bourgeoisie? If so, you're running counter to Trotsky. If not, you're running counter to Marx and Engels. Your pick.


I don't follow you. Seizing the means of production should mean, that most petit bourgeois are unaffected. Though some would be.



4. "Russia 1917. Proved TRUE" -- Really? See, this goes back to my previous comment on compartmentalizing. You can argue that the October Revolution "proved" the power of Trotsky's view on permanent revolution, but you can only do so by ignoring everything that happened following the seizure of power, especially the systematic dismantling of workers' control of production, the political liquidation of the soviets, the annihilation of the best sections of the working class, etc.


The eventual defeat of the revolution isn't evidence that its victory was never possible. It depended on a struggle of living forces with no pre-determined result.

Certainly, they succeeded in fully expropriating the bourgeoisie, which is more than any other revolution can claim.



If the Russian Revolution is your "proof" of the validity of Trotsky's permanent revolution, then you're really little more than an apologist for the bureaucracy and police-state apparatus that was the USSR, and your "revolution" is nothing but state ownership and control -- a dictatorship over the working class. No thanks. I'll take Marx and Engels over Trotsky and Stalin any day of the week.


Typical argument, I'm sure you know the response (failure of international revolution, degeneration of revolution, etc.)



Ah, Trotskyist evangelism at its finest! No one here that I know of is advocating either New Democracy, Menshevism or Stagism. This is a discussion over Trotsky's "permanent revolution" compared to Marx and Engels' concept of permanent revolution. The fact that you respond this way to any kind of criticism is embarrassing for all of us. You are so accustomed to battling "Stalinists" over this question, that you cannot think about what your interlocutors are writing. You should seek out a Russian Civil War re-enacting group; it seems to be more your speed.

If you have some kind of other theory to address this issue I'm happy to hear it. What should they have done Russia 1917, Miles the Wise?

The revolution seems like a high point for all humanity, and in the face of an incredible low of destruction and death; "10 days that shook the world" and struck a huge blow for progress world-wide. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it "re-enacted..."

[Devrim]

TPR argued that in countries where the capitalist class was too weak to carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution on its own, that task would have to be carried out by the workers, and that, once having taken power, they should not then hand power to the bourgeoisie, but make the revolution permanent, and carry forward to socialism.

Capitalism is everywhere now. The old feudal or slave owning classes are gone or have become capitalists. All social relations are capitalist relations. The tasks of the bourgeois revolution have been completed. Thus, there is no need for the proletariat to carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolutions. The only task before them is to overthrow capitalism.

I think that this is the key point. The bourgeois revolution is over. It no longer falls to the working class to complete the tasks of the bourgeois revolution.

I think in a way those who cling to the idea of 'permanent revolution' are condemned to lead the working class into supporting different factions of the bourgeoise in a period where all of said factions are equally against the working class. Ultimately they militate against working class independence and the class becoming a class for itself.

Devrim

[RedTrackWorker]

I think in a way those who cling to the idea of 'permanent revolution' are condemned to lead the working class into supporting different factions of the bourgeoise in a period where all of said factions are equally against the working class. Ultimately they militate against working class independence and the class becoming a class for itself.

Given how many Trotskyists have fallen into popular frontism, I can see a kind of empirical basis for your claim, but I would ask you what faction of the bourgeois did the Fourth International support in the 30's? I don't know how familiar with the LRP's politics you are, but what faction of the bourgeoisie have our political perspectives pointed to in Venezuela, Egypt, China, wherever we've tried to theoretically work out a perspective based on permanent revolution? And the ultimate application of PR so far has been of course the soviets taking power in Russia--whatever criticisms of Bolsheviks policy you may have, did PR lead them to a faction of the bourgeoisie in Russia? If so, why did they not join the Provisional Government? If not, explain more what you mean with this claim.

[Devrim]

but I would ask you what faction of the bourgeois did the Fourth International support in the 30's?

Well as the Fourth International was formed in 1938 that doesn't leave us much space to find one. The one I will choose from the thirties is support for the Chinese state in the war against Japan. Trotsky himself said "all as one for the defence of China!" I think this is a clear case of taking sides in a capitalist war.

Of course by 1941, the Fourth International had taken sides in the Second imperialist war. Trotsky himself was dead by then, but he had made his position clear "We will defend the United States with a workers’ army, with workers’ officers, with a workers’ government, etc. If we are not pacifists, who wait for a better future, and if we are active revolutionists, our job is to penetrate into the whole military machine."


I don't know how familiar with the LRP's politics you are, but what faction of the bourgeoisie have our political perspectives pointed to in Venezuela, Egypt, China, wherever we've tried to theoretically work out a perspective based on permanent revolution?

I am not familiar with them at all.


And the ultimate application of PR so far has been of course the soviets taking power in Russia--whatever criticisms of Bolsheviks policy you may have, did PR lead them to a faction of the bourgeoisie in Russia?

My point was about the change in period, and its application today, not about one hundred years ago.

Devrim

[black_tar_heroin]

Revolution isn't even a prospect today, what relevance can permanent revolution have?

[RedTrackWorker]

Well as the Fourth International was formed in 1938 that doesn't leave us much space to find one. The one I will choose from the thirties is support for the Chinese state in the war against Japan. Trotsky himself said "all as one for the defence of China!" I think this is a clear case of taking sides in a capitalist war.

Okay...I meant the emphasis to be "on the 30's" not the specific form of organization as the Fourth International, so re-phrase to the Bolshevik-Leninist tendency of the 30's. If you think supporting China against Japan is a problem, then I have a problem too--are you also against the the Easter uprising in Ireland and the war of independence? Do you also think that in Spain in 1936 the workers should not have pointed their guns at Franco until they had first vanquished the republic?


Of course by 1941, the Fourth International had taken sides in the Second imperialist war. Trotsky himself was dead by then, but he had made his position clear "We will defend the United States with a workers’ army, with workers’ officers, with a workers’ government, etc. If we are not pacifists, who wait for a better future, and if we are active revolutionists, our job is to penetrate into the whole military machine."

So if the workers govern the U.S. you're still not for defending it? (See http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/conscription78.html which addresses this quote and others.)


My point was about the change in period, and its application today, not about one hundred years ago.

I don't understand this point. You claim that "permanent revolution" somehow (no attempt at explaining the mediation) leads to supporting capitalist forces. The obvious and clearest exception to this seems to be the Bolsheviks not entering the Provisional Government--dealing with exceptions is often a good way to explain a rule. Sure that was a century ago (almost), but what has so changed in the world that the Provisional Government example is not applicable to what you're saying? Answering that would also help clarify your claim.

[graymouser]

It's quite funny; I was re-reading The Eighteenth Brumaire, because my SA branch is reading it for an educational. And I came across this quote:


Therefore the interests of the peasants are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but are now in opposition to bourgeois interests, to capital. Hence they find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task it is to overthrow the bourgeois order.
I find it fascinating, because unlike the private correspondence Miles was putting up a few pages back, here we have a published statement in one of Marx's books - in fact, what I generally consider one of the most important books for introducing the class analysis of politics. And yet it is unambiguously in favor of the peasantry being led by the urban proletariat - stating this leadership as a matter of the natural development of class antagonism.

So: how is Trotsky's concept of the workers leading the petty bourgeois, and in the case of Russia particularly the peasantry, a revision? This idea is plainly in Marx, in the summary chapter of one of his most important works.

There was something else earlier in one of Miles's posts that he wrote, which I found a bit stunning for a supposed Marxist to be using as a basis for policy, and is the main reason I hadn't replied to his previous reply to me. Specifically, he brings up a letter from Engels to Joseph Wedemeyer. This was a perfectly obscure piece of correspondence, that was tucked away at the back of the Marx/Engels collected works. In it, Engels shares a private concern that it could look bad for their party if it were forced into power prematurely and be poorly regarded.

In context, the working class movement was in a state of total political disarray following the debacles of the 1848 revolutions. Engels is expressing some concern - yet he emphasizes that his concerns don't actually matter ("none of this matters a rap") and that his main worry is that their party could be regarded as bête, which means idiotic. This is hardly a ringing denunciation of "premature revolution" but rather a straightforward statement of a very normal human concern; Engels was an intellectual (and a conscious class traitor, a bourgeois who had welded himself programmatically to the proletarian movement - and wouldn't be allowed in Miles's party) who fears that the workers in power before their time could look foolish. This is a molehill, dismissed repeatedly as such, that Miles wants to build an anti-Trotsky mountain out of. Unfortunately the material he has for building it up is rather redolent of the bull that produced it.

A final comment, this one directed at Devrim rather than Miles. I can't find any merit in a position that says that there are no longer tasks of the bourgeois revolution left; every bourgeois revolution, in that its program meant liberty for all, has been left woefully incomplete. Here in the US, we find the most burning example of this in the treatment of racial and national minorities - Black liberation, Latino liberation are tasks of the bourgeois revolution that were never completed. Likewise it still has yet to pay its due to women in countless ways. Looking at the world and drawing a line that says, "The bourgeois revolutions left nothing undone," is simply risible. In fact, there is so much left undone that the proletariat in power will be years in sorting through all the rubbish of the bourgeoisie.

[S.Artesian]

I think that this is the key point. The bourgeois revolution is over. It no longer falls to the working class to complete the tasks of the bourgeois revolution.

I think in a way those who cling to the idea of 'permanent revolution' are condemned to lead the working class into supporting different factions of the bourgeoise in a period where all of said factions are equally against the working class. Ultimately they militate against working class independence and the class becoming a class for itself.

Devrim

The above is a misapprehension of the social forces that drive permanent revolution, and the theory of uneven and combined development.

Permanent revolution is the argument that the "bourgeois revolution" is over in that the organization of capitalist property, the relations of capitalist production cannot support the tasks historically associated with "bourgeois" development-- in particular creation of the so-called "domestic market" by the reorganization of agriculture through the creation of "free soil," "free farming" relations.

Incapable of that reorganization, capitalism finds itself circumscribed, restricted both in terms of capitalist development, the valorization process if you will, and in terms of social development, the labor process if you will. Transportation networks, infrastructure, educational advancement and availability, etc. etc. all are stunted.

Consequently all those "tasks" -- all that material basis for valorization-- now requires the abolition of the property relations embedded, enmeshed, absorbed by, fundamental to, capital itself; the labor process has to overthrow the valorization process, so to speak, to engage the tasks, not of bourgeois or capitalist development [terms which are now self-contradictory] but rather of social development.

Since this configuration of capital in Russia was the product of Russia's relations and position in the world markets, of international capital's penetration into Russia, then the process cannot be successful or completed within the confines of Russia alone, but must be reciprocated in an international revolution.

That's the material, social, and determining backdrop to what is expressed in Trotsky's theory.

I don't know how anyone can argue that based on that analysis, those adhering to PR or uneven and combined development will wind up supporting different factions of the bourgeoisie. First such an argument is essentially anti-materialist--- "I have a theory, therefore I class-collaborate" and secondly, such a claim runs counter to the history of the organizations adhering to PR in China, Spain, Vietnam, etc. etc.

[S.Artesian]

One, or more, things:

Perhaps Miles or NHIA can clarify. It appears to me that two assessments, which I think are mildly antagonistic to each other, are advanced by those comrades about Trotsky's development of the theory of PR:

1. There's nothing new here. Essentially it's old hat, and has been part of the class struggle arsenal of analysis since Marx and Engels wrote of the struggles in 1848.

2. There is something new here, namely it's a revision of Marx and Engel's, revised perhaps to accommodate "alien class elements."

Is it in one or another or both... if 1. it seems odd to me that very few at the time pointed out that it was old hat, and drew the conclusions that "yeah, it's all up to the working class to take power, abolish private property in production, and create the organs of its own power to resolve all these issues." Now maybe one wants to argue that speaks to the "poverty" of those Marxists of that era, but IMO, to blanketly dismiss all the Marxists of that era including Rosa, Connolly etc. -- those who actually led strikes, chaired soviets, organized militias-- as ignorant or "class alien" is a fool's way of dealing with history.

if 2. well see 1. Why wasn't that a big issue, but not with those Marxists, but with the proletariat, the proletariat who actually struck, created soviets, entered militias, formed factory committees? These weren't sheep. These workers knew what issues they were confronting. They took it upon themselves in their soviets to provide for each other and the society, they organized expeditions to the countryside to obtain grain [without forced requisitioning] they arranged the transport of the grain to the cities. But yet, they couldn't see they were being duped, set-up, by the alien petit-bourgeoisie controlling the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the almost everybody? They saw enough to demand "all power to the soviets," so how could they not see the "alien class ideology" of "permanent revolution, the Trojan horse, of the theory?


If both 1 & 2, please explain everything. Hindsight truly is a wonderful thing.


To continue-- Graymouser is correct in citing The 18th Brumaire ... it is Marx's greatest demonstration of historical materialism. And moreover, if permanent revolution is "old hat" then quite clearly the issue of agrarian relations of land, labor and landed labor, was a critical task confronting the proletarian revolution not just in France or Germany in 1848-- after all, the history of all societies, writes Marx, is the history of relations between city and countryside-- but also in Africa, Turkey, Iran, Bolivia, Brazil, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the US [where it takes the form of immigrant labor] today.

Now while Marx and Engels may not have confronted those problems in their writings, that does not mean that those who did, who derived theory of proletarian revolution directly from analysis of those relations between city and countryside, are "revisionists" introducing alien classes into the proletariat's struggle.

[Devrim]

If you think supporting China against Japan is a problem, then I have a problem too--are you also against the the Easter uprising in Ireland and the war of independence? Do you also think that in Spain in 1936 the workers should not have pointed their guns at Franco until they had first vanquished the republic?

I think that you must see that supporting states in wars is different from supporting uprisings, but yes I think that Connolly dragging of militant workers into a doomed uprising led by blood and soil nationalists like Pearse, and supported by German imperialism was a betrayal. I also think that anarchists joining the popular front government and 'postponing the revolution' till after the war was a betrayal.

The analogy with China doesn't work though. That was straight forward supporting of belligerent states in a war.


So if the workers govern the U.S. you're still not for defending it? (See http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/conscription78.html which addresses this quote and others.)

The workers were not about to govern the US. The 4th International didn't think that they were either. It was a transitional demand. Effectively it led to them being recruiting sergeants for allied imperialism.


I don't understand this point. You claim that "permanent revolution" somehow (no attempt at explaining the mediation) leads to supporting capitalist forces. The obvious and clearest exception to this seems to be the Bolsheviks not entering the Provisional Government--dealing with exceptions is often a good way to explain a rule. Sure that was a century ago (almost), but what has so changed in the world that the Provisional Government example is not applicable to what you're saying? Answering that would also help clarify your claim.

My point is that capitalism is now clearly a world system whilst in 1917 it would have been possible to argue that it wasn't.

Devrim

[tir1944]

My point is that capitalism is now clearly a world system whilst in 1917 it would have been possible to argue that it wasn't.
How do you mean this?
Can you elaborate a bit more?

[Devrim]

A final comment, this one directed at Devrim rather than Miles. I can't find any merit in a position that says that there are no longer tasks of the bourgeois revolution left; every bourgeois revolution, in that its program meant liberty for all, has been left woefully incomplete. Here in the US, we find the most burning example of this in the treatment of racial and national minorities - Black liberation, Latino liberation are tasks of the bourgeois revolution that were never completed. Likewise it still has yet to pay its due to women in countless ways. Looking at the world and drawing a line that says, "The bourgeois revolutions left nothing undone," is simply risible. In fact, there is so much left undone that the proletariat in power will be years in sorting through all the rubbish of the bourgeoisie.

They are tasks of the bourgeoise revolution that will never be completed within capitalism.

To me the idea that there are countries which still have to go through that phase at its worst gives the idea that every country in the world will go through some stage of development to become like the Western democracies, or more so the abstract idea of Western democracies.

Devrim

[S.Artesian]

I think that you must see that supporting states in wars is different from supporting uprisings, but yes I think that Connolly dragging of militant workers into a doomed uprising led by blood and soil nationalists like Pearse, and supported by German imperialism was a betrayal. I also think that anarchists joining the popular front government and 'postponing the revolution' till after the war was a betrayal.

First point-- on Connolly: a "betrayal" how? Did he urge the workers to abandon the class struggle ? And please, let's stop with the "supported by German imperialism" stuff. It sounds way too much like Kerensky and the PG denouncing Lenin and Trotsky as agents of German imperialism.

Mistake? Maybe. Maybe more than maybe... but betrayal? Exactly what part of Connolly's previous work did he betray?

Second point-- RTW did not ask you if joining the popular front was a betrayal. Even linear, one dimensional, slavish followers of Trotsky agree with that. Where RTW displays a weakness, and you display a strength, is that he leaves the question at "pointing the guns" at Franco first or second, after dealing with the Republicans, and thus more or less interrupts the "permanence" of the revolution.

Pointing the guns at Franco without organizing the overthrow of the Republican government is a pointless [pardon the pun] exercise. That's the issue. Organizing armed self-defense that does not disable the Republican government was an exercise not in self-sacrifice, but class sacrifice.... like running at the enemy's machine gun nest with you shirt removed, offering your chest to the bullets. Not a strategy for victory.

Rigor, comrades, more rigor, please.

[RedTrackWorker]

The workers were not about to govern the US. The 4th International didn't think that they were either. It was a transitional demand. Effectively it led to them being recruiting sergeants for allied imperialism.

We criticize how Cannon and the SWP applied Trotsky's formulations. At best they become ambiguous. Saying they became "recruiting sergeants" seems a bit much as while they had some slogans that became ambiguous they did not become out and out social patriots overall as the SPD did but the Trotsky quote says he would defend the U.S. "with a workers' government" is different. You say the workers' weren't about to govern the U.S., sure and that means Trotsky wasn't about to call for defense of the U.S. We have several important political differences Devrim but I fail to see how you're interpreting this quote in a fair fashion. And if that's what Trotsky really meant, it's in contradiction to everything else he was writing at the time about not being for "defense of the fatherland" and it's amazing he wouldn't "meant" that in that letter but nowhere else in his political activity.

On Connolly, it was a betrayal of a kind for him to subordinate working class independence to Pearse, a very bad mistake (my understanding is not just that he joined the uprising but merged into the nationalist organization), but that doesn't make the uprising itself a betrayal anymore than it makes strikes lead by class collaborationist leaders betrayals. And like Artesian I have to emphasize, are you serious about that supported by German imperialism line?

On Spain, I'm not sure we disagree S. Artesian or if I wasn't clear. My point wasn't dealing with Franco "first or second" but if it was wrong to shoot at Franco until the republic was vanquished--which was the position of the Bordigists at the time. In other words, Franco is descending on Madrid, do you participate in the defense of the city from Franco--organizing the working class independently and still preparing for the seizure of power (obvious parallel to Kerensky and Kornilov)--or do you sit out the fight, as the Bordigists argued, using the same type of argument that Devrim is that to fight is to subordinate onesself to a faction of the bourgeosie? Of course it was the popular front that crushed the revolution, not Franco--so "Franco first, revolution second" is deadly but a refusal to defend against Franco (or Kornilov) in a bloc would've been deadly...if anyone would have possibly listened to it (which thankfully no one did).

[S.Artesian]

We have a recent answer to your question, RTW, re waiting, or fighting... namely look to Allende's popular front govt in Chile. There Allende himself urged the workers not to fight the coup, making an address on the radio during the coup telling workers to stay home and "trust" in democracy.

You organize to repel the coup. To do that your organizations have to be independent of the "republic," from the popular front, from the provisional government-- whatever the label, from the getgo.

You certainly don't say it doesn't make any difference if Franco or Pinochet defeat the republic or the UP, because in truth... their target isn't the republic or the UP, it's the fact that the UP or the republic is not sufficient to the task of pulverizing the workers. Defend the revolution from military counterrevolution, and oppose the popular front. The popular front is NOT the revolution, as much as the CPs and SPs petty bourgeois would like it to be.

[Martin Blank]

I don't have a lot of time for replies
today. So if I don't respond to everyone, please understand.


Marx famously said that the working class fits itself for power by making the revolution. Of course that doesn't mean that one can answer the question of every particular situation by referring to that quote, but I would argue that's the case in Egypt today. If you only answer one question, please answer this: how can the working class fit itself for power in Egypt today by not putting itself forward to rule society?

First of all, thanks again for posting the link to the Marx quote. It is much appreciated, especially since the passage itself offers a slightly more equivocal approach than your paraphrase. Marx is completely right when he says that the "alteration of men" and their "becom fitted to found society anew" can only come through the process of a "practical movement, a revolution". What I was talking about was the preparatory process that precedes the beginning of the "alteration" and "fitting" -- the education, organization and development of the proletariat to be able to take power, to carry out the revolution itself.

Think of it this way: Marx sees the revolution as something like taking a shower, in that it is designed to aid the proletariat "in ridding itself of all the muck of ages". But to take the shower, you must do some necessary preparatory work: disrobing, turning the water on to a proper temperature, making sure there is ample amounts of soap and shampoo, etc. You don't step into the tub fully dressed and then start doing the things to take a shower. I see our difference in this last point: We need to prepare ourselves and our class brothers and sisters for the necessary task of revolution, not just rush headlong into it, without preparation or proper organization, or else we cannot succeed in ridding ourselves of the "muck of ages".

To answer your question directly, Egyptian workers cannot finally fit themselves "to found society anew" (as in, they cannot complete the process) without putting themselves forward and fighting for a revolution. At the same time, without preparing themselves to take power in their own name, they also cannot fit themselves "to found society anew", since the workers will then have no practical ability or experience in running the society they find cradled in their hands.

This is, in its essence, the difference between the permanent revolution of Marx and Engels, and that of Trotsky: The Old Man's theory places the working class at a disadvantage in the revolution, bereft of any of the necessary education and development needed to take control of society in its own name, while Marx and Engels' theory rests precisely on the question of education and development, especially in the areas that matter most (control and administration of the mode of production and the political system).


I have no idea what any of the above means. The petty bourgeois rules Egypt? What does that even mean?

I'll see if I can give a quick synopsis here, since a full discussion would take us away from the question of permanent revolution and into fundamentally different areas. Anyway,...

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels write of the process by which the petty bourgeoisie becomes transformed under capitalism: "In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, poised between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen." Far from imagining the petty bourgeoisie disappearing, Marx and Engels saw they would be transformed -- "perfected", if you will -- to meet the needs of the mode of production. The petty artisan, peasant, guild manufacturer and petty trader would be replaced by the manager, shopkeeper, bureaucrat, cop, independent professional, technician, farmer, etc. More often than not, this "replacement" was one of occupation, not of people. (Here we get into the question of generations, which takes us on a tangent.)

As capitalism developed throughout the 19th century, it became increasingly difficult for the capitalists, either individually or as a class, to deal with the day-to-day running of its political and economic systems. In the latter years of the Gilded Age, you had the introduction of middle and senior management, and the bureaucracy, in both the economy and in the civil service. By the turn of the 20th century, however, this expanded petty bourgeoisie in capitalist society was as disorganized and chaotic as capitalism itself. At the same time, though, these economic and political institutions continued to grow and require more management, more bureaucrats, more technicians, more cops, etc. The bourgeoisie was in a seemingly impossible situation. And then came Taylor with his Faustian deal: hand over practical control of the political and economic levers of society to the petty bourgeoisie, and, in turn, help to regiment and standardize the roles of the petty bourgeoisie.

With Taylorism came a fundamental change in the relations among classes. No longer was the petty bourgeoisie a mere "supplementary part of bourgeois society", but a junior partner and ally of the bourgeoisie. Economically, the Taylor system standardized not only the management of industry, but standardized management and professional organization themselves. With standardization came stability for the petty bourgeoisie; the place of management and professionals within the mode of production had been codified. Politically, it is from this period that we can note the beginning of the professional career politician as the norm, the exponential growth of civil service bureaucracy and government staffs.

But while the petty bourgeoisie was now in a practical position to carry the construction of capitalist society to its logical conclusion, it would not be until the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 that the opportunity presented itself. The rise of Keynesian economics, the welfare state, the "democratic republic", the New Deal system in the U.S., the social-democratic consensus, etc., were manifestations of an outbreak of class struggle between the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie (the latter in the form of petty-bourgeois democracy). With the entrenchment of these new political and economic arrangements, the petty bourgeoisie had left its indelible mark on society as a whole; it had carved out a place for itself in an alliance with the bourgeoisie.

It was in the years after the Second World War that this kind of arrangement between the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie was effectively "exported" around the world and appeared in various forms. The "official Communists" were relatively unique in their development of this system, since theirs was an internal-external alliance -- the petty bourgeoisie ruling internally, and its alliance with the bourgeoisie occurring through the world system. Most countries, however, developed as an internal alliance and partnership of the bourgeoisie (business owners, etc.) and petty bourgeoisie (the military-officer corps, state security, civil service bureaucracy, etc.), with the former serving as the bridge to the world capitalist system. However, while this alliance model for capitalist rule was common, it was disjointed, disorganized and varied from country to country.

After the collapse of the USSR and the "people's democracies", there was a need among the ruling classes in Great Power centers for international standardization of management and industry, especially since the centers of production had moved out of those countries to places like China, Mexico, Brazil, India, Indonesia, etc. "Globalization" exported the management structures and norms developed in Europe and North America to the rest of the world. At the same time, it also exported the class relations that the current incarnation of the capitalist mode of production needed for support.

The development of the world capitalist system in the last 20 years has brought the petty bourgeoisie into its own as a modern, "perfected" class designed to serve as the administrators and organizers of exploitation and oppression. While the bourgeoisie is still the owning class and senior partner, the petty bourgeoisie is the management of the political and economic institutions; they have direct, day-to-day control over society and its functioning.

Marx and Engels were able to see the development of this alliance of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie through the crucible of revolution. Their theory of permanent revolution takes this into account and seeks to prepare the proletariat for its struggle against the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie.


Fordism made the petty bourgeois partners with the big bourgeois in the U.S.? I like to think I try to give the best interpretation of an opponent's argument, but I can't figure this one out. So my grocery store franchise manager rules with Obama because of Fordism?

Actually, it's more Taylorism than Fordism that is behind the phenomenon. I probably should have left Fordism out of the sentence. Even so, it's not just Taylorism, but everything that followed the rise of Taylorism, that makes your "grocery store franchise manager" a part of the same ruling alliance as Obama.


We have to expropriate the petty bourgeoisie? I request a proof-text please from Marx on that.

Oh, for crying out loud, seriously?! What part of "classless society" do you not understand? What part of "the abolition of classes and class antagonisms" doesn't make sense to you?


How is a capitalism different when ruled by the petty bourgeoisie and what does that have to do with the workers taking power?

The ascension of the petty bourgeoisie into a partnership with the bourgeoisie in ruling over capitalist society is, historically speaking, the end of the ability of that class, or any section of that class, to play a socially-progressive role in society. At that point, when not only has the bourgeoisie constructed state and society after its own image but the petty bourgeoisie, in its wake, has already carried that reconstruction to its logical conclusion (historically, this has taken the form of the democratic republic, the social-democratic consensus, nationalist "socialism" in the Global South, etc.), the petty bourgeoisie ceases to be anything more than a part of one great reactionary mass against the proletariat. It negates the petty bourgeoisie, or any section thereof, as an "ally" of the proletariat.

Further, it acts as the signal that the revolutionary class struggle is now that of the proletariat against the petty bourgeoisie, the latter either being in an alliance with the bourgeoisie or, as in the case of the USSR, China, Cuba and the "people's democracies", having expropriated the bourgeoisie and nationalized the economy under its control.

What this has to do with workers taking power is that it clears away the last great obstacles to the proletariat's struggle for power. Hitherto, the petty bourgeoisie (usually in the form of petty-bourgeois democracy) would seek to use the proletarian movement to come to power -- would rise on their shoulders. The most disastrous example of this is the October Revolution of 1917, when the petty bourgeoisie rose to power on the wave of proletarian revolution. The existence and acknowledgement of the petty bourgeoisie as a ruling class allows the proletariat to properly direct its power in the struggle for liberation -- to not be deceived by those elements of the petty bourgeoisie that look to divert and imprison the proletariat with platitudes about a classless "people" or "masses", or "democratic socialist" schemes that leave the petty bourgeoisie untouched while the bourgeoisie is expropriated, or appeals to unite with the petty bourgeois organizations in the form of a "united front", and so on.

In sum, it has everything to do with maintaining the principle: "That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule."



I am trying to make some more headway on the book I've been researching and writing for well over a year on the role of communists in the American Civil War and Reconstruction, tentatively titled [I]More than Visionaries. It's been a long process, but very educational.

[RedTrackWorker]

You organize to repel the coup. To do that your organizations have to be independent of the "republic," from the popular front, from the provisional government-- whatever the label, from the getgo.

You certainly don't say it doesn't make any difference if Franco or Pinochet defeat the republic or the UP, because in truth... their target isn't the republic or the UP, it's the fact that the UP or the republic is not sufficient to the task of pulverizing the workers. Defend the revolution from military counterrevolution, and oppose the popular front. The popular front is NOT the revolution, as much as the CPs and SPs petty bourgeois would like it to be.

Allende is a good example. The bolded part is key and what I was trying to get at in asking Devrim his perspective--is it supporting a faction of the bourgeoisie to repel Kornilov, Franco or Pinochet? This was the Bordigist line on Spain as I understand it.

[Devrim]

First it seems that we have lost track of the actual point, which was Trotsky's support of the Chinese state in war, and got bogged down in RTW's analogies, but to comment on them briefly:


First point-- on Connolly: a "betrayal" how? Did he urge the workers to abandon the class struggle ? And please, let's stop with the "supported by German imperialism" stuff. It sounds way too much like Kerensky and the PG denouncing Lenin and Trotsky as agents of German imperialism.

Mistake? Maybe. Maybe more than maybe... but betrayal? Exactly what part of Connolly's previous work did he betray?


On Connolly, it was a betrayal of a kind for him to subordinate working class independence to Pearse, a very bad mistake (my understanding is not just that he joined the uprising but merged into the nationalist organization), but that doesn't make the uprising itself a betrayal anymore than it makes strikes lead by class collaborationist leaders betrayals. And like Artesian I have to emphasize, are you serious about that supported by German imperialism line?

No, I am very serious about the supported by German imperialism stuff. The IRB's original plans for the rising involved a German expeditionary force landing in Ireland, and the rising being lead by german officers. Casement recruited for the german army amongst Irish prisoners of war in Germany. The fact that in the end the Germans only committed to providing 20,000 rifles, machine guns and ammunition does not stop the rising being what it was, a nationalist uprising planed taking the side of one of the belligerent imperialist powers in the war, and a betrayal of internationalism.


My point wasn't dealing with Franco "first or second" but if it was wrong to shoot at Franco until the republic was vanquished--which was the position of the Bordigists at the time.

It wasn't the position of the Bordigists. I am not a Bordigist anyway, and the point isn't this, but Trotsky's support of the Chinese state.


We criticize how Cannon and the SWP applied Trotsky's formulations. At best they become ambiguous. Saying they became "recruiting sergeants" seems a bit much as while they had some slogans that became ambiguous they did not become out and out social patriots overall as the SPD did

The position of the Trotskyists in the Second World War was social patriotism.


but the Trotsky quote says he would defend the U.S. "with a workers' government" is different. You say the workers' weren't about to govern the U.S., sure and that means Trotsky wasn't about to call for defense of the U.S. We have several important political differences Devrim but I fail to see how you're interpreting this quote in a fair fashion. And if that's what Trotsky really meant, it's in contradiction to everything else he was writing at the time about not being for "defense of the fatherland" and it's amazing he wouldn't "meant" that in that letter but nowhere else in his political activity.

Do you mean it is totally in contradiction with everything else he was writing at the time such as his defencist position on China? It seems to me completely in line with his position.

Devrim

[Martin Blank]

The problem comes, when you take that "common outlook" and turn it into one static picture -- connecting Lenin 1905 with Lenin 1917 with Lenin 1923, and saying it's all "Lenin's world view," when in reality dialectics teaches us that all things are constantly changing.

Even within dialectical change there are relative consistencies from form to form and moment to moment. The unity and interrelationship among opposing forces is based on this. To use your example, Lenin's views in 1905 and in 1923 may have been fundamentally different, but there were interrelationships and dynamics that tied them together; one was not a complete break from the other, in the sense that they are both the product of shared experience and material conditions. Using dialectics to hide an impressionistic view is no better than doing so to hide a vulgar materialist position.


You want to discuss Militarization of Labor -- a heated and controversial issue which Trotsky changed position on. Well, you've got some work to show the common thread with Permanent Revolution, and not just rely on some "eternal Trotsky" like a vulgarian.

The only thing I'd say about the connection between Trotsky's permanent revolution concept and the militarization of labor is that a common undercurrent to both is a sense of the proletariat as a whole being a passive object in history, not a conscious subject. Both relegate the proletariat to being little more than the class in itself, with an external force (the "proletarian party" or its state) substituting as the class for itself.


The USSR was not bad off materially compared to some of the tasks it could help with. For instance, it did act as a material bastion to Spain -- the arms they sent were a big addition to the Republican side -- and it could have done much more before hitting material constraints. USSR also sent weapons to East Asia.

Sending rifles to Spain or East Asia is not what I think of when it comes to a workers' republic being a "material bastion". Even if the USSR had the capacity to be the world's arms exporter, it would not be a "material bastion" in any meaningful sense. For a workers' republic to be a "material bastion", it would have to be able to fundamentally alter the world relationship of forces. This means not merely in the production of military hardware, but in overall economic production and output, in cultural development, in political advancement, in social progress. It means demonstrating at every step the superiority of those elements of the communist mode of production that are able to begin being constructed in the transition from capitalism to communism (e.g., workers' control of industries and services).


I don't follow you. Seizing the means of production should mean, that most petit bourgeois are unaffected. Though some would be.

So, in other words, it's not a case of expropriating "any bourgeoisie", just the grand bourgeoisie. That's a recipe for extending class rule.


The eventual defeat of the revolution isn't evidence that its victory was never possible. It depended on a struggle of living forces with no pre-determined result.

Certainly, they succeeded in fully expropriating the bourgeoisie, which is more than any other revolution can claim.

I never said victory wasn't possible. What I was saying was that it takes more than the seizure of power for a proletarian revolution to be victorious.


Typical argument, I'm sure you know the response (failure of international revolution, degeneration of revolution, etc.)

The Revolution was stabbed in the back by the Bolsheviks in 1918, with their attacks on the Factory-Shop Committees and attempts to subordinate them to the trade union apparatus. By the time of Germany's November Revolution in 1918, workers' control of production in Russia had effectively ceased to exist, replaced by state-appointed managers and "specialists".

Arguments like you cite in your post, and the countless others that go with them, do not account for the fact that Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks had a very limited conception of "workers' control". They saw workers' control as a matter of "accounting" -- inventory control. The essential decisions were to be made by state-appointed planners and managers, and the workers, through the trade unions, were to do nothing more than see that their decisions were implemented. The workers had no control over their workplace, the trade unions were little more than cops on the lookout for thieves and shirkers, and the decisions of management were unchallenged.

By this logic, any nationalized industry where there exists an arrangement between the state and the unions, whereby the former handles all management decisions and the latter serves to see they are implemented, is the epitome of the "Marxist-Leninist" (including Trotskyist) conception of "workers' control". Personally, I have a number of rather choice terms for an arrangement like this, but none of them are positive.


If you have some kind of other theory to address this issue I'm happy to hear it. What should they have done Russia 1917, Miles the Wise?

Oh, it's the "Who are YOU to question god ... erm, I mean, Lenin?" argument. Good choice. "Miles the Wise" actually has a nice ring to it. Certainly more accurate than "Miles the Merciful". Anyway,...

As much as it would have been better if the Russian working class had more time to develop as a class capable of taking and administering power in its own name, those conditions simply did not exist. In the end, taking power was really the only choice available to the Bolsheviks, since the alternative would have likely meant restoration of the tsar, in one form or another.

At the same time, it was incumbent on the Bolsheviks to be aware of the dangers of such an action under the existing conditions. Anyone who has experience organizing unions or other workers' organizations knows about the risks of doing such work in hot-house conditions. "Hot shop" union organizing is always fraught with problems, since the flare-up in support for a union can just as quickly turn into a flare-up in opposition to a union. Russia was one big "hot shop" in the fall of 1917, due to its material circumstances. In reality, it was a choice between two equally bad situations: 1) take power and risk becoming the opposite of what you set out to be, or 2) don't take power and risk undoing everything gained hitherto.

The political immaturity of the Bolsheviks only made the risks greater. Their statist view on "workers' control" doomed the Soviet Republic from the beginning, since it ended up undermining the very basis of the republic: the workers' councils. The unwillingness to countenance differing opinions from within the working class, to tolerate political differences within the Bolshevik Party after the seizure of power, silenced any check on the Party by the proletariat. The Bolsheviks took power and immediately began to cut its moorings, distancing itself from the working class politically and organizationally.


The revolution seems like a high point for all humanity, and in the face of an incredible low of destruction and death; "10 days that shook the world" and struck a huge blow for progress world-wide. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it "re-enacted..."

See Political Lesson No. 17.

Anyway, we've wandered far from the original intent of this thread. Let's try to put it back on track from now on.

Also, I've burned up all my time on here for today. Until tomorrow (or the next day), cheers.

[S.Artesian]

Well that's all great, and plus it gets everybody off the hook of actually having to come to grips with the conditions, relations that provide that material basis for permanent revolution and uneven and combined development.

So far what I've read from Miles, NHIA, and Devrim regarding PR is a) incorrect as to its derivation, content and application b) sees it as vector for denouncing Trotsky [and Lenin, I guess], c) never deals with the theory's for the proletariat in actual conditions of class struggle d) seems to lead us into a conundrum where social combat erupts, triggered by a conflict between means and relations of production, yet the proletariat is not sufficiently "ready" "educated"-- hasn't gathered up its soap, and towel, and robe, and slippers-- to actually become the subject of that struggle itself.

My point is, that revolution is not like taking a shower, where you get to pick when you turn the water on; how hot you make the water; how many towels you get to use.

It's more like a downpour, a deluge, a flood. PR recognizes just that "tidal" quality of revolution.

[RedTrackWorker]

To answer your question directly, Egyptian workers cannot finally fit themselves "to found society anew" (as in, they cannot complete the process) without putting themselves forward and fighting for a revolution. At the same time, without preparing themselves to take power in their own name, they also cannot fit themselves "to found society anew", since the workers will then have no practical ability or experience in running the society they find cradled in their hands.

This is, in its essence, the difference between the permanent revolution of Marx and Engels, and that of Trotsky: The Old Man's theory places the working class at a disadvantage in the revolution, bereft of any of the necessary education and development needed to take control of society in its own name, while Marx and Engels' theory rests precisely on the question of education and development, especially in the areas that matter most (control and administration of the mode of production and the political system).

How will the workers get "prepared to be prepared" (or however you want to put it) to have administrative "experience in running society" so that they get to the point that you think they should take power? You say they're not ready in Egypt. How will a group of workers ever be ready in your conception? Do you think they have time to do so in Egypt before a bloody reaction sets in to restore the stability of a rather key link in the world capitalist system?


Oh, for crying out loud, seriously?! What part of "classless society" do you not understand? What part of "the abolition of classes and class antagonisms" doesn't make sense to you?

Yes I'm serious. Classless society is the goal, the socialist revolution does not establish socialism or abolish classes but lays the basis for it--I thought you did agree with that part of Marxism (Critique of Gotha Program). So again, I ask where Marx or Engels said we'd expropriate the petty-bourgeoisie as part of the revolution, which is how I read your statement that "the proletariat takes power and establishes a genuine workers' republic, expropriates both the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie".

[RedTrackWorker]

First it seems that we have lost track of the actual point, which was Trotsky's support of the Chinese state in war

Well, I don't understand how only the example of China is relevant to the theory of PR and your claim of supporting capitalists due to it, but here's a link to one of their articles taking up that question http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1942/04/china.htm.


It wasn't the position of the Bordigists. I am not a Bordigist anyway, and the point isn't this, but Trotsky's support of the Chinese state.

I'm no expert in the left communist movement. It was the position of at least Bilan (which I thought was Bordigist) and I had seen other references that Bordigists took that position.

Bilan (http://en.internationalism.org/ir/006_bilan_36_dont_betray.html) said "To desert the military fronts in Spain as an example for the whole proletariat is to disassociate oneself from capitalism. It is to struggle against capitalism and for the working class." There are other articles from them along the same line.

But the point isn't whether you are a Bordigist nor is this only about China but it's about your claim that PR someone leads to supporting a faction of the capitalists. I'm trying to flesh out what you mean by that.


The position of the Trotskyists in the Second World War was social patriotism.

See http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1941/dec/21.htm and http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol06/no01/swp-us.htm, resolutions and reports published against supporting the U.S. during the war, a position which partially lead to 18 of their leaders being imprisoned. But this in particular is getting far afield and if you think you have some kind of evidence, probably deserves its own thread.


Do you mean it is totally in contradiction with everything else he was writing at the time such as his defencist position on China? It seems to me completely in line with his position.

Then why was every other thing other than that one quotation (as you interpret it) by Trotsky arguing against defencism in imperialist nations?

[black magick hustla]

The historic task of the bourgeosie was never "freedom and democracy for all", the historic task of the bourgeosie was to internationalize the economy through capital. its a very old fashioned view that equality and democracy were the tasks of the bourgeosie, its a very formal way of treating capital as opposed to its content, because capital in its barebones has nothing to do with the particular ideology or form of the state. "Democracy comes from dictatorships and viceversa" wrote Bordiga. This whole nonsense of PR is linked with the trotskyists obsession with transitional and minimum programs, which are completely unrealistic (workers' government in the US LOL what was trotsky smoking), so in the eyes of trotskyists, workers will seize the government and have to implement transitional tasks (one of them the extension of bourgeois democratic tasks) through the permanence of revolution. there are no "incomplete" tasks today, you either adhere to the maximum program of the destruction of this civilization, or get swallowed by social democracy and the left wing of capital.

[Leo]

NHIA, Devrim, black magick hustla and others made quite points (although I don't agree with all that has been said) so I won't go into the details of the question.

I just want to make a point on the original question:


What do comrades among the communist left and anarchist tendencies think about the relevance of Trotsky's expansion on the idea of "permanent revolution"?

I think the question is Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution when. In 1906 (Results and Prospects), Trotsky's idea of the permanent revolution was a position challenging the dogma socialist orthodoxy of the time and led him to quite good political conclusions for the period, in other words for arguing a workers revolution rather than a bourgeois revolution in countries where there hasn't been one. Within its historical context, it was a positive theory and formed the basis of Trotsky's internationalist position during the war and for his joining the Bolsheviks who were saying all power to the soviets in 1917. Looking at it today, it is for an overwhelming part only valuable as a historical text. It was a transitory text in the efforts of the left wing of international socialism in understanding the nature of the coming period. It has been far surpassed by other, both more advanced and more clear, well-formulated and complete theories explaining the new period of capitalism (by revolutionaries such as Luxemburg, Mitchell, Mattick etc.) Also it was a text with lots of problematic theoretical positions, some of which has been pointed out and Trotsky expressed himself there regardless basing himself on the framework of the Second International which had not been surpassed by then.

In 1931 (The Permanent Revolution) Trotsky synthesized parts of the post revolutionary official Bolshevik line with some of the ideas he had when he was revolting against the dogmas of the Second International, in order to formulate all of them together in the form what was ultimately destined to serve as the dogma of the Fourth International and the Trotskyist tendency afterwards. Trotsky here is not just clinging to the old theory even though the events left it behind. He is creating the theoretical framework for the Transitional Program, which has been the recipe for Trotskyism to support a faction in every inter-bourgeois conflict for its entire future.

[Geiseric]

I disagree, in countries with supposed "revolutions" happening today, the implementation of perminant revolution would surely change things for the better, in places like Libya and Egypt.

[S.Artesian]

The historic task of the bourgeosie was never "freedom and democracy for all", the historic task of the bourgeosie was to internationalize the economy through capital. its a very old fashioned view that equality and democracy were the tasks of the bourgeosie, its a very formal way of treating capital as opposed to its content, because capital in its barebones has nothing to do with the particular ideology or form of the state. "Democracy comes from dictatorships and viceversa" wrote Bordiga. This whole nonsense of PR is linked with the trotskyists obsession with transitional and minimum programs, which are completely unrealistic (workers' government in the US LOL what was trotsky smoking), so in the eyes of trotskyists, workers will seize the government and have to implement transitional tasks (one of them the extension of bourgeois democratic tasks) through the permanence of revolution. there are no "incomplete" tasks today, you either adhere to the maximum program of the destruction of this civilization, or get swallowed by social democracy and the left wing of capital.

What nonsense, but I commend the comrade for compressing all the nonsense in one paragraph.

First, nobody here thinks the "historical task" of the bourgeoisie is "freedom and democracy for all." This historical task of the bourgeoisie is, was, and will be to make money. That's as far as it goes. Now how they make that money, that's the important part. They do that by expropriating production for subsistence, by forcing labor to present itself in the markets as a commodity, as wage-labor, yielding value and surplus value [rather than simply product and surplus].

That's the valorization process, and the link between the labor process and the valorization process. In order to achieve valorization the bourgeoisie have to amplify the productivity of wage labor, thereby enhancing the productivity of labor power. That is the historic result of the bourgeois order.

However, in so augmenting that productivity of labor power, the productivity itself undermines the valorization process. Capital finds itself unable to transform the relations of production, the property relations in its own image, without undermining those property relations that inform, determine its own organization of labor.

It is that inherent conflict that Trotsky recognizes and gives political expression to in the theory of permanent revolution-- where capital cannot achieve the development of the productivity of labor, the overall social productivity, as doing so erodes the valorization of production itself, and so the social productivity, and most particularly, the productivity and the relations of agriculture are left "unrevolutionized" as the capitalists "embrace" the private property in land in the archaic forms it may exist [the manor, the hacienda, the great house, the plantation] and make those forms units of production for world markets.

Not putting to fine a point on it, that's the thumbnail sketch of the material conditions behind PR, and it is exactly that change-- that running up of capital against the limits of private property that Marx alludes to, that Marx provides the "economics" for, but that Marx does not analyze in any of his volumes of Capital or his historical investigations after 1857.

Secondly, since PR precedes the "transitional program" and since PR generated so much antipathy precisely because it implicitly rejects "minimum" and "maximum" program, putting forward instead the organization of the working class as a class actually abolishing the capitalist relations of production, it's bad faith to assign to the theory of PR the "obsessions of Trotskyists."

As far as there being "no incomplete tasks today"... you don't get around much do you? Know very much about land tenure and landed labor in Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Africa, China, Thailand, etc.? Remember, the material backdrop for the theory of PR was that capital had reached a point where, a point it reproduces daily, the amplification of labor productivity undermines valorization of the production process. This makes capital incapable of advancing social productivity, and causes capital to preserve backward relations.

PR does not say "Oh there are incomplete tasks, therefore a bourgeois revolution is required." PR argues, that the backward "undeveloped" conditions of agriculture, of land tenure, landed labor cannot be resolved by capitalism, and can only be resolved by abolishing the capitalist relations of production internationally.

So if you think that's nonsense, then tell us exactly how the land tenure relations, why the conditions of the indigenous producers in Latin American are the way they are, why agricultural productivity is not uniformly advanced all around the world to levels equal to that of the US, Australia, Western Europe.

[black magick hustla]

What nonsense, but I commend the comrade for compressing all the nonsense in one paragraph.

First, nobody here thinks the "historical task" of the bourgeoisie is "freedom and democracy for all."



you don't get around many marxist circles then. people talk about bourgeois democratic tasks all the time.



It is that inherent conflict that Trotsky recognizes and gives political expression to in the theory of permanent revolution-- where capital cannot achieve the development of the productivity of labor, the overall social productivity, as doing so erodes the valorization of production itself, and so the social productivity, and most particularly, the productivity and the relations of agriculture are left "unrevolutionized" as the capitalists "embrace" the private property in land in the archaic forms it may exist [the manor, the hacienda, the great house, the plantation] and make those forms units of production for world markets.

yes, and it could not have happened otherwise.



Secondly, since PR precedes the "transitional program" and since PR generated so much antipathy precisely because it implicitly rejects "minimum" and "maximum" program, putting forward instead the organization of the working class as a class actually abolishing the capitalist relations of production, it's bad faith to assign to the theory of PR the "obsessions of Trotskyists."

as leo said, PR is the theoretical framework of the transitional program. they are intimately linked.


As far as there being "no incomplete tasks today"... you don't get around much do you?

LOL i am as rootless and cosmopolitan and expatriate-like as you can get son




Know very much about land tenure and landed labor in Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Africa, China, Thailand, etc.? Remember, the material backdrop for the theory of PR was that capital had reached a point where, a point it reproduces daily, the amplification of labor productivity undermines valorization of the production process. This makes capital incapable of advancing social productivity, and causes capital to preserve backward relations.



i am aware of all of this. however, this implies this issues should have been eroded by capital, as if if there was some teleological task needed to be done.




PR does not say "Oh there are incomplete tasks, therefore a bourgeois revolution is required." PR argues, that the backward "undeveloped" conditions of agriculture, of land tenure, landed labor cannot be resolved by capitalism, and can only be resolved by abolishing the capitalist relations of production internationally.

i never said PR implies their needs to be a bourgeois revolution. PR argues that "workers' governments" need to carry on the bourgeois democratic tasks and other sort of social tasks through workers' revolution and making the revolution permanent. however, the key here is the term "workers' goverment", its a term used by trotskyists to avoid using terms like communism, hence all the stupid "workers government" transitional demands, like the hilarious cwi demand of "a confederation of socialist israel and socialist palestine" or other sort of demands that in their attempt to be realistic just sound funny and loopy.



So if you think that's nonsense, then tell us exactly how the land tenure relations, why the conditions of the indigenous producers in Latin American are the way they are, why agricultural productivity is not uniformly advanced all around the world to levels equal to that of the US, Australia, Western Europe.

i never argued that capital was meant to level out all the corners of the world, that is your call. in the same sense the ghettos are the bread and butter of new york city, so are third world hells the bread and butter of today's dynamic world economy. my argument was that PR by implying there are some tasks that need to be done, it formed the theoretical framework for the spinelessness associated with trotskyism.

[RED DAVE]

So if you think that's nonsense, then tell us exactly how the land tenure relations, why the conditions of the indigenous producers in Latin American are the way they are, why agricultural productivity is not uniformly advanced all around the world to levels equal to that of the US, Australia, Western Europe.Nepal is a perfect example of all this.

The bourgeoisie in Nepal are incapable of revolutionizing production, either in agriculture or in industrial production. They are rooted in archaic forms of economic relationships which undermine their "historic role." In order modernize agriculture, they would have to liquidate themselves as a class.

This is why permanent revolution is vital and the Maoist counterpart, the block of four class and New Democracy, is a sham – as seen in China and Nepal.

RED DAVE

[black magick hustla]

Nepal is a perfect example of all this.

The bourgeoisie in Nepal are incapable of revolutionizing production, either in agriculture or in industrial production. They are rooted in archaic forms of economic relationships which undermine their "historic role." In order modernize agriculture, they would have to liquidate themselves as a class.

This is why permanent revolution is vital and the Maoist counterpart, the block of four class and New Democracy, is a sham – as seen in China and Nepal.

RED DAVE

bourgeois revolution is impossible today. the counterpart to maoist-bourgeois revolution is communist revolution, not permanent revolution!

[black magick hustla]

edit wrong thread

[S.Artesian]

you don't get around many marxist circles then. people talk about bourgeois democratic tasks all the time.

The operative word is "here"-- in this thread. Perhaps that wasn't clear to you. But "here" means... "here" and not "many Marxist circles." I'll keep that in mind, however, the next time I decide to go around in a Marxist circle.


as leo said, PR is the theoretical framework of the transitional program. they are intimately linked.
But that has nothing to do with this thread. See above about operative words.


i am aware of all of this. however, this implies this issues should have been eroded by capital, as if if there was some teleological task needed to be done.There's nothing teleological about this. History doesn't have a purpose. Human labor does however; the "model" of "free" capitalist development should have eroded the hacienda, the estate, the great house the plantation, the manor as it did in France in that revolution; as it did in the English Revolution; as it destroyed slavery in the US in that civil war. PR begins with the fact that in Russia, capitalism did not destroy the social forms obstructing the productivity of agricultural, and thereby, social productivity. The requires a bit of explanation, no?




i never said PR implies their needs to be a bourgeois revolution. PR argues that "workers' governments" need to carry on the bourgeois democratic tasks and other sort of social tasks through workers' revolution and making the revolution permanent. however, the key here is the term "workers' goverment", its a term used by trotskyists to avoid using terms like communism, hence all the stupid "workers government" transitional demands, like the hilarious cwi demand of "a confederation of socialist israel and socialist palestine" or other sort of demands that in their attempt to be realistic just sound funny and loopy.


What does that have to do with the OP, and the subject of this thread-- Trotsky's expansion of the theory of PR?



i never argued that capital was meant to level out all the corners of the world, that is your call. in the same sense the ghettos are the bread and butter of new york city, so are third world hells the bread and butter of today's dynamic world economy. my argument was that PR by implying there are some tasks that need to be done, it formed the theoretical framework for the spinelessness associated with trotskyism.Talk about bad faith-- nobody edit: here argued that capital was meant to level out all the corners of the world. PR in fact is an attempt, later elaborated as "uneven and combined development" to account for that unevenness and why that unevenness is an index to the obsolescence of capital. Although perhaps you think there is no need for any explanation as to how and why capitalism manifests itself the way it does, in which case, I hope your comfortable ceding all that nasty kind of economic, social stuff to... Maoists with their new democracy, and Stalinists with their popular fronts etc. etc.

Of course there are tasks that need to be accomplished, that's the whole point of a revolution-- like the task of providing for free education to all; like the task of eliminating racial discrimination. PR argues that none of these tasks can be isolated from the systemic task of overthrowing capitalism.

[RED DAVE]

bourgeois revolution is impossible today. the counterpart to maoist-bourgeois revolution is communist revolution, not permanent revolution!Comrade, whatchou gonna do: establish socialism in Nepal? The material conditions do not exist there.

Should the workers seize power in a country like Nepal, the tasks will be nationalization of industry under workers control, land to the peasants, granting rights to ethnic minorities, universal education, eradication of feudal practices for women, children, gays, etc. But that won't be socialism. It will still be grinding poverty and difficult conditions in a backward land with many of the contradictions still present as remnants of capitalism and surrounded by huge capitalist countries and trying to stay afloat in an increasingly globalized capitalism.

Permanent revolution will mean, before, during and after the revolution, the working class must struggle for its maximum possible achievements, giving, especially, no concessions to the bourgeoisie, native, foreign or comprador. It also means that without revolutionary aid from other revolutionary countries, the survival of the workers state is problematical at best.

Let me add, sort of as an addendum, that I believe that the days of state capitalism, in the form that it existed in the USSR and China are over. While the national bourgoisies of Russian and China are still not capable on their own of completing the bourgeois revolution, in terms of bourgeois economic relations, due to the globalization of capitalism, that part of the revolution can be carried out but not by the so-called national bourgeoisie.

This is the reason why state capitalism lasted roughly 60 years in the USSR, 40 years in China, even less than that in Vietnam and will probably scarcely exist at all in Nepal. And even those holdouts of state capitalism, Cuba and North Vietnam, are succumbing to private capitalism.

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

I think the question is Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution when. In 1906 (Results and Prospects), Trotsky's idea of the permanent revolution was a position challenging the dogma socialist orthodoxy of the time and led him to quite good political conclusions for the period, in other words for arguing a workers revolution rather than a bourgeois revolution in countries where there hasn't been one. Within its historical context, it was a positive theory and formed the basis of Trotsky's internationalist position during the war and for his joining the Bolsheviks who were saying all power to the soviets in 1917. Looking at it today, it is for an overwhelming part only valuable as a historical text. It was a transitory text in the efforts of the left wing of international socialism in understanding the nature of the coming period. It has been far surpassed by other, both more advanced and more clear, well-formulated and complete theories explaining the new period of capitalism (by revolutionaries such as Luxemburg, Mitchell, Mattick etc.) Also it was a text with lots of problematic theoretical positions, some of which has been pointed out and Trotsky expressed himself there regardless basing himself on the framework of the Second International which had not been surpassed by then.

In 1931 (The Permanent Revolution) Trotsky synthesized parts of the post revolutionary official Bolshevik line with some of the ideas he had when he was revolting against the dogmas of the Second International, in order to formulate all of them together in the form what was ultimately destined to serve as the dogma of the Fourth International and the Trotskyist tendency afterwards. Trotsky here is not just clinging to the old theory even though the events left it behind. He is creating the theoretical framework for the Transitional Program, which has been the recipe for Trotskyism to support a faction in every inter-bourgeois conflict for its entire future.

Coincidentally, what you just posted coincides with CPGB comrade Mike Macnair's criticisms of Permanent Revolution, as paraphrased by Zanthorus:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/leon-trotskys-permenant-t142346/index.html?p=1878708


There was also a certain amount of economism latent in Trotsky's perspective. In his recent talk on Permanent Revolution at Communist University '10, Mike Macnair pointed out that there is something of a shift between the Trotsky of Results and Prospects and the Trotsky of The Permanent Revolution. In the latter he seems to adopt the perspective that the democratic revolution must inevitably lead to the socialist revolution in backwards countries. Macnair points out that this perspective has lead Trotskyists away from Trotsky's own opposition to class collaborationism and right back into the mire of popular frontism, supporting bourgeois-nationalist movements in backwards countries in the belief that socialist revolution would/will inevitably spring out of them. I have seen one Trotskyist on here cite the Cuban coup d'etat as an example of Permanent revolution! The latent economism can also be seen in Trotsky's 1938 Transitional Program, the basic point of which is that capitalism is so weak that we don't need proper socialist measures, we just need to make demands that cannot be implemented within capitalism, and the struggle for socialism will spring out of these struggles for reformist demands. If reformist demands are all that is needed, of course, then the best thing for revolutionaries to do is not to undertake the task of raising class consciousness, but to simply 'go to the masses', and evolve the struggle for socialism out of immediate economic struggles.

[RED DAVE]

I have seen one Trotskyist on here cite the Cuban coup d'etat as an example of Permanent revolution!People have all kinds of weird ideas, and some Trots definitely had this notion, which was dead wrong.


The latent economism can also be seen in Trotsky's 1938 Transitional Program, the basic point of which is that capitalism is so weak that we don't need proper socialist measures, we just need to make demands that cannot be implemented within capitalism, and the struggle for socialism will spring out of these struggles for reformist demands.Dead wrong. This is the opposite of economism. Economism states, basically, that socialism will spring from economic victories that undermine capitalism. The transitional method puts forth demands that are necessary for everyday life, such as healthcare, but which capitalism will not or cannot provide. Soch a healthcare demand would be, in and of itself, economism in England in the 1940s, but not so in the USA now.


If reformist demands are all that is needed,One more time, transitional demands are not reformist demands.


of course, then the best thing for revolutionaries to do is not to undertake the task of raising class consciousness, but to simply 'go to the masses', and evolve the struggle for socialism out of immediate economic struggles.Now that's economism.

RED DAVE

[S.Artesian]

Originally Posted by Zanthorus
The latent economism can also be seen in Trotsky's 1938 Transitional Program, the basic point of which is that capitalism is so weak that we don't need proper socialist measures, we just need to make demands that cannot be implemented within capitalism, and the struggle for socialism will spring out of these struggles for reformist demands. Look, I'm no Trotskyist, opposing vanguards, the view that the "crisis of humanity reduces itself to a crisis of leadership, finding Lenin's take on imperialism woefully inadequate....I could go on and on... but if you're going to make real criticisms of Trotsky, you have to display a bit of understanding as to what the transitional program was all about. Not to put too fine a point on it, after the defeats of the proletariat in Spain, Germany, and with the continued romance with the "popular front," the transitional program is nothing other than a programmatic basis for a united front of the working class; areas where the most advanced and less advanced elements in the working class could engage in common action, in common class action and common class struggle against the bourgeoisie.

That's the, once again, class relation behind the offering of the program. So if that's the origin, the determinant of the program we need to ask two things 1) how appropriate are the demands, i.e. the tactics, to the strategy, i.e. united class front, and 2) how well does the "follow through" on this program create the basis for its own superseding by the struggle for revolutionary power by the united class?

[Leo]

I disagree, in countries with supposed "revolutions" happening today, the implementation of perminant revolution would surely change things for the better, in places like Libya and Egypt. I think this comment by itself shows how obsolete the permanent revolution is today.

Trotsky, when writing in 1906 was very much under the influence of what went on the previous year. He reached his theory because he had seen how significant and revolutionary a factor the proletariat was in a country which was supposed to have a bourgeois revolution before a proletarian one, in a country ruled by a state at the top level of which sat a class other than the bourgeoisie, not as figureheads but as an influential social force.

Can the same thing be said in any way about Mubarak and Qaddafi? Were they not bourgeois? Are Egypt and Libya less capitalist than the countries of the West? Is any revolution other than a full fledged proletarian revolution on the agenda in these countries?

What exactly would the permanent revolution mean for Egypt or in Libya? Whatever it would do, how would it do it exactly?

See RED DAVE is very clear on the answer to these questions:


Nepal is a perfect example of all this.

The bourgeoisie in Nepal are incapable of revolutionizing production, either in agriculture or in industrial production. They are rooted in archaic forms of economic relationships which undermine their "historic role." In order modernize agriculture, they would have to liquidate themselves as a class.

This is why permanent revolution is vital and the Maoist counterpart, the block of four class and New Democracy, is a sham – as seen in China and Nepal. It is clear here that the permanent revolution today is nothing but one of the many ideologies of capitalist "modernization".

And of course, when this is pointed out, the question comes:


whatchou gonna do: establish socialism in Nepal? The material conditions do not exist there. In response to which, one is obliged to point out to your fellow defender of the permanent revolution the fact that socialism can't be established in a single country. Neither can there be in a single country an actual revolution today, that is a proletariat revolution, which is not a part and expression of a worldwide revolutionary upsurge of the working class even if it is the first one.

[Martin Blank]

It's quite funny; I was re-reading The Eighteenth Brumaire, because my SA branch is reading it for an educational. And I came across this quote:

It is quite funny, especially since you rip that quote out of its context just to make your point. The entire passage up to the point where you begin citing talks about how the peasantry was having its lands taken away, how peasants were being forced to live in caves, how they were to be counted among the paupers and vagabonds, how they left the countryside to come to the city for work and survival. These were the peasants Marx saw as becoming "natural allies" of the proletariat: the landless peasants who were becoming proletarians.


I find it fascinating, because unlike the private correspondence Miles was putting up a few pages back, here we have a published statement in one of Marx's books

The passages I cited (apart from Engels' admonition to Weydemeyer) were from Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany, hardly "private correspondence".

[Martin Blank]

If both 1 & 2, please explain everything. Hindsight truly is a wonderful thing.

Yes, it is. It allows us to look back and see what went wrong, instead of spending the rest of our lives making shallow excuses for fundamental mistakes (or, similarly, simply papering over them, because re-thinking old dogmas makes one's head hurt).

I fully understand that, when it comes to certain works by Marx and Engels, they were not even published until after the 1917 October Revolution. This is especially true of their correspondence. Nevertheless, those writings do offer a greater insight into the method and logic used by Marx and Engels to analyze what was going on around them. It is a shame that attempts to integrate those writings into the full body of work and full scope of the methodology are derided by you and others, for pretty much the sole purpose of avoiding having to re-think the positions you've held for so long.

Marx and Engels had written about what we now call combined and uneven development throughout the 1848 revolutions -- certainly, the best time to write about it, as far as I'm concerned. It is unfortunate that Marx was not able to expand on this point during his lifetime; however, it seems that, looking through the manuscripts for what became the third volume of Capital, Marx was coming back to the issue, in the context of classes and the relationship between them and the development of society. Nevertheless, it can be fairly said that they did see combined and uneven development taking place, and that not only their understanding of the need for "simultaneous" revolution in the advanced capitalist countries was predicated on it, but so was their slogan of permanent revolution, which rejected any support to the petty bourgeoisie rising to power on the shoulders of the proletariat by rejecting any alliance with them.

I would argue that the rise of the Second International and the development of the social-democratic parties did result in many of the revolutionary writings of Marx and Engels being buried under a mountain of dead dogs. I need only remind you of the fight between the editors of Neue Zeit and Engels over the editing of his introduction to Class Struggles in France to demonstrate the example. This left the more radial leftwing elements in the International, including the Bolsheviks and Trotsky's group, groping in the dark on specific subjects. Placed in the balance of relatives, Trotsky's permanent revolution was better and closer to Marx and Engels' views than was, say, Kautsky's concept of revolution; similarly, the Bolsheviks were, relatively speaking, better than the Mensheviks, and so on.

Had I been in Russia in 1917, and had known only what was available, in terms of Marx and Engels' writings, I would have been a member of the Bolsheviks and generally supported Trotsky's writings in Results and Prospects. But that's neither here nor there. We are not in 1917, this is not Russia at that time, and we have almost 94 years of experience and understanding in between. Hindsight truly is a wonderful thing, as it allows us to place events in a more complete context and analyze them more carefully.


To continue-- Graymouser is correct in citing The 18th Brumaire ... it is Marx's greatest demonstration of historical materialism. And moreover, if permanent revolution is "old hat" then quite clearly the issue of agrarian relations of land, labor and landed labor, was a critical task confronting the proletarian revolution not just in France or Germany in 1848-- after all, the history of all societies, writes Marx, is the history of relations between city and countryside-- but also in Africa, Turkey, Iran, Bolivia, Brazil, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the US [where it takes the form of immigrant labor] today.

Graymouser's quote was an abuse of Marx. It redacted the entire context to the single sentence for no reason other than to prove his point, which was to make Marx appear to be favorable to the petty bourgeoisie. It was dishonest and an embarrassment to everyone. In other words, it was pretty much what I expected.


Now while Marx and Engels may not have confronted those problems in their writings, that does not mean that those who did, who derived theory of proletarian revolution directly from analysis of those relations between city and countryside, are "revisionists" introducing alien classes into the proletariat's struggle.

In and of itself, that's true. I have no issues with honest Marxian communists working to methodologically extend the body of analysis to include new questions that neither Marx nor Engels faced in the 19th century. Indeed, without such work, our theory and program would be little more than an exhibit in a political wax museum. But if one is going to do such work, it should not be done half-assed; every effort should be made to fully understand and grasp what Marx and Engels wrote and understood before finally embarking on the analysis of the new issue. Now, perhaps Trotsky could be excused on this, considering that not all of Marx and Engels' writings were available to him as they are to us. But what that means to me is that his theories have to be viewed with a critical eye, and the shortcomings of his theories need to be pointed out.

[graymouser]

It is quite funny, especially since you rip that quote out of its context just to make your point. The entire passage up to the point where you begin citing talks about how the peasantry was having its lands taken away, how peasants were being forced to live in caves, how they were to be counted among the paupers and vagabonds, how they left the countryside to come to the city for work and survival. These were the peasants Marx saw as becoming "natural allies" of the proletariat: the landless peasants who were becoming proletarians.
That's either false, if you mean "becoming proletarians" in the sense that the peasantry were being transformed sociologically into the working class, or it means your entire approach is wrong, if you mean that the peasantry were becoming proletarians in the Roman sense of not owning property. The Trotskyist analysis of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry is based on exactly these circumstances: impoverishment, usury and marginalization of the peasantry. Trotsky's analysis of the Russian peasants in Results and Prospects, crushed by debt and taxes and constantly a bad harvest away from starvation, can not be painted as qualitatively different from Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire unless you are being disingenuous in an attempt to score political points. Also, you are unable to identify why the proletarians would be leaders of these peasants if Marx only meant that the peasants were about to be proletarians themselves; it makes no sense politically.

[Martin Blank]

So far what I've read from Miles, NHIA, and Devrim regarding PR is a) incorrect as to its derivation, content and application b) sees it as vector for denouncing Trotsky [and Lenin, I guess], c) never deals with the theory's for the proletariat in actual conditions of class struggle d) seems to lead us into a conundrum where social combat erupts, triggered by a conflict between means and relations of production, yet the proletariat is not sufficiently "ready" "educated"-- hasn't gathered up its soap, and towel, and robe, and slippers-- to actually become the subject of that struggle itself.

My point is, that revolution is not like taking a shower, where you get to pick when you turn the water on; how hot you make the water; how many towels you get to use.

It's more like a downpour, a deluge, a flood. PR recognizes just that "tidal" quality of revolution.

So, in other words, what? Do nothing? Prepare for nothing? Leave it all to a "vanguard party"? A managerial elite?

You know what happens to people who don't prepare for a flood? They drown.

[Martin Blank]

How will the workers get "prepared to be prepared" (or however you want to put it) to have administrative "experience in running society" so that they get to the point that you think they should take power?

This is actually a very good question and, again, I'm glad RTW posted it. I do think there are ways to help prepare for workers to take control of their workplaces, their communities and society as a whole. A decent starting point, IMO, would be the writing and publishing of basic pamphlets and booklets that explain the meaning of workers' control of production, what that would entail on the workplace floor, the role of collective management and accounting, etc. There could be a basic primer that acts as an introduction, followed by a specific booklet for each kind of workplace.

For example, RTW, you could do this for where you work. You could gather together workers from the different jobs and outline what needs to be done on a daily basis and how they can be done in a context where workers' control would be the norm (as opposed to the current system of managers and bosses). You can try to get your hands on the forms and documents that managers use and adapt them for use by a workplace committee. In short, you can compile a basic organizing pamphlet that will aid any worker in your industry in the process of controlling the workplace along with their co-workers. If a printed form is not adequate, then you could put together a PowerPoint presentation and hold meetings on the subject, do a series of instructional videos, etc.

Something like this begins that process of preparation -- begins to arm workers with the skills and knowledge needed to take control of society. It's not a difficult task at all. We started working on a basic primer a couple months ago, and when that's done we're going to start writing specific pamphlets for the workplaces where we have members. These will eventually have videos to go along with them as supplements, as well as other multimedia presentations.

Does this really seem like something too difficult to grasp? This is work we all can do now, and we can link it to our practical activity in the workplace, in our communities, etc.


You say they're not ready in Egypt. How will a group of workers ever be ready in your conception? Do you think they have time to do so in Egypt before a bloody reaction sets in to restore the stability of a rather key link in the world capitalist system?

They might have time in Egypt to do some of this kind of preparatory work. Pamphlets, booklets and such can be done quickly, especially if they are being done by workers with a relatively high level of class consciousness (which will mean that they have already begun thinking about the question). If they don't have the time, though, that will lead to problems down the road. Let me be clear: In spite of my concerns about the effects of a lack of preparation, I am not suggesting that Egyptian workers should refuse to act. Quite the opposite! What I am saying, though, is that it is a duty of communists in Egypt, under such conditions, to be conscious of the risks associated with workers taking power without proper preparation and to be working to aid in arming workers with the necessary knowledge and skills to be able to hold control of society in their hands.


Yes I'm serious. Classless society is the goal, the socialist revolution does not establish socialism or abolish classes but lays the basis for it--I thought you did agree with that part of Marxism (Critique of Gotha Program). So again, I ask where Marx or Engels said we'd expropriate the petty-bourgeoisie as part of the revolution, which is how I read your statement that "the proletariat takes power and establishes a genuine workers' republic, expropriates both the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie".

Marx's view on the expropriation of the petty bourgeoisie is not as straightforward as one can pose the issue today, and for good reason. It is not that he rejected the idea of the petty bourgeoisie being expropriated; rather, it was his view, and that of Engels, that the petty bourgeoisie would be expropriated by the bourgeoisie:


Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. (Chapter 2: Proletarians and Communists, Communist Manifesto; boldface mine)

This theme is repeated throughout Marx and Engels' writings. And in many respects, they were right about it.

Most of the tangible (i.e., non-intellectual) property held by the petty bourgeoisie, then and now, is property that is really "owned" by the bourgeoisie, through mortgages and loans, through consignments and commission-work, etc. Who really owns your corner grocery store? The banks and lenders. Who really owns the local gas station? Either a major chain (e.g., Speedway/SuperAmerica) or the bank. In this sense, it is fair to argue that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie is also the expropriation of the petty bourgeoisie, since the latter are indebted to the former, and their property is collateral held by banks and other investment houses.

This accounts for most, but not all, of the property held by the petty bourgeoisie. Leaving aside "intellectual property" for the moment, we do see that there is a thin layer of petty-bourgeois small business owners who are not wholly indebted to the bourgeoisie -- who actually do own their property and small slice of capital. What Marx could not foresee was that the alliance of the two classes that would develop in the 20th century would inaugurate a process of artificial maintenance, through special tax codes and incentives to the petty bourgeoisie. The relatively linear process Marx and Engels wrote about was disrupted, and the petty bourgeoisie was able to stabilize its levels of property ownership (and, thus, stabilize itself as a class) with the assistance of these state-sponsored programs. These elements would escape relatively unscathed from the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, if expropriation was so limited.

It is clear, though, that Marx and Engels agreed with expropriating the petty bourgeoisie, but they saw it taking place in a different form: through the continued growth of the capitalist mode of production. They did not completely anticipate what the rise of the petty bourgeoisie into the position of being a junior partner with the bourgeoisie would mean. They did expect that the process would be slowed down, to wit:


They [the petty bourgeoisie] further demand the removal of the pressure exerted by big capital on small capital through the establishment of public credit institutions and the passing of laws against usury, whereby it would be possible for themselves and the peasants to receive advances on favourable terms from the state instead of from capitalists;... (Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, March 1850)

But Marx and Engels conceived of it merely as a slowing down, not a halting or reversal, of the process of expropriation of the petty bourgeoisie by the bourgeoisie. That is, they still expected the petty bourgeoisie to be expropriated by the bourgeoisie before the proletariat was able to overthrow and expropriate the capitalist class.

But that did not happen. Why? This is where our analysis of the development of class relations began. I summarized much of this in a previous post, so I won't repeat myself here.

So, in direct answer to your question, Marx and Engels did not say we -- as communists; as the proletariat -- would expropriate the petty bourgeoisie, because they believed it would already be done for us by the bourgeoisie, and that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie would also mean the expropriation of petty bourgeoisie, since the latter's property was actually owned by the former. Today, the situation is somewhat different, given the use of state resources to maintain and stabilize the petty bourgeoisie, and thus it is wholly appropriate to speak of the expropriation of both the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie as part of the revolutionary process.

[S.Artesian]

So, in other words, what? Do nothing? Prepare for nothing? Leave it all to a "vanguard party"? A managerial elite?

You know what happens to people who don't prepare for a flood? They drown.

Strawman. or Strawmen. That's not what the issue is. Of course you "prepare." As we used to say "proper planning prevent piss-poor performance." But what we prepare for is the fact that a revolutionary rarely, if ever appears from the getgo as a simple, linear, working class vs. bourgeoisie struggle for control, expropriation of the means of production, or the abolition vs. expropriation of capital.

And more than that, the bourgeoisie, the petit-bourgeoisie will act tirelessly to obscure, deny, deflect, co-opt, suppress, recuperate what is at core, what will be shown to be essentially as a conflict between labor and capital, into the forms, terms, organizations, ideologies, etc. of "democratic reform," "national unity," class collaboration-- look at Peron in Argentina, Lula in Brazil, Allende in Chile, Bachelet in Chile, Morales in Bolivia, the MNR in Bolivia, Cardenas the older and Cardenas the younger in Mexico, Mujica in Uruguay.

And the methods so used-- besides rhetoric, besides the police, and the army-- is the argument about "development;" about the minority status of the working class; about the "political immaturity" of the workers and the poor; about, most importantly, agriculture and the relations of landed property and labor.

Permanent revolution apprehends the momentary "democratic" expression of the struggle as a kind of "anticipatory nostalgia," nostalgia for a democratic, expanding capitalism that has never truly existed. EDIT: PR can answer those claims about development, the numbers and ability of the proletariat, about landed property and agricultural relations with a program of class power as opposed to a class collaborationist program.

This:

It is clear, though, that Marx and Engels agreed with expropriating the petty bourgeoisie, but they saw it taking place in a different form: through the continued growth of the capitalist mode of production. They did not completely anticipate what the rise of the petty bourgeoisie into the position of being a junior partner with the bourgeoisie would mean. They did expect that the process would be slowed down, to wit:
Exactly. And what is analogous to the petit-bourgeoisie? The peasantry. Individual subsistence, or "subsistence +" production in agricultural. Marx and Engels saw that being dissolved by capitalist production. But the fact was, it wasn't. The process was interrupted, incomplete, and unable to be resolved in capitalism. That's where permanent revolution comes in-- as the process of "expropriating" the petit-bourgeoisie in town and countryside is inseparable from the process of amplifying the productivity of labor, the total social productivity, which is now, as then, in conflict with valorization, and will destabilize the relations of private property. Marx and Engels clearly did not see capitalism running up against that limit, the limit that is itself, when they wrote about capitalism, accumulation, or about "permanent revolution" in 1848.

[tir1944]

The peasantry....is not a homogeneous "group",nor is it a class in its own.Class war exists between the kulak and the poor peasant(rural proletarian).
Sorry if i misunderstood you.


...in conflict with valorization, and will destabilize the relations of private property.But what if the "destabilization of the relations of private property" is necessary for the process of "amplifying the productivity of labor, the total social productivity" to start/be possible in the first place?

[Homo Songun]

All social relations are capitalist relations. The tasks of the bourgeois revolution have been completed.

All social relations everywhere are capitalist in nature? I'm sorry, but this is absurd.

[S.Artesian]

Yes, it is. It allows us to look back and see what went wrong, instead of spending the rest of our lives making shallow excuses for fundamental mistakes (or, similarly, simply papering over them, because re-thinking old dogmas makes one's head hurt).

Could you specify who here is "spending his/her life making shallow excuses for fundamental mistakes"? Better yet, what are the fundamental mistakes in PR, in uneven and combined development. What are the fundamental mistakes in the analysis that shows capitalism introjecting its most advanced technical and social relations of production into the midst of "archaic" social and technical relations of agricultural production; of those archaic relations adapting themselves to become units of production in the world markets; of capitalism adapting itself to property relations that obstruct the productivity of labor?


I fully understand that, when it comes to certain works by Marx and Engels, they were not even published until after the 1917 October Revolution. This is especially true of their correspondence. Nevertheless, those writings do offer a greater insight into the method and logic used by Marx and Engels to analyze what was going on around them. It is a shame that attempts to integrate those writings into the full body of work and full scope of the methodology are derided by you and others, for pretty much the sole purpose of avoiding having to re-think the positions you've held for so long.
Could you be more specific please and point out where Marx and Engels say in their studies of India, or Ireland, or anywhere point out this uneven and combined economic, social configuration of capitalist technical and social relations?


Marx and Engels had written about what we now call combined and uneven development throughout the 1848 revolutions -- certainly, the best time to write about it, as far as I'm concerned. It is unfortunate that Marx was not able to expand on this point during his lifetime; however, it seems that, looking through the manuscripts for what became the third volume of Capital, Marx was coming back to the issue, in the context of classes and the relationship between them and the development of society. Nevertheless, it can be fairly said that they did see combined and uneven development taking place, and that not only their understanding of the need for "simultaneous" revolution in the advanced capitalist countries was predicated on it, but so was their slogan of permanent revolution, which rejected any support to the petty bourgeoisie rising to power on the shoulders of the proletariat by rejecting any alliance with them.
You think? I don't, I don't think that was the best time to write about it, as it was not clear that the limits to capitalist accumulation would manifest themselves in almost every continent, save the sub-continent of Western Europe [and even there, Germany] or North America [and even there, Mexico] during the 1848-1849 period.

When do I think would have been the best time-- the "long deflation" of 1873-1896, when these forces really started to take shape in Cuba, in the Philippines, in Russia, in Mexico, in Indonesia, in Argentina, in Vietnam. Unfortunately, for whatever reasons Marx spent almost no time [at least as far as we can tell so far from his published works, examining the long deflation and the movement of US capital in Mexico; British capital in Argentina; French and Dutch capital in Asia and the impact of those movements on relations of production in agriculture.

And whether or not they saw uneven and combined development on the horizon, when u & c development was becoming the signature aspect of international movement of capital, they did not explore it, as far as we can tell.


I would argue that the rise of the Second International and the development of the social-democratic parties did result in many of the revolutionary writings of Marx and Engels being buried under a mountain of dead dogs. I need only remind you of the fight between the editors of Neue Zeit and Engels over the editing of his introduction to Class Struggles in France to demonstrate the example. This left the more radial leftwing elements in the International, including the Bolsheviks and Trotsky's group, groping in the dark on specific subjects. Placed in the balance of relatives, Trotsky's permanent revolution was better and closer to Marx and Engels' views than was, say, Kautsky's concept of revolution; similarly, the Bolsheviks were, relatively speaking, better than the Mensheviks, and so on.
That's fine, so it sounds like you should be giving credit to Trotsky for seeing through this-- for being able to base his analysis on the actual relations and configuration of capitalist production, internationally, no?, rather than spend his time "making shallow excuses for fundamental mistakes (or, similarly, simply papering over them, because re-thinking old dogmas makes one's head hurt)" as you so correctly put it.




Graymouser's quote was an abuse of Marx. It redacted the entire context to the single sentence for no reason other than to prove his point, which was to make Marx appear to be favorable to the petty bourgeoisie. It was dishonest and an embarrassment to everyone. In other words, it was pretty much what I expected.
No, Graymouser's quote is not an abuse of Marx. I reproduce below an extended section from The 18th Brumaire that shows the deep, sophisticated, incisive analysis Marx made of the condition of the peasantry, and its actions as a class arising from those conditions:


The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.

Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: “Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.” After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.



But, it may be objected, what about the peasant uprisings in half of France,the raids of the army on the peasants, the mass incarceration and transportation of the peasants?



Since Louis XIV, France has experienced no similar persecution of the peasants “on account of demagogic agitation.”



But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes but his modern Vendée


[emphasis added, obviously]



The three years’ stern rule of the parliamentary republic freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and revolutionized them, even though superficially; but the bourgeoisie violently repulsed them as often as they set themselves in motion. Under the parliamentary republic the modern and the traditional consciousness of the French peasant contended for mastery.



The process took the form of an incessant struggle between the schoolmasters and the priests. The bourgeoisie struck down the schoolmasters. The peasants for the first time made efforts to behave independently vis-à-vis the government. This was shown in the continual conflict between the mayors and the prefects. The bourgeoisie deposed the mayors. Finally, during the period of the parliamentary republic, the peasants of different localities rose against their own offspring, the army. The bourgeoisie punished these peasants with sieges and executions. And this same bourgeoisie now cries out against the stupidity of the masses, the vile multitude that betrayed it to Bonaparte. The bourgeoisie itself has violently strengthened the imperialism of the peasant class; it has preserved the conditions that form the birthplaces of this species of peasant religion. The bourgeoisie, in truth, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses so long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary.



In the uprisings after the coup d’état, a part of the French peasants protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of December 10, 1848. The school they had gone to since 1848 had sharpened their wits. But they had inscribed themselves in the historical underworld; history held them to their word, and the majority was still so implicated that precisely in the reddest departments the peasant population voted openly for Bonaparte. In their view, the National Assembly had hindered his progress. He has now merely broken the fetters that the towns had imposed on the will of the countryside. In some parts the peasants even entertained the grotesque notion of a convention with Napoleon.



After the first Revolution had transformed the semi-feudal peasants into freeholders, Napoleon confirmed and regulated the conditions in which they could exploit undisturbed the soil of France which they had only just acquired, and could slake their youthful passion for property. But what is now ruining the French peasant is his small holding itself, the division of the land and the soil, the property form which Napoleon consolidated in France. It is exactly these material conditions which made the feudal peasant a small-holding peasant and Napoleon an emperor. Two generations sufficed to produce the unavoidable result: progressive deterioration of agriculture and progressive indebtedness of the agriculturist. The “Napoleonic” property form, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition of the emancipation and enrichment of the French countryfolk, has developed in the course of this century into the law of their enslavement and their pauperism. And just this law is the first of the “Napoleonic ideas” which the second Bonaparte has to uphold. If he still shares with the peasants the illusion that the cause of their ruin is to be sought not in the small holdings themselves but outside them – in the influence of secondary circumstances – his experiments will shatter like soap bubbles when they come in contact with the relations of production.



The economic development of small-holding property has radically changed the peasants’ relations with the other social classes. Under Napoleon the fragmentation of the land in the countryside supplemented free competition and the beginning of big industry in the towns. The peasant class was the ubiquitous protest against the recently overthrown landed aristocracy. The roots that small-holding property struck in French soil deprived feudalism of all nourishment. The landmarks of this property formed the natural fortification of the bourgeoisie against any surprise attack by its old overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century the urban usurer replaced the feudal one, the mortgage replaced the feudal obligation, bourgeois capital replaced aristocratic landed property. The peasant’s small holding is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profits, interest, and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the agriculturist himself to see to it how he can extract his wages. The mortgage debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French peasantry an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this enslavement by capital toward which its development pushes it unavoidably, has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes. Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in caves, a large number of which have but one opening, others only two and the most favored only three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist’s caldron of capital. The Code Napoléon is now nothing but the codex of distraints, of forced sales and compulsory auctions. To the four million (including children, etc.) officially recognized paupers, vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes in France must be added another five million who hover on the margin of existence and either have their haunts in the countryside itself or, with their rags and their children, continually desert the countryside for the towns and the towns for the countryside. Therefore the interests of the peasants are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but are now in opposition to bourgeois interests, to capital. Hence they find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task it is to overthrow the bourgeois order.[emphasis added] But “strong and unlimited government” - and this is the second “Napoleonic idea” that the second Napoleon has to carry out – is called upon to defend this “material order” by force. This “material order” also serves, in all Bonaparte’s proclamations, as the slogan against the rebellious peasants.
In addition to the mortgage which capital imposes on it, the small holding is burdened by taxes. Taxes are the life source of the bureaucracy, the army, the priests, and the court – in short, of the entire apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical. By its very nature, small-holding property forms a basis for an all-powerful and numberless bureaucracy. It creates a uniform level of personal and economic relationships over the whole extent of the country. Hence it also permits uniform action from a supreme center on all points of this uniform mass. It destroys the aristocratic intermediate steps between the mass of the people and the power of the state. On all sides, therefore, it calls forth the direct intrusion of this state power and the interposition of its immediate organs. Finally, it produces an unemployed surplus population which can find no place either on the land or in the towns and which perforce reaches out for state offices as a sort of respectable alms, and provokes the creation of additional state positions. By the new markets which he opened with bayonets, and by the plundering of the Continent, Napoleon repaid the compulsory taxes with interest. These taxes were a spur to the industry of the peasant, whereas now they rob his industry of its last resources and complete his defenselessness against pauperism. An enormous bureaucracy, well gallooned and well fed, is the “Napoleonic idea” which is most congenial to the second Bonaparte. How could it be otherwise, considering that alongside the actual classes of society, he is forced to create an artificial caste for which the maintenance of his regime becomes a bread-and-butter question? Hence one of his first financial operations was the raising of officials’ salaries to their old level and the creation of new sinecures.
Another “idée napoléonienne" [Napoleonic idea] is the domination of the priests as an instrument of government. But while at the time of their emergence the small-holding owners, in their accord with society, in their dependence on natural forces and submission to the authority which protected them from above, were naturally religious, now that they are ruined by debts, at odds with society and authority, and driven beyond their own limitations, they have become naturally irreligious.



Heaven was quite a pleasing addition to the narrow strip of land just won, especially as it makes the weather; it becomes an insult as soon as it is thrust forward as a substitute for the small holding. The priest then appears as only the anointed bloodhound of the earthly police – another “idée napoléonienne.” The expedition against Rome will take place in France itself next time, but in a sense opposite from that of M. de Montalembert.



Finally, the culminating “idée napoléonienne” is the ascendancy of the army. The army was the “point d’ honneur” of the small-holding peasants, it was they themselves transformed into heroes, defending their new possessions against the outer world, glorifying their recently won nationhood, plundering and revolutionizing the world. The uniform was their own state costume; war was their poetry; the small holding, enlarged and rounded off in imagination, was their fatherland, and patriotism the ideal form of the sense of property. But the enemies whom the French peasant now has to defend his property against are not the Cossacks; they are the huissiers [bailiffs] and the tax collectors. The small holding no longer lies in the so-called fatherland but in the registry of mortgages. The army itself is no longer the flower of the peasant youth; it is the swamp flower of the peasant lumpen proletariat. It consists largely of replacements, of substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte is himself only a replacement, the substitute for Napoleon. It now performs its deeds of valor by hounding the peasants in masses like chamois, by doing gendarme duty; and if the natural contradictions of his system chase the Chief of the Society of December 10 across the French border, his army, after some acts of brigandage, will reap, not laurels, but thrashings.



It is clear: All “idée napoléonienne” are ideas of the undeveloped small holding in the freshness of its youth; they are a contradiction to the outlived holdings. They are only the hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, spirits transformed into ghosts. But the parody of imperialism was necessary to free the mass of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between state power and society. With the progressive deterioration of small-holding property, the state structure erected upon it collapses. The centralization of the state that modern society requires arises only on the ruins of the military-bureaucratic government machinery which was forged in opposition to feudalism.



The condition of the French peasants provides us with the answer to the riddle of the general elections of December 20 and 21, which bore the second Bonaparte up Mount Sinai, not to receive laws but to give them.
Clearly Marx is describing the condition of the peasantry, its relations to to other classes, in its own existence of rural, subsistence, petty producers, not simply those elements dispossessed and forced into cities or caves. He is speaking of the situation of the the mass of the peasantry; he directs it to the proletariat as its leader based on the impoverishment and immiseration imposed upon it by the bourgeois order in its "democratic" and "dictatorial" forms.

You might wish Marx was saying something else, something to support your analysis, but he is not.


In and of itself, that's true. I have no issues with honest Marxian communists working to methodologically extend the body of analysis to include new questions that neither Marx nor Engels faced in the 19th century. Indeed, without such work, our theory and program would be little more than an exhibit in a political wax museum. But if one is going to do such work, it should not be done half-assed; every effort should be made to fully understand and grasp what Marx and Engels wrote and understood before finally embarking on the analysis of the new issue. Now, perhaps Trotsky could be excused on this, considering that not all of Marx and Engels' writings were available to him as they are to us. But what that means to me is that his theories have to be viewed with a critical eye, and the shortcomings of his theories need to be pointed out.I agree, let's not do anything half-assed. So far all the criticisms I've read of the theory of PR have been less than half-assed.

[S.Artesian]

...is not a homogeneous "group",nor is it a class in its own.Class war exists between the kulak and the poor peasant(rural proletarian).
Sorry if i misunderstood you.

But what if the "destabilization of the relations of private property" is necessary for the process of "amplifying the productivity of labor, the total social productivity" to start/be possible in the first place?

Exactly. And you know what capitalism, being capitalism, initiates that destabilization itself. But it cannot complete it; it draws back; interrupts the process; restores, embellishes, the most reactionary political structures to suppress the social conflict triggered in the destabilization. Look at the actions of the media-lunatics in Bolivia; the death squads in the service of the big cotton producers during the civil war in El Salvador in the 1970s.

[S.Artesian]

All social relations everywhere are capitalist in nature? I'm sorry, but this is absurd.

No, the dominating social relation of production is capitalist in nature; the resolution of the problems, poverty, isolation, inherent in the other relations can only be solved through overthrowing that dominant social relation, that dominant mode of production.

[RedTrackWorker]

A decent starting point, IMO, would be the writing and publishing of basic pamphlets and booklets that explain the meaning of workers' control of production, what that would entail on the workplace floor, the role of collective management and accounting, etc. There could be a basic primer that acts as an introduction, followed by a specific booklet for each kind of workplace.

For example, RTW, you could do this for where you work. You could gather together workers from the different jobs and outline what needs to be done on a daily basis and how they can be done in a context where workers' control would be the norm (as opposed to the current system of managers and bosses). You can try to get your hands on the forms and documents that managers use and adapt them for use by a workplace committee.

When I've talked about stuff like this at work the two primary "objections" I encounter are political, not lack of details ("but what forms would we use?!"), namely:
1. Cynicism grounded in the fact of the union's collaboration. Example, when I said once that the workers should control hiring and firing, one worker said: "It'd probably be worse if the union was in charge of that!" Pointing out the difference between the "union" we have now and active work place committees is, for most workers, a literary abstraction.
2. A realistic understanding that our problems can't be solved on the shop floor: "How are we going to take over from the MTA bosses? What about the cops, army, media, etc.?"

More to the point, while doing this kind of thing as a subordinate part of explaining the need for workers' management of production may helpful, I think it is a repetition of Utopian Socialism (but the second time as farce) to put it forward as a task necessary for a successful revolution.

[graymouser]

Graymouser's quote was an abuse of Marx. It redacted the entire context to the single sentence for no reason other than to prove his point, which was to make Marx appear to be favorable to the petty bourgeoisie. It was dishonest and an embarrassment to everyone. In other words, it was pretty much what I expected.
Miles is lying and falsifying Marx to make a polemical point, and then accusing me of doing the same. In context, the point is exactly the one I was making: Marx is NOT talking about the portion of the peasantry that was forced off the land, but about the WHOLE peasantry being pushed into desperate poverty. And Marx calls the proletariat the natural leader of the peasantry because of this.

I find the whole tenor of this debate to be downright awful. The anti-Trotskyists in this thread (with the exception of S. Artesian who is honest about his own differences) have done nothing but try to pull the discussion away from permanent revolution and to distort Marx so he's further away from Trotsky for factional gain. To the extent that the ideas of Miles, NHIA et al can be called "Marxism," as the man himself said, ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.

[Martin Blank]

This will have to be my last post for the next day or so. I will be back to respond to RTW and maybe Greymouser at that time.


Strawman. or Strawmen. That's not what the issue is. Of course you "prepare." As we used to say "proper planning prevent piss-poor performance." But what we prepare for is the fact that a revolutionary rarely, if ever, appears from the get-go as a simple, linear, working class vs. bourgeoisie struggle for control, expropriation of the means of production, or the abolition vs. expropriation of capital.

Glad you know your Six Ps, first of all. They're an essential thing these days.

I'm well aware of the fact that revolutionary situations rarely appear as "simple, linear, working class vs. bourgeoisie struggle for control, expropriation of the means of production, or the abolition vs. expropriation of capital". That's not the point here, and it never was. Those of you who are trying to defend Trotsky's view are distorting my views, NHIA's views, etc., to match a certain position you wish for us to hold -- that is, that we are simply waiting for the perfect revolution to come, and that we recommend doing nothing until then. That's nonsense, and you know it.

You say I am constructing strawmen. That's not the case at all. The reality is that you, RTW and Greymouser have been pelting me with so many strawmen -- and, to use GM's terms, the waste matter from the bulls that hold them together -- that I've got it all over me.

You say you prepare for the fact that revolutions rarely appear as those "simple, linear" upheavals. Fine. You prepare for that. What of the working class? Do they prepare for that? If so, how? Is it just by knowing it won't be "simple, linear"? How does that prepare them to take power in their own name?

This is the central issue you all are dodging: How does the working class prepare to take power during this period?

The more you all drag this out, the more dung and straw you throw at your opponents, the more it becomes clear that your perspective of revolution does not include the working class, except as a battering ram for your particular political current to take power in its own name, for its own purposes.


And more than that, the bourgeoisie, the petit-bourgeoisie will act tirelessly to obscure, deny, deflect, co-opt, suppress, recuperate what is at core, what will be shown to be essentially as a conflict between labor and capital, into the forms, terms, organizations, ideologies, etc. of "democratic reform," "national unity," class collaboration-- look at Peron in Argentina, Lula in Brazil, Allende in Chile, Bachelet in Chile, Morales in Bolivia, the MNR in Bolivia, Cardenas the older and Cardenas the younger in Mexico, Mujica in Uruguay.

Yes, and as I recall, the proponents of Trotsky's permanent revolution have been taken in by every single one of these petty-bourgeois movements and have tailed them, seeking in these organizations and individuals their "natural ally".


And the methods so used-- besides rhetoric, besides the police, and the army-- is the argument about "development;" about the minority status of the working class; about the "political immaturity" of the workers and the poor; about, most importantly, agriculture and the relations of landed property and labor.

So it's guilt by association now? Communists saying the working class needs to be prepared to take power in its own name is now counterrevolutionary, according to the proponents of Trotsky's permanent revolution, because bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements are saying something similar as a means to stop the revolutionary struggle. By that logic, the Trotskyists really were agents of Hitler and the Mikado, since they too said "Down with Stalin".


Exactly. And what is analogous to the petit-bourgeoisie? The peasantry. Individual subsistence, or "subsistence +" production in agricultural. Marx and Engels saw that being dissolved by capitalist production. But the fact was, it wasn't. The process was interrupted, incomplete, and unable to be resolved in capitalism. That's where permanent revolution comes in -- as the process of "expropriating" the petit-bourgeoisie in town and countryside is inseparable from the process of amplifying the productivity of labor, the total social productivity, which is now, as then, in conflict with valorization, and will destabilize the relations of private property. Marx and Engels clearly did not see capitalism running up against that limit, the limit that is itself, when they wrote about capitalism, accumulation, or about "permanent revolution" in 1848.

Actually, looking back at what they wrote, it is clear to me now that they did see the limit to that process -- they did see the point at which the process "was interrupted, incomplete, and unable to be resolved": it was in the rise of the petty bourgeoisie into power as a partner with the bourgeoisie. Thus, Marx and Engels' permanent revolution, which begins from the standpoint of the role of the petty bourgeoisie in vying to become a ruling class in alliance with the bourgeoisie, was developed precisely to address the questions of completing the expropriation of the petty bourgeoisie, of increasing social productivity, of destabilizing private property relations.

[S.Artesian]

Glad you know your Six Ps, first of all. They're an essential thing these days

I'm well aware of the fact that revolutionary situations rarely appear as "simple, linear, working class vs. bourgeoisie struggle for control, expropriation of the means of production, or the abolition vs. expropriation of capital". That's not the point here, and it never was. Those of you who are trying to defend Trotsky's view are distorting my views, NHIA's views, etc., to match a certain position you wish for us to hold -- that is, that we are simply waiting for the perfect revolution to come, and that we recommend doing nothing until then. That's nonsense, and you know it.

You say I am constructing strawmen. That's not the case at all. The reality is that you, RTW and Greymouser have been pelting me with so many strawmen -- and, to use GM's terms, the waste matter from the bulls that hold them together -- that I've got it all over me.


What is your point, then? I've repeatedly asked you or NHIA what part of Trotsky's analysis in Results and Prospects or 1905 is "revisionist," or anti-Marxist. I've repeatedly challenged those who think PR is "not applicable" to explain exactly how capitalism expresses itself in certain relations of land, labor, and landed labor in some countries, in so types of countries of Western Europe and North America, and in other types of relations of land and landed labor that are based on "pre-capitalist" relations in other types of countries-- how it is that the hacienda, the plantation, the manor, is preserved by capitalism and adapted to the world markets? No answer from the "anti-PR" group has been provided.

I never said you or NHIA were advocating waiting for the perfect revolution to come, and recommended doing nothing until then-- look back at your posts, you were the one making that charge-- of doing nothing, preparing nothing. This, unfortunately Miles, is the way you conduct arguments. You make a charge and when it is refuted, and shown to be inaccurate, immaterial, and ahistorical, you then accuse others of making that charge against you.

I said nothing about what you advocate politically. I said a lot about the meaning of PR and U&C development that challenged the various assertions that Trotsky either revised or "plagiarized" Marx, and everything Trotsky advocated correctly was already well established by Marx and Engels. The simple answer to that is that is not historically accurate. They never analyzed the meaning of the persistence of "pre-capitalist" forms in capitalism, the significance of this to the international functioning of capital, and the path of class struggle.



You say you prepare for the fact that revolutions rarely appear as those "simple, linear" upheavals. Fine. You prepare for that. What of the working class? Do they prepare for that? If so, how? Is it just by knowing it won't be "simple, linear"? How does that prepare them to take power in their own name?

This is the central issue you all are dodging: How does the working class prepare to take power during this period?


Haven't dodged a thing. On the contrary, I've have argued, and provided evidence that that is exactly what PR and U &C lead to, the proletariat taking power in its own name, neutralizing the bourgeoisie's appeal to other elements through their notions of "democracy" "development" etc.

Let's take a concrete case. Like Spain in 1936. So, expropriation of the large landed estates without compensation; organization of councils,or their equivalent, on the national scale; immediate disbanding of colonial rule everywhere it exists; autonomy and self-rule for the Basque area; no support for the various iterations of the provisional governments, all power to the councils.

Spain, you will recall, exhibited all the traits of uneven and combined development, not that much different from its former colonies in Latin America, unto which it had grafted its archaic organization of land, labor and agricultural-- in its "private" form of the hacienda, and in its "common" form-- specifically the ejido and the pueblo, which were forms utilized by the crown to assess and tax the indigenous people, just as the Russian commune was a creature of the Tsar's bureaucracy, to assess and tax the peasantry.

At the same time, Spain had very advanced enclaves of industrial production, communication and transportation, much of which was the result of the penetration of investment from the advanced capitalist countries-- ATT ran the telephone system, etc. etc.

But what was the organization of the republic? Was it that of the working class? Was it that of the bourgeoisie, propped up by "socialists" big C communists, the petit-bourgeoisie, based on notions of "democracy" and "development"? It was the latter. Could it deliver on either. Of course not. So the question is why not? Why couldn't in an economy apparently as undeveloped as Spain?

What occurred to make the existence of capitalist property a barrier to the expansion of capitalism itself and to over all social development?

You don't think that's an important question? Maybe not for you, maybe you think it's enough to say..... "oh there's a working class, therefore the bourgeoisie is obsolete." But you know what, that is mos def not enough as history has shown.

For example, what exactly did the MNR do during 1952-1964 in Bolivia to control and suppress the miners? Well among many other things, one thing was it worked diligently to separate the peasantry, the rural poor, the indigenous people from any alliance with the workers. And it did that pretty well, so well that when the military took power it encountered separate resistance by workers, separate resistance from the rural poor and the indigenous, but no united resistance, with the rural poor looking to the workers for a program of power.



The more you all drag this out, the more dung and straw you throw at your opponents, the more it becomes clear that your perspective of revolution does not include the working class, except as a battering ram for your particular political current to take power in its own name, for its own purposes.



I have no political current. None. Zero. I don't even agree with the people I work most closely with. And please, quit the whimpering, nobody's throwing any dung on you. If your knickers are in a twist because you were called on your claim about Marx's analysis of the direction and relations of the peasantry in the 18th Brumaire, well that's too bad, but that's not dung. You completely misapprehend Marx's writing in that area.


Yes, and as I recall, the proponents of Trotsky's permanent revolution have been taken in by every single one of these petty-bourgeois movements and have tailed them, seeking in these organizations and individuals their "natural ally".


Where and when? Spain 1936? Cuba 1937? China 1927-1929? France 1936-1937? Vietnam, 1931? Vietnam 1937? Vietnam 1945?

And equally important, where Trotskyists did tail such movements [calling themselves Peronists in Argentina for example] was that what the theory of permanent revolution prescribed? If so, since these people also called themselves Marxists, and your claim is that PR was developed fully by Marx, we might as well dismiss Marx's theory of PR while we're at it.



So it's guilt by association now? Communists saying the working class needs to be prepared to take power in its own name is now counterrevolutionary, according to the proponents of Trotsky's permanent revolution, because bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements are saying something similar as a means to stop the revolutionary struggle. By that logic, the Trotskyists really were agents of Hitler and the Mikado, since they too said "Down with Stalin".



WTF is that? Who said anything like that? I know I didn't. What has been argued, at least by me is that PR states only the working class taking power in "its own name," that is to say... abolishing capitalism, capitalist property relations, capitalist organization of land and labor can organize revolutionary social development.

You might want to direct your comments to DNZ, who right now must be torn between his desire to give you "big props" because of his hatred for Trotsky, but has previously explicitly stated his opposition the proletariat taking power in its own name, and pretty much anywhere.


Actually, looking back at what they wrote, it is clear to me now that they did see the limit to that process -- they did see the point at which the process "was interrupted, incomplete, and unable to be resolved": it was in the rise of the petty bourgeoisie into power as a partner with the bourgeoisie. Thus, Marx and Engels' permanent revolution, which begins from the standpoint of the role of the petty bourgeoisie in vying to become a ruling class in alliance with the bourgeoisie, was developed precisely to address the questions of completing the expropriation of the petty bourgeoisie, of increasing social productivity, of destabilizing private property relations.


Here's another that goes hand in hand with the 6Ps: "The devil's in the details." So provide some reference please to the analysis of Marx and Engels that accounts for permanent revolution and the incapability of the bourgeoisie to resolve, or abolish, the previous archaic relations of land and labor. Where did that do that? Did they even apply that to the analysis of Bismarck's Junker capitalism, which was more Bonapartist than Bonaparte, and enshrined seemingly "uncapitalist" agricultural relations as the basis for consolidating the rule of capital over Germany?

Did they do that in analyzing the retreat of the US bourgeoisie from Radical Reconstruction?

Did they do that in the analysis of the establishment of imperial enclaves in China and the inability to expropriate, and overwhelm, "home production"-- the local commercial production of clothing and fabrics in the countryside?

If they did, then let's see it, because historians, Marxist and non-Marxist have spent a century grappling with just those manifestations of capitalism, and capitalism's "incompleteness."

[Devrim]

Well, I don't understand how only the example of China is relevant to the theory of PR and your claim of supporting capitalists due to it,

It is not particularly relevant to the idea of 'permanent revolution', but was relevant to this question that you asked:


but I would ask you what faction of the bourgeois did the Fourth International support in the 30's?

Of course as we all know an organisations politics don't come in separate little packages, but more as a coherent whole. Sometimes it is easy to identify a political position as the result of one theoretical idea, but more often it is not.


I'm no expert in the left communist movement. It was the position of at least Bilan (which I thought was Bordigist) and I had seen other references that Bordigists took that position.

Bilan said "To desert the military fronts in Spain as an example for the whole proletariat is to disassociate oneself from capitalism. It is to struggle against capitalism and for the working class." There are other articles from them along the same line.

I don't think that the article says that you can't shoot at fascists until the Republican government is defeated. Perhaps you could find the line for me, or perhaps you were distorting something somebody said.


But the point isn't whether you are a Bordigist nor is this only about China

No, it isn't only about China. That was just a reply to a direct question, which you ignored by bring up two very different analogies.


See http://www.marxists.org/archive/cann...941/dec/21.htm and http://www.marxists.org/history/etol...o01/swp-us.htm, resolutions and reports published against supporting the U.S. during the war, a position which partially lead to 18 of their leaders being imprisoned. But this in particular is getting far afield and if you think you have some kind of evidence, probably deserves its own thread.

I think that the first of these documents provide evidence enough.


This characterization of the war does not apply to the war of the Soviet Union against German imperialism. We make a fundamental distinction between the Soviet Union and its “democratic” allies. We defend the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a workers’ state, although degenerated under the totalitarian-political rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Only traitors can deny support to the Soviet workers’ state in its war against fascist Germany. To defend the Soviet Union, in spite of Stalin and against Stalin, to defend the nationalized property established by the October revolution. That is a progressive war.

The war of China against Japan we likewise characterize as a progressive war. We support China. China is a colonial country, battling for national independence against an imperialist power. A victory for China would be a tremendous blow against all imperialism, inspiring all colonial peoples to throw off the imperialist yoke. The reactionary regime of Chiang Kai-shek, subservient to the “democracies,” has hampered China’s ability to conduct a bold war for independence; but that does not alter for us the essential fact that China is an oppressed nation fighting against an imperialist oppressor. We are proud of the fact that the Fourth Internationalists of China are fighting in the front ranks against Japanese imperialism.

The idea that you can pick particular nations on one side of a conflict as fighting a 'progressive war', and other on the same side as not doing so is absurd.

It goes on to talk about the attitude in the US:


In the midst of the war against Hitler, it is necessary to extend the hand of fraternity to the German people. This can be done honestly and convincingly only by a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. We advocate the Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. Such a government, and only such a government, can conduct a war against Hitler, Mussolini and the Mikado in cooperation with the oppressed peoples of Germany, Italy and Japan. Our program against Hitlerism and for a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government is today the program of only a small minority. The great majority actively or passively supports the war program of the Roosevelt administration. As a minority we must submit to that majority in action. We do not sabotage the war or obstruct the military forces in any way. The Trotskyists go with their generation into the armed forces. We abide by the decisions of the majority. But we retain our opinions and insist on our right to express them.

I think that just about says it all.

Incidentally, doesn't your group believe that the Soviet Union was capitalist (I know that the Israeli group you are close to does). If this is the case then surely you must see this as a betrayal.


Then why was every other thing other than that one quotation (as you interpret it) by Trotsky arguing against defencism in imperialist nations?


but it's about your claim that PR someone leads to supporting a faction of the capitalists. I'm trying to flesh out what you mean by that.

I think that the characterization of individual nations as being imperialist and others not is a part of it, and as I understand it, partly this can be traced to the idea of 'uneven development'. It is not just about one quote. It is something at the heart of Trotskyist politics. A well known example is the quote about if Brazil was at war with Britain, which was oft quoted during the Falklands war, which I presume you would have taken the Argentina side in.

We could also talk about how the Trotskyists support various national liberation movements, which I think is connected to 'permanent revolution' though perhaps more so to Lenin's theory of imperialism.

Devrim

[RedTrackWorker]

I don't think that the article says that you can't shoot at fascists until the Republican government is defeated. Perhaps you could find the line for me, or perhaps you were distorting something somebody said.

The article I quoted in my post calls for workers "to desert the military fronts". I really don't know how much more explicit they could get. Another article tells workers to strike the war industries.

On China and the SWP, again this is the link that takes up "why defend China" http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1942/04/china.htm. I know left communists generally reject the idea of defending an oppressed nation against an imperialist one (and even reject drawing distinctions between them)--but your original claim was that the theory of PR lead Trotskyists to supporting factions of the capitalists. As S. Artesian is arguing with Miles, when they did support such factions (MNR in Bolivia in 52 the first big one)--it was in contradiction to the theory of PR. You reject defense of what we call oppressed nations, but you still cannot point to the Trotskyists politically supporting a faction of the capitalists in those countries like the Stalinists did. Neither can you point to them supporting a faction of the capitalists in Spain.

On Russia, yes, we see it as a capitalist power post-1939 and so we think the Fourth International was wrong on that question in WW2. Do you think only people that sabotaged the army and got executed for it are not social patriots?

[Devrim]

The article I quoted in my post calls for workers "to desert the military fronts". I really don't know how much more explicit they could get. Another article tells workers to strike the war industries.

Yes, I think it is quite clear. It doesn't as you claim suggest that workers had to fight against one side before the other.


On China and the SWP, again this is the link that takes up "why defend China" http://www.marxists.org/history/etol...2/04/china.htm.

To be honest, I am not that interested in apologism for defencist ideas.


but your original claim was that the theory of PR lead Trotskyists to supporting factions of the capitalists. As S. Artesian is arguing with Miles, when they did support such factions (MNR in Bolivia in 52 the first big one)--it was in contradiction to the theory of PR. You reject defense of what we call oppressed nations, but you still cannot point to the Trotskyists politically supporting a faction of the capitalists in those countries like the Stalinists did. Neither can you point to them supporting a faction of the capitalists in Spain.

Different states represent different factions of the capitalist class. I think that it is quite clear that the Trotskyists supported one of these factions, the Chinese state in 1938.


On Russia, yes, we see it as a capitalist power post-1939 and so we think the Fourth International was wrong on that question in WW2.

What then changed in the Russia economy in 1939?


Do you think only people that sabotaged the army and got executed for it are not social patriots?

I don't understand where this question is coming from.

Devrim

[RedTrackWorker]

Different states represent different factions of the capitalist class. I think that it is quite clear that the Trotskyists supported one of these factions, the Chinese state in 1938.

The whole point of the Trotskyist analysis of imperialism is that the attack of a country like Japan on a country like China is that it is not just an attack on "a faction of the capitalist class" but that it furthers the oppression of the masses and raises obstacles to their own struggle in various ways. If it were only about supporting a faction of the bourgeoisie, why were the Trotskyists not for suppressing class struggle in Vietnam, China, etc. as the Stalinists were?


What then changed in the Russia economy in 1939?

That's very far off topic but we do have a whole book on the issue which is now online: http://lrp-cofi.org/book/index.html. For this thread, here is the section on "Permanent Revolution": http://lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter2_3.html.


I don't understand where this question is coming from.

Because you quoted Cannon on saying that they would not sabotage the U.S. army and said "I think that just about says it all" which I took to refer to your claim that the SWP were social patriots during WW2.

[S.Artesian]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but can we stick to the issue raised in the OP?

[Die Neue Zeit]

You might want to direct your comments to DNZ, who right now must be torn between his desire to give you "big props" because of his hatred for Trotsky, but has previously explicitly stated his opposition the proletariat taking power in its own name, and pretty much anywhere.

If you're gonna do drive-by cheap shots, then please do a better job at them. :lol:

I don't "hate" Trotsky, I just disagree with a number of his political positions. Oh, and you haven't explained your blatant double-think re. left parties of the peasantry and urban "national" petit-bourgeoisie taking over, something which Trotsky opposed in pressing on with the possibility of "civil war with the peasantry."

Oh, and your generalization at the end is slander, especially if you're referring to First World scenarios.


Yes, and as I recall, the proponents of Trotsky's permanent revolution have been taken in by every single one of these petty-bourgeois movements and have tailed them, seeking in these organizations and individuals their "natural ally".

One word of correction: "every single one of these comprador petit-bourgeois movements."


The historic task of the bourgeosie was never "freedom and democracy for all", the historic task of the bourgeosie was to internationalize the economy through capital. its a very old fashioned view that equality and democracy were the tasks of the bourgeosie, its a very formal way of treating capital as opposed to its content, because capital in its barebones has nothing to do with the particular ideology or form of the state.

Not quite. The historic tasks of the bourgeoisie pertain to rule of law, the international state system, and deficit financing.

[S.Artesian]

If DNZ is addressing me, he's going to wait a long time for the answer, as he's on my ignore list. Put him there, originally, after he endorsed Stalin's use of slave labor as a "plus."

[Die Neue Zeit]

Folks, I wasn't expecting anyone to respond to the first part of Post #115, particular those who are politically inconsistent and then make poor attempts to cover this up with slander. Carry on.

[RedTrackWorker]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but can we stick to the issue raised in the OP?

S. Artesian is right. I apologize for going so far afield. I hope Devrim will start new threads to back up his claims against Trotskyism but I will cease replying to such on this thread.