Permanent Revolution and New Democracy

[jookyle]

Lately I've been reading up on Maoism and I've come across the "New Democracy" concept. I was wondering if I could hear from some Maoists on what makes the Maoist New Democracy different from the Trotskyist "Permanent Revolution".

From what I can tell they seem to be more or less the same, centered around the idea of skipping capitalism and moving right into socialism. Personally, I feel the history of Russia and China have shown that this doesn't work. Not that it really matters anymore considering 99% of the world practices capitalism already in one form or another. But, I do think(at least from what I've read) that quite a few Maoist concepts would be beneficial to revolution if applied in underdeveloped/third world countries but, I fail to see how it would adapt to a developed country.

[Aurora]

The permanent revolution was never about skipping capitalism, the permanent revolution says that in the underdeveloped countries the national bourgeoisie is tied to foreign capital and cannot play the leading revolutionary role in the democratic revolution, it cannot carry out the emancipation of the peasantry create democracy solve the national question, the revolutionary peasantry who have never played an independent role can only become emancipated with leadership from the cities and the only class capable of providing this leadership is the proletariat, the form this must take is the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry, but the proletariat will not stop after carrying out the democratic revolution, it will inevitably carry out it's own socialist tasks making the revolution uninterrupted or permanent.
This was the program of the Bolshevik Party and was proven correct in the October Revolution where the proletariat won the support of the peasantry and in the first few months of the revolution carried out the democratic tasks and then moved on to their own socialist tasks.

In contradistinction New Democracy and the bloc of four classes states that the national bourgeoisie can still play a revolutionary role and must be brought into collaboration with the proletariat peasantry and petite-bourgeosie in order to carry out the democratic revolution and the form this must take is not the dictatorship of the proletariat but bourgeois democracy in preparation for a future proletarian dictatorship.
This class collaboration and stageism has been proven a failure every time especially in China where the opportunist Comintern pushed the Chinese communists not to form soviets and to dissolve themselves in the bourgeois party the Kuomintang wherein they were massacred.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

http://vimeo.com/14808875

[Homo Songun]

In contradistinction New Democracy and the bloc of four classes states that the national bourgeoisie can still play a revolutionary role and must be brought into collaboration with the proletariat peasantry and petite-bourgeosie in order to carry out the democratic revolution and the form this must take is not the dictatorship of the proletariat but bourgeois democracy in preparation for a future proletarian dictatorship.

I thanked your post for being a substantive contribution, but you are in fact wrong, Mao was quite explicit that the New Democratic Revolution was commanded by the proletarian forces. Please give me a quote that contradicts me if you think I am wrong.

http://captionsearch.com/pix/e9wp91dqrj.jpg

[Aurora]

I thanked your post for being a substantive contribution, but you are in fact wrong, Mao was quite explicit that the New Democratic Revolution was commanded by the proletarian forces. Please give me a quote that contradicts me if you think I am wrong.

Ok, well i had a look through Mao's 'On New Democracy' and he does mention the proletariat as the leading force a number of times but makes it clear that this is not in the form of the proletarian dictatorship but rather a cross class 'united front', he doesn't get any clearer as to what form of state this will take apart from a dictatorship of all revolutionary classes(including the bourgeois), he does say that this is realized in China at the time of writing though, so China in 1940 is allegedly the New Democracy, i don't have much knowledge of China at this time but i'd take a guess that the democratic revolution wasn't in any way completed and the proletariat wasn't leading anything.

[Homo Songun]

...Except that the proletariat was leading the revolution, at least according to Mao: "the revolution cannot succeed without the modern industrial working class, because it is the leader of the Chinese revolution and is the most revolutionary class."

In 1940, Japanese fascism was at or near it's apogee. True, in no sense did the Party exercise hegemony overall in China. So how does the Trotskyist conception of the United Front under these circumstances differ in concrete terms from the Maoist one? Note that he spends sections IX and X describing the necessity of political independence of the Party programme from that of the bourgeois nationalists. He takes pains to demarcate the two tasks of the Party's strategy in an undivided revolutionary process -- overthrow the imperialists, and overthrow the bourgeoisie: "Both are bad and should be completely destroyed."

[Blanquist]

new democracy was class collaboration, part of the stalinist 2-stage theory. a reactionary bureaucratic theory.

there is absolutely nothing in common, trotsky waged war on this opportunistic idea.

[islandmilitia]

his class collaboration and stageism has been proven a failure every time especially in China where the opportunist Comintern pushed the Chinese communists not to form soviets and to dissolve themselves in the bourgeois party the Kuomintang wherein they were massacred.

This completely distorts the chronology of the CPC and the evolution of Mao's thought. Mao published his essay on New Democracy in 1940, when Mao had already established himself as the most influential theoretician within the party and when the CPC had expanded its base areas throughout much of northern China, whereas the first break between the CPC and the KMT occurred in 1927, at which point the CPC was still very much subordinate to Comintern directives and when Mao was only one amongst many influential cadre within the party organization. The theoretical content of New Democracy also differs from the directives of the Comintern because through his articulation of New Democracy, Mao repeatedly emphases the importance of the working class as the leading force, he does not say that the leadership of the working class must be postponed until bourgeois-democratic tasks have been carried out under the leadership of the bourgeoisie.

In answer to the OP, there are important similarities between these two perspectives. In particular, both Mao and Trotsky draw a distinction between the conditions facing revolutionaries in countries like China on the one hand and the conditions in which the initial bourgeois revolutions (like the French Revolution) took place on the other, by arguing that the bourgeois classes of peripheral societies in the age of imperialism are so tied to pre-capitalist elites and the forces of foreign capital that they cannot constitute themselves as meaningful political and cultural agents. On this point, they are both in agreement, but beyond this, there are also important differences. Most importantly, whereas Trotsky argues (largely implicitly) that imperialism serves to break down pre-capitalist social formations and that the weakness of the bourgeoisie extends to the class as a whole (such that, for Trotsky, China is a capitalist society and the bourgeoisie as a whole is weak), Mao argues that the effect of imperialism is actually to turn China into a complex hybrid social formation whereby imperialist domination meshes with and reinforces pre-capitalist forms of exploitation and domination - hence Mao's concept, semi-feudalism, semi-colonialism. In addition, and on that basis, Mao also distinguishes between different sections of the bourgeoisie, by identifying a national bourgeois stratum that can be incorporated into a revolutionary alliance, albeit on a subordinate and largely unstable basis.

In the last analysis, I think there is more in common between the two perspectives than most people acknowledge, and that they both contrast with the main body of Comintern directives during the main part of its existence.

[islandmilitia]

new democracy was class collaboration, part of the stalinist 2-stage theory. a reactionary bureaucratic theory.

You are using "class collaboration" here as a political insult in order to close down discussion, but what does it mean in the concrete? In the literal sense, of cooperation between the working class and other classes, every classical Marxist theorist advocated "class collaboration" - Lenin and Trotsky emphasized the need for the working class to draw on the peasantry as an ally in the revolutionary process, Gramsci, through his notion of the "historic bloc", meaning a broad union of social forces who have been won to the side of the working class, and, of course, with Mao you have his "bloc of four classes". The real issue here should not be seen as the absence or presence of collaboration or cooperation as such, but that of leadership - that is, which class is seen as having basic leadership in the revolutionary process, and how that leading class, in concrete and specific terms, relates to other social forces. On that point, and as myself and other people have already pointed out, Mao emphasized the leading role of the working class, and at the same time emphasized the unstable and wavering position of the national bourgeoisie within the class bloc.