Tony Cliff, 1963, Trotskyist. What are the pros and cons of Deflected Permanent Revolution. That's where the intelligentsia of the bourgeoisie start a state-capitalist Leninist revolution. It could be started by Intellectuals. The Intellectual is the third guy other then the worker and peasant to start dictatorship of the proletariat. I think a statue exists in KimIlSung square/Pyongyang square along with Karl Marx / VI Lenin posters.
IMO, Cliff's state capitalism theory is flawed. The "deflected" permanent revolution flows from this flawed theory and the mythology -especially around Cuba- that these post war revolutions did not overturn capitalism and had little or no participation from the workers and peasants. My take on Cuba is different. I would urge you to read the Joseph Hanson book, Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution. I would also encourage you to read Ernest Mandel's's Inconsistencies of State Capitalism Two other good pieces to read might be "The Working Class in the Cuban Revolution" and Cuba, a revolution in motion by Isaac Saney Finally, Socialist Action's 1998 resolution on Cuba. Our current resolution, I'm hunting for. We think that Cuba had an authentic revolution, that the Castro leadership was not a fully crystallized Stalinist leadership. That said, the Castroist leadership (whatever its faults) carried out the expropriation of the Cuban bopurgeoisie and kicked US imperialsim out of Cuba. Lack of workers democracy is a brake on the full development of the Cuban Revolution. We would refer to Cuba as a workers state lacking the organs of workers democracy.
