Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution
The Theory of Permanent Revolution is most closely associated with Trotsky. Basing himself on Marx's writings and analysis of the revolutions of 1848, and subsequent socio-economic developments, Trotsky sets out that it is possible for workers, in more backward countries, to come to power, before those in more advanced countries. That is because the proletariat, in these countries, is larger and more advanced than was the proletariat in 1848. The later economic development means that it is concentrated in larger enterprises, and in cities and large towns. The development of transport and communications speeds up the transmission of ideas. Workers now have the advantage of the experience of workers in the more advanced economies to draw on, as well as the ideas of large Marxist parties. But, this coming to power is not the same as the creation of Socialism.
An inevitable contradiction arises. The workers may come to power in such places, more easily, because the bourgeoisie is relatively smaller and weaker, and the still sizeable peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie may fall in behind the proletariat to achieve the aims of the bourgeois-democratic national revolution, but, having come to power, the workers' and peasants' government must soon begin to pursue the needs of the working-class, which brings it into conflict with the bourgeoisie, and sections of the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry, in process of becoming bourgeois themselves. It must encourage the differentiation, and draw over those sections of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie in the process of becoming proletarianised by that process.
“The abolition of feudalism will meet with support from the entire peasantry, as the burden-bearing estate. A progressive income-tax will also be supported by the great majority of the peasantry. But any legislation carried through for the purpose of protecting the agricultural proletariat will not only not receive the active sympathy of the majority, but will even meet with the active opposition of a minority of the peasantry.
The proletariat will find itself compelled to carry the class struggle into the villages and in this manner destroy that community of interest which is undoubtedly to be found among all peasants, although within comparatively narrow limits. From the very first moment after its taking power, the proletariat will have to find support in the antagonisms between the village poor and village rich, between the agricultural proletariat and the agricultural bourgeoisie. While the heterogeneity of the peasantry creates difficulties and narrows the basis for a proletarian policy, the insufficient degree of class differentiation will create obstacles to the introduction among the peasantry of developed class struggle, upon which the urban proletariat could rely. The primitiveness of the peasantry turns its hostile face towards the proletariat.”
(Trotsky – Results and Prospects, VI The Proletarian Regime)
But, the backwardness of the economy makes it impossible to move forward towards socialism within the confines of the nation state. The workers in power are faced with the same dilemma as that described by Engels, in The Peasant War in Germany.
“The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to his doctrines and the demands hitherto propounded which do not emanate from the interrelations of the social classes at a given moment, or from the more or less accidental level of relations of production and means of communication, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost. We have seen examples of this in recent times. We need only be reminded of the position taken in the last French provisional government by the representatives of the proletariat, though they represented only a very low level of proletarian development. Whoever can still look forward to official positions after having become familiar with the experiences of the February government — not to speak of our own noble German provisional governments and imperial regencies — is either foolish beyond measure, or at best pays only lip service to the extreme revolutionary party.”
The revolution must then fail, because it is either overthrown from without, or else degenerates from within. The only alternative, as Trotsky describes, is that the concept of permanence takes on a further meaning, which is that, in the age of imperialism, of the dominance of the world economy, when capitalism has burst asunder the constraints of the nation state, the revolution, which begins in one country, must rapidly become internationalised, and continue until the whole world is encompassed by it. It is this concept, accepted also by Kautsky, and by Lenin, which establishes the difference between the Marxist theory of Permanent Revolution, and the bourgeois-nationalist stages theory of the Mensheviks and Stalinists, and its manifestation, also, in the Stalinist theory of building Socialism In One Country.
In 1924, the faction fight inside the Bolshevik Party opened up, following the death of Lenin. The initial line up was between the Centre (Stalin), and Right (Bukharin), against the Left, represented by Trotsky, but which also, initially, included Zinoviev and Kamenev, as part of the United Opposition. Stalin required a basis upon which to frame his opposition to Trotsky, and to claim his own heredity from Lenin. He chose Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. It created the framework in which the battle between Stalinism and Trotskyism was to be fought out – a battle between Permanent Revolution and the newly formulated Stalinist theory of building Socialism In One Country, which Stalin was driven into, as a result of his attack on Permanent Revolution.
Stalin was facilitated, in his line of attack against Trotsky, by the fact that, for much of the period prior to 1917, Trotsky was outside the ranks of the Bolsheviks. He led a group of “conciliators”, who thought that it was necessary to unite the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. There was no shortage of material in which Lenin criticised Trotsky for this conciliationist position, criticisms, which Trotsky, later, accepted as being wholly correct, as he had overestimated the chances of the Mensheviks being won over to the Bolshevik positions, as a result of practical joint activity. Trotsky had formulated the ideas contained in his theory of Permanent Revolution, prior to the 1905 Revolution, in which he played a central role, as President of the Petersburg Soviet.
The established position of Marxists had been that socialism could only first be established in developed capitalist economies. In 1905, Russia, though it had seen rapid capitalist development, since 1861, was still a largely backward economy. But, in the revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels had noted that, although these were bourgeois national revolutions, a leading role within them had been played by the working-class, and, unlike the initial bourgeois revolutions, such as the Great French Revolution of 1789, this was inevitably going to be the case, because of the rapid development of the proletariat in the intervening period. Combined and uneven development meant that there were now many countries, like Russia, which were still largely backward and undeveloped, with a large peasantry, but which also had a large, and organised proletariat, resulting from the rapid development of large scale industries in the towns and cities. Taken as a whole, the productive and social relations created by capitalism/imperialism, as a global system, made the transition to socialism possible, but that was not the case in each individual country.
Because, of its later development, in Russia, capitalism had skipped some stages, because it was able to go quickly to these large-scale, machine industries, whereas, in Britain, a long period of development of handicraft based capitalism had had to transpire, before large scale use of machinery was introduced. These large machine industries required fewer capitalists for any given level of output, again skipping over stages of concentration and centralisation of capital that had taken place in Britain etc. In fact, many of the large enterprises were foreign owned. This meant that the Russian bourgeoisie was relatively small, compared to the size of the proletariat. The peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie was large, but as Marx had set out, in his analysis of these classes, they are amorphous and unable to take a lead in revolutionary situations, always acting as support for some other class. They seek the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution, freeing them from the binds of feudalism via agrarian reform, as well as the achievement of bourgeois political rights and freedoms, but this remains within the bounds of bourgeois individualism.
Indeed, the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie could not be viewed as homogeneous classes, because they divided into those elements that were in the process of becoming bourgeois, and those that were in the process of becoming proletarianised, as a result of the process of differentiation, driven by competition. The latter could be drawn behind the proletariat in any revolutionary situation, and a revolutionary strategy had to be geared to that end. The Workers Party would have to advocate the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in order to draw the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie behind it, but having come to power on this basis, the workers' party would inevitably be driven beyond it, to meet the specific needs of the workers.
In 1905, Trotsky's predictions in relation to Permanent Revolution were borne out. The revolution, which is a bourgeois revolution, sees the working-class, inevitably, take a leading role, and it draws behind it these elements of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie. But, this creates an inevitable dialectical contradiction. On the one hand, this is a bourgeois revolution, not a proletarian revolution, yet the leading role is taken by the proletariat. Moreover, the material conditions, in Russia, at this time, are not yet developed enough to be able to create socialism. The revolution must become international, drawing in the advanced economies, to be able to support the workers in these less advanced economies.
It is, in fact, a good example of the contradictions caused by combined and uneven development. Capitalism/imperialism, as a global economy, has achieved the required development to make socialism possible, but, this development is by no means even, so that, in many countries, that required level of development has not been achieved. Yet, it is in those countries that the bourgeoisie is weakest and proletariat, consequently, relatively stronger. Its here, where the potential for socialism does not exist, where the potential for workers coming to power, with the support of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, in order to carry through he bourgeois-democratic revolution, is greatest. It was on this basis, in 1917, that Lenin came over to the Trotskyist conception of Permanent Revolution, and argued the need to break the capitalist chain at its weakest link, in the belief that the world revolution would follow quickly behind.
In fact, Trotsky was not the only one to have considered the possibility that, in these circumstances, it might be possible for the Russian working-class to come to power before the working-class of Britain, Germany, France or other developed capitalist economies. The same possibility had been considered, and even thought likely by Kautsky, as well as by Lenin, much earlier.
“At that time Kautsky (true, not without the beneficial influence of Rosa Luxemburg) fully understood and acknowledged that the Russian Revolution could not terminate in a bourgeois-democratic republic but must inevitably lead to the proletarian dictatorship, because of the level attained by the class struggle in the country itself and because of the entire international situation of capitalism. Kautsky then frankly wrote about a workers’ government with a social-democratic majority. He did not even think of making the real course of the class struggle depend on the changing and superficial combinations of political democracy.
... Kautsky understood that to call the Russian Revolution a bourgeois revolution and thereby to limit its tasks would mean not to understand anything of what was going on in the world. Together with the Russian and Polish revolutionary Marxists, he rightly acknowledged that, should the Russian proletariat conquer power before the European proletariat, it would have to use its situation as the ruling class not for the rapid surrender of its positions to the bourgeoisie but for rendering powerful assistance to the proletarian revolution in Europe and throughout the world. All these world-wide prospects, imbued with the spirit of Marxian doctrine, were not made dependent either by Kautsky or by us upon how and for whom the peasants would vote at the elections to the so-called Constituent Assembly in November and December 1917.”
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