Lenin's Adoption of Permanent Revolution
Lenin's position, adopted by the Bolsheviks, was also that, in the specific conditions of Russia, it was possible that the workers and peasants could come to power, before the workers of the advanced countries. The workers would have to ally themselves with the peasants, given the huge social weight of the peasantry. Lenin describes this situation as The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry. What is not set out in this formulation, quite deliberately, by Lenin, is the actual balance of forces, within this dictatorship, between the workers and the peasants. It is quite deliberate, because Lenin, as an historical materialist, argues that it is not possible to know a priori, what that balance will actually be, which can only be determined by history. This formula is described, therefore, as being “algebraic”, leaving the actual quantities blank, until they are filled out by events.
However, what Lenin, like Kautsky and Trotsky, says, in 1905, is that, the dialectics of class struggle means that the representatives of the proletariat, in this social dictatorship, will inevitably have to advance the interests of that proletariat, and that means that they will increasingly come into contradiction with the bourgeois elements of the peasantry, within that same social dictatorship. It will mean that the proletariat will increasingly have to align with the sections of the peasantry that are themselves being pushed into the ranks of the proletariat, and, thereby, to drive a wedge between them, and those sections of the peasantry that are becoming bourgeois. For a start, the representatives of the workers would have to advance the interests of those peasants who had already been turned into agricultural day labourers, by that process of differentiation. That section of the peasantry that was still imbued with the individualist ideas that characterises the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie were limited in their ambitions simply for land reform, and a division of the land in its entirety, but the interests of the agricultural proletariat resided in the development of collectivism, of the creation of large agricultural cooperatives, and so on.
From the 1890's, Lenin had analysed the arguments of the Narodniks – See Lenin on Economic Romanticism – who represented the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie. The whole point of this analysis, was to show, not only that capitalism was already implanted in Russia, and was bringing about a progressive transformation of society, but that the Narodnik representatives of the peasantry were reactionary. They represented the views of that element of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie that wanted to deny the process of differentiation that was taking place. They attempted to defend small scale private property, which could be nothing other than small-scale, capitalist private property. The Narodniks could be nothing more than advocates of bourgeois liberalism, whilst this would increasingly fail to meet the needs of the proletarianised peasants. The question would be to what extent the peasants could create their own political party to represent them in this government of workers and peasants.
Trotsky's argument merely preceded Lenin's answer to that question, in the light of the events of February 1917.
“the Revolution, having begun as a bourgeois revolution as regards its first tasks, will soon call forth powerful class conflicts and will gain final victory only by transferring power to the only class capable of standing at the head of the oppressed masses, namely, to the proletariat. Once in power, the proletariat not only will not want, but will not be able to limit itself to a bourgeois democratic programme. It will be able to carry through the Revolution to the end only in the event of the Russian Revolution being converted into a Revolution of the European proletariat. The bourgeois-democratic programme of the Revolution will then be superseded, together with its national limitations, and the temporary political domination of the Russian working class will develop into a prolonged Socialist dictatorship. But should Europe remain inert the bourgeois counter-revolution will not tolerate the government of the toiling masses in Russia and will throw the country back – far back from a democratic workers’ and peasants’ republic. Therefore, once having won power, the proletariat cannot keep within the limits of bourgeois democracy. It must adopt the tactics of permanent revolution, i.e., must destroy the barriers between the minimum and maximum programme of Social Democracy, go over to more and more radical social reforms and seek direct and immediate support in revolution in Western Europe. This position is developed and argued in the work now reissued, which was originally written in 1904 - 1906.”
This is the position that Lenin adopts in the April Theses of 1917, and as set out in his “Letters On Tactics”, which support the conclusions arrived at in the Theses. The Narodniks themselves evolved into the Social Revolutionary party, which itself split, reflecting the process of differentiation of the peasantry described by Lenin and Trotsky. One section aligned with the bourgeois Cadet Party, whilst the Left SR's aligned with the Bolsheviks.
In 1917, Lenin writes that the old idea that there would be a bourgeois-democratic revolution, as one stage in social evolution, following on from feudalism, representing a previous stage of social evolution, and that, only after having gone through the stage of bourgeois democracy, would it become possible for the next stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry to be considered, was now superseded by real events. The democratic dictatorship, Lenin says, does not describe any specific form of government, but is only an algebraic formula describing a social relation between classes. The reality of February 1917, had, in fact, already created this democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, alongside the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In other words, a condition of dual power had already arisen in society.
“A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, “Communist” elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Steklov, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the other revolutionary defencists, who are opposed to moving towards the commune and are in favour of “supporting” the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois government).
The person who now speaks only of a “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of “Bolshevik” pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of “old Bolsheviks”).
In other words, there was the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, represented by the Provisional Government of Prince Lvov that would go through several changes of personnel before becoming led by Kerensky, and, on the other hand, there was the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, represented by the soviets of workers and soldiers (who represented the peasants from whom they were mostly drawn, as the largest social class). The Provisional Government was itself a Popular Front government. It represented the parties of the bourgeoisie such as the Cadets and Constitutional Monarchists, as well as of the peasants in the form of the Populist parties, and also the reformist workers parties such as the Mensheviks. The peasant and workers parties, themselves rested upon the social dictatorship of the workers and peasants as manifest in the soviets.
The bourgeoisie rested upon the economic and social power of capital, and upon the capitalist state apparatus, in the shape of the military, the police, the courts and so on. But, this bourgeois state power was neutralised by the condition of dual power.
“For it must not be forgotten that actually, in Petrograd, the power is in the hands of the workers and soldiers; the new government is not using and cannot use violence against them, because there is no police, no army standing apart from the people, no officialdom standing all-powerful above the people. This is a fact, the kind of fact that is characteristic of a state of the Paris Commune type. This fact does not fit into the old schemes. One must know how to adapt schemes to facts, instead of reiterating the now meaningless words about a “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” in general.”
(ibid)
The consequence of the old ideas, however, was that the representatives of the peasantry, and of the reformist workers parties, within the soviets, were voluntarily ceding power to the bourgeoisie, and its representatives within the Provisional Government. But, Lenin's attack, here, is aimed not at those representatives of other parties, but at those within the Bolsheviks themselves that continued to advocate this stages theory of social development. In February 1917, the leaders of the Bolsheviks in Russia, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin, had themselves continued to argue the line of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, and on the basis of the stages theory subordinated the workers to the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois-democratic revolution. It was against them that the April Theses is directed.
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