So, Lenin understood that any revolutionary government would have to lean most heavily on the proletariat, and so amended his formula to The Dictatorship of The Proletariat Leading The Peasantry. By the time of the February 1917 Revolution, Lenin concluded that history had resolved the equation. The Democratic Dictatorship already existed in the form of the Workers and Peasants Soviets, and their specific weights were known. On that basis, he concluded, as set out in his April Theses, and Letters on Tactics, that the demand for the Democratic Dictatorship (bourgeois-democracy) was, now, defunct, and the reality was that they, now, had to carry through the proletarian revolution. In other words, he now stood on the same ground as Trotsky, set out in 1905.
Stalin, along with Zinoviev and Kamenev, had continued to argue for the old defunct formula of the Democratic Dictatorship, in 1917, but were defeated by Lenin. The proletarian revolution proceeded, but the creation of a workers' state, then, appeared to create a contradiction. If Socialism In One Country is impossible, how could such a revolution, in backward Russia, be justified? The answer, for Lenin and Trotsky, was obvious – Permanent Revolution. That is that the Russian Revolution merely breaks the chain at the weakest link, and sets up the basis, and the necessity, for its extension on an international scale.
Having chosen Permanent Revolution as the ground upon which to distinguish himself from Trotsky, however, this created a contradiction, for Stalin. If PR is rejected, then the justification for the proletarian revolution is rejected, because the survival of the revolution depends on PR, and its active extension to the developed economies. Consequently, Stalin dropped his opposition to the idea of Socialism In One Country, and developed it as a foundation for Stalinist theory. This also allowed Stalin to return to his previous support for the Democratic Dictatorship (bourgeois-democracy), when it came to China and elsewhere, as the basis of the concept of the Popular Front (Kerenskyism), as also used in the Stalinist strategy for opposing fascism. The concepts on the “Left”, which, in various forms, support such cross-class blocs, talk about supporting bourgeois-democracy, as some kind of “staging post”, giving “breathing space”, and so on, are all the poisoned fruit of this Stalinist tree. They are based upon formalism, not dialectics, with these different “stages” viewed as discrete phenomenon, rather then the first being, already, the product of, and pupa form of the second.
But, the Chinese Revolution of 1925-7, again, confirmed the validity of Permanent Revolution. Stalin had refused to support the creation of soviets, arguing that they can only be created at the point that the revolution becomes a proletarian revolution, not a bourgeois-democratic revolution. He opposed them, and demanded the communists remain inside, and subordinate to the KMT, the party of the bourgeoisie, so as not to scare off the bourgeoisie from the revolution. History had other ideas, and, on the ground, in China, the workers and peasants were setting up soviets, and the revolutionary governments set up were having to push forward measures such as workers' control, and nationalisation that are part of the proletarian not bourgeois revolution, just as Lenin and Trotsky had said was bound to be the case.
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