The Stalinists turned soviets into a signpost along the path to proletarian revolution that could only be erected at the point that the revolution had already passed. It was a talisman, arising not out of the revolutionary process, and its interaction with the revolutionary party, as the means to organise and drive that process, but simply into an empty vessel, called into existence by bureaucratic decree. They did a similar thing with the concept of Permanent Revolution.
The concept of Permanent Revolution, going back to Marx, is that, because of the role of the proletariat, now, in carrying through the bourgeois-democratic, national revolution, all such revolutions have a tendency to go beyond their tasks, and to become permanent, i.e. to begin to address the tasks of the proletarian revolution. But, this is not some automatic or teleological process. As with the question of soviets, it implies and requires the active involvement of an independent, revolutionary proletarian party.
“That is just what the Marxian conception of the proletarian revolution consists of, being distinguished by that from the bourgeois revolution, limited by its national scope as much as by its specific objectives. The Chinese revolution contains within itself tendencies to become permanent in so far as it contains the possibility of the conquest of power by the proletariat. To speak of the permanent revolution without this and outside of it, is like trying to fill the cask of the Danaïds. Only the proletariat, after having seized the state power and having transformed it into an instrument of struggle against all the forms of oppression and exploitation, in the interior of the country as well as beyond its frontiers, gains therewith the possibility of assuring a continuous character to the revolution, in other words, of leading it to the construction of a complete socialist society.” (p 157-8)
To achieve that goal, the revolutionary party must prepare the working-class for it. From the start, the revolutionary party sets as its goal the proletarian revolution, not the bourgeois/national revolution, and addresses itself to the proletariat, insisting on its independence from and separate interests to those of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. Again, this distinguishes the Marxist conception from the Menshevist/Stalinist conception, because, whilst the latter only has, as its primary objective, the achievement of the bourgeois-democratic/national tasks, the Marxist conception has as its objective the proletarian revolution, with the former only being a moment within this overall revolutionary process. If the Marxist could skip over that moment of the bourgeois-democratic/national revolution, and move directly to the proletarian revolution, they most certainly would do so. At some future point, when Socialism is established in developed economies, that should be possible, as Marx indicated to Zasulich, and Engels to Danielson.
But, the Marxist recognises that, in the vast majority of cases, the revolutionary masses are not, yet, at this level of revolutionary class consciousness, and remain in thrall to the delusion of bourgeois-democracy, which they can only be divorced from, in the process of the revolutionary struggle itself, which requires the active role of the revolutionary party in demonstrating to them, in action, the sham nature and bankruptcy of bourgeois-democracy, which acts as cover for the social dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and its oppression and exploitation of them. That is why any suggestion that the Marxists “support” that bourgeois-democracy, or other bourgeois-democratic concepts, such as the right to national self-determination, is nonsense. We recognise, abstractly, those bourgeois rights, at a certain stage of social development, and defend them, in so far as they benefit and facilitate the struggle of the working-class, but we do not support them, or advocate them. From the start, if the concept of Permanent Revolution is to have any real meaning, rather than being some abstract formula, and automatic process, the Marxists have to make clear that our objective is not those bourgeois rights and principles, not the bourgeois-democratic/national revolution, but international, proletarian revolution.
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