What permanent revolution demonstrates is that, in the age of imperialism, where industrial capital has grown, and along with it the industrial working-class, this working-class can, lead the bourgeois national revolution, where it has not already taken place, and, where it does, it will be led to go beyond the tasks, purely of that revolution, that it will be led to fulfil the tasks of that revolution, by proletarian not bourgeois means. (Incidentally, this shows the lack of understanding of revolution as a dialectical process, rather than as an event portrayed by Lars T Lih, in his recent article in the Weekly Worker) But, can that bourgeois national revolution occur without the working-class taking that leading role, and so without the process of permanent revolution being set in motion? Yes, of course it can.
For one thing imperialism is not colonialism. Colonialism is the expression of mercantilism, of the symbiotic relation between the landed aristocracy with merchant capital, and the financial oligarchy. The same appropriation of surplus value via unequal exchange that characterises rent, commercial profit and interest is what characterises the extraction of surplus value from colonial possessions. It also is an extension of the old monopolies and protected markets, that industrial capitalism sweeps away. This is a fundamental error in Lenin's “Imperialism”, in which he continued to see the issue in terms of colonialism, and a struggle for division of the world, to acquire these protected markets, whereas the real issue was a struggle to create, and dominate ever larger single domestic markets, subsumed within ever larger, multinational states.
Rather than seeking to create protected markets, what multinational capital actually sought, as industrial capital had done in creating the nation state, was to ensure the openness of those global markets, as sources of supply of materials, and locations where it could invest capital, and, thereby, exploit labour, i.e. the extraction of surplus value, not via unequal exchange, but directly in production, via the production of ever larger quantities of relative surplus value, and ever larger masses of capital. World War I and II, in Europe, was about creating a single European market, for example. It required not the old protectionism, but free trade and a level playing field for all capital operating within it, which requires a single, European, multinational state.
So, colonialism after WWII, no longer served the interests of capital, which had become dominated by multinational industrial capital - imperialism. As Trotsky notes, western imperialism had financed revolutionaries to overthrow Tsarism, whose political regime was no longer compatible with the needs of industrial capital. The development of industrial capital, and the consequent decline of the old landed aristocracy, as well as of the peasantry/petty-bourgeoisie, inevitably leads to the social dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, whose preferred political regime is that of the parliamentary republic, as Lenin described in “State and Revolution”.
Towards the end of WWII, Roosevelt proposed to Stalin that, if required, they should join forces to ensure the break-up of the old colonial empires, which, of course, the US required, in order to gain access to them. That did not happen, but those old colonial empires were broken up, as a consequence of the dominance of US imperialism, the bankruptcy of the old European capitals, and the national liberation struggles conducted within those former colonies. What imperialism required was no longer colonial slaves, but wage slaves, and that meant it no longer required colonies, or even neocolonies, but the ability to move capital freely to wherever labour could be best exploited to maximise profits. It required something approaching a global rule of law protecting capitalist property rights, and so something approaching bourgeois-democratic states, implementing and enforcing such laws.
Of course, as the Revolutions of 1848 demonstrated, such bourgeois republics require either that the ruling class is dominant, and able to exercise direct control over its state, or else that a large, professional middle-class, and proletariat exists upon which social democracy rests. In many developing countries, no such conditions existed, or indeed exist. The domestic ruling class is often weak, with foreign capital being strong.
As in Russia and China, that also means that the working-class may develop rapidly, concentrated in these large scale, foreign owned enterprises, whilst the rapid expansion of commodity production and exchange, at the expense of direct production, leads to the rapid development of the domestic petty-bourgeoisie. As the working-class may assert its interests against capital, this petty-bourgeoisie, sees its net social weight increase, and, in many cases, other cross-cutting cleavages, for example, based on caste, religion, or ethnicity may weaken class division. In these conditions, Bonapartism again thrives, imposing order from above.
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