In latter-day Trotskyism the theory of 'permanent revolution'-- anti-landlord or anti-colonial revolution being merged with socialist revolution under the leadership of the working class -- has become a dogma, used more to obscure the fact of many colonies winning freedom on a capitalist basis than to enlighten. In part 1 of a two-part article, Clive Bradley discusses the issues. (Originally published in Workers Liberty [Britain] No. 7).

Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was one of the most important of his contributions to Marxism, but it has become one of the most vulgarised aspects of his legacy. In particular, the theory of permanent revolution and the Marxist attitude towards the national question have been collapsed into each other, to the detriment of both. In this article, I want to unravel these separate questions, and unearth the real assumptions and points of departure of classical Marxism.

Trotsky agreed with all the Russian Marxists that the revolution against the Tsar would be a bourgeois revolution in its general character. Its principal tasks were those of the bourgeois revolution: the formation of a democratic republic, land to the peasants, and so on. It would sweep away all the impediments to the free development of capitalism.

Trotsky argued that social conditions in Russia put the young working class at the centre of the revolutionary movement. This was the crucial lesson of the 1905 revolution, and Trotsky was not alone in drawing it (the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg and even Kautsky all stressed it).

Indeed the centrality of the working class to the bourgeois-revolutionary movement was common ground among all the early Russian Marxists; it was one of the things that distinguished them from the populists. Zinoviev writes: 'The conflict between Marxism and populism reduced itself essentially to the question of the role of the working class in Russia, whether we would have a class of industrial workers and if we did, what its role in the revolution would amount to'. (1)

The early Plekhanov advocated the 'hegemony of the proletariat' in the revolution. The Leninist strategy, aiming at a 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry', Trotsky looked principally to the workers (the Bolsheviks never saw themselves as a 'worker-peasant' party). But the precise relationship between the workers and the peasantry was not clearly understood. Trotsky posed the matter sharply: the peasantry could not play an independent political role. This meant specifically that it was not a question of forming a strategic alliance with a revolutionary peasant-based party.

The workers would lead the revolution, and on the basis of their own power would 'stand before the peasants as the class which has emancipated it'. (2) He thus criticised the Bolshevik formula as evasive on the key question of the class character of the state to be fought for. The implications of working class leadership should be faced squarely: '...the fact that both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks invariably talk about the 'independent' policy of the proletariat...in no way alters the fact that both...become scared of the consequences of the class struggle and hope to limit it by their metaphysical constructs'. (3)

The working class in power would be compelled to go beyond the limits of the bourgeois revolution if it was not to hand power over to the bourgeoisie. Faced with a strike, for example, a workers' government would have to side with the workers, to the point of expropriating the capitalists. The logic of the class struggle thus pointed towards the immediate, 'uninterrupted' development of a bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist one.

While both Lenin and Luxemburg hinted at this conclusion, Trotsky alone spelled it out clearly -- and was of course vindicated by the course taken by the revolution in 1917. As a result of conscious intervention, the revolution -which began as a bourgeois revolution fired by the industrial workers -- became a socialist revolution. Trotsky, in other words, most clearly drew political perspectives and strategy from the logic of the class struggle in the actual conditions of Russia.

Trotsky of course accepted that the objective limits to 'socialist' revolution pointed to by the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were real: backward Russia, where the vast majority of society were illiterate peasants, could not sustain this socialist extension of the revolution. Socialist revolution was only possible if it was extended internationally. 'Without the direct state support of the European proletariat the working class of Russia cannot remain in power and convert its temporary domination into a lasting socialist dictatorship'. (4)The material prerequisites for socialism did not exist in Russia, but internationally they did. The main coherent alternative perspective was that of the Mensheviks: that the revolution was 'bourgeois' and therefore the bourgeoisie would lead it; that socialism was impossible, and therefore it would be wrong to fight for it; that the role of the Marxists was to develop bedrock working-class organisation in preparation for a socialist revolution in the future, after capitalism had further developed.

Lenin, like Trotsky, argued that the weak Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of playing a revolutionary role. But Lenin's position remained somewhat incoherent. What he seemed to envisage was a revolution creating a democratic assembly within which the Marxist workers' party would accept their minority status. He did not think through the implications of the dynamics of class struggle.

Trotsky was historically vindicated. After April 1917, the Bolsheviks fought for a programme essentially similar to that advocated by Trotsky, and took power on that basis. The issue of 'permanent revolution' was thereafter a dead letter until the Stalinists revived it as part of their campaign against 'Trotskyism'. The theory after 1917 In the course of the Chinese revolution of 1925-7, the Communist International retreated from the strategy pursued by the Bolsheviks to a variant of Menshevism.

Advocating a 'bloc of four classes' for a 'first stage' in the revolution, they liquidated the Communist Party into the bourgeois Kuomintang. Politically disarmed and organisationally unprepared, the Communists were slaughtered when the Kuomintang inevitably turned on them. Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought against this disastrous course (after an initial period of silence on the question). As he was to put it in 1928: 'China is still confronted with a vast, bitter, bloody and prolonged struggle for such elementary things as the liquidation of the most 'Asiatic' forms of slavery, the national emancipation, and unification of the country.

But as the course of events has shown, it is precisely this that makes impossible in the future any petty-bourgeois leadership or even semi-leadership in the revolution. The unification and emancipation of China today is an international task, no less so than the existence of the USSR. This task can be solved only by means of a desperate struggle on the part of the downtrodden, hungry and persecuted masses under the direct leadership of the proletarian vanguard -- a struggle not only against world imperialism, but also against its economic and political agency in China, against the bourgeoisie, including the 'national' bourgeoisie and all its democratic flunkeys. And this is nothing else than the road toward the dictatorship of the proletariat.'' (5)

The experience of China confirmed the general applicability of Trotsky's earlier conclusions for Russia. He therefore generalised the theory of permanent revolution. From a theoretical and strategic perspective for Russia, it became a general theory. 'With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries...the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.' (6)

Three theoretical issues come together in this generalisation: permanent revolution, imperialism and the national question. Before the generalisation of the theory, these were quite separate questions: Trotsky's original exposition of permanent revolution makes no reference to imperialism or national independence (and was in any case put forward for a country that was in one sense imperialist itself). Trotsky was right to integrate the issues. But they were and are separate issues, and it is important to look at how they do inter-relate. Above all, it is important to remember that Trotsky's position was not simply derived from a theory of imperialism: it was based upon an understanding of the dynamics of class struggle, first in Russia, then in China, and upon a generalisation of these historical experiences.

Footnote references, and rest of the article, in May 2000 newsletter under title Permanent revolution after Trotsky