The theory of permanent revolution, first formulated by Leon Trotsky in 1905-6, defines a theoretical field whose principal, dialectically linked problems are: (a) the possibility of proletarian revolution in 'backward’ (underdeveloped, semi-feudal, pre-capitalist or pre-industrial) countries; (b) the uninterrupted transition from the democratic to socialist revolution, as so-called bourgeois-democratic tasks (national -independence and unity, the emancipation of the peasantry, democratic enfranchisement, and so on) are undertaken by workers’ power in ineluctable combination with specifically socialist tasks; (c) the international extension of the revolutionary process and the construction of socialism on a world scale. The formulation of this theory, and the new problematic it entailed, unquestionably signalled a bold and original break from the evolutionist Marxism of the Second International. At the same time, however, it initiated a controversy that persists to this day: does Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution represent a creative development of classical socialist theory, or is it, in fact, a heretical rupture with the fundamental principles of historical materialism as conceived by Marx?

It is a cliche of anti-Marxists of every stripe, repeated ad infinitum, that ‘according to Marxism, the proletarian revolution should have been the final outcome of industrialization, and not vice versa, and it should have come first in the highly industrialized countries, and only much later in Russia’.¹ Unfortunately, this platitude has acquired dogmatic validity to the extent that it has also been accepted and embellished by a surprising number of Marxists from the end of the nineteenth century down to the present day. For example, no less an authority than Kautsky—the ‘Pope’ of German Marxism—proclaimed in 1909: ‘Marx and Engels acknowledged . . . that a revolution could not be made at will, but only as far as it was the necessary product of determinate conditions, and to the extent that these conditions were lacking, revolution was thus impossible. It is only where the system of capitalist production has achieved a high level of development that economic conditions permit public power co transform the means of production into social property.’² Moreover, it was in the name of this thesis that Kautsky criticized the October Revolution, stressing that the working class of so backward a country as Russia was not capable of introducing socialism, and that it should, therefore, refrain from installing a dictatorship of the proletariat.

This near-unanimity between many Marxists and their most hostile critics concerning the unilinear link between economic development and socialist revolution has reinforced a certain interpretation of Marxism that claims that historical materialism has proved itself analytically bankrupt. Indeed, if Marx simply believed what was imputed to him by Kautsky, then the actual unfolding of twentieth-century history confounds all Marx’s predictions. In particular, the direct reduction of revolutionary possibility to economic potential on a national scale makes the sequence of revolutions and revolutionary movements since 1917—centred as they have so often been in the ‘weak links' rather than the economic fortresses of world capitalism—almost inexplicable in theoretical terms. For some commentators, this apparent dissonance between theory and reality has only ratified their belief in the fundamental invalidity of Marxism as a whole; for others, especially right-wing social democrats, it has demonstrated the ‘anti-Marxist adventurism’ of the Bolsheviks’ and later attempts to leap over iron laws of history. Even revolutionary socialists in Western Europe originally had great difficulty reconciling the success of the Bolsheviks with an ‘orthodox’ understanding of Marxism. Thus the young Gramsci was brash enough to hail October as the ‘revolution against Capital'} This double entendre expressed the terrific tension that the eruption of the Russian Revolution created wichin the mental apparatus and world outlook of a generation of socialist militants conditioned to expect that the ‘last fight’ would begin in Berlin, London or Chicago rather than Petrograd, Shanghai or Havana.

²La chemin du pouvoir, Paris 1969, p. 3. See also Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938, London 1979, p. 224.

³Tn Russia, Mant's Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie chan of the proletariat. It stood as the critical demonstration of how events should follow a predetermined course: how in Russia a bourgeoisie had to develop, and a capitalist era had to open, with the setting-up of Western-type civilization, before the proletariat could even chink in terms of its own revolt, its own class demands, its own revolution. But events have overcome ideologies.' ('The Revolution Against “Capital'", in Selections from Political Writings, 1910-1920, Quinrin Hoare, ed., London 1977, p. 34).

Thus, before examining Trotsky's seminal break with this mechanical model of the socialist transition, it is necessary to interrogate the works of Marx and Engels. Did the Kautskian orthodoxy of the Second International faithfully reproduce, as its grey-bearded leaders always insisted, the letter and the spirit of Marx’s theory of socialist revolution; or did it flatten and distort its complex folds and nuances? It is my opinion chat a rigorous analysis of the writings of Marx and Engels, in fact, reveals a problematic far more complex and subtle, pregnant with ideas and hypotheses that offer a groundwork for the conception of permanent revolution as eventually theorized by Trotsky. It is, of course, undeniable that certain texts of the ‘founding fathers’ are marked by an explicitly stagist perspective—the supposition of an unvarying succession of historical (economic and?or socio-political) stages. Rather than skirt this contradiction, I will try to situate it in its proper context relative to unresolved theoretical and strategic problems in the thought of Marx and Engels. In the absence of previous systematic inquiry into the question of permanent revolution as conceived by Marx and Engels, I attempt in this chapter to disentangle the different threads of theory—‘stagist’ and ‘permanentist’—that comprise their reflections on the revolutions of the nineteenth century. At the same time I will endeavor to answer the paradoxical question raised by Gramsci in 1917: was the Russian revolution the living negation of Capital and classical Marxism?

How did Marx and Engels envisage revolutions in backward, semi-feudal and absolutist countries? Did they believe in an inevitable repetition of the model of past bourgeois revolutions or did they look forward to the uninterrupted development of the revolutionary process towards the consolidation of proletarian power? These questions find a far from univocal and coherent answer in their writings. Indeed, one discovers contradictory elements that express the contradictory social reality and transitional nature of their period. To begin with, the very concept of 'bourgeois revolution’ was itself never formalized or rigorously defined in their political thought. Occasionally, the concept was anchored by certain common features putatively shared by two great bourgeois revolutions of the past—1648 and 1789. As Marx explained in the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848: ‘In these revolutions the bourgeoisie gained the victory; but the victory of the bourgeoisie was at that time the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois property over feudal property, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over guild, of the partition of estates over primogeniture ... of enlightenment over superstition ... of industry

over heroic laziness, of civil law over privileges of medieval origin.’⁴ More typically, however, it was the Great French Revolution alone that provided Marx and Engels with the ‘classical’ prototype of bourgeois revolution; for, unlike its English predecessor, ‘it constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the past; it cleared out the very last vestiges of feudalism’.⁵

The concept of a ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie' is, then, intimately linked to the model of 1789, and the French bourgeoisie of this epoch becomes the measure of the revolutionary or non-revolutionary character of the European bourgeoisies of the nineteenth century—especially the German. In his journalism during the revolution of 1848, Marx repeatedly contrasted the revolutionary fortitude of the bourgeoisie of 1789 with the pusillanimity of the German middle classes. Whereas the French bourgeoisie had upheld its anti-feudal alliance with rhe peasantry, the German bourgeoisie in 1848-50 cravenly betrayed the peasants in order to mollify the aristocracy and king.⁶ In contrast to the German middle classes, the French bourgeoisie of 1789-94 had really acted (in Marx’s view) as the incarnation of the general interests of modernity in confrontation with the old feudal order.⁷ It is beyond the purview of the present study to weigh the historical accuracy Marx and Engels’s estimate of the French bourgeoisie; suffice to say that on other occasions they openly acknowledged that the prime mover of the revolutionary process was not actually the bourgeoisie but the sansculottes.⁸ Later on, in the Second International, it was precisely the sociopolitical category of ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’ that became the basis of a generalized, stagisr interpretation of Marxism; in particular it provided the strategic horizon of political debates within Russian Social Democracy. Yet there is plenty of evidence that Marx and Engels themselves were uncomfortable with the concept. As early as the Communist Manifesto, Marx had conceived ‘democracy’ as a specific task of socialist rather than bourgeois revolution (‘. . . the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to

⁵ Engels, Special Introduction to the English Edition of Socialism: U topian and Scientific (1892) in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, London 1970, p. 387. In his Political Power and Social Classes London 1975, pp. 173-180), Poulantzas questions whether the Revolution of 1789 really provided the exemplary pattern for other ‘bourgeois revolutions'. Although a discussion of chis question lies outside the boundaries of his study, it should be noted that Poulantzas wrongly attributes the responsibility for a paradigmatic interpretation of 1789 to Gramsci, when in fact it was Marx and Engels themselves who introduced it.

⁶See ‘The Bill for the Abolition of Feudal Burdens’, in The Revolution of 1848, pp, 137-43.

⁷See ‘The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution’ (December, 1848) in ibid, pp. 193-4.

⁸See Marx, ‘Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality' (1847) in Collected Works, vol. 6, London 1976, p. 319-

win the battle of democracy’²). In later years both Marx and Engels were to question further whether the bourgeoisie actually required a ‘revolution’ to accomplish its "historic tasks'—the abolition of feudal institutions and barriers, the free development of industry, national independence and unification and so on. For example, in his 1895 introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, Engels suggests the following hypothesis concerning the historical roles of Napoleon HI and Bismarck: after 1851, ‘the period of revolutions from below was concluded for the time being; there followed a period of revolutions from above. . . . The general result, however, was that in Europe the independence and internal unity of the great nations, with the exception of Poland, had become a fact. . . . The grave-diggers of the Revolution of 1848 had become the executors of its will’.³ Although the idea was never codified by Marx and Engels, their writings seem to suggest that the prospect of future bourgeois revolutions would become less certain as the bourgeoisie became able to attain its aims through non-revolutionary means—revolutions ‘from above’—without popular mobilization or political rupture.

If the concept of bourgeois revolution is ambiguous in Marx and Engels, the question of the character of the revolutionary process in countries with feudal-absolutist structures is even more contradictory in their writings. In a series of texts, especially those of Engels, one can find the clear outlines of a stagist doctrine that defines bourgeois revolution and/or industrial capitalism as the necessary historical condition(s) of autonomous revolutionary intervention by the proletariat. This thesis is sometimes justified on economic grounds, sometimes socio-politically; the approaches in the two cases are different and need to be examined separately.

In the most extreme version, the economic foundation of stagism is given as the level of the development of the productive forces. Capitalism can only be abolished at the point where it has exhausted its ability to nurture technological creativity and expand production. As Engels observed in 1895, this was manifestly not the case in 1848: ‘History has . . . made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent. . .—all on a capitalist basis, which, in the year 1848, therefore had great capacity for expansion.’⁴ Compare this

with Marx’s celebrated remark in the 1859 Preface: ‘No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed. . ⁵ Certainly if Marx and Engels had confined themselves to

this rigidly economistic and deterministic problematic, and its equation of revolution with the breakdown of a moribund capitalism, then not a single nineteenth-century society—not even late Victorian England—could have been adjudged ripe for socialism. Indeed, if the exhaustion of potential for economic development in some abstract sense is the overarching structural precondition of socialism, what country could meet this criterion even today?

But in the very same texts one can also find a more subtle version of economic stagism which focuses attention less on the maximum development of the productive forces, and more on the transformation of the relations of production. Here the decisive material condition of the socialist revolution becomes the formation and centralization of the factory proletariat as industrialism dissolves pre-capitalist layers of peasants, artisans and small producers in general. It chus follows that revolution is only possible where capitalism has simplified and polarized the social structure into openly opposed armies of proletarians and bourgeois.'⁶ This is why Marx and Engels in certain writings present England as the country most ‘ripe’ for socialism, or, indeed, sometimes as the only country where proletarian revolution has become the order of the day.⁷

In contrast with these straightforwardly economistic justifications of an inevitable bourgeois-revolutionary stage, Marx and Engels also argued from a socio-political perspective that adumbrated an explicitly per-manentist conception of revolution. In this transitional problematic the bourgeois revolution appears as a precondition to the extent that, by abolishing the monarchy and the power of the feudal nobility, the political terrain is simplified into the direct contraposition of bourgeoisie and proletariat. ‘The workers . . . know that their own struggle against the bourgeoisie can only dawn with the day when the bourgeoisie is victorious. . . . They can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a precondition for the workers’ revolution. However, they cannot for a moment regard it as their ultimate goal.’⁸ The change here from previous formulations is considerable: the focus has shifted from a fixed succession of generation-long economic stages to a telescoped sequence of political phases. The stagist dimension remains, but it has been reduced to the somewhat abstract categorical assertion that bourgeois revolution remains the sine qua non of revolutionary proletarian politics.

For Marx, the stagist theory of revolution did not exclude the possibility of a ‘premature’ accession to power, although in his view such an experience could not be more than an ephemeral episode. Indeed, if the proletariat were, by some unexpected and contingent turn of events, to come to power in van of the bourgeois revolution, it would find itself doomed to become a political instrument or temporary surrogate of the socially ascendant bourgeoisie. Marx claiirted (not very convincingly in my opinion) to find an historical precedent for such an event in the Jacobin dictatorship of Year Four.⁹ Brought to power by the sans-culottes, the Committee of Public Safety found itself nonetheless constrained to serve the logic of bourgeois, not plebeian, emancipation. During the debate within the Central Committee of the Communist League in 1850, Marx further elaborated this idea, now stressing the overwhelming social weight of the petty-bourgeois layers and their ideology in France. In a country so little transformed by modern industry, a victorious working class would be obliged to share power with the numerically preponderant peasantry and lower middle classes. The proletariat would be forced to defer its own class demands while legislating the programme of its allies.¹⁰ Engels gives a different twist to this thesis in a letter to Weydemeyer in 1853. Where Marx had emphasized the captivity of a revolutionary government to the stage of social development, Engels now fretted over the dangers of adventurism as he confided his fear that if‘our party’ were forced to take power in Germany ‘before its own time’, it might be tempted ‘to make communist experiments and leaps’ that were ‘premature’ and would lead to total defeat.¹¹ These cautionary allusions left a profound imprint upon the politics of the Second International in the form of a conception of proletarian power that, in countries like Russia, was confined to alliance with the peasantry and the execution of bourgeois-democratic tasks.

All these various formulations, however, provide only one scenario of revolution to be found in the writings of Marx and Engels. In a contradictory manner—sometimes literally side by side with stagist conceptions—there appears the idea of permanent revolution: that is to say, the concept of an uninterrupted revolutionary process enabling the proletariat to overturn capitalism and maintain state power, even in the peripheral, backward and semi-feudal countries of Europe. I say ‘idea’ and not ‘theory’, because it is not possible to speak of a coherent and systematic theory of permanent revolution in Marx and Engels. Rather, there is a series of fragmentary conceptions, prophetic intuitions and inchoate perspectives, which intermittently appear and reappear but are never ordered in a rigorous doctrine or global strategy. Their importance is above all methodological: they show that Marx and Engels had admitted the objective possibility of a rupture in the succession of historical tasks; that these tasks have a complex, dialectical articulation; and that historical materialism—at least as practised in the writings of its founders—cannot be reduced to a metaphysical and econo-mistic evolutionism.

The term ‘permanent revolution’ is first employed by Marx in his 1844 text, The Jewish Question. It occurs in a passage criticizing Jacobinism as a terroristic attempt to impose the supremacy of the political sphere over bourgeois society (although this was, of course, its actual foundation): ‘But it only manages to do this in violent contradiction to the conditions of its own existence, by declaring the revolution permanent, and for that reason the political drama necessarily ends up with the restoration of religion, private property and all the elements of civil society (biirgerlichen Gesell-schaft), just as war ends with peace.'¹² Of course this utilization of the mere term in 1844 had little relationship to the idea of permanent revolution as the uninterrupted process leading the proletariat to power in backward countries. The Jacobins were far from being the precursors of the revolutionary proletariat, and Marx in this period tended to employ the term in an imprecise manner. Consider, for example, its appearance in a well-known passage from The Holy Family (1845) concerning Napoleon: ‘He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution.’¹³ It was only in 1850 that Marx first used the term to designate the concept in a familiar sense. Still, one may wonder whether the term was truly adequate in its reference to the problematic involved; does not the connotation of perpetual and ceaseless motion introduce an element of misunderstanding and confusion? Perhaps an expression like ‘uninterrupted and combined revolution’ would have been more precise. Nonetheless, revolutionary tradition for nearly a century has invested Marx’s formula with a rich signification that transcends its literal sense—scarcely a unique example of lexical overdetermination in socialist discourse (just think of the loaded, multiple meanings compressed within signifiers like ‘socialism’, ‘communism’, and so on). Trotsky openly recognized this problem when he referred to ‘this rather high-flown expression’.¹⁴

The crucial question is, what actual ideas are denoted by the term ‘permanent revolution’ in the various texts of Marx and Engels that concerned themselves with the problem of revolution in continental Europe? In fact, the richest and most rigorous development of the concept can be found in their texts on Germany. Although the German Empire would be the industrial giant of Europe by the century’s end, it should not be forgotten that the ‘Germany’ of 1844-56 was still semi-feudal, pre-industrial and politically fragmented. Its most powerful core state—the Prussia of Kaiser Wilhelm n—was one of the purest examples in Europe of unreformed absolutism. It is interesting to observe, therefore, that the first work in which Marx explicitly recognized the revolutionary agency of the proletariat is simultaneously the first work in which he sketched a ‘per-manentist’ prospectus for the class struggle in Germany: the Introduction to ‘The Critique of Hegel’s Theory of Right’, published in the Franco-German Yearbook for 1844. Marx’s personal experience of direct collaboration with the German liberal bourgeoisie, as the crusading young editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (1842-43), gave him a negative view of that class’s revolutionary capacity. In particular, the servile capitulation of the paper’s shareholders to Prussian censorship so disgusted him that he resigned (in ²¹Preface to the First Edition (1922), 1905, New York 1971, p. vi. When Nicolas Krasso (‘Trotsky's Marxism', New Left Review 44 (July-August, 1967], pp. 67-68) tries at all cost to expose Trotsky’s supposed confusion ('He called this process "permanent revolution"—an inept designation that indicated the lack of scientific precision even in his profoundesc insights’), he very simply forgets that Trotsky had only appropriated the term from Marx.

March 1843) rather than concede to ‘moderation’ of the editorial line. A little while later, in a letter to Ruge, he expressed his scorn for the bourgeois philistinism that accepted a sheepish subservience rather than struggle to become ‘free men—that means republicans’.^{15 16} In the 1844 Introduction this conclusion is sharpened and amplified: for Marx, the German bourgeoisie does not posess ‘the consistency, acuteness, courage and ruthlessness which would stamp it as the negative representative of society’. It lacks ‘that revolutionary boldness which flings into the face of its adversary the defiant words: I am nothing and I should he everything’.²ⁱ He thus ironically chastises the German bourgeoisie with the defiant words of Sieyes’s Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat?, that incomparable manifesto of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie of 1789-

Why was the German bourgeoisie of the 1840s so weak-kneed and timid in comparison with the French middle classes of a half-century earlier? The remarkable sociological explanation outlined by Marx in the Introduction contained the seeds of some of the decisive elements of the modern theory of permanent revolution. In particular, Marx analysed with great acuity the simultaneously backward and advanced character of German society: ‘Every sphere of civil society . . . experiences defeat before it celebrates victory, and asserts its narrow-mindedness before it has had a chance to assert its generosity. As a result, even the opportunity of playing a great role has always passed by before it was every really available, and every class, as soon as it takes up the struggle against the class above it, is involved in a struggle with the class beneach it. Thus princes struggle against kings, bureaucrats against aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie against all of these, while the proletariat is already beginning to struggle against the bourgeoisie. The middle class scarcely dares to conceive the idea of emancipation from its own point of view, and already rhe development of social conditions and the progress of political theory have demonstrated this point of view to be antiquated or at least problematic.’¹⁷ It is, therefore, the working-class menace ‘below’ that makes the German bourgeoisie conservative and prevents it from becoming a revolutionary force of any consequence. This leads Marx to conclude that only a ‘universal class’, lacking any hierarchy of privilege or power to defend against a more subordinate class, could possibly liberate Germany from the shackles of the past. This class is, of course, the proletariat. But the emancipation to which the proletariat aspires is not simply a reform of regimes; as a class with ‘radical chains’, it requires a radical revolution and general human emancipation— that is to say, communism. Consequently, ‘it is not radical revolution or universal human emancipation which is a utopian dream for Germany; it is the partial, merely political revolution, the revolution which leaves the pillars of the building standing. ... In Germany universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation. ’²⁵ Of course at the moment when Marx was writing this, the German workers’ movement hardly existed, so his audacious thesis was actually more an extrapolation from the French situation (he was just then receiving his first introduction to the Parisian underground of secret revolutionary societies and communist artisans) than an accurate description of German conditions. However, the great revolt of the Silesian weavers a few months later seemed an astounding confirmation of Marx’s prevision. In August, Marx used the Silesian events as a backdrop in his continuing polemic with Ruge, arguing that this first uprising of the German working class demonstrated that ‘just as the impotence of the German bourgeoisie is the political impotence of Germany, so too the capacity of the German proletariat ... is the social capacity of Germany’. Moreover, he added, one could find ‘the first rudiments necessary for an understanding of this phenomenon in my Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’.²⁶

Three years later, the Communist Manifesto offered a more ambiguous gloss on the probable course of a German revolution; and partisans of stagism and permanent revolution have both managed to find passages that seem to support their respective positions. In contrast with the 1844 texts, the Manifesto hypothesizes the possibility of a revolutionary role for the bourgeoisie—in which case, Marx and Engels argue, ic would be necessary for the proletariat to form a common front with it against the old order. It may be that this hypothesis was a reaction to the clash between the bourgeoisie and the monarchy during the meeting of the German Assembly in March 1847. At all events, even if Marx and Engels envisioned circumstances in which a tactical alliance with the bourgeoisie might be necessary, the strategic conceptions advanced by the Manifesto remained on a clearly permantist terrain: 'The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that ¹⁸

is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.’¹⁹ This famous passage contains several notions that would be decisive in the future elaboration of the theory of permanent revolution: (1) the idea that the level of social and economic development (‘civilization’) as an index of 'revolutionary maturity’ could not simply be measured in a single nation-state, but had to be evaluated within the appropriate international context (European in the nineteenth century); (2) the understanding that the social and political weight of the German proletariat precluded the repetition of a ‘classical’ bourgeois-democratic revolution of the English or French types; (3) (and although the affirmation of the necessary priority of bourgeois revolution did open the door for a stagist reading of the Manifesto) the intuition that, rather than two distinct historical stages, the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions might in fact constitute only two moments of the same uninterrupted revolutionary process.

During the course of the Revolution of 1848-49 in Germany, Marx and Engels had the concrete opportunity to test the strategic orientation they had outlined in the Manifesto. With the aid of Fernando Claudin’s remarkable study of the evolution of their political thought in this period,²⁰ we can compare the trajectory of positions adopted in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung with the perspective they advanced on the eve of the revolutionary storm.

In the first period (spanning most of 1848) Marx and Engels tried to implement the first tactical priority of their strategy: the common struggle with the bourgeoisie against absolutism. They joined the Democratic Association of Cologne and attempted to enlist the participation of several leading middle-class activists in the launching of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (described simply as an ‘organ of democracy’).²¹ Although their bourgeois associates deserted the paper after a few weeks, Marx and Engels persisted in searching for a basis of unity; as late as January, 1849 Marx published an article that presented a rather stagist defence of democratic solidarity.³⁰Yet in the same period they also wrote articles that questioned the tactic of alliance with the bourgeoisie. Most notably there was an article by Engels, published in September 1848 shortly after the shameless capitulation of the Frankfurt Assembly to the monarchy and the bloody suppression by Prussian troops of attempted resistance by workers and peasants. According to Engels, the struggle that had become the order of the day ‘in Vienna as well as Paris, Berlin as well as Frankfurt, London as well as Milan, is the political overthrow of the bourgeoisie’; raised now on every barricade of the continent was ‘the symbol of the European proletariat's unity in combat’— the red flag, under whose banner the German workers had fought the reactionary ‘parliament of che combined junkers and bourgeoisie’. The bourgeoisie now felt itself directly threatened by every popular uprising, so the masses had to struggle not only against the military-bureaucratic state, but also ‘against the armed bourgeoisie itself.³¹

After December 1848 Marx undertook to further develop this position in the well-known series of articles entitled ‘The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution’. ‘A purely bourgeois revolution ... is impossible in Germany. What is possible is either feudal and absolutist counter-revolution or the social-republican revolution,'^{22 23 24} But what would be the motive forces of such a revolution? In an article of February 1849, he gave the answer: ‘the most radical and democratic classes of society’, the workers, peasants and petty bourgeoisie.³³ By April, Marx had resigned from the Democratic Association and was now concentrating all his energies on building the Workers’ Association of Cologne. This shift in his political focus was also reflected in the publication of his famous essay, Wage-Labour and Capital; whose introduction warned that any revolutionary uprising in Europe would be doomed to defeat until ‘the revolutionary working class is victorious. . . .

[Every] social reform remains a utopia until the proletarian revolution and the feudalistic counter-revolution measure swords in a world war.’³⁴ Thus, just before the closure of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx had completely discarded the Manifesto’s insistence on a preliminary phase of bourgeois revolution in Germany, and had reoriented the entire problematic towards the international scene. This was the culmination of Marx’s increasing distrust of all attempts at tactical reliance on the middle classes; each bourgeois betrayal of the workers and surrender to the monarchy had pushed Marx back toward the permanentist orientation first outlined in 1844.

It is interesting to compare this second cycle of Marx’s disillusionment with the revolutionary capacity of the bourgeoisie and his original break with liberalism after the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1843. In both cases, the initial assumption—however qualified by various doubts and reservations—had concerned the capacity of the bourgeoisie to mount serious and consequent opposition to the feudal-absolutist system. In both cases, bitter practical experience forced Marx to set this belief aside. (As we shall see a little later, a somewhat similar analytic evolution was repeated in the case of Spain in the 1850s.) Nothing distinguished Marx and Engels more from some later ‘Marxists’ than this capacity to correct and to amend erroneous theoretical presuppositions in the light of the class struggle.

Exiled in England, Marx and Engels continued to radicalize their conception of the dynamics of the German revolution. For example, in March-April 1850, Engels published The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution’, with the following conclusion: ‘Ever since the defeat of June 1848 the question for the civilized part of the European continent has stood thus: either the rule of the revolutionary proletariat or the rule of the classes who ruled before February. A middle road is no longer possible. In Germany, in particular, the bourgeoisie has shown itself incapable of ruling; it could only maintain its rule over the people by surrendering it once more to the aristocracy and the bureaucracy . . . the revolution can no longer be brought to a conclusion in Germany except with the complete rule of the proletariat.’³⁵ At the same time, Marx and Engels were also writing the document that would outline most clearly, coherently and explicitly their perspective of permanent revolution: ‘The Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’. Their starting-point was a condemnation of the unholy alliance between the ‘liberal’ bourgeoisie and absolutism. Against this reactionary coalition, they championed the common action of

³⁵'The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution’, ibid., vol. 10, p. 237.

the proletariat with the democratic parties of the petty bourgeoisie. But their conception of ‘democratic unity’ was now inserted within a much more internationalist and permanentist conception of the revolutionary process: ‘while the democratic petty bourgeoisie want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible . . . it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far—not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world—that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.’²⁵ This striking passage contains three of the fundamental themes that Trotsky would later develop in the theory of permanent revolution: (1) the uninterrupted development of the revolution in a semi-feudal country, leading to the conquest of power by the working class; (2) the application by the proletariat in power of explicitly anticapitalist and socialist measures; (3) the necessarily international character of the revolutionary process and of the new socialist society, without classes or private property.

Given this perspective, what form must the revolutionary movement of the proletariat take? Marx assumed that the next revolutionary wave would carry the democratic party (bourgeois/petty-bourgeois) to power in Germany, but ‘alongside the new offical governments they [the workers] must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers' governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers.’²⁶ Need we emphasize the extraordinary similarity between this action programme and the October Revolution: organization of workers’ councils, dual power, permanent revolution? The resemblance becomes even more unmistakable when Marx and Engels go on to stress the need to centralize the workers’ councils and provide them with ‘red guards’.²⁷ Finally, the ‘Address’ ends

with a ringing appeal to the German workers not to be deceived by hypocritical slogans of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, but to organize their own independent party. ‘Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.’²⁸

For obvious reasons this text has always been an embarassment and irritation to dogmatically stagist interpreters of Marx’s political thought. For some it proposes a revolutionary programme literally ‘incompatible with historical materialism’, while for others it constitutes only a ‘brief Jacobin-Blanquist aberration’ in Marx’s thought.²⁹ The Menshevik historian Nicolaievski, for example, thinks it is ‘difficult to accept that this document really reflects, in all its details, the opinion of Marx’, and that it was actually the product of a ‘compromise’ between Marx and the extremist wing of the Communist League.³⁰ Most of these commentators, however, have accepted the accusation first made by Bernstein in 1899 that the ‘Address’ and its theory of permanent revolution reveal the indelible influence of ‘Blanquism’.³¹ This is totally erroneous, for not only does the problematic of the ‘Address’ diverge entirely from Blanquism (how, for example, could its central insistence on the revolutionary self-organization of the working class be squared with Blanqui’s conception of a conspiracy?), but the rheme of‘permanent revolution’is most emphatically not of Blanquist origin. To my knowledge, neither the term nor the concept ever surface in the writings of Blanqui; moreover, when Marx first used the term in 1844-45, he was virtually ignorant of Blanqui’s works. In reality, for Bernstein to be able to calumniate Marx’s ideas in 1850 as ‘Blanquist’, he was first obliged to ‘redefine’ radically the conventional meaning of the concept. Thus for Bernstein, ‘Blanquism’ was no longer simply the theory of a revolutionary coup d’etat organized by a secret society (a ‘superficial definition’), but rather ‘the theory of the unlimited power of revolutionary violence and of its corollary: expropriation’.³² Of course, within such an expansive definition, every revolutionary socialist current would a priori become ‘Blanquist’. . . . On the other hand, Bernstein did demonstrate a more profound philosophical intuition when he saw that the ultimate source of the ‘Blanquist error’ in Marx and Engels was nothing other than the dialectic itself. For Bernstein, the concept of the transformation of the coming revolutionary explosion in Germany into a ‘permanent revolution’ was the fruit of the Hegalian dialectic (‘all the more dangerous because it is always totally false’) which permits the ‘brusque passage from economic

Indeed, it was only by virtue of their dialectical approach that Marx and Engels were able to transcend the rigid and intransigent dualism between economic evolution and political violence, between democratic revolution and socialist revolution. It was their understanding of the contradictory unity of these different moments, and of the possibility of qualitative leaps (‘brusque passages’) in the historical process that this made possible, that allowed them to lay the foundations for the theory of permanent revolution. Against this dialectical method Bernstein could propose only ‘a return to empiricism’ as ‘the sole means of avoiding the most terrible errors’.⁴⁵ No one could have thrown into sharper relief the contrasting methodological premisses of stagism and permanentism!

It is, of course, entirely true that the ‘empirical’ events foretold in the ‘Address’—the next revolutionary round in Germany, the victory of the democratic party, and so on—failed to come true. But just as history confounded the short-term predictions of the ‘Address’, it also eventually vindicated the brilliance of its prefiguration of the proletarian revolutions of the twentieth century.⁴⁶ The extraordinarily fertile dialectical approach of Marx and Engels touched on a broad spectrum of problems related to the class struggle in more backward capitalist countries. Indeed, their writings in the early 1850s even contain an intuition that revolution would break out more easily at the periphery than at the centre of the capitalist system. ‘These violent convulsions must necessarily occur at the extremities of the bourgeois organism rather than at its heart, where the possibilities of "Ibid., _P. 67.

⁴⁶Trocsky made a comment on the predictive errors of Marx and Engels in 1850 which, it seems to me, is very incisive; ‘Marx regarded the bourgeois revolution of 1848 as the direct prelude to the proletarian revolution. Marx "erred”. Yet his error has a factual and not a methodological character.' THeTevolution of 1848 did not turn into a socialist revolution. But that is just why it also did not achieve democracy.' {The Permanent Revolution, New York 1969, p. 131.) This distinction between factual error and methodological correctness is paradoxical, but it nonetheless constitutes the key to interpreting Marx’s writings on the revolutions, of 1848-50.

restoring the balance are greater.'⁴⁷ (For Marx in 1850 the 'heart' was obviously Britain, while the ‘extremities’ were the countries of the Western and Central Europe). Another seminal idea first canvassed in this period was the question of the peasantry. Reflecting on the failure of the revolution in Germany, Marx commented in a letter to Engels (April 1856): ‘The whole thing in Germany depends on the possibility of backing che proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasants’ War. ’⁴⁸ Lenin was later to interpret this passage in the following terms: ‘while the democratic (bourgeois) revolution in Germany was uncompleted, Marx focused every attention, in the tactics of the socialist proletariat, on developing the democratic energy of the peasantry.’⁴⁹ Actually, the position of Marx was much more radical, since its problematic was not that of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, but of peasant support for a proletarian revolution— an idea that reappears as a central theme in Trotsky’s writing after 1905.

It is clear that the permanentist strategy outlined by Marx and Engels between 1848 and 1850 was inspired in its form by the rhythms of the French Revolution of 1789, with its succession of increasingly radical forces assuming power amidst a continuing process of political and social upheaval. When, more than a generation after its demise, Engels drafted a balance-sheet of the Neue Rbeinische Zeitung, he emphasized that he and Marx had, at the time, envisioned the stormy period of February-March 1848 as ‘the starting point of a long revolutionary movement ... in which, as in the great French upheaval, the people would develop themselves still further through their struggles . . .’.⁵⁰ Engels believed that Marat was a precursor of this orientation to the extent that he had envisaged a process of revolution 'en permanence',⁵¹ But Engels did not sufficiently stress in this passage everything that distinguished the social content of the French Revolution (and its process of deepening radicalization) from the perspective of permanent revolution. Beyond the level of formal analogy, entirely different historical stakes were involved, since the revolutions

⁴¹The Class Struggles in France in Marx and Engels, Surveys From Exile, Harmondsworth 1973, p. 131.

⁵°'Marx und die "Neue Rheinische Zeicung" 1848-49', in Zur Deutschen Geschichte, li/l, p. 220. In an 1849 article Engels had compared che Jacobin dictatorship and che Hungarian Insurrection in che following terms: 'The levee en masse, the national manufacture of weapons, the revolution in permanence, in short all the chief characteristics of the glorious year 1793 are to be seen again in Hungary as armed, organized and galvanized by Kossuth.' (my italics; 'The Magyar Struggle', in Revolutions of 1848, pp. 213-4.)

of 1848 opened the new epoch of proletarian power. Thus the reference to Marat is obfuscatory inasmuch as he—unlike Babeuf—did not have a truly anti-capitalist programme.

The 1848 Revolution in France was also visualized by Marx and Engels as a process of permanent revolution, despite the feet that it involved a country that had not only known a bourgeois revolution but was also the most industrialized on the Continent. The existence of a monarchical state and the nearly exclusive concentration of political power in the hands of a financial aristocracy dictated certain revolutionary-democratic tasks; while the numerical superiority of the petty bourgeoisie and peasantry was a formidable obstacle to a workers' revolution. Thus the France of 1848 constituted a social formation intermediate between the ‘backwardness’ of Germany and the ‘ripeness’ of England in relation to the development of the productive forces and the polarization of the class structure. This complex situation was analysed in a contradictory manner in Marx’s Class Struggles in France. On one hand, he affirmed that ‘it is only the rule of the bourgeoisie which serves to tear up the material roots of feudal society and level the ground, thus creating the only possible conditions for a proletarian revolution’. On the other, with the exception of Paris, the proletariat ‘is almost submerged by the predominance of peasant farmers and petty bourgeoisie’. This argument seems to revive an economistic vision that postponed the possibility of proletarian revolution until a much later historical stage, when France had been fully industrialized and the middle layers proletarianized. Yet in the very same paragraph, he added, ‘The French workers could not move a step forward, nor cause the slightest disruption in the bourgeois order, until the course of the revolution had aroused the mass of the nation, the peasants and the petty bourgeoisie, located between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie', against this order, against the rule of capital, and until it had forced them to join forces with their protagonists, the proletarians. The workers were able to gain this victory at the price of the terrible defeat of June.’⁵² In focusing on the trajectory of the revolutionary process itself, Marx shifted from a rigid stagism towards a perspective of permanent revolution. For example, he considered the victory of the left in the by-elections of March 1850 as the first achievement of this vast popular coalition under proletarian leadership; ‘It was a general coalition against the bourgeoisie and the government, as in February. But this time the proletariat was the head of the revolutionary league. ’⁵³ And at the head of the proletariat was revolutionary socialism—

communism—‘for which the bourgeoisie itself has invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary intermediate point on the path towards the abolition of class differences in general, the abolition of all relations of production on which they are based . . . ’³³Socialist revolution was, therefore, recognized by Marx as possible in France provided that the proletariat won the following of other popular strata, especially the peasantry. In a famous passage of the Eighteenth Bru-maire this idea is extended to the entirety of ‘peasant nations’: generalized industrialization and proletarianization are no longer proposed as absolute preconditions for workers’ power; rather the problem is recast in political terms—it is the capacity of the proletariat to assume hegemony over the movement of the plebeian masses that arbitrates whether a dynamic of permanent revolution can take hold.^{34 35} Marx also conceived the proletarian revolution in France as permanent revolution because of its necessary international resonance and extension: ‘The new French revolution will be forced to leave its natural soil immediately and to conquer the European terrain, on which alone the social revolution of the nineteenth century can be carried ouc. ’³⁴ He outlined a dialectical relationship between revolutions in France and England that anticipated the Bolsheviks’ conception of the interdependence of the Russian and German revolutions: the victorious rising of the French working class would be the first step in the emancipation of Europe, provided that the French revolution was not isolated and eventually defeated by the economic power and world supremacy of England. Thus only the capture of power by the English working class could ensure that the ‘social revolution would pass from Kingdom of Utopia to the Kingdom of Reality’.³⁶ In a passage of The Class Struggles in France, he criticized the nationalist illusions of the French workers’ movement from the standpoint of an internationalist conception of proletarian revolution that emphasized the global character of capitalism and the linkages it perforce established between class struggles in different national contexts. 'Just as the workers believed that they could emancipate themselves alongside the bourgeoisie, so they believed that they could accomplish a proletarian revolution within the national walls of France alongside the remaining bourgeois nations. But French relations of production are determined by France’s foreign trade, by its position on the world market and by the laws of this market; how was France to break these laws without a European revolutionary war, which would have repercussions on the despot of the world market, England?’⁵⁸ Although this type of formulation had the unquestionable merit of posing the problem of the international dimension of the revolutionary process, it also underestimated—as would certain of Trotsky’s texts—the unequal character of this process, and, thus, the actual autonomy of the crisis and mass movements in each country.

Several years after the defeat of the French and German revolutions, echoes of the 1848-50 events were heard in a rather unexpected country: Spain. In June 1854 the ‘liberal’ generals, O’Donnell and Espartero, supported by the barricades of the people, staged a military uprising that liberated political prisoners and promised reforms. In a series of articles in the New York Daily Tribune, Marx carefully analysed these events, stressing the contradictions between the military (who wanted to preserve the monarchy) and the people (who demanded universal suffrage, the confiscation of the property of counter-revolutionaries, and so on). Nonetheless he was not very sanguine about the possibility of a Spanish version of June 1848; on the contrary, it was his opinion that ‘the social question, in the modern sense of the term, lacked a real foundation in a country whose resources were still as undeveloped and population as reduced (merely fifteen million) as Spain.’⁵⁹ The second part of Marx’s argument may seem rather capricious in retrospect; after all, Prussia—where Marx considered the ‘social question’ definitely on the agenda—had only about seventeen million inhabitants, just a few more than Spain. But the first part of the argument was more cogent: because of its economic and social underdevelopment, the 'social question’ in the sense of the struggle of the proletariat was not yet the order of the day in Spain. Yet two years later Marx abandoned this quasi-stagist conception in the face of another round of revolutionary crisis in Spain. In July 1856, O’Donnell in complicity with the throne seized power in a coup d’etat. The still liberal Espartero went into hiding, while the Cortes, after a timid attempt at resistance, de facto dissolved itself and advised the (bourgeois) national militia to disperse. Only the working-class districts of Madrid continued to fight until—after several days of desperate

³⁹Manc and Engels, Revolution in Spain, New York 1938, p. 126 (retranslated).

urban guerrilla warfare—they were crushed by the regular army. The Spanish proletariat had been capable of its heroic ‘June’ after all. Amending his earlier commentary, Marx now concluded that these events showed how ‘the proletarians were betrayed and abandoned by the bourgeoisie’, and that in Spain in 1856, ‘we no longer have simply the Court and the army on one side and the people on the other, but that we now have also the same divisions in the ranks of the people which exist in the rest of Western Europe’.⁶⁰ The social logic of the Spanish coup was ultimately the same as that of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: while the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie did oppose military despotism, they were more afraid of the mobilization of the workers, and, therefore, preferred the ignoble embrace of the generals to a democratic alliance with the proletariat.⁶¹ Marx concluded his first article on the 1856 events with a phrase which indicated not only his' evident surprise at the Spanish developments, but also the extent to which he was forced to reconsider his presuppositions about the country’s relative ‘immaturity’: ‘that{his lesson should also be demonstrated in Spain is as impressive as it is surprising’.⁶²In a second article (18 August 1856), he continued with an analysis of how the 1856 insurrection had transcended the liberal bourgeois and putschist framework of the Revolution of 1854, predicting that ‘the next European revolution will find Spain ripe to cooperate with it. The years 1854 and 1856 have been transitional phases that it had to pass through to achieve this maturity.’⁶³

What European revolution was Marx thinking of? In a letter to Engels around this time he expressed his conviction that ‘on the Continent revolution is imminent and will immediately take a socialist character’.⁶⁴Although this prognosis was obviously incorrect, it does clarify Marx’s particular interpretation of the Spanish situation. First, he clearly believed that Spain was ready to play its part in an imminent European socialist revolution. Second, Spain’s ‘maturity’ was the product neither of economic expansion nor of industrial revolution, but rather a result of a sequence of socio-political developments, including especially the counterrevolutionary role of the bourgeoisie and the experience acquired by the proletarian masses in the process of struggle. The shift of optic from an earlier determinist vision of distinct stages to a new scenario of permanent

⁶⁴Letter of 8 October, 1858, Ausgewdhlte Briefe, p. 133-revolution recalls the earlier revolution in Marx and Engels’s strategic conception of the German revolution. Here, however, the revision was more drastic, since Marx’s starting point had been the denial of the possibility of any specifically proletarian movement in Spain.

Marx’s reflections on permanent revolution in Spain—which have remained generally forgotten and undiscussed—are the last chapter in the ensemble of texts dealing with the revolutionary period around 1848 (from its first premonitions in the 1840s until its last, dying echo in the 1850s). As the debates on revolutionary strategy faded away, the question of permanent revolution also tended to sink below the immediate political horizon. It would only reappear after a hiatus of more than twenty years, but this time in the context of another country, the social formation in which the first historical concretization of uninterrupted and combined revolution would occur: Russia.

In order to understand the methodological basis of Marx’s approach to the Russian question, it is necessary to recall his polemic with the populist theorist Mikhailovsky in 1877. Accused of wanting to transpose onto Russia the model of ‘primitive accumulation’ described in Capital, Marx responded: ‘For him {Mikhailovsky] it is absolutely necessary to change my sketch of the origin of capitalism in Western Europe into an historio-philosophical theory of a Universal Progress, fatally imposed on all peoples, regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves.’³⁷Is there any point underlining the exceptional clarity and importance of this passage for understanding Marx's views on Russian and other ‘backward’ nations in the world market? The same problem is raised again in a letter to Vera Zasulich written in 1881 when the ideals of populism still gripped most of the revolutionary intelligentsia in Russia. Marx complained about certain Russian ‘Marxists’ who attributed to him a ‘theory of the historical necessity for all countries of the world to pass through the phases of capitalist production’. In reply, the author of Capital insisted that his analysis of the necessity of the expropriation of the peasantry as outlined in the chapter on primitive accumulation was ‘explicitly restricted to the countries of Western Europe'.³⁸ These remarks clearly dissociate Marx from any evolutionist, unilinear, mechanical or abstract conception of historical motion and socio-economic development. Indeed, the refusal to enshrine the Western European case as a universal model allowed him to recognize

the multiform character of concrete social development. It opened the { theoretical possibility of a distinct succession of social and historical stages -in Asia, and the ‘periphery’ in general, which differ from those analysed in ) Capital (feudalism, the crisis of feudalism, mercantilism, manufacture, heavy industry). Transcending the antinomy between the metaphysical universalism (geschichtsphilosophie) of the self-proclaimed Russian ‘Marxists’ and the mystical, Slavophile particularism of the Narodniks, Marx achieved in his writings on Russia between 1877 and 1882 a remarkable dialectical synthesis between the general and the particular that allowed him to understand the specific contradictions of the Russian economy and society in this epoch.

What would be the character of the Russian revolution that Marx and Engels anxiously anticipated from the 1870s onwards? For Engels (in 1894) the Russian bourgeoisie was unlikely to play a liberal, much less a revolutionary role: ‘If meanwhile it [the bourgeoisie] is still tolerating the despotic autocracy . . . this is only because this autocracy offers it greater security than would a change—even in a bourgeois liberal direction—the consequence of which, given the internal situation in Russia, no one can foresee.’⁶⁷ What might be the ‘unforeseeable’ consequences of a revolutionary uprising in Russia? Several times Engels speaks of a ‘Russian 1789, which would necessarily be followed by a 1793’.⁶⁸ The problem, of course, is that the significance of ‘ 1793’ is just as ambiguous in Engels as in Marx. Sometimes it appears as the synonym of the revolution ‘en permanence (as in Engels’s 1849 article on Hungary), while other times it denotes simply the realization of the tasks of bourgeois revolution via plebeian means (as in Marx’s 1848 articles on the bourgeoisie and counter-revolution). On another occasion (in a message to a meeting of Slavic revolutionaries) Marx and Engels employ the different historical analogy of the ‘future establishment of a Russian Commune’.⁶⁹ Is this simply a rhetorical formula corresponding to the tenth anniversary of the Paris Commune? It seems to me that its meaning is, in fact, more profound; but to understand it, we must first consider Marx and Engels’s attitudes towards the thesis (familiar in some populist circles) that Russia might be able to utilize the traditional rural commune as the social basis for a revolutionary short cut through the calamities of capitalist development. In his 1877 letter, Marx spoke of the

^S8‘Die Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland, Frankreich, den USA und Russland' (1878), Werke, 19, p- 115; see also the letter to Vera Zasulich (23 April 1885) in Ausgewahlte Briefe, p. 457.

danger that Russia might squander ‘the finest occasion that history has ever offered a people not to undergo all the sudden turns of fortune of the capitalist system’; later, in his 1881 reply to Zasulich, he clarified this remark by straightforwardly asserting that the obschtchina (the Russian rural commune) ‘is the strategic point of social generation in Russia’.³⁹ Finally, there is a surviving draft of a letter in which Marx tackled this problem most explicitly, wich special emphasis on the political conditions that would allow the rural communes to provide the cellular structure for a transition to socialism. ‘Only a Russian Revolution can save the Russian village community. ... If such a revolution takes place in time, if it concentrates all its forces to assure the free development of the rural community, this latter will soon become the regenerating element of Russian society, and the factor giving it superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system.’⁴⁰

This letter has had a strange history. Portions of it were first found by Riazanov in 1911, who asked Zasulich, Plekhanov and Axelrod, one after the other, whether they had been the recipient of the final version. All replied in the negative; but in 1923 the full letter was unexpectedly discovered amongst Axelrod’s papers. The amnesia of the three Menshevik-leaders is symptomatic, prompting the observation that they had probably repressed the memory of the letter because it so blatantly contradicted their construction of Marxist orthodoxy and its application to Russia.⁴¹ Yet it would be mistaken to think that Marx intended to provide succour to the Narodniks by his comments on the obschtchina. Whereas the populists insisted that Russia could only be redeemed by its spiritual and political separation from a decadent and corrupt Europe, Marx saw the potential role of the rural commune in terms of European and international frameworks. Thus in fragments of a letter intended for Zasulich in 1881, Marx emphasized: ‘Russia finds itself in a modern historical environment. It is contem-

poraneous with a superior civilization, it is tied to a world market in which capitalist production predominates. By appropriating the positive results of this mode of production, it is in a position to develop and transform the yet archaic form of its village community, instead of destroying it.’^{42 43 44} How could this ‘appropriation’ be achieved? Already, in an 1873 article which was probably the first attempt to theorize the role of the obschtchina in Marxist terms, Engels had argued that a revolution in the West would be a necessary precondition, since only then could the farm machinery and other advanced inputs become available for the modernization of the communes. ‘If there is anything which can save the Russian system of communal property, and provide the conditions for it to be transformed into a really living form, it is the proletarian revolution in Western Europe.’⁴⁵ It is hard to establish whether Marx shared this viewpoint, but in the ‘preface’ to the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto the dialectical reciprocity of the two revolutions is affirmed by both authors: ‘If the Russian revolution sounds the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West so that each complements the other, the prevailing form of communal ownership of land in Russia may form the starting point for a communist course of development.’⁴⁶

After Marx’s death Engels began to manifest an increasing scepticism about the future of the obschtchina and Russia’s chances to escape the capitalist stage.⁴⁷ In an 1892 letter to his populist acquaintance Danielson, for example, he stated, ‘I am afraid we shall have to treat the obschtchina as a dream of the past, and reckon, in future, with a capitalist Russia.’⁴⁸ Engels had good reason to be pessimistic about the rural commune, since the rapid development of industrial capitalism in Russia after 1890 was rapidly dispelling the illusory hopes that he and Marx had invested in the possibility of a non-capitalist path. Yet once again a predictive error contained a more fundamental truth: namely, that Russia might embark on a ‘communist course of development’ simultaneously or even before industrialized Western Europe. In more general terms, Marx and Engels’s reflections on Russia provided the crucial indications for a theory of how a revolution might break out in a backward country with a broad pre-capitalist residuum; how such a revolution might begin the transition toward socialism; and why the success of this monumental enterprise would depend to a very great measure upon the extension of the revolution to the West. It is almost needless to add that the whole course of twentieth-century history has tended to confirm these previsions and intuitions; or that the reason their insight into the logic of the historical process was so profound was that it grew out of the recognition that history moves dialectically—not unilinearly—through innumerable combinations, fusions, discontinuities, ruptures and sudden, qualitative leaps. One of the decisive methodological aspects of their writings on Russia was a rejection of any form of ‘infrastructural fatalism’, of any conception (like that held by the Mensheviks) that Russian history was preordained by its economic structure. Socioeconomic conditions indisputably delimited the field of the possible and defined viable alternatives, but the ultimate decision of history depended upon those autonomous political factors: the revolutions in Russia and Europe.

In conclusion I would propose that writings of Marx and Engel on the question of revolution in underdeveloped and semi-feudal countries reveal a double contradiction', first, a contradiction between stagist and permanentist visions of revolution; second, a contradiction in the heart of the permanentist texts themselves, between short-term empirical error and profound historical intuition. These persistent contradictions in their political theory, moreover, are the refraction of a contradiction in reality itself—a contradiction in the nature of the historical epoch in which Marx and Engels lived. As Trotsky pointed out in his Results and Prospects (1906), during the nineteenth century in countries like Germany 'capitalism had developed sufficiently to render necessary the abolition of the old feudal relations, but not sufficiently to bring forward the working class, the product of the new industrial relations, as a decisive political force. The antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, even within the national framework of Germany, had gone too far to allow the bourgeoisie fearlessly to take up the role of national hegemon, but not sufficiently to allow the working class to take up that role.’⁴⁹ In other words, it was too

late for the bourgeois revolution but still too early for the proletarian. The shifting positions of Marx and Engels must be situated in terms of this dilemma, as at one moment they insisted on the incapacity of the bourgeoisie to play a revolutionary role, while at another they emphasized the immaturity of the proletariat. They grappled heroically with this dilemma, but its solution evaded them because it involved a transformation in social reality itself.

Nevertheless, Trotsky’s comment needs to be relativized and qualified: while it is certainly true that after 1848 the bourgeoisie no longer played a hegemonic revolutionary role comparable to that of 1789, it is also true that profound political and economic changes serving the interests of capital were carried out by the agencies of quasi-absolutist or military states. These semi-revolutions from above in France, Germany, Italy and Japan were the decisive events of the second half of the nineteenth century, and although Marx gave some recognition to them in his writings after 1859, it was Engels who dealt with them more extensively through the medium of his studies of the historical roles of Napoleon ill and Bismarck.⁵⁰ In the case of Bismarckian Germany—which Engels characterized as a variety of Bonapartism—it was ‘a strange destiny that Prussia would end up finishing towards the end of the century and under the more comfortable mantle of Bonapartism the German bourgeois revolution which had begun in 1808-13 and flickered briefly again in 1848.'⁵¹ It is necessary to. add that both Marx and Engels greatly underestimated the most important 'bourgeois revolution from above’ of this entire epoch: the Italian Risorgimento. The struggle for national unification in Italy had unleashed incomparably more profound forms of popular, democratic mobilization than anything in Bismarckian Germany. Oddly, Engels overlooked this mass dimension of the Risorgimento to emphasize, instead, the limitations of its bourgeois leadership. ‘The bourgeoisie, coming to power during and after national emancipation, has no desire to complete its victory. It has taken no initiative to

destroy feudal remnants nor to reorganize national production on the model of modern capitalism.’⁵²

It is unfortunate that this crucial block of European history did not command more sustained attention in the writings of Marx and Engels, and that the texts (expecially those of Engels) that did focus on the mode of socio-economic transformation represented by the Bismarkian programme or the Risorgimento deployed an array of concepts deriving from the 1848 Revolutions—particularly ‘Bonapartism’—which were not entirely adequate to the specific contradictions involved. For it was these ‘semirevolutions’ or ‘passive revolutions’ (as Gramsci termed them)—together with certain more limited ‘bourgeois’ reforms like the abolition of serfdom in Russia—that laid a basis for the European revolutions of the twentieth century. Precisely because these reforms from above were incomplete— leaving considerable feudal detritus and/or vestiges of the absolutist state, which the bourgeois would or could not destroy—they created the explosive contradictions that would allow the proletariat to raise the banner of democracy in its own name. In his 1874 Preface co The Peasant War in Germany, Engels ironically projected what the Germany of a generation later would look like: ‘If all goes well, if everyone remains very tranquil and we should all live so long, then we might, perhaps, see in 1900 that the Prussian government has truly suppressed all the feudal institutions and that Prussia has finally arrived at the same point where France was at in 1792.’⁵³ However things went very differently, and the Prussia of Wilhelm II in 1900 was a long way away from the republican France of 1792. It required a workers’ revolution in November 1918 to overthrow the monarchy and the power of the junker oligarchy. And it was clearly the cumulative retardation of reform that explained the wave of revolutionary explosions that rocked Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy between 1918 and 1920: in other words, the inability of the bourgeoisie to lead bourgeois-democratic revolutions to their conclusion created the conditions for a revolutionary upsurge led by the proletariat itself.

Permanent Revolution in Russia

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was born in the revolutionary tumult of 1905-6 in Russia. Like the seminal texts of Marx and Engels in 1848-50, which first outlined a conception of revolution en permanence, Trotsky’s works of this period—above all, Results and Prospects—were written from a standpoint of intense and impassioned engagement with the problems of a living revolution. Their interest, first and above all, is their originality. Trotsky’s theses on the revolution of 1905 implied a radical break with the dominant beliefs of the Second International about the ' future of the class struggle in Russia. Since the death of Engels, it had become a universal, almost canonical assumption amongst ‘orthodox’ Marxists that the coming Russian revolution would be inevitably bourgeois in character. All factions of Russian social democracy took this assertion as their undisputed starting point; if they fought amongst themselves, it was over different interpretations of the role of the proletariat and its necessary class alliances in this bourgeois revolution. Trotsky was the first and for many years the only Marxist to question this sacrosanct dogma. To appreciate the qualitative originality of his approach, it is necessary to compare it with the ideas of his contemporaries in the Russian and international labour movements.

As we have seen, Marx and Engels were far from convinced that Russia was condemned to follow the same path as Western Europe, or that a socialist revolution was excluded in that country until the maturation of advanced industrial capitalism. It is, thus, impossible to attribute to them these doctrinaire assertions that would become hegemonic in Russian and Western Marxism until 1917. Their origins must be found elsewhere: especially in the writings of Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918). It was he who developed for the first time in a coherent and systematic way an exclusively stagist conception of the Russian revolution, which, in turn, became a virtual paradigm for similar theorizations

applied to other backward and underdeveloped countries. This does not mean, of course, that Plekhanov’s interpretation could not claim legitimacy from certain texts of Marx and Engels; indeed, he repeatedly quoted certain passages from the 1859 Introduction and other essays. But what does set him aside from his mentors was his prodigious effort to transpose a rigid and one-sided version of the Western European ‘model’ of development on Russia. When Marx and Engels explicitly opposed chis interpretation, criticizing Plekhanov’s mechanical formalism (see the previously cited 1877 letter of Marx); he demonstrated his undeniable independence of mind by insisting all the more firmly that his position was more orthodox than (by inference) Marx’s. Thus the irony that the ‘Father of Russian Marxism’ held views on Russia that diverged quite sharply from those of Marx himself.

Furthermore, one is inclined to ask whether Plekhanov’s ‘Marxism’ did not differ from Marx in method and epistemology as well? In my opinion, a careful study of Plekhanov’s writings reveals an approach very different from the revolutionary dialectics of Marx and Engels. It included certain closely related tendencies which might be characterized as pre-dialectical, and which constitute the methodological ground for his political theory:

(1) A tendency to underestimate the distance between Marx’s new materialism and the older metaphysical materialism of Helvetius, La Mettrie, Feuerbach, etc. Plekhanov went so far as to write that Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach ‘did not reject the philosophy of Feuerbach; they only amended it. . . . The materialist conceptions of Marx and Engels had developed in the very sense indicated by the internal logic of Feuerbach’s philosophy.’¹

(2) A metaphysical naturalization of history leading to a fatalistic conception of the laws of social development is ubiquitous in his writings—as when he asserted that the programmatic aims of the labour movement would be achieved ‘as certainly and surely as the rising of the sun in the morning.’²

(3) An ‘objectivistic’ economism that made the growth of the productive forces the exclusive foundation for social and political development: 'The degree of preparedness of a people for true democracy . . . depends on the degree of its economic development. . . . The development of productive forces brings us nearer to our goal and guarantees the victory of the proletariat.’³

Quoted by A. Walecki, ‘Le probleme de la revolution russe chez Plekhanov’, in Histoire du marxisme contemporain, Paris 1977, p. 87.

These general propositions were translated into Plekhanov’s political analyses, which, in turn, became the central strategic axis for the constitution of Menshevism. The essence of the latter was the belief that Russia was a backward, ‘Asiatic’ and barbarous country requiring a long stage of industrialism and ‘Europeanization’ before its proletariat could aspire to power. Since Russia was only ripe for a bourgeois-democratic revolution, the task of the proletariat was to support the liberal bourgeoisie in overthrowing autocracy and establishing a ‘modern’ (i.e. ‘European’) constitutional state. Only after Russia had completely passed into this stage of advanced capitalism and parliamentary democracy would the requisite material and political conditions be available for socialist revolution.⁴

From his conversion to Marxism until his death in 1918 Plekhanov defended this orientation with an uncommon obstinancy and rigor, against all odds, and independently of changes in political conjuncture or the concrete historical situation. In a sense he had already written the last word in his political philosophy when he inscribed in his notebook in 1881: ‘Russia stands at a crossroads on the way to capitalism and all other solutions are closed to her. In order to fight capitalism, only one way is left: to help it grow as fast as possible.’⁵ This one-sided determinism and unflinching refusal to imagine any historical alternative to the capitalist road lay at the root of all of his political activity. This perspective first appears in 1883-4 when Plekhanov almost single-handedly founded Russian Marxism in a series of great polemical battles with populism. In his early pamphlets—Socialism and Political Struggle (1883) and Our Controversies (1885)— Plekhanov drew from a scientific analysis of the development of capitalism in Russia to demonstrate the errors and illusions of the populists. Yet, at the same time as he refuted the subjectivist fantasies of the Narodniks about the rural commune and Russian agrarian socialism, he also damned their more fertile and realistic intuitions: the idea of a specific road to socialism, the importance of the peasantry in the future revolution, and so on. Although he was justified in rejecting their slavophilic mysticism, he

"‘This conception was not contradictory with Plekhanov’s occasional affirmation of the hegemonic role of the working class in the fight against Tsarism. In 1902, for example, Plekhanov wrote, ’Our party will take upon itself the task of the struggle against absolutism and indeed the hegemony in this struggle.' (Sochinennya, ed. Riazanov, vol. xn, Moscow 1923-7, pp. 101-2.) Yet at the same time he insisted that the future reserved for Russia ‘the triumph of the bourgeoisie'. In other words, Plekhanov believed that the hegemonic role of the proletariat stopped short of the seizure of power: after the overthrow of Tsarism, the labour movement had to let the bourgeoisie rule alone in order to accomplish its historical tasks. See Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review 100, January 1977, pp. 15-16.

offered as a substitute only a narrow-minded eurocentrism which dogmatically asserted that Russia must reproduce Western forms of capicalist development and bourgeois power.

When, after 1903, Plekhanov assumed leadership of the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (RSDLP), he revived the same arsenal of theses to combat a new bete noir: Bolshevism. Throughout the 1905 revolution Plekhanov and his Menshevik comrades maintained that 'it is now the turn of the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat cannot take history into its own hands and change it.’⁶ Here is a precise formulation of a naturalistic and reified conception of history, in which socioeconomic stages and classes succeed each other according to a necessity as objective and inevitable as the succession of the seasons during the year. The idea of Marxist historicism—that people make their own history, but under given conditions—is replaced in Plekhanov’s writings by a purely ‘objective’ conception, leaving no room for the revolutionary practice of the proletariat and its creative intervention in the political process. In the name of science, Plekhanov forbade the proletariat to take history into its own hands.

Finally, in 1917 at the most crucial moment in the history of the Russian workers’ movement, Plekhanov clung stubbornly to his rigidly stagist doctrines. When Lenin published his famous April Theses, which broke decisively with traditional tenets and embraced a permanentist conception akin to Trotsky’s, Plekhanov launched a virulent counter-attack: ‘He who breaks off all contact with the interests of the bourgeoisie, is destroying the socialist revolution. . . . The attempt co precipitate a socialist revolution can be likened to the attempts of the anarchists of the International Congress in 1889, when the bourgeoisie had not yet matured. . . .’⁷ Plekhanov’s tragedy was that the more the proletariat radicalized itself and intensified its struggle against the bourgeoisie, the more the ‘Father of Russian Marxism’, in order to maintain the petrified and inflexible coherence of his theory, evolved towards moderate if not

^Letter to the Menshevik members of Nachalo (18 December 1905) quoted in Ella Feldman-Belfer, 'The Conflicts and Dilemmas of the Marxist Path of G. V. Plekhanov’, Ph.D. thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1972, p. 222. Under such circumstances it is hardly surprising that Miliukov, the leader of the Kadets (the Constitutional Democratic Party: the principal political expression of the liberal bourgeoisie), hailed him with enthusiasm. ‘If all G. V. Plekhanov’s comrades understoodwhat the most outstanding of their leaders understood, and if they were as little discomforted as he by the praises of the “liberal bourgeoisie", my God how that would simplify the explanation of our present political problems. . . .' (Ibid., p. 220). ¹Edinstvo, 11 (12 April 1917) and 18 (20 April 1917), quoted in ibid., p. 365. The term ‘maturity’ that constantly appears in Plekhanov’s writings is the shibboleth of a certain ‘naturalization' of history.

conservative positions, insisting on the need to curtail socialist agitation and propaganda amongst the workers. He had so lost step with the real evolution of the Russian class struggle that on his deathbed in 1918 he could ask his old friend Leo Deutsch: 'Did we not start the Marxist propaganda too soon, in this backward, semi-Asiatic country?’⁸ Clinging to his 'orthodox’ interpretation of Marxism until the bitter end, Plekhanov seems to have come to the bizarre conclusion that such an interpretation could only triumph if Marxism remained unknown to the Russian toiling masses.

Of course, as has already been noted, the presupposition that the Russian revolution must necessarily be bourgeois-democratic in content was shared before 1917 by virtually every sector of Russian and international Marxism. Where Lenin and the Bolsheviks differed from Plekhanov and the Mensheviks was over which class would play the leading role in carrying out these bourgeois tasks. For the latter, the hegemonic class had to be the bourgeoisie itself, while for the former it would be an alliance of workers and peasants. Furthermore, we should recall that Lenin considered himself (until 1914 at least) as the philosophical disciple of Plekhanov, and his great epistemological opus—Materialism, and Empirico-Criticism—was deeply influenced by the elder figure. In this phase Lenin accepted some of the fundamental premises of Plekhanov’s pre-dialectical Marxism as well as their strategic corollary—the bourgeois-democratic character of the Russian revolution. Nevertheless he refused, unlike Plekhanov, to make a tabula rasa of the populist tradition. Although he also rejected the agrarian socialist dream, he did critically assimilate their insights on the roles of the intelligentsia and, especially, the peasantry (whom Plekhanov treated as an obscurantist and reactionary mass) in the revolutionary process. Moreover, from the very beginning, Lenin manifested a more radical concrete political orientation than that of the spirtual leader of Menshevism.

A close reading of Lenin’s most important political text of this period, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905), reveals with extraordinary clarity the tension in Lenin’s thought between his profound revolutionary realism and the limitations imposed by the straitjacket of so-called ‘orthodox Marxism’. On one hand, this work contains an illuminating and penetrating analysis of the incapacity of the Russian bourgeoisie successfully to lead a democratic revolution, which, in fact, could be accomplished only by a worker-peasant front under proletarian hegemony. On the other hand, there are innumerable passages in the

pamphlet that categorically insist on the exclusively bourgeois character of the revolution and condemn as ‘reactionary’ the idea of ‘seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism’.⁵⁴ Lenin supported this latter thesis by appealing to the classical leitmotiv of pre-dialectical Marxism: ‘The degree of Russia’s economic development (the objective condition) and the degree of class consciousness and organization of the broad masses of the proletariat (the subjective condition, inseparably bound up with the objective condition) make immediate and complete emancipation of the working class impossible. Only the most ignorant people can close their eyes to the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place.’⁵⁵ The objective determines the subjective, the economy is the condition of consciousness; here, in two phrases, is the quintessence of the materialist gospel of the Second International, whose dead weight overlay Lenin’s rich and powerful political intuition.

‘The Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry’: this formula was the shibboleth of pre-1917 ‘old Bolshevism’, reflecting within itself all the ambiguities of the first Leninism. In contrast, the radically innovative dimension of Lenin’s politics, which so sharply demarcated Bolshevism from Menshevism, was expressed by the far more flexible and realistic formula of ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Power’. As Trotsky later remarked, this last slogan had an ‘algebraic’ character in that the specific weight of each class was not determined a priori by some mechanistic principle. The apparently paradoxical term, ‘democratic dictatorship,’ on the other hand, revealed the limitations imposed by the schemas of the official Marxism of the Second International: the revolution cannot but be democratic, that is, bourgeois. This premiss, Lenin insisted, flowed from the ‘elementary principles of Marxism’⁵⁶—which is to say Marxism as conceived and taught by Plekhanov.

Another theme in the Two Tactics that testifies to the methodological obstacles created by the analytical (pre-dialectical) character of contempor-

ary Marxism was the explicit rejection of the Paris Commune as a model for the Russian revolution. According to Lenin, the Commune failed because it was ‘unable to distinguish between the elements of democratic revolution and socialist revolution’, and because it ‘confused the tasks of fighting for a republic with those of fighting for socialism. Consequently, it was a government such as ours {the future provisional revolutionary government in Russia} should not be’.¹² As we shall see later, the return to the Paris Commune was to be one of the decisive steps in Lenin’s drastic revision of the 'old Bolshevism’ in April 1917.

It would not be fair to leave Lenin’s writings on the revolution of 1905 without noting that there are some passages that seem to hint at the idea of an uninterrupted revolutionary development towards socialism. Particularly intriguing is an article on the peasantry written in September 1905 where Lenin asserts: ‘From the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class conscious and organized proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way.’¹³ Nonetheless this is an exceptional formulation which does not correspond to the orientation evinced in the overwhelming bulk of his writing in this period.¹⁴

It is quite characteristic of Lenin before 1914 that in his polemic against Plekhanov he evoked the authority of Kautsky. For instance, he saw in an article by Kautsky on the Russian revolution (1907) ‘a direct hit against Plekhanov’ and elsewhere he emphasized the coincidence between Kaut-skian and Bolshevik conception—‘A bourgeois revolution, brought about by the proletariat and the peasantry in spite of the instability of the bourgeoisie—this fundamental principle of Bolshevik tactics is wholly confirmed by Kautsky.’⁵⁷ Indeed, Kautsky in his article, ‘The Driving Forces and the Perspectives of the Russian Revolution' (1906), advanced some quite radical views which were (contrary to his later position in 1917) clearly antagonistic to Menshevism: ‘As soon as the proletariat appears as an independent class with independent revolutionary aims, the bourgeoisie ceases to be a revolutionary class . . . the bourgeoisie therefore does not belong to the driving forces of the present revolutionary movement in Russia and to that extent one cannot designate it as a bourgeois one.’ But at

¹²CW, vol. 9, pp. 80-81. This analysis of Lenin’s views before 1914 draws on my article, ’From the Great Logic of Hegel to the Finland Station of Petrograd’, Critique 6 (Spring 1976).

¹⁵CW, vol. 11, pp. 372-3- See also Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938, London 1979, pp- 100-8.

the same time he reaffirmed the orthodox dogma, categorically rejecting the possibility of socialist revolution. ‘This does not at all permit us to write that this is a socialist movement. It will not lead in any case to a purely proletarian power, to its dictatorship. For this the Russian proletariat is too weak and underdeveloped.’ However, Kautsky admits the possibility that social democracy might arrive in power with the. support of other classes (especially the peasantry); but in this case ‘it will not be able, as a victorious party, to go further in the implementation of its programme than as permitted by the interests of the classes which support the proletariat.’ Like Lenin, Kautsky stresses, ‘without the peasants we can not triumph in Russia. But we cannot expect that the peasants will become socialists.’ Thus, it ‘appears unthinkable that the present Russian revolution could lead to the introduction of a socialist mode of production, even if the revolution should temporarily put Social Democracy at the helm.’^{57 58}

This hypothesis of a transitory workers power was also at the heart of Rosa Luxemburg’s reflections on the Russian revolution of 1905. In 1906 in a polemical article against Plekhanov she tried to analyse the conditions and limits of such an experience. ‘The proletariat, as the most revolutionary element, will perhaps take on itself the task of liquidating the old regime by “seizing power” in order to fight against the counter-revolution, in order to prevent the revolution from being blocked by a bourgeoisie which is by its nature reactionary. . . . Apparently, no social-democrat has any illusions about the possibility for the proletariat co remain in power; it could keep power, this would imply the domination of its class ideas, the implementation of socialism. But its forces are not sufficient for this at the present moment, because the proletariat, strictu senso, is only a minority of the society in the Russian Empire. . . . After the fall of Tzarism, power will pass into the hands of the most revolutionary section of society, the proletariat . . . but only as long as the power will not yet be in the hands legally designated to receive it.’⁵⁹ This legal power, for Rosa Luxemburg, had to be that of a democratically elected constituent assembly where the representatives of the majority of the Russian population—the peasantry and the petty-bourgeois democrats—would inevitably be dominant. This position is very reminiscent of Marx's warning in 1847 that a ‘premature’ taking of power by the proletariat would perforce be both temporary and constrained by the exigencies of the bourgeois nature of the revolution.

Even though her conception was more advanced than Plekhanov’s—and even, to a certain extent, Lenin’s—she did not question the most deeply rooted and ‘self-evident’ of social-democratic dogmas: the inevitably bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. At the same, however, she did in certain writings arrive at a premonition of the most crucial idea of the theory of permanent revolution—the historical combination and practical fusion between bourgeois and socialist revolutions. ‘The present revolution in Russia goes far beyond the content of all previous revolutions. ... It is then, both in method and in content, a radically new type of revolution. Bourgeois-democratic in form, proletarian-socialist in essence, it is also in content and form a transitional form between the bourgeois revolutions of the past and the proletarian revolutions of the future.’ But in a later passage in the same essay Luxemburg again yielded ground to the traditional presupposition that the ‘proletariat does not now place before itself the task of implementing socialism, but rather must first create the bourgeois-capitalist pre-conditions for the implementation of socialism.’¹⁸

The principal difference between the strategic viewpoints of Luxemburg and Lenin was over the question of the relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry. At the conferences of the Russian social democrats in 1907 and 1909, Luxemburg embraced the formulation first proposed by Trotsky in 1905: ‘ the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry .¹⁹Although Lenin finally rallied to this slogan at the 1909 conference, there was still considerable distance between him and Luxemburg because she did not believe in the joint exercise of revolutionary power by workers and peasants; for her, only the concentration of all power into the hands of the proletariat could accomplish the casks of the democratic revolution in Russia.²⁰ It was probably because of the coincidences between their formulations, that Trotsky later wrote in his autobiography that at the 1909 congress ‘on the question of the so-called permanent revolution, Rosa took the same stand as I did’.²¹ This is not quite true, for on the pivotal question of the bourgeois character of the programme to be enacted by the revolution, Luxemburg was still nearer to Lenin than to the theory of the permanent revolution. In a typical statement, combining ignorance and

^ls'Die russische Revolution (1649-1789-1905)’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Berlin 1970, pp. 8-9.

²⁰ See ‘Die Lehren der Drei Dumas’, PrzegladSocjaldemokratcyczny, 3, (May 1908) in Luxemburg, Intemationalismm und Klassenkampf, Luchterhand 1971, pp. 359-71.

²'My Life, New York 1960, p. 203-deliberate distortion, Stalin in 1931 attempted to contribute to the history of the theory of permanent revolution by claiming: ‘Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg , . . invented the utopian and semi-Menshevik scheme of permanent revolution . . subsequently, this semi-Menshevik scheme of permanent revolution was caught by Trotsky.’⁶⁰

In fact, the first authors to use the term ‘permanent revolution’ in relation to the Russian revolution (before Trotsky himself) were Kautsky and Franz Mehring. Kautsky wrote in his most enthusiastic and radical article on the 1905 revolution that ‘permanent revolution is . . . exactly what the proletariat in Russia needs’; but apparently for him this meant little more than that ‘it is under revolutionary conditions that the proletariat .. . imprints its own stamp on state and society most profoundly, and obtains the greatest concessions from them’.⁶¹ A few months later, in an article in Neue Zeit (November 1905) under the heading ‘Die Revolution in Permanenz’, Mehring emphasized the differences between the European upheavals of 1848 and the contemporary revolution in Russia. By refusing to lay down its arms and by accelerating the pace of popular mobilization, the Russian working class became the leading force in the revolution. Against the bourgeois slogan of‘order at any price’, it opposed the defiant battle cry of‘the revolution in permanence’.⁶² A close reading of Mehring proves that he cannot be considered a partisan of permanent revolution in the same sense as Trotsky in 1905-6 (or Marx in 1850);⁶³ but it is very likely that his article suggested to Trotsky the utilization of the term ‘permanent revolution’, otherwise virtually extinct in the vocabulary of the Second International. Indeed, in The New Course (1923) Trotsky recalled: ‘Franz Mehring employed it for the revolution of 1905-7. The permanent revolution, in an exact translation, is the continuous revolution, the uninterrupted revolution.’⁶⁴ But Trotsky was wrong when he wrote that Mehring and Kautsky shared the ‘viewpoint of permanent revolution’.⁶⁵The vital kernel of the theory, its concept of the uninterrupted going-over of the democratic towards the socialist revolution, was denied by Mehring

(although he used the term) quite as much as by Kautsky. One cannoc help but form the impression that Trotsky sometimes endeavoured to minimize | the originality of his conception by claiming an identity of views with | Luxemburg, Mehring, Kautsky and, to a certain extent, Lenin. Doubtless f this was a retrospective atrempt to play down the supposedly 'heretical’ nature of the theory of permanent revolution. But Trotsky’s contemporary polemical opponents had no illusions about the novelty of his ideas. For f example, Mehring’s article was immediately translated in 1905 in Trot- | sky’s newspaper Nachalo in Petrograd and in the same issue the first article in which Trotsky probably used the term ‘permanent revolution’ appeared: ‘Between the immediate goal and the final goal there should be a perma-nent revolutionary chain.’ Martov, the Menshevik leader, in a work written

many years later, recalled Trotsky’s piece as a disturbing ‘deviation from | the theoretical foundations of the Programme of Russian Social- i( Democracy’. He clearly distinguishes between Mehring’s article, which he considered acceptable, and Trotsky’s essay, which he repudiated as j ‘utopian’, since it transcended ‘the historical task which flows from the jj existent level of productive forces’.^28 :f

If Trotsky’s terminological source was Mehring, what was the theoretical source of the permanentist strategy? Parvus (Alexander Israel Helphand) is frequently mentioned as the true inspirer and mentor of Trotsky and some jj of the latter’s enemies (such as Stalin) gave Parvus exclusive intellectual j responsibility for the theory of permanent revolution.²⁹ Trotsky never attempted to hide his debt to Parvus. In many of his writings—particularly <

in My Life—he paid Parvus homage, emphasizing the ‘extraordinary bold- ; ness of his thought’ and recognizing his debt to him when he came to ; consider ‘the conquest of power by the proletariat from an astronomical ‘‘final” goal to a practical task for our own day’.³⁰ As we shall see, however, Parvus—unlike Trotsky—never really crossed the Rubicon; his strategic conception did not break the established doctrinaire framework of a necessarily ‘bourgeois’ Russian revolution. But he contributed three central themes that laid a foundation for Trotsky’s prophetic vision of Russia’s

^See the discussion in L. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, London 1954, pp. 102-3. The ulterior motive of this imputation was obviously to present Trotsky as the disciple of the 'renegade' Parvus, who became, after having been a dedicated member of the most extreme left wing of pre-war social democracy, a diplomatic agent of the German Kaiser during the First World War.

(1) In a series of articles on ‘War and Revolution’ published in Iskra in 1904, Parvus deployed the methodological category of totality towards an understanding of the world capitalist system as a whole. These articles had a great impact on Trotsky’s thinking, and Parvus's biographers, Zeman and Scharlau, have correctly observed that: ‘Helphand’s thesis on the development of capitalism into a universal system, on the decline of the importance of the national state, and on the parallel extension of both the bourgeois and the proletarian interests outside the framework of these states, all this Trotsky took over in toto.'^⁶⁶

(2) An analysis of the peculiarities of the Russian social formation (partially inspired by the works of the liberal historian Miliukov): the semi-Asiatic character of the Russian state and society resulted in a very weak development of the towns, which were administrative-bureaucratic rather than economic centres; from this followed the weakness of the artisanate and of the petty-bourgeois Strata which are the traditional social base for revolutionary democracy. The eventual development of an urban economy at the end of the nineteenth century was directly capitalist in character, with huge factories, a concentrated proletariat, and so on. Therefore, as Parvus put it, ‘all that was negative for the development of petty-bourgeois democracy favoured the emergence of proletarian class consciousness in Russia’.³²

(3) The idea that the proletariat could and should take political power through the Russian revolution. Parvus should probably be registered in the history of Marxism as the first thinker to envisage the possibility of a proletarian state in ‘agrarian’, ‘backward’ and ‘Asiatic’ Russia. He presented this idea for the first time in the ‘Preface’ to a collection of essays by Trotsky published under the title Before the 9th January. ‘Only the workers can complete the revolutionary change in Russia. The revolutionary provisional government in Russia would be a government of workers’ democracy. If social democracy stands at the head of the revolutionary movement of the Russian proletariat, then this government will be social-democratic.’³³ Although, as we have seen, both Trotsky and Luxemburg soon adopted this position, Lenin, in an article of March 1905, explicitly rejected it. ‘This cannot be,

since only a revolutionary dictatorship, which is supported by a huge major icy of che nation, can be of a certain duracion. . . . The Russian proletariat, however, now forms only a minority of the nation.’⁶⁷

Unfortunately, Parvus did not stay the course of the bold road that he opened with his brilliant essays and articles of 1904-5. He remained, in the last analysis, a prisoner of the immovable conviction of the Second International that the Russian revolution had to be non-socialist.⁶⁸ Thus his hypothetical workers’ government was not supposed to take any directly socialist measures, but only to introduce progressive social legislation and reforms favourable to the working class within the limits of the capitalist mode of production, as according to the model of ‘socialist’ government that existed at that time in Australia.⁶⁹ In other words, Parvus wanted to change the locomotive of history, but not its rails.⁷⁰

A summary of the different conceptions of the Russian revolution that were advanced by Russian Marxists from the end of the nineteenth century to 1917 will help to locate precisely Trotsky’s specific theoretical innovation. Setting aside the ideas of pseudo-Marxist populists such as Nicolaion as well as, at the opposite pole, ‘legal Marxists’ such as Piotr Struve, who appropriated Marxist arguments to justify the progressive character of capitalism in Russia,^{71 72} there remain four clearly delimited positions inside the social-democratic camp strictu sensof⁹

(1) The Menshevik view of the revolution as bourgeois by its nature and the motion of its driving force as an alliance of the proletariat with the liberal bourgeoisie.

(2) The Bolshevik conception also recognized the inevitably bourgeois-democratic character of the revolution, but it excluded the bourgeoisie from the revolutionary bloc. According to Lenin, only the proletariat and the peasantry were authentically revolutionary forces, bound to establish through their alliance a common democratic revolutionary dictatorship.

(3) The theory advocated by Parvus and embraced by Luxemburg which, while recognizing the bourgeois character of the revolution in the last instance, insisted on the hegemonic revolutionary role of the proletariat supported by the peasantry. The destruction of czarist absolutism could not be achieved short of the inauguration of a workers’ power led by social democracy. At the same, however, such a proletarian government could not yet transcend in its programmatic aims the fixed limits of bourgeois democracy.⁴⁰

(4) Finally, Trotsky’s concept, which envisaged not only the hegemonic role of the proletariat and the necessity of its seizure of power, but also the possibility of a growing over of the democratic into the socialist revolution.

How was it possible for Trotsky alone to cut the gordian knot of the Marxism of the Second International and to grasp the revolutionary possibilities that lay beyond the dogmatic construction of a bourgeois-democratic Russian revolution which was the unquestioned problematic of all other Marxist theorizations?

Before 1905 Lev Davidovitch Bronstein’s writings did not, in fact, go beyond the political horizon of his contemporaries. Indeed, in Our Political Tasks (1904), which contains his famous attack on the theses of Lenin’s What is To Be Done?, he assumes a stance not very distinguishable from Menshevism: ‘it is not yet possible for us to conduct a generalized political offensive against it {the bourgeoisie}. . . . Only in the future free Russia, in which we will obviously be obliged to play the role of the opposition party, and not that of a government, can the class struggle of the proletariat develop in all its fullness.’⁴¹ It is true that the same essay contains

““Kautsky in his famous article on Russia in 1906 (see notes 15 and 16) would be located half-way between Lenin and Luxemburg. In 1917, of course, he adopted the traditional Menshevik viewpoint.

passages with a different ring that seem to announce an alternative perspective: ‘As Communists, we neither can nor want to forget or repress our proletarian tasks. All our revolutionary tactics must be subordinated to these tasks, not only in the tedium of daily politics, but also on the eve of the revolutionary explosion and during the travail of the revolution itself.’⁷³ The tension in Trotsky’s writing signalled his impending break with Menshevism. Only one month after finishing this work, with its dedication to 'My dear teacher: Pavel Borisovitch Axelrod’, Trotsky abandoned his ephemeral alliance with the Mensheviks by refusing to endorse their campaign for the bourgeoisie’s 'liberal banquets’. A few months later (December 1904) Trotsky launched a violent attack on bourgeois liberalism in his pamphlet Before the 9th January. In this work he defined the proletariat as the vanguard of the people and the leader of the national revolution, but he still limited the aims of the revolutionary movement to bourgeois-democratic tasks such as the establishment of a constituent assembly.⁷⁴

It was during 1905, in the fire of the revolution, that Trotsky actually made that ‘great leap forward’ which, by formulating the first elements of his theory of permanent revolution, placed him in the ideological and political vanguard of European Marxism. In the preface (June) to the Russian edition of some of Lassalle’s works on the 1848 Revolution, Trotsky for the first time advanced his perspective of a proletarian government in Russia, counterposing it to the views of the Bolsheviks. ‘It is clear that the proletariat in order to fulfill its historical mission must rely—as the bourgeoisie in its time—upon the support of the peasantry and the petty-bourgeoisie. It leads the village and draws it into the movement. . . . The leading force is the proletariat itself. This is not a “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry", but rather the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry.’⁷⁵ Later that summer he began to formulate his chief heresy: the possibility of the democratic revolution uninterruptedly unfolding, without fixed stages, into the socialist revolution. From his retreat in Finland, between July and October 1905, he wrote an article declaring: ‘The revolutionary foreground is already occupied by the proletariat. Only the Social Democracy, acting through workers, can make the peasantry follow its lead. This opens to the Russian Social Democracy the prospect of capturing the power before that can possibly take place in the countries of the west. The immediate task of the Social Democracy will be to bring the democratic revolution to completion. But once in control, the proletarian party will not be able to confine itself merely to the democratic programme; it will be obliged to adopt socialist measures. How far it will go in that direction will depend not only on the correlation of forces in Russia itself, but on the entire international situation as well.’⁴⁵ Previously we noted that Lenin refused to take the Paris Commune as a model because it ‘confused’ the democratic-republican revolution with the socialist. But Trotsky in December 1905 made the Commune an exemplary reference precisely for this reason. In his preface to a Russian edition of Marx’s writings on the Commune, he prophesized that the future workers’ government in Russia would be forced, like the Communards in 1871, ‘by the very logic of its situation, to go over to a collectivistic practice’.⁴⁶

Why did the other exponents of Marxism in Russia regard these bold theses of Trotsky as so utopian and adventuristic? The difference in revolutionary generations may have been partly responsible for the hostile reception to the first version of permanent revolution. Plekhanov, Axelrod and Zasulich belonged to the first generation of Russian Marxists, who had to wage an arduous struggle against the influence of populism by criticising its ‘socialist’ utopias and the mystique of Russian exceptionalism. To use Lenin’s favourite metaphor, they ‘bent the stick’ very far to demonstrate the inevitability of capitalist development in Russia. Trotsky, on the other hand, was twenty-five years younger and, finding the ideological battle more or less won, could permit himself to take a more nuanced view of the Narodniks (Lenin occupies in this respect an intermediate position). He was less obsessed than his predecessors and mentors by the need to prove at any price that Russia could not escape the same fate as Western Europe.⁴⁷Yet this hardly suffices as an explanation for the difference in vision, since

. ⁴⁷See Denise Avenas, Economic et politique darts lapensie de-Trotsky, Paris 1970, p. 7. Writing on the role of generations in the process of knowledge, Mannheim has argued that each generation ‘eliminates from the beginning a great number of possible ways and means of experiencing, thinking, feeling and acting, and restricts the space of expression of the individual to certain limited possibilities.’ (Karl Mannheim, Wissensoziologie, Neuwied 1964, p. 528.)

Mensheviks such as Martov or Bolsheviks such as Kamenev were also contemporaries of Trotsky, but scarcely shared his theories.

Indeed, a careful study of the roots of Trotsky’s political boldness and of the whole theory of permanent revolution reveals that Trotsky’s views were informed by a specific understanding of Marxism, an interpretation of the dialectical materialist method, distinct from the reigning orthodoxy of the Second International. This methodological specificity, which differentiated Trotsky from the dominant trends of Russian Marxism, may have owed something special to the thinker whose works first tutored the young Trotsky in the foundations of historical materialism—namely, Antonio Labriola. In his autobiography Trotsky recalled the ‘delight’ with which he first devoured Labriola’s essays during his imprisonment in Odessa in 189 3-⁴⁸ His initiation into ‘materialist dialectics’, thus, took place through an encounter with perhaps the least orthodox of the major theoretical figures of the Second International. As Gramsci once pointed out, Labriola occupied a very special place in the panorama of pre-war European Marxism as ‘the only man who has attempted to build up the philosophy of praxis scientifically’.⁴⁹ Formed in the Hegelian school, Labriola battled relentlessly against the neo-positivist and vulgar-materialist trends that proliferated in Italian Marxism (Turati, for example). He was one of the first to reject the orthodox economistic interpretation of Marxism by attempting to restore the concept of totality and by defending historical materialism as a self-sufficient and independent theoretical system, irreducible to other trends.⁵⁰ Moreover, he rejected scholastic dogmatism and the talmudic cult of the textbook, criticizing explicitly all attempts to ‘reduce the doctrine to a kind of vulgate or recipe for the interpretation of the history of all times and all places . . . Marxism ... is not and cannot be confined to the writings of Marx and Engels. . . . Since this doctrine is critical, it cannot be developed, applied and corrected except critically .⁵¹

Trotsky’s starting-point, therefore, was this critical, dialectical and anti-dogmatic understanding of Marxism that Labriola had inspired. ‘Marxism is above all a method of analysis—not analysis of texts, but analysis of

⁵°'Those who designate the new materialist conception of history as an economic interpreta-cion of history are wrong. . . . it is rather an organic conception of history. In it the totality and unity of social life are reflected. The economy itself ... is dissolved into the flow of a process . . . and is historically conceived/ (Antonio Labriola, La conception materialista de la historia [1897], Havana 1970, p. 115.)

^5lIbid., p. 243-social relations.’⁵² In his polemics against the Mensheviks, who always used quotations from Marx to prove that ‘the time for the proletariat had not yet arrived’, Trotsky attacked them as ‘scholasticists who regard themselves as Marxists only because they look at the world through the paper on which Marx’s works are printed’.⁵³ In Results and Prospects he did not hesitate to criticize a well-known text of Engels (at that time wrongly attributed to Marx) in which the historical backwardness of the German bourgeoisie and proletariat were intimately linked—‘Like master, like man’- Textual orthodoxy did not worry him too much; as we shall see, the essential part of his argumentation was based on a careful analysis of the Russian social formation. Indeed, the only passage from Marx quoted by Trotsky in support of the thesis of permanent revolution is the paragraph of the Communist Manifesto where Marx asserted that the German bourgeois revolution would be the immediate prelude to proletarian revolution.⁵⁴

Trotsky’s attitude towards the founding fathers testifies to his intellectual independence and originality, but it is nonetheless surprising that he did not utilize more of the texts of Marx that manifestly paralleled and prefigured his own problematic, particularly the Address of March 1850 and the writings on Russia from 1877 to 1882. In the case of the former text, the only possible explanation is that Trotsky simply did not know of its existence at the time (1905-8) (the old re-edition of 1885 in Zurich was not well known in Russia and a new German edition was only issued in 1914); so it was through Mehring’s 1905 article that he discovered the term ‘permanent revolution’. But in the case of the Russian writings, such as the Preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto, which he could not have been ignorant of, the probability is that he preferred not to use them because of their affinity with certain populist ideas, especially the role of the obshtchina. Even the slightest concession to the Narodniks would have aggravated his isolation inside Russian social democracy and laid him open to his adversaries.

Whatever Trotsky failed to borrow from the text of Marx was more than compensated for by his fidelity to the Marxist method, however. And however heavily the works of Plekhanov and the Mensheviks may have relied upon exegetical authority, they fundamentally lacked the dialectical approach so evident in Trotsky’s work. Let us focus on five of the most important and distinctive features of the methodology that underlies the ⁷⁶

(1) From the vantage point of a dialectical comprehension of the unity of opposites, Trotsky criticized the Bolsheviks’ rigid division between the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat and the ‘democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants’ as a ‘logical, purely formal operation’. This abstract logic is even more sharply attacked in his polemic against Plekhanov, whose whole reasoning can be reduced to the ‘empty syllogism’: our revolution is bourgeois, therefore we should support the Kadets. Moreover, in an astonishing passage from a critique of the analysis of the Menshevik Cherevanin, he explicitly condemned the analytic (i.e., abstract-formal, pre-dialectical) character of Menshevik politics. ‘Tscherewanin constructs his tactics as Spinoza did his ethics, that is to say, geometrically.’⁷⁷ Of course Trotsky, unlike Lenin was not a philosopher and almost never wrote specific philsophical texts, but this makes his clear-sighted grasp of the methodological dimension of his controversy with stagist conceptions all the more remarkable.

(2) In History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs stressed that the category of totality was the essence of Marx’s method, indeed the very principle of revolution within the domain of knowledge.⁷⁸ Trotsky’s thinking is an exceptionally significant illustration of this Lukacsian thesis. Indeed, one of the essential sources of the superiority of Trotsky’s revolutionary theory is the fact that he adopted the viewpoint of totality, visualizing capitalism and the class struggle as a world process. In the Preface to the aforementioned Russian edition of Lassalle: ‘Binding all countries together with its mode of production and its commerce, capitalism has converted the whole world into a single economic and political organism. . . . This immediately gives the events now unfolding an international character, and opens up a wide horizon. The political emancipation of Russia led by the working class . . . will make it the initiator of the liquidation of world capitalism, for which history has created all the objective conditions.’⁷⁹ Only by posing the problem in these terms—at the level of the ‘maturity’ of the capitalist system in its totality—was it possible to transcend the traditional perspec-

tive that saw the socialist-revolutionary ‘ripeness’ of Russia exclusively in terms of national economic determinism.⁵⁸

(3) Trotsky explicitly rejected the economism (the tendency to reduce, in a non-mediated and one-sided fashion, all social, political and ideological contradictions to the ‘economic infrastructure’) which was one of the hallmarks of the Plekhanovian interpretation of Marxism. Indeed, Trotsky’s break with economism was one of the decisive steps towards the theory of permanent revolution. A key paragraph in Results and Prospects defined with precision the political stakes entailed in this rupture: To imagine that the dictatorship of the proletariat is in some way automatically dependent on the technical development and resources of a country is a prejudice of “economic” materialism simplified to absurdity. This point of view has nothing in common with Marxism.’⁵⁹

However some of Trotsky’s modern critics, such as Nicolas Krassb, have maintained that behind his rejection of economism lurked another, equally profound ‘deviation’: ‘We may call this, for the sake of convenience, “Sociologism”. Here it is not the economy, but social classes, which are extracted from the complete historical totality and hypostasized in an idealistic fashion as the demiurges of any given political situation. ... In his {Trotsky’s} writings, mass forces are presented as constantly dominant in society, without any political organizations or institutions intervening as necessary and permanent levels of the social formation.’⁶⁰ In his reply to Krasso, Ernest Mandel has shown quite clearly how this imputation of ‘sociologism’ is totally irrelevant in relation to Trotsky’s post-1917 writings (for example, his famous analysis of the political conjuncture in Germany in the early 1930s). I would extend his caveat and assert that Krasso’s charge is not valid for the young Trotsky of Results and Prospects (1906) either. As Krasso himself honestly recognizes, ‘Trotsky shows a great awareness of the state as a bureaucratic and military apparatus.’⁶¹ Now is not the state an ‘institution intervening as [a] necessary and permanent level of the social formation? In fact, the only correct argument that Krasso can advance to prove his thesis is the underestimation of the role of the party in Trotsky’s views on the revolution of 1905—an error which Trotsky himself later designated as the main weakness of his political thought in

^S1lbid., p. 17. Some pages later Krassd seems to forget this assertion, writing without hesitation that 'Trotsky's indifference to political institutions divided him from Lenin before the October Revolution’ (p. 89). Would the state be a non-political institution to Krassb?

this period. Granting this, I would still challenge the accuracy of Krasso's statement that ‘indeed, when Trotsky writes of the political struggle in Russia he never simply refers to the role of revolutionary organizations—he only speaks of social forces."⁵² If Krasso had only read Results and Prospects more carefully, he would have encountered several passages where Trotsky emphasized the leading role of the revolutionary party in the capture and maintenance of proletarian power. ‘Collectivism will become not only the inevitable way forward from the position in which the party in power will find itself, but will also be a means of preserving this position with the support of the proletariat.’⁶³

(4) Trotsky’s method is resolutely historical. The historical specificity of the Russian social formation is a central theme in Trotsky's writings. Moreover, his historicism is an open historicism, a rich and dialectical conception of historical development as a contradictory process, where at every moment alternatives are posed; it has nothing in common with the impotent fatalism that pervaded Menshevik thinking, where the dead ruled the living and the past determined the future. The task of Marxism, according to Trotsky, is precisely to ‘discover the “possibilities” of the developing revolution by means of an analysis of its internal mechanism’.⁶⁴ In Results and Prospects, as well as in later essays (see, for example, his 1908 polemic against the Mensheviks, ‘The Proletariat and the Russian Revolution’ in 1905), he tended to see the process of permanent revolution towards socialist transformation as an objective possibility, legitimate and realistic, whose outcome depended on innumerable subjective factors as well as unforsee-able events—and not as an inevitable necessity whose triumph (or defeat) was already assured. It was this recognition of the open character of social historicity that gave revolutionary praxis its decisive place in the architecture of Trotsky’s theoretical-political system from 1905 on.

(5) At the height of its engagement with populism, Russian Marxism, and especially the Mensheviks, insisted on the unavoidable similarity between the socio-economic development of Western Europe and the future o’f Russia. Every particularity of Russia was denied or overlooked, and the ‘universal’ laws of capitalist accumulation were extended, pure and simple, .to the Czarist Empire. One of Trotsky’s chief merits was his success in achieving, to an impressive degree, a dialectical synthesis of the particular and the universal, of the specificity of the Russian social formation and of

Permanent Revolution in Russia 51 the general tendencies of capitalist development. Thanks to his dialectical orientation, he was able to simultaneously transcend-negate-preserve (Aufhebung) the contradiction between populism and Menshevism, and to develop a new perspective, which was both more concrete and less unilateral. In a remarkable passage in the History of the Russian Revolution (1930) Trotsky explicitly formulated the viewpoint that was already implicit in his 1906 texts: ‘In the essence of the matter the Slavophile conception, with all its reactionary fantasticness, and also Narodnikism, with all its democratic illusions, were by no means mere speculations, but rested upon indubitable and moreover deep peculiarities of Russia’s development, understood one-sidedly however and incorrectly evaluated. In its struggle with Narodnikism, Russian Marxism, demonstrating the identity of the laws of development for all countries, not infrequently fell into a dogmatic mechanization discovering a tendency to pour out the baby with the bath.’⁶⁵

It was the combination of all these methodological innovations that made Results and Prospects—a pamphlet written in jail in 1906—so unique.⁶⁶This first systematic exposition of the theory of permanent revolution begins with an analysis (inspired by Parvus and Miliukov) of the genesis of the Russian social formation and its peculiarities—an analysis which Trotsky would continue to develop and enrich in his subsequent works between 1906 and 1908 (a number of essays from this period are included in the volume 1905). Trotsky contrasts the differential character of the urban economy in Russian and Western history: whereas towns in Western Europe were the nuclei of commercial and artisanal production, in Russia they remained, well into the nineteenth century, mere fortresses and administrative centres. When, at the end of the nineteenth century, European capital began to pour into Russia, it suffocated the seeds of a Russian artisanate and thereby destroyed the social basis for a bourgeois-democratic mass movement of a Western type: the plebian and petty-bourgeois urban layers. Furthermore, heavy industry in Russia did not develop, as in the West, ‘organically’ from small crafts and manufacturing, but was to a large extent directly implanted by foreign (German, French, Belgian and

“‘Whether one reads his message with horror or hope, whether one views him as the inspired herald of a new age surpassing all history in achievement and grandeur, or as the oracle of ruin and woe, one cannot but be impressed by the sweep and boldness of his vision. He reconnoitred the future as one who surveys from a towering mountain top a new and immense horizon and points to vast, uncharted landmarks in the distance. ’ (The Prophet Armal, p. 161.)

English) capital. This foreign and very modern origin of the dominant sections of Russian industrial capital was a principal cause of both the weakness of the native Russian bourgeoisie and of the relative sociopolitical weight of the young Russian working class. ‘The proletariat immediately found itself concentrated in tremendous masses, while between these masses and the autocracy there stood a capitalist bourgeoisie, very small in numbers, isolated from the “people”, half-foreign, without historical traditions, and inspired only by the greed for gain.’⁶⁷

Trotsky showed how the concentration of workers in Russian industry had attained truly gigantic proportions, even by the standards of the advanced capitalist countries. Indeed he would later demonstrate that the percentage of the labour force employed in very large factories was much higher in Russia [38.5%] than in Germany [only 10%}.⁶⁸ In this analysis it is possible to see the emergence of the first sketch of the theory of unequal and combined development. Later, in his book 1905 (written between 1905 and 1909) he filled in this sketch with more elaborated concepts; stressing, for example, that Russian society comprised an articulation of ‘all stages of civilization’ from the most primitive and archaic agriculture to the most modern large-scale industry. He criticized the Mensheviks for their inability to grasp the complex and contradictory interpenetration of world capitalism and the Russian social formation. ‘Today they fail to see the unified process of world capitalist development which swallows up all the countries that lie in its path and which creates, out of the national and general exigencies of capitalism, an amalgam whose nature cannot be understood by the application of historical cliches, but only by materialist analysis.’⁶⁹

Trotsky’s interpretation of Russian reality was intertwined with a broad and original conception of the world-historical movement. Comparing 1789, 1848 and 1905, he periodized the modern class struggle into three important phases: first, when the revolutionary bourgeoisie leads the rebellion of the plebeian masses against despotism; second, when the bourgeoisie is no longer revolutionary, but the proletariat is still too weak; and third, when the proletariat becomes the leading force in the struggle against the autocracy. (The Russian bourgeoisie was more afraid of the armed Russian proletariat than of the Cossacks; it therefore betrayed the revolutionary

^6S/905, pp. 21-2. Comparing the number of workers in big factories (more than a thousand workers), Trotsky showed that backward and semi-Asiatic Russia had three times more workers (in absolute numbers) in this category than Germany (1,115,000 versus 448,731)! (pp. 291-92)

ideals of its youth, ideals of which the proletariat had become the inheritor.)⁷⁰ Trotsky’s historical schema can also be used to elucidate the difference between his theory of permanent revolution and Marx’s; Marx’s conceptions of a permanentist strategy remained unconsolidated because he was, so to speak, trapped in the epoch of transition between the ages of bourgeois and socialist revolution. Trotsky, on the other hand, entered the workers’ movement at the advent of the era of the proletarian revolution. He was one of the first to grasp in its universal-historical significance.⁷¹The practical conclusion of this whole socio-historical analysis, at the level of political action, was the famous formula that Trotsky advanced after 1905: ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry’. This slogan, of course, was considered heretical by most Russian Marxists, especially the Mensheviks, for whom the role of the proletariat could not but be the direct expression of the level of industrial development; it implied, therefore Trotsky’s rejection of economism and his comprehension of the relative autonomy of the political sphere.⁷²

What were the principal divergences between the views of Trotsky and Lenin on the social nature of the Russian revolution? Trotsky agreed with Lenin that the revolutionary power to be established in Russia must be some sort of coalition between the proletariat and the peasantry, but he insisted that the proletariat should necessarily be the hegemonic force in this alliance. In support of this thesis, he advanced three different arguments: (1) the inevitable subordination of the country to the town as a result of industrialization; (2) the peasantry’s incapacity to play an independent political role and its necessary dependence upon the leadership of one of the urban classes; (3) that since Russia lacked an authentic revolutionary bourgeoisie, the peasantry would, therefore, be forced to support the power of workers’ democracy—‘it will not matter much even if the peasantry does this with a degree of consciousness not larger than that with which it usually rallies to the bourgeois regimes.’⁷³ Lenin polemicized vigorously against this last thesis, stressing, not without reason, that ‘the proletariat

⁷²‘Between the productive forces of a country and the political strength of its classes there cut across at any given moment various social and political factors of a national and international character, and these displace and even sometimes completely .altenthe political expression of economic relations. In spite of the fact that the productive forces of the United States are ten times as great as those of Russia, nevertheless the political role of the Russian proletariat. . . [is] incomparably greater than in the case of the proletariat of the United States. ’ (Results and Prospects, p. 197.)

cannot count on the ignorance and prejudices of the peasantry as the powers that be under a bourgeois regime, count and depend on them, nor can it assume that in time of revolution the peasantry will remain in their usual state of political ignorance and passivity.’⁸⁰ But in the last analysis, his disagreement with Trotsky was not so deep, since he too insisted on the need for proletarian hegemony in the revolutionary movement.⁸¹ For example at the 1908/1909 conference of the rsdlp, Lenin, after proposing the formula ‘the proletariat which carries behind it the peasantry', finally rallied to the motto advanced by Trotsky and Luxemburg—‘the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry’—explaining that the conception behind this different slogan was still the same.

As a matter of fact, Trotsky’s perspective of a workers’ government in Russia was shared by Parvus, Luxemburg and, more intermittently, by Lenin as well. The radical novelty of the theory of permanent revolution was located less in its view of the class nature of the future revolutionary power than in its conception of its historical tasks. Trotsky’s decisive contribution was the idea that the Russian revolution could transcend the limits of an extensive democratic transformation and begin to take anti-capitalist measures with a distinctively socialist content. How did Trotsky justify this iconoclastic hypothesis? The linchpin of his argument was the belief that ‘the political domination of the proletariat is incompatible with its economic enslavement.’ Why—Trotsky asked—would the proletariat in power, and controlling the means of coercion, continue to tolerate capitalist exploitation? And even if the working class attempted to restrict itself to an implementation of the demands of its minimum, democratic programme, would not ‘the very logic of its position . . . compel it to pass over to collectivistic measures'? For example, if the state gave aid to strikers, it would probably provoke a reaction by the employers in the form of widespread lock-outs. Confronted by the challenge of a 'strike by capital’, the proletarian power would be obliged to take over factories and organize production. To put it in a nutshell, ‘the barrier between the ‘‘minimum” and the “maximum” programme disappears immediately the proletariat comes to power.’⁸² (It should be noted that the workers’ power to which Trotsky refers has nothing to do with the participation in government by reformist workers’ parties in the framework of the bourgeois state—as with Jaures and the French socialists at the turn of the century.)

Trotsky’s conception of the permanent character of the revolutionary process, then, follows logically from an extrapolation of the dynamics of class struggle in a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship’. Moreover, it is rooted in a deep understanding of how, in the conjuncture of revolutionary transition, the political sphere becomes dominant: the political power of the proletariat immediately becomes a social and economic power, a direct threat to bourgeois domination in the factories. Under such conditions lock-outs and various forms of economic sabotage (curtailment of investment, flight of capital, hoarding, etc.) are the logical and almost inevitable response of a bourgeoisie confronted with the break-down of institutional (state) guarantees of private property and the great danger of working-class power. In other words, the contradiction between the political domination of the proletariat and the economic power of the bourgeoisie is unbearable for both classes; such a highly unstable and ephemeral situation must rapidly be resolved in favour of one or the other antagonists. Finally, Trotsky also argued that this same process of uninterrupted revolution would also be enacted in the countryside; the dictatorship of the proletariat would necessarily be forced to take socialist measures—such as the organization of cooperative production or state farms—because the division of the great estates would be an unimaginable economic and political regression.

This last thesis—so squarely contradicted by the experience of the October Revolution—leads us to the most debatable feature of his 1905-6 conception of permanent revolution: namely, the nature of the relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry in the course of revolutionary struggle. For Trotsky, the alliance between the two classes, and particularly the support of the whole peasantry for the proletarian dictatorship, was a transitory factor that would endure only until the abolition of feudalism and absolutism. After that a new phase would open, with the workers' government necessarily implementing measures favouring the rural proletariat which would then, incur the hostility of the rich peasant stratum. Meanwhile the proletariat could count on little more than the indifference or passivity of the mass of the peasantry, which would remain socially too undifferentiated and petty-minded to grasp the historical stakes of the socialist transition. Thus, Trotsky drew the starkly pessimistic conclusion that 'the more definite and determined the policy of the proletariat in power becomes, the narrower and more shaky does the ground beneath its feet become.’⁸³ Under such conditions how could the dictatorship of the proletariat survive? The only solution that Trotsky can envision is the extension of the revolution to Europe. ‘Left to its own resources, the working class of Russia will inevitably be crushed by the counterrevolution the moment the peasantry turns its back on it. It will have no alternative but to link the fate of its political rule, and, hence, the fate of the whole Russian revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in Europe.’⁷⁸ Thus the real obstacle to the implementation of a socialist programme by a workers’ government in Russia would not be economic so much—that is, the backwardness of the technical and productive structures of the country—as political: the isolation of the working class and the inevitable rupture with its peasant and petty-bourgeois allies. Only international solidarity could save the socialist Russian revolution: ‘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 socialistic dictatorship.⁷⁹

These two, interconnected predictions—the impossibility of preserving the worker-peasant alliance after the establishment of proletarian power, and the dependence of this power upon socialist revolutions in Western Europe—were the objects of frequent criticism by Trotsky’s adversaries. Who was ultimately proved more correct? It is difficult to give a clear-cut answer to such a question. It is, of course, true that during the 1920s the alliance with the peasantry collapsed and violent confrontation took its place. But was this inevitable, as Trotsky saw in 1906, or was it rather the result of the disastrous policies of Stalin-Bukharin in 1924-7 (support to the kulaks) and of Stalin alone in 1928-30 (forced collectivization)? Trotsky’s own fight at the head of the Left Opposition against these policies obviously presumed the possibility of an alternative orientation. On the other hand, it was also true that workers’ democracy in Russia was not able to survive long after the defeat of the European revolution (1923); although its decline did not lead, as Trotsky had feared in 1906, to bourgeois restoration, but rather to the rule of a bureaucratic stratum which largely originated from within the working class itself. It must be observed also that both series of events were deeply interrelated, because the contradictions between the workers and peasants help to facilitate the emergence of the bureaucracy as an all-powerful arbitrator, while the repression of the peasantry in the late 1920s accelerated the growth of the monstrous power of the GPU. Thus, although Trotsky’s prognostics of 1906 grasped the crucial connection between the weakening of the worker-peasant alliance" and the fate of the international revolution, they could scarcely anticipate

the importance or relative autonomy of the political struggle within the proletarian party in shaping the ultimate outcome.

Results and Prospects remained for a long time a forgotten book. It seems that Lenin did not read it—at least before 1917⁸⁴—and its influence over contemporary Russian Marxism was desultory at best. Like all forerunners, Trotsky was in advance of his time, and his ideas were too novel and heterodox to be accepted, or even studied, by his party comrades. But during the bitter period of revolutionary low-tide and reactionary stability (1907-16), Trotsky did not abandon his vision of Russia's revolutionary future. There was a moment, however, in the wake of the defeat of 1906 and in the face of his comrades’ incomprehension, when Trotsky attempted to moderate his views closer to ‘orthodox’ party positions. Both in his speech before the London congress of the rsdlp in 1907 and in the pamphlet In Defence of the Party, published in the same year, he contented himself with re-affirming the necessity of a workers’ government to assure the victory of the democratic revolution, but without advancing the perspective of a permanentist transition towards socialist revolution.⁸⁵ But during the next year he rapidly returned to his whole programme of permanent revolution in the course of a series of polemics both against the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. In a critical review (published in 1908 in Neue Zeit) of a book on 1905 by Cheravanin, he once again argued that the transformation of the democratic into a socialist revolution was an objective possibility that could not be excluded a priori by abstract and formal reasoning (the so-called ‘geometrical’ arguments). The social and economic conditions of Russia would lead to a potential historical situation in which the victory of a bourgeois revolution would be possible only through a proletarian revolutionary power. ‘Does the revolution therefore stop being a bourgeois one? Yes and no. The answer does not depend on formal definitions but on the further progress of events. If the proletariat is overthrown by a coalition of bourgeois classes, including the peasantry whom the proletariat itself has liberated, then the revolution will retain its limited bourgeois character. But if the proletariat succeeds in using all means to achieve its own political hegemony and thereby breaks out of the national confines of the Russian revolution, then that revolution could become the

Russian revolution will reach can, of course, be answered only conditionally.’⁸² In the same period, in an article published in a Polish .I; review edited by Rosa Luxemburg (Przeglad Social-demokratyczny) Trotsky criticized the Bolsheviks for what he termed their ‘class asceticism’: that :-i is, the idea that the proletariat in power would have to adhere to the limits ^ and borders of bourgeois democracy. As in Results and Prospects, he stressed that a workers’ government could not refrain—except by betraying its own class—from supporting strikes and struggles against unemployment; in the i, face of fierce resistance from the bourgeoisie, it would be forced to undertake socialist measures to avoid economic chaos.⁸³

With the outbreak of the First World War and the crisis of the Second ¹International, Trotsky continued to defend his permanentist perspective. * In a series of articles in his paper Nashe Slovo he explained how changes in ? Russia since 1905 had only reinforced his view of the central class dynamics 'vj| of the Russian revolution. ‘The period of reaction and economic crisis saw f the further ‘Europeanization’ of Russian industry . . . leading to a further ^ deepening of the social contradictions which prevent the proletariat and !⁽| bourgeoisie from fighting together against the regime. The proletariat S grows in numbers, class consciousness and organization . . . thus enlarging f the social base of the revolution and strengthening its socialist aims.’⁸⁴ In t this period, however, he was tempted to develop his conceptions in a < one-sided way, going as far as to deny the possibility of a revolutionary -alliance of the workers with the petty-bourgeois intellectuals and the peasantry. ‘The experience of 1905 teaches us not ro count on the eventual participation of the peasantry . . . the workers can rely only on the semiproletarian rural labourers, not on the peasants. The revolutionary move- \ ment will acquire more of a class, and less of a national, character than in ■ 1905- ’⁸⁵ Although this formulation was not characteristic of Trotsky’s 1 global political orientation, it did reveal his habitual mistrust of the peasantry (about which he would write an unequivocal self-criticism in 1930⁸⁶).

^’Catastrophe militaire et perspectives politiques’, Nashe Slovo (September, 1915), in Trotsky, La Guerre et I’lntemationale, Paris 1974, pp. 166-9.

⁸⁶'In the twelve years (1905-17) of my revolutionary journalistic activity, there are also ■ articles in which the episodic circumstances and even the episodic polemical exaggerations inevitable in struggle protrude into the foreground in violation of the strategic line. Thus, for ■( example, articles can be found in which I expressed doubts about the future revolutionary role 1

If, during the war years, Trotsky stood fast by his conception of permanent revolution, the challenge of organizing an internationalist opposition to the mass slaughter changed his views on party organization; and, shortly after the February revolution, led him to join the Bolshevik party (May 1917). Trotsky’s reconciliation with the Bolsheviks was reciprocated by a profound shift in Lenin’s views on the nature of the coming revolution. To understand how the theory of permanent revolution became the action programme of the Bolsheviks, it is necessary to survey briefly the evolution of Lenin’s strategic thought between the outbreak of the war and his famous April Theses, which signalled his adoption of a permanentist perspective.

On 4 August 1914 German social democracy voted war credits while Kautsky called upon the German proletariat to defend the fatherland. At the same moment, that other patriarch of 'international' socialism, Plek-hanov, was rousing the Russian toilers to fight for their motherland. The Second International, the supposedly impregnable fortress of proletarian internationalism, had broken down. It was probably the trauma of these events that moved Lenin to seek a critical revision of ‘orthodox’ Marxism from its very foundations. Perhaps he also had a lucid intuition that the methodological Achilles heel of the Second International’s politics was the absence of dialectics. Whatever the precise reason, he began in September 1914 to study Hegel’s Science of Logic-, in the course of which he wrote what later became known as the Philosophical Notebooks. This collection of glosses, comments and brief digressions amounted to nothing less than a sketch of a new understanding of the Marxist method, radically opposed to the one developed by Kautsky and Plekhanov. The most significant elements of Lenin’s methodological break-through were: (1) a vigorous critique of metaphysical materialism, which Lenin characterized as ‘stupid’, ‘crude’, ‘dead’ and in most respects inferior to the ’intelligent’ idealism of Hegel; (2) a clear distinction between vulgar evolutionist and dialectical conceptions of development (only the last being capable of ‘giving us the key to the leaps and ... to the breaks in continuity’); (3) the dissolution of the 'solid and abstract opposition’ between the subjective and the objective; (4) the critique of the absolutization and fetishism of the concept of law; (5) the understanding of the category of totality—‘the development of the entire ensemble of the moments of reality’—as being the essence of dialectical knowledge; and (6) a dialectical view of opposites which transcended of the peasantry as a whole, as an estate, and in connection with this refused to designate, especially during the imperialist war, the future Russian revolution as "national”. . . .’ (Permanent Revolution, pp. 47-8).

their metaphysical petrification and grasped their transformation in one another.⁸⁷

Lenin’s methodological break with pre-dialectical Marxism prepared the way for his break with its political corollary, the dogma that the material and objective conditions in Russia were not ‘mature’ enough for a socialist revolution. In other words, the Philosophical Notebooks were a kind of philosophical prolegomena to the April Theses of 1917: from a conversion of opposites into one another, to the transformation of the democratic into the socialist revolutions; from the critique of vulgar evolutionism, to the ‘break in continuity’ in 1917; and so on. But even more important, Lenin’s critical reading of Hegel helped deliver him from the straitjacket that the Plekhanovian philosophical orthodoxy had imposed on his thinking (and which was still so visible in his other great philosophical meditation: the 1909 Materialism, and Empirio-criticism). It permitted him to cross the forbidden threshold and to develop in April 1917 the ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ which he proposed to the Bolsheviks as the perspective of a struggle for a proletarian and socialist power in Russia. In the meantime Lenin had also written his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which, situating capitalism in its concrete totality as a world system, allowed him to approach the question of the Russian revolution in a new light. In particular, it led to the theory of the ‘weakest link’, which postulated that revolutionary ‘maturity’ had to be adjudged in the framework of the international system of imperialism, and not exclusively at the level of an isolated country.

It is only, however, after the eruption of the February revolution that Lenin’s new methodological departures and theory of imperialism were synthesized within an explicitly permanentist conception of the revolutionary process. In March, while the majority of the Bolsheviks in Petrograd were still conceiving of the new revolution as limited to bourgeois tasks, Lenin sent from exile his ‘Letters from Afar’, which envisioned socialist measures as already being on the order of the day.⁸⁸ At the moment of his return to Russia on 3 April, he made an extraordinary speech at the Finland Station to the mass of workers, soldiers and sailors. 'You must struggle for the socialist revolution, struggle to the end, till the complete victory of the proletariat. Long live the socialist revolution!’⁸⁹ These words, and the

^ Philosophical Notebooks, cw, vol. 38, pp. 151, 157-9, 179, 187, 260, 276-7 and 360. See also my essay, ‘From the Great Logic of Hegel to the Finland Station in Petrograd', Critique, 6 (Spring 1976).

^Stenographic notes by che Bolshevik Bonch-Bruevitch in G. Golikov, La revolution d'oc~ tohre, Moscow 1966.

central political slogan proposed by Lenin—'All power to the soviets!’— resounded, according to the testimony of the Menshevik Sukhanov, ‘like a thunderclap from a clear blue sky’, which ‘stunned and confused even the most faithful of his disciples’. On 8 April Pravda, the official organ of the Bolsheviks, published an editorial signed by Kamenev, stressing that ‘as for the general scheme of comrade Lenin, ic seems to us unacceptable, in that it starts from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is ended and counts upon an immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution.’ According to Sukhanov, the Mensheviks greeted Pravda s position with glee, ‘it seemed that the Marxist rank and file of the Bolshevik party stood firm and unshakable, that the mass of the party was in revolt against Lenin to defend the elementary principles of the scientific socialism of the old days; alas, we were mistaken!’⁸⁶ As a matter of fact, Lenin's new theses did imply a profound break with the ‘scientific socialism of the old days’ and with a certain way of understanding the ‘elementary principles’ of Marxism, inspired by Plekhanov and Kautsky, which had been the common wisdom of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. In a critical commentary on Sukhanov’s book written in 1923, Lenin emphasized the methodological roots of this break: people like Sukhanov ‘call themselves Marxists, but. . . . They completely failed to understand what is decisive in Marxism, namely, its revolutionary dialectics.'⁸⁷

Faced with almost unanimous condemnation of his heretical views, Lenin for the moment moderated his propositions: the April Theses did not speak of socialist revolution, although they implied it by evoking the Commune-state of 1871 as a model for the Soviet Republic. The Paris Commune was traditionally understood, as a result of Marx’s analysis in The Civil War in France, as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat; moreover, Lenin himself had previously criticized the Commune (in his Two Tactics) from a stagist perspective for having confused the tasks of the democratic and socialist revolutions. So to advance the proposal for a ‘Commune-state’ was, in the last analysis, to struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia and for a revolution combining democratic and socialist tasks. As E. H. Carr has put it, ‘Lenin’s powerful argument . . . implied the transition to socialism, though he stopped short of explicitly proclaiming ic. ’⁸⁸ But the Bolsheviks did not have to wait long for Lenin to make the point explicitly; before the end of April, he was battling within the party'fonhe abandonment of the traditional slogan of a ‘democratic

dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. In his eyes, those who still clung to the old formula (Kamenev, for example) had ‘in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle, ’ and ‘should be consigned to the archive of “Bolshevik” pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of “old Bolsheviks”)’.⁸⁹ Later, in a series of articles in the newspaper Volna, which summarized in question-and-answer form the positions of the different Russian political parties, he gave this answer to the question ‘What is their [Bolsheviks’] attitude towards socialism?’—‘For socialism. The Soviets must immediately take all possible practicable steps for its realization.’⁹⁰

Over the last half-century, generations of Stalinist and ‘post-Stalinist’ ideologues have toiled to prove that Lenin’s conceptions in 1917 had nothing in common with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, and that they were merely an ‘amended and improved’ version of the strategy he had formulated back in 1905. The touchstone of this laborious argumentation is the thesis that the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, established in February 1917 alongside the Provisional Government, was the materialization of the ‘democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants’.⁹¹ But it is impossible to bend the events of 1917 to fit the neat schemas of 1905. In the first place, if Lenin did consider the Petrograd _v Soviet as a ‘democratic dictatorship . . .’, it was only ‘to a certain extent . . . with a certain number of highly important modifications’; namely the fact that this institution—dominated in the beginning by the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries—‘voluntarily gave up its power to the bourgeoisie.’^{92 93} This, in turn, deprived it of the capacity to implement its historical tasks; the most important of which was the revolutionary solution of the agrarian question through the expropriation of the landowners. But an even more fundamental point is overlooked by the different Stalinist and neo-Stalinist theoreticians: while in his Two Tactics Lenin is still convinced that the Russian revolution can only ‘clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European and not Asiatic, development of capitalism’,⁵⁷ in March/April 1917 he made the decisive transition to a perspective that stressed the immediacy of anti-capitalist, socialist-revolutionary measures. In 1905 he believed that ‘the degree of Russia’s economic development . . . make[s] immediate and complete emancipation of the working class impossible;’⁹⁴ but in 1917 he advanced a strategy that aimed at nothing less than this 'complete emancipation’. How, then, is it possible to deny the deep affinity and evident convergence of his April Theses with Trotsky’s conception of permanent revolution?

The events of 1917 dramatically confirmed Trotsky’s predictions twelve years earlier. First, the Russian bourgeoisie (and its political allies: the Mensheviks, moderate populists, and so on) proved incapable of completing the democratic revolution, especially of satisfying the revolutionary aspirations of the peasantry. Second, the crucial democratic tasks were, therefore, only completed after the seizure of power by the proletariat, who emerged as the real emancipator of the peasantry. As Lenin later observed, ‘it was the Bolsheviks . . . who, thanks only to the victory of the proletarian revolution, helped the peasants to carry the bourgeois democratic revolution really to its conclusion.’⁹⁹ Third, once in power the working class was unable to confine itself to merely democratic reforms; the dynamic of the class struggle forced it—as Trotsky had prophesized—to undertake explicitly socialist measures. Indeed, in the face of the economic boycott conducted by the propertied classes and the growing menace of a general paralysis of production, the Soviets were led—much sooner than he forsaw—to expropriate capital when, in June 1918, the Peoples’ Council of Commissars decreed the socialization of the principal branches of industry.¹⁰⁰ Thus the revolution of 1917 underwent a process of uninterrupted development from its (unfinished) bourgeois-democratic phase in February to its proletarian-socialist phase which began in October. With the support of the peasantry, the Soviets combined democratic tasks (the agrarian revolution) with socialist tasks (the expropriation of the bourgeoisie), opening a ‘non-capitalist road’ for the transition to socialism. But the Bolshevik party, with Lenin and Trotsky at its head, could only "cw, vol. 28, p. 314. See also The Permanent Revolution, p. 109: ‘The gist of the matter lay in the feet that the agrarian question, which constituted the basis of the bourgeois revolution, could not be solved under the rule of the bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of the proletariat appeared on the scene not after the completion of the agrarian democratic revolution but as the necessary prerequisite for its accomplishment.’

¹⁰⁰See Marcel Liebman, The Russian Revolution, New York 1970, p. 324: 'During the same period, the government ordered the nationalization of a number of individual enterprises without, however, evincing any desire to extend this measure to the encite economy. In each case, chey were motivated by the departure or the hostile attitude of the proprietors, or by the particular importance of these enterprises. . . . the Bolshevik Government was forced co reconsider its relatively moderate policy which depended on some measure of co-operation by the industrialists, who became more obstructive as the Civil War drew nearer. . . .And when the Civil War could no longer be averted, and the production of arms had to be stepped up, centralization became a matter of life and death for the new regime'.

take the leadership of this gigantic social movement that ‘shook the world’, because of the radical strategic re-orientation that Lenin had initiated in April 1917 along lines congruent with the theory of permanent revolution.

The ‘orthodox’ Marxists of the Second International condemned the October Revolution for its defiance of the ‘iron laws of history’. In a 1921 Pravda article on the 'Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution’, Lenin brilliantly summed-up the theoretical-political gulf between stagist and permanentist conceptions of revolution. The Kautskys, Hilferdings, Martovs, Chernovs, Hillquits, Longuets, MacDonalds, Turatis and other heroes of "Two-and-a-Half” Marxism were incapable of understanding this relation between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian-socialist revolutions. The first develops into the second. The second, in passing, solves the problems of the first. The second consolidates the work of the first. Struggle, and struggle alone, decides how far the second succeeds in outgrowing the first.’⁹⁵ Of course, the Mensheviks and their supporters in European social democracy did attempt to base their critique of Bolshevism on a consistent Marxist argument: the establishment of socialism requires the existence of a high level of the development of the productive forces. But Lenin and Trotsky did not dispute this premise, but rather the false reasoning which the Mensheviks attempt to deduce from it. In his memoirs the Menshevik historian Sukhanov asked, ‘How to reconcile this economic backwardness, this peasant and petty-bourgeois structure of society, with socialist transformation. . . ?’⁹⁶ In a review of Sukhanov’s book, Lenin responded as follows. ‘You say that civilization is necessary for the building of socialism. Very good. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of civilisation in our country as the expulsion of the landowners and the Russian capitalists, and then start moving towards socialism? Where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the customary historical sequence of events are impermissible or impossible?’⁹⁷

In the light of the experience of the Russian revolution, Lenin and the Third International attempted to outline a global strategy for the backward, underdeveloped; colonial or semi-colonial societies. Here, also, Lenin deeply modified and revised his pre-war views. For example, in a 1912 article on China, he had polemicized against Sun Yat-sen (not without, first, praising his revolutionary-democratic sincerity), attacking his populist ideology and his ‘dream’ that China could somehow ‘avoid the

capitalist road’. At that time Lenin believed that the concept of a noncapitalist road in China was nothing more than another version of the ‘theory of petty-bourgeois reactionary “socialism”’, which Russian Marxism had fought against so long and hard in the form of Narodnikism. Moreover, he predicted that within fifty years China would have many towns like Shanghai: ‘that means, great centres of capitalist wealth and proletarian poverty and misery’.¹⁰⁴ Eight years later, at the Second Congress of the Communist International, Lenin undertook a radical reformulation of his views on the prospects for national liberation movements in the colonial world. After a series of extended discussions and debates (in 1920 the Comintern was still an organization where dissent and debate were considered both healthy and normal), the two main strategic orientations—those of Lenin and of the Indian communist, M. N. Roy—had converged in a certain consensus or compromise. Both, agreed that the fundamental strategic aim in ‘Oriental’ countries (a term which, in reality, designated all the colonial and semi-colonial nations) must be the struggle for the establishment of a soviet-based workers’ and peasants’ power, which would, in turn, open a non-capitalist road of socialist transition.¹⁰⁵ Disagreement remained over the tactics to be adopted toward bourgeois nationalism: Lenin envisaged the possibility of ‘temporary alliances with bourgeois democracy in colonial and backward countries’,¹⁰⁶ while Roy, Sultan-Zade and others were more reserved about such possible coalitions.¹⁰⁷ Ultimately, a common agreement was reached on the need to distinguish between bourgeois-democratic reformism and popularrevolutionary movements for emancipation in the colonies and semicolonies. ¹⁰⁸

¹⁰⁵Lenin, "The Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions’ (26 July, 1920), in Lenin on the National and Colonial Questions, Peking 1967, p. 35: 'The question was posed as follows: Are we to accept as correct the assertion that the capitalist stage of development of the national economy is inevitable for those backward nations which are winning liberation. . . ? We replied in the negative. If the victorious revolutionary proletariat conducts systematic propaganda among them, and the Soviet governments come to their assistance with all the means at their disposal—in that event it would be wrong to assume that the capitalist stage of development is inevitable for the backward peoples. With the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, the backward countries can pass over to the Soviet system and, through definite stages of development, to communism, without going through the capitalist stage.' ___

¹⁰⁷See Henri Carriere d’Encausse and Stuart Schram, Le marxisme et I'Asie, Paris 1965, pp. 44-5, 205-22.

"^‘Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions’, Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, London 1980, pp. 76-81.

On the central question of the peasantry, however, Lenin’s views remained ambiguous, if not actually contradictory. On the one hand, he proposed the constitution of peasant soviets, even in countries with precapitalist agrarian structures; while, on the other hand, he proclaimed, ‘there is not the slightest doubt that every national movement can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement, for the overwhelming mass of the population in backward countries consists of peasants who represent bourgeois-capitalist relations. ’⁹⁸ This typically ‘Europeanist’ conception of the peasantry—shared by Trotsky—did not take into account sufficiently the historical specificity of the rural class structures and ideologico-cultural matrices in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. In particular, it greatly underestimated the peasantry and rural poor’s potential as a socialist revolutionary force under the leadership of a Marxist-proletarian vanguard, as manifested on a world scale repeatedly in this century. (We shall return to this question in relation to Trotsky.)

The ‘Theses on the Eastern Question’ of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern (December 1923) developed and complemented those of the Second. While again recognizing that 'temporary agreements with bourgeois democracy are acceptable and indispensable’, they stressed that ‘the objective tasks of the colonial revolution transcend the framework of bourgeois democracy’ and that ‘the moment the proletarian and peasant masses incorporate themselves into the revolutionary movements in the colonies, the elements of the great bourgeoisie and of the landowning bourgeoisie draw back from it.’ The strategic perspective of the Congress was that of the establishment of a soviet-like power in the East; a power of workers' and peasants’ councils that would spare countries the stages of capitalist development and exploitation.⁹⁹ Although the principal interest of the Third International was in the Asian bloc of colonial/semi-colonial countries, other regions of imperialist domination were not forgotten. Although there were no specific Congress resolutions, a number of other documents and appeals of the Executive Committee of the Comintern sketched a permanentist strategy—unifying the anti-imperialist struggle, agrarian emancipation and socialist revolution—for Latin America. For example, in a January 1921 text, the Executive Committee asserted that only a revolutionary movement expressing the interests of the proletariat and the peasantry could liberate Latin America from the oppression of both its national exploiters and American imperialism. Moreover, after a remarkable analysis of the Mexican revolution, the document concluded with the necessity of an anti-capitalist alliance between the proletariat and peasantry.¹¹¹ There was no question in this or similar Comintern statements of the 1921 to 1923 period of a specific ‘bourgeois-democratic stage’ or of the revolutionary role of the national bourgeoisie in Latin America. Indeed, there was no mention even of a possible alliance of the workers and peasants with bourgeois democracy.

A detailed analysis of the Comintern’s policies on the ‘national and colonial question’ during its Leninist period—the first four congresses 1919-22—is beyond the scope of this work. It suffices to note that the general orientation of most documents and resolutions of the congresses and of the Executive Committee advotated a struggle in the colonial and semi-colonial countries for a soviet-type power of the workers and peasants, under proletarian hegemony, with a programme combining democratic, national and anti-capitalist (socialist) revolutionary measures: in other words, a strategy which had the same general orientation as the theory of permanent revolution. The question that remained open and subject to debate was over the nature of the tactics to be employed relative to bourgeois-nationalist currents. If the idea of‘temporary alliance’ was more or less accepted by the entire Comintern leadership, the concrete implementation of it in each country was more controversial.¹¹²

How did Trotsky’s ideas on permanent revolution develop during the first years after the victory of the October Revolution? As one would expect, Trotsky considered that the revolution thoroughly confirmed his conceptions and forecasts of 1905-6. In a preface written in 1919 to the re-issue of Results and Prospects, he wrote: ‘The final test of a theory is experience. Irrefutable proof of our having correctly applied Marxist theory ‘“'The Mexican case is at che same time both typical and tragic. The agrarian workers rebelled and made a revolution only to see the fruits of their victory stolen by the capitalists. . . . The revolutionary union of the poor peasantry and the working class is indispensable; only in this way can the proletarian revolution liberate the peasantry by smashing the power of capital, and only in this way can che proletarian revolution be safeguarded from being crushed by the counter-revolution’. ('Sur la revolution en Amerique, Appel a la classe ouvriere des deux Ameriques’, L'Intemationale Communiste, 15 (January, 1921], pp. 321-2. See also 'Aux ouvriets et paysans de I’Amerique du sud', La corrapondance Internationale, 2 [20 January, 1923], pp. 26-7].

¹¹²This was particularly the case with the entrance of che Chinese communists into che Kuomintang in 1923. ’1 personally was from the very beginning, chat is from 1923, resolutely opposed to the Communist Party joining the Kuomintang. ... Up to 1926 I always voced independently in the Political Bureau on this quescion, against all the others'. (Letter to Max Schachtman, 10 December, 1930, in Trotsky On China, New York 1976, p. 490.) However this must be qualified by Trotsky's admission to Radek (Lecter of March 1927) that before 1925 he had been willing to concede that joining the Kuomintang for one or two years 'would have, perhaps, been admissible'. (Ibid., p. 122.)

is given by the fact that the events in which we are now participating, and even our methods of participation in them, were foreseen in their fundamental lines some fifteen years ago.’¹¹³ A similar viewpoint was expressed in 1922 in another preface (to a new edition of 1905) and again, a year later, in The New Course, where he answered the first wave of criticism that claimed that the permanent revolution was an ‘un-Leninist theory’. ‘I persist in considering that the thoughts I developed at that time (1904-5), taken as a whole, are much closer to the genuine essence of Leninism than much of what a number of Bolsheviks wrote in those days. . . . The theory of permanent revolution led directly to Leninism and in particular to the April 1917 Theses.’¹¹⁴ But as the pressure increased, and the attacks on the permanent revolution became an increasingly important element of the ’troika’s’ (Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin) campaign against him, Trotsky was backed into a more and more defensive stance. In Our Differences (written in November 1924, but never published), for example, he claimed that the formula of permanent revolution only ‘reflected a stage in our development that we have long since passed through’.¹¹⁵ Later, in a January 1925 letter to the Central Committee of the Party, he went so far as declaring that ‘the formula “permanent revolution” . . . applies wholly to the past. ... If at any time after October I had occasion, for private reasons, to revert to the formula "permanent revolution”, it was only a reference to party history, i.e. to the past, and had no reference to the question of present-day political tasks.’¹¹⁶

On the other hand, it is interesting to consider briefly Trotsky’s views, in the five years after October, on the revolution’s significance for other peripheral capitalist countries. To what extent could the theory of permanent revolution be generalized to zones of belated capitalist development or to the regions of colonial oppression? Certainly at the beginning of the 1920s the colonial revolution was far from the centre of his interests, since he was preoccupied with the fate of the revolutionary left in Western- and Central Europe. Nevertheless, Trotsky's relatively rare pronouncements on the ‘Eastern question’ suggest a quite negative attitude towards the role of the native bourgeoisie in the dominated countries. In a speech to the Third World Congress of the International (1921), he attempted to apply the lessons of the Russian revolutionary experience to the struggle for national

'■'■^Permanent Revolution, p. 164; and 1905, p. 8 ('Despite an interruption of twelve years, this analysis has been entirely confirmed.') ^lliChallenge of the Left Opposition, pp. 101-2. ⁿ⁵Ibid., p. 299. ^nsIbid., p. 305.

liberation in Asia. ‘The basis for the liberationist struggle of the colonies is constituted by the peasant masses. But the peasants in their struggle need leadership. Such a leadership used to be provided by the native bourgeoisie. The latter’s struggle against foreign imperialist domination cannot, however, be either consistent or energetic, inasmuch as the native bourgeoisie itself is intimately bound up with foreign capital. Only the rise of a native proletariat strong enough numerically and capable of struggle can provide a real axis for the revolution. In comparison to the country’s entire population, the size of the Indian proletariat is, of course, numerically small, but those who have grasped the meaning of the revolution’s development in Russia will never fail to take into account that the proletariat’s revolutionary role in the Oriental countries will far exceed its actual numerical strength.’¹⁰⁰ Although this passage clearly provides an indication of the theory of permanent revolution’s applicability to other national contexts, it would be incorrect to conclude that Trotsky already possessed in the early 1920s a global, coherent- and precise conception of the dynamics of revolution in the colonial and dependent countries. Only after the tragedy of the Chinese revolution of 1926-7 and in the midst of his struggle against Stalin’s doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ did Trotsky attempt to systematically generalize the theory of permanent revolution as a theory of world revolution.

The Emergence of the General Theory

Trotsky elaborated the international implications of the theory of perma-nent revolution in the course of fierce theoretical and political confronta- -$

be distinguished: (1) the struggle against the neo-Menshevik doctrine of § socialism in one country (1925-9); (2) the debate on the Second Chinese -l Revolution of 1926-7; and (3) the appearance of Trotsky’s book Permanent || Revolution in U928""'i 4

many angels could stand on the head of a pin’, while even Isaac Deutscher denounced the ‘bizarre irrelevancy’ of the whole controversy on occasion.¹But behind the abstruseness and the almost ritualistic character of the polemics (with every side piously collecting as many quotations as possible j from Lenin) critical political questions, decisive for the future of the world labour movement, were being debated.

The doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ was without any doubt the original creation of Stalin, first elaborated in the year after Lenin’s death. Indeed, its appearance can be dated with some precision. For as late as May 1924 Stalin still defended (in Foundations of Leninism) the traditional Bolshevik view on the question: ‘For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient; for that the efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries are required.’² But a few months

‘H. Brahm, Trotskijs Kampf um die Nachfolge Lenim, die ideologische Auseinandersetzung, 1923-26, Cologne 1964, p. 211; I. Deutscher, Stalin, London 1949, p- 288. Trotsky himself recognized that the debate appeared on the surface as academic or scholastic. See 'Socialism in One Country’, in The Revolution Betrayed, New York 1965, p. 292.

later (December 1924), in his pamphlet The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists, he suddenly declared that the USSR possessed favourable conditions ‘for pushing on with the organizing of a socialist economy’.³ Why this change? In Concerning Questions of Leninism (January 1926) Stalin explained it in characteristic terms: the first formulation was directed against certain assertions of the Trotskyists, and ‘to that extent— but only to that extent—this formulation was then (May 1924) adequate and undoubtedly it was of some service.' Subsequently, however, as new questions came to the fore, this formula ‘became obviously inadequate, and therefore incorrect'.⁴ This is a truly striking example of the almost purely opportunistic nature of theoretical constructions in Stalin’s writing: truth or error are not defined in relation to facts, but instrumentally according to their being or not being ‘adequate’ or ‘of some service’ to polemical employment. Thus a theory becomes ‘incorrect’ not because the objective situation has changed or become better understood, but only because the needs of the ideological struggle have changed.

If this doctrine of socialism in one country was summoned forth as a weapon against Trotsky, it owed its inception also to its immediate affinity with the spontaneous nationalistic ideology of the emerging bureaucratic strata. In 1926 Stalin openly admitted an even more compelling raison d'etre for the theory: ‘Can it (our country) remain the mighty centre of attraction for the workers of all countries that it undoubtedly is now, if it is incapable, of achieving victory at home over the capitalist elements in our economy, the victory of socialist construction? I think not. But does it not follow from this that disbelief in the victory of socialist construction, the dissemination of such disbelief, will lead to our country being discredited as the base of the world revolution?’⁵ As we shall see this is, in fact, the real political role of the doctrine in its global implications: to guarantee the prestige of the USSR, its ‘central position’ and its hegemony over the world communist movement. In other words, the ideology of socialism in one country was needed by Stalin and the bureaucratic ruling strata to justify the subordination of the international class struggle to the requirements of ‘building socialism’ in the USSR. As Stalin would have put it, the doctrine was ‘adequate, and undoubtedly of some service. . . .’

If the debate over socialism in one country tended to become obscure, it was because two different sets of questions were frequently conflated: first, the possibility of an isolated workers’ state surviving for some extended

historical period; and, second, the potentiality for achieving a completed socialist society in a single country. As regards the survival of a workers’ state, we have already seen how in 1906 Trotsky asserted that without the rapid reinforcements of a triumphant revolution in Europe, the working class could scarcely hope to remain in power in Russia. He continued to defend this idea through the 1920s, sometimes insisting on the danger of imperialist military intervention, sometimes of an economic collapse of the USSR.⁶ Further, there can be little doubt that Lenin shared Trotsky’s view on this point, and all later efforts of Stalin to discover a contradiction between them were in vain.⁷ As time passed, however, and no intervention or collapse occurred, Trotsky continued to speak of a ‘breathing-space’ or an 'undated moratorium’ for the USSR.⁸ Finally by the 1930s it had become obvious that the course of events contradicted, at least in the direct sense, this perspective of imminent danger. In the Revolution Betrayed (1936), he recognized that ‘to be sure, the isolation of the Soviet Union did not have those immediate dangerous consequences which might have been feared. . . . The “breathing spell” proved longer than a critical optimism had dared to hope. . . . But a more malign product of isolation and backwardness has been the octopus of bureaucratism.’⁹ Nevertheless, Trotsky continued to defend his 1906 position as correct in the medium-range. 'Without a more or less rapid victory of the proletariat in the advanced countries, the workers’ government in Russia will not survive. Left to itself, the Soviet regime must either fall or degenerate. More exactly it will first degenerate and then fall. I myself have written about this more than once, beginning in 1905-’¹⁰ In fact, at that time (1937), the workers’ government in Russia had already degenerated, and the bureaucracy had politically expropriated the proletariat.¹¹ So in a certain sense Trotsky had been

⁶Cf. Permanent Revolution, pp. 142-3; and The Third International After Lenin, New York 1936, pp. 64-5.

⁷To take one of innumerable examples: ‘Anglo-French and American imperialism will inevitably destory the independence and freedom of Russia if the world socialist revolution, world Bolshevism, does not triumph.’ ('The Valuable Admissions of Pitirim Sorokin’ [November 1918], cw, vol. 28, p. 188.) ^aPermanent Revolution, p. 143.

¹ 'At first Trotsky was reluctant to admit the full extent of this expropriation, and continued through 1936 to consider the USSR a ‘degenerated form of the dictatorship of the proletariat’. After the Moscow Trials, however, he discarded chis concept. Although he maintained until his death that the Soviet Union was a 'workers’ state' (principally because of its planned economy), he now characterized the political regime as a ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’, stressing that the state apparatus ‘was transformed from the weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class’. (See The Transitional Programme [1938], London n.d., p. 43 )

correct all along: in the isolated USSR the workers were not able to keep power. But it was a bureaucracy—not the'bourgeoisie or imperialism— that wrested power from them and physically destroyed the Bolshevik old guard in the purges of 1936-8. In that sense Trotsky was wrong, the degeneration of the regime was not equivalent to its ‘fall’—that is, to a capitalist restoration.

The other problem implied in the controversy over socialism in one country and frequently confused with the first, is the possibility of building a ‘complete socialist society’ within the limits of one nation, specifically the USSR. As previously noted, much of the discussion of this question has revolved around talmudic exegeses of Lenin’s writings. Without delving into the scholastic detail, it should simply be noted that the overwhelming bulk of Lenin’s texts which at all touch on this question deny its possibility.¹⁰¹ Indeed, the only text that Stalin could adduce to support his position was a short paragraph in the 1923 article ‘On Cooperation’, where Lenin argues that the USSR has ‘all that is necessary and sufficient' to build a socialist society. Trotsky’s answer was that Lenin meant by this only the political, not the material conditions for the realization of socialism.¹⁰² At any event, this rather arid debate over quotations is scarcely the crux of the matter.

Trotsky’s most serious argument was based on the assumption that socialism was by definition a system economically superior to capitalism and could not therefore represent a regression in relation to the international level already attained by the development of the productive forces under capitalism. ‘The productive forces of capitalist society have long ago outgrown the national boundaries. ... In respect of the technique of production socialist society must represent a stage higher than capitalism. To aim at building a nationally isolated socialist society means, in spite of all passing successes, to pull the productive forces backwards even as compared with capitalism.’^{103 104} From this perspective, Russia’s economic backwardness (the predominance of peasant agriculture, the low level of productivity, and so on) was not the decisive aspect, since even in England, according to Trotsky, it would be impossible to build an isolated ‘national socialist’ economy.¹⁰⁴ What was all important was the extension of the revolution to several or more advanced countries. Needless to say, authors who have attributed to Trotsky the belief that there is within the USSR a contradiction between its ‘socialist economy and un-socialist state’ completely misunderstand his thesis. While considering that the planned state economy of the USSR was a conquest of the October Revolution that had to be defended at all costs, Trotsky never identified this with socialism.¹⁶

In contrast, the partisans of ‘socialism in one country’, Stalin and Bukharin, defined socialism as synonymous with social forms of property. Bukharin even wrote about a ‘backward socialism’ in Russia, implying by ‘socialism’ the predominance of the national (state) economy and cooperatives over private capital.¹⁷ Of course anyone is entitled to define ‘socialism’ as they please. But it is obvious that for Marx and Engels a ‘backward socialism’ would have been a contradiction in terms, since socialism meant to them precisely a superior level of the development of the productive forces that are ultimately limited and constrained within capitalist relations of production. Moreover, such a socialist economy could not at all be reduced, in their view, simply to social property in the means of production. In his Critique of the Gotha Program Marx explicitly indicated that in the first stage of socialist society, commodity production, money and the law of value would disappear.¹⁸

This controversy over the meaning of socialism was, in turn, subsumed within an even broader struggle. The concrete, political stake of the debate over ‘socialism in one country’ was ultimately nothing less than whether or not the world class struggle was to be subordinated to the ‘building of socialism in the USSR’. In other words, Stalin’s doctrine was an ideological rationalization (with the usual dimension of self-mystification involved) for the submission of the international communist movement to the economic, political, diplomatic and military needs of the USSR as understood by its

^lvGreat Brirain . . . being no doubt a highly developed capitalist country, it has precisely because of that no chance for successful socialist construction within the limits of its own island. Great Britain, if blockaded, would simply be strangled in the course of a few months.’ (Third International After Lenin, pp. 57-8.)

^1<sEven a rigorous thinker like Cludin commits this error, attributing to Trotskyism the thesis that 'the system of production is socialist but not the political superstructure.' (Fernando Claudin, Eurocommunism and Socialism, London 1978, p. 61.)

¹⁸In Marx and Engels, Selected 'Works, Moscow 1968, pp. 320-1. See also Engels, Anti-Diihring, Moscow 1959, pp- 386-9-

bureaucratic leadership. Trotsky clearly perceived this implication and made it the central object of his critical writings in the late 1920s. ‘The new doctrine proclaims that socialism can be built on the basis of a national state if only there is no intervention. From this there can and must follow . . . a collaborationist policy towards the foreign bourgeoisie with the object of averting intervention, that is to say, will solve the main historical question. The task of the parties in the Comintern assumes, therefore, an auxiliary character; their mission is to protect the USSR from intervention and not to fight for the conquest of power. It is, of course, not a question of the subjective intentions but of the objective logic of political thought.'¹⁹

Alchough Lenin and other Soviet leaders had shown an avid interest during the early 1920s in the anti-imperialist movements of the East, the fact that the next great revolutionary upheaval after October 1917 (and after the defeats in Hungary and Germany in 1919-23) took place in Asia came as a great surprise to the Bolshevik and Comintern leadership. The five-month long general strike of the Canton—Hong Kong workers in 1925 (under communist leadership and backed by a workers’ militia) was the first dramatic sign of the rising tide; and when the ‘Northern Expedition’ of the Kuomintang Army led by Chiang Kai-shek in 1926 was followed by a vast wave of peasant rebellions, workers’ strikes and insurrections in the warlord-controlled regions, it was clear that a major revolutionary process was unfolding.

Initially there appeared to be a kind of consensus amongst the Soviet leadership that China was still too backward a country and its proletariat too small to allow anything like a re-enactment of the October Revolution. Even Trotsky, as we shall see, retreated in the beginning to a position similar to Lenin’s strategy of 1905 (a ‘workers’ and peasants’ democratic dictatorship’). But Stalin and Bukharin very quickly regressed to a neo-Menshevik stand, comparable although not identical to the positions of Dan and Martynov in 1905. As a matter of fact, the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-8 provided the catalyst for Stalin’s second great ideological contribution (with the help of collaborators like Martynov!): the doctrine of revolution by stages and of the bloc of four classes. These new conceptions were destined to become the strategic line advanced by the Comintern in all the backward, colonial and semi-colonial countries. They became so strongly rooted in the thinking of non-Western communist parties that, after Stalin's dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, they

remained accepted in theory even by those communists such as Mao and Ho who departed from them in practice. Indeed the evolution of this strategic line is the key to understanding the history of communism in Asia.

The first document to elaborate these two interlinked tenets of stagism and a four-class bloc was the Thesis on the Situation in China—directly inspired by Stalin and Bukharin—approved in December 1926 by the Seventh Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCi). This document stated that 'in its present stage, the Chinese revolution is historically a revolution of a bourgeois-democratic nature.’ Therefore, ‘the proletariat allied with the peasants struggling for their rights, with the urban petty-bourgeoisie and a section of the capitalist bourgeoisie. This combination of forces finds its political expression in the Kuomintang and the Canton government.’¹⁰⁵ Although both the Second (1920) and the Fourth (1922) Congresses of the Comintern had envisaged ‘temporary alliances’ with bourgeois forces, the idea of a strategic bloc with them—including a coalition government—and of a separate bourgeois-democratic stage was a new departure. The change appears even more striking if one considers Stalin’s speech at the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI on 30 November 1926. Whereas Lenin had earlier insisted (during the Second Congress in 1920) that the Comintern emphasize the priority of building peasant soviets in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, Stalin now opposed this strategy in the Chinese countryside—‘to speak of soviets now would be running.too far ahead.’ Moreover, in place of the Comintern’s original stress on the importance of fighting every form of bourgeois influence over the popular anti-imperialist movements, he specifically urged that Chinese youth (student, working-class and peasant) be ‘subordinated to the ideological and political influence of the Kuomintang’.¹⁰⁶

Stalin’s evolving orientation clearly implied that the Bolshevik strategy of the October Revolution had no direct relevance to the struggle in China. As a matter of fact, even the ‘old Bolshevik’ line of 1905 (‘the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’) was no longer considered a suitable precedent, since it was based on the intransigent refusal of strategic alliances or pacts with the liberal bourgeoisie. This rejection of traditional Bolshevik conceptions was first explicitly recognized in February 1927 by A. S. Martynov, a former leading Menshevik who joined the rCP in 1923 and was soon afterwards promoted by Stalin as a principal spokesman for the Comintern’s positions on the Chinese revolution. According to Martynov, 'in its attitudes towards the national government and the leadership of the revolutionary army, the Chinese Communist Party could not confine itself to merely copying the Bolsheviks’ tactics toward the Russian liberal bourgeoisie in 1905.’ Although the official goal of the struggle was still a ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’, the road leading to this dictatorship was not the same as that of the Bolsheviks in 1905- Indeed, it could only be achieved by the Chinese communists fully supporting—not opposing—the revolutionary work being undertaken by the national government [Kuomintang] and its revolutionary army under bourgeois command.’¹⁰⁷

What did this policy of support for the Kuomintang mean in 1927 at the very moment when everywhere in China the peasants and workers surged forth against the landlords and the capitalists? In order to remove any doubts about his position, Martynov explicitly argued that ‘what was now being resolved via workers’ strikes and spontaneous movements of the peasants should instead be resolved by government legislation and commissions of arbitration. ’¹⁰⁸

Of course, it would be both incorrect and ahistorical to simply equate Stalin’s doctrine of revolution by stages with Menshevism tout court. But the affinity between their strategic conceptions is undeniable, despite Stalin’s ritualistic evocations of Bolshevik tradition. Thus, it was no accident that it was precisely the same Martynov who had twenty years before so vehemently defended Menshevik stagism who became an official mouthpiece for Comintern policy, while the exiled Menshevik leader Dan wholeheartedly supported him from afar. Writing in a bulletin of the expatriate Mensheviks published in Switzerland, Dan commented: ‘On April 10, Martynov, in Pravda, most effectively and, despite the obligatory

abuse of the Social Democracy, in a quite “Menshevik manner” showed the “left” Oppositionist Radek the correctness of the official position, which insists on the necessity of retaining the “bloc of four classes”, on not hastening to overthrow the coalition government in which the workers sit side-by-side with the big bourgeoisie, not to impose "socialist tasks” upon it prematurely.’¹⁰⁹

On March 21 1927 the communist workers of Shanghai seized power and opened the city to the ‘Northern Expedition’ of Chiang Kai-shek. There were insistent rumours of an impending alliance between Chiang and the reactionary warlords against the communists. Yet on March 30 the official bulletin of the ECCI in Moscow declared: ‘A split in the Kuomin-tang and hostilities between the Shanghai proletariat and the revolutionary soldiers are absolutely excluded right now. ... A revolutionist like Chiang Kai-shek will not ally himself, as the imperialists would like one to believe, with the counter-revolutionary Chang Tso-lin to struggle against the emancipation movement.’¹¹⁰ Was this just a propaganda manoeuvre by the Comintern for external, consumption, or did its leadership actually believe this? At a meeting of functionaries in the Hall of Columns in Moscow on April 5, Stalin argued: ‘Why drive away the Right {of the Kuomintang] when we have the majority and when the Right listens to us?

. . . When the Right is of no more use to us, we will drive it away. At present, we need the Right. It has capable people, who still direct the army and lead it against the imperialists. Chiang Kai-shek has perhaps no sympathy for the revolution but he is leading the army and cannot do otherwise than lead it against the imperialists.’¹¹¹ According to the testimony of Chen Tu-hsiu, at that time the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the Comintern sent him a telegram instructing the Parry to bury the weapons of the workers in Shanghai before the arrival of Chiang’s troops in order to avoid possible confrontations.¹¹² When Chiang entered Shanghai on April 12, he immediately allied with the warlord Chang Tso-lin to crush the revolutionary workers. In a reign of terror thousands of trade unionists and communists were executed; some by being thrown alive into the boilers of the army’s locomotives. It was the beginning of the end of the Second Chinese Revolution.

A few weeks after Chiang’s April Coup, the ‘left wing’ of the Kuomin-tang under the leadership of Wang Chin-wei seceded and set up a coalition government with communist participation in Wuhan. Stalin doggedly insisted on the necessity of the Chinese communists remaining within the (‘Left’) Kuomintang while denying the feasibility of launching workers’ or peasants’ soviets in China. By advancing the slogan of soviets, he proclaimed, Trotsky ’has confused a bourgeois-democratic revolution with a proletarian revolution. He has "forgotten” that, far from being completed, far from being victorious as yet, the bourgeois-democratic revolution in China is only in its initial stage of development.’¹¹³ Stalin denied that the Bolshevik strategy of 1917 had any relevance for China, since ‘Russia at that time was facing a proletarian revolution while China now is facing a bourgeois-democratic revolution.’¹¹⁴ ‘How then’, Stalin asked, was . . the formation of Soviets of workers’ deputies in Russia in 1905 to be understood? Were we not then passing through a bourgeois-democratic revolution?’ His answer was quite interesting, revealing with particular acuity the qualitative differences between the new doctrine and the Bolshevik tradition (of 1905 as well as 1917). ‘It is possible that there would have been no Soviets in Russia in 1905 if there had been at that time a broad revolutionary organization in Russia, similar to the Left Kuomintang in China today. . . . The Left Kuomintang is performing approximately the same role in the present bourgeois-democratic revolution in China as the Soviets performed in the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia in 1905 - ’¹¹⁵ Indeed the only historical precedent that Stalin evoked to defend his policy of communist participation in (and subordination to) the Wuhan government was the example of Marx’s attitude toward the German liberal bourgeoisie at the beginning of the 1848 revolution.¹¹⁶ Again it is hard to deny the striking resemblance between Stalin’s positions and the historical policies of Menshevism. And once again the similarity was ratified by the exiled Menshevik paper, which on May 9 1927 endorsed Stalin’s view of the Chinese Revolution: ‘If we strip the envelope of words that is obligatory

for the theses of a communist leader, then very little can be said against the essence of the "line" traced there. As much as possible to remain in the Kuomintang, and to cling to its left wing and to the Wuhan government to the last possible moment. . . ,’³²

The tragic course of events that followed is well-known: A few months later, in July 1927, the ‘Left’ Kuomintang of Wang Chin-wei, which was supposed to play ‘approximately the same role’ as the 1905 Soviets, and the Wuhan government, which Stalin considered as the ‘centre of the revolutionary movement in China’ (Speech of May 24 1927), broke with the communists and quickly achieved reconciliation with Chiang. Once again thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants were massacred. How did Stalin and the Comintern leadership explain such a catastrophic defeat? Absolving himself and the ECCI of all blame, Stalin declared that ‘the task was to make the Wuhan Kuomintang the centre of the fight against counter-revolution. . . . Was that policy correct? The facts have shown that it was the only correct policy. . . .’³³ Responsibility for the defeat was shifted, instead, exclusively onto the Chinese communists; the official proclamation of the ECCI castigated the ‘opportunist errors of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’.³⁴ According to all surviving testimony, however, the Chinese communist leadership did nothing more than to faithfully execute the very precise instructions which they received from Comintern delegates and Russian advisors. Moreover, these instructions repeated the same insistent themes: ‘Submit to the Kuomintang. Don’t divide the “anti-imperialist” bloc.’ According to Chen Tu-hsiu, when the Chinese communists in 1926 wanted-to keep five thousand rifles from the Soviet shipments to Chiang’s troops to arm workers’ militias, the Comintern delegate flatly refused and added, 'the present period is a period in which the communists should do the coolie service for the Kuomintang.’³⁵

What were Trotsky's views on the correct strategic orientation for the Second Chinese Revolution (1926-7)? Already in the period before Chiang’s coup of April 1925, a number of clear-cut differences opposed Trotsky to the dominant Stalin-Bukharin-Martynov line.

(1) The alliance -with the Kuomintang-. As we have already seen, Trotsky voted against the Chinese communists joining the Kuomintang in 1923- In 1926

³³‘Plenum of the CC of the CPSU(B)’ (1 August 1927), On the opposition, p. 788.

³⁵Ch’en Tu-hsiu, 'Appeal to All the Comrades of the Chinese Communist Patty' (10 December 1929), Appendix to On China, p. 601.

he again reiterated the necessity for the full political and organizational independence of the Chinese Communist Party.³⁶

(2) The national bourgeoisie: Trotsky had no illusions about the ‘revolutionary’ nature of the Chinese national bourgeoisie; in his opinion, ‘the section of the Chinese bourgeoisie which still participates in the Kuomintang’ was, in the last analysis, ‘an auxiliary detachment of the compradorian bourgeoisie and of the foreign imperialists.’³⁷ Moreover, he rejected the Stalin-Martynov theory of a national-bourgeois stage under Kuomintang leadership as a typically Menshevik conception.

(3) The question of soviets: For Trotsky the struggle for workers, peasants and soldiers soviets was the correct alternative to dependence upon the Kuomintang. In a letter to the Politbureau on March 31 1927, he stressed that the task of ‘forming soviets of the working and exploited masses . . . cannot be postponed any longer’.³⁸

(4) The immediate danger of a right-wing coup by the Kuomintang leadership: Trotsky repeatedly warned against any illusions about the Nationalist military top brass. In his letters to the Politbureau, he emphasized that in the Kuomintang’s National Army 'the officer cadre ... is characterized by bourgeois and landlord origins and by sympathies tending to favour these same classes.’ He pointed to the impending danger of a Bonapartist military coup: ‘Will anyone wish to deny that in the staff of the Kuomintang its own Pilsudski will be found? They will. Candidates can already be designated.’³⁹ At the same time he reminded the Russian leadership that ‘there is no more effective measure for countering such dangers than the establishment of soldiers sections of the soviets.’ In the absence of such revolutionary measures, he predicted with uncanny precision (March 22 1927) the collapse of the Comintern’s opportunist strategy: ‘The concept is Menshevik through and through. . . . And of course, we will fall flat on our face at the very first turn. This turn will in all likelihood be the occupation of Shanghai.’⁴⁰ A bare three weeks later, on April 12, the ’turn’ took place as Chiang’s legions slaughtered the Shanghai workers.

^ib0n China, pp. 113-20. The editors show (pp. 22-3) that authors such as Isaac Deutscher and E. H. Carr have been mistaken in suggesting that Trotsky did not consistently oppose the Kuomintang alliance until March or April 1923.

³⁷‘Class Relations in the Chinese Revolution' (3 April 1927), in On Chita, p. 145-³⁸Ibid„ p. 134.

Subsequently, after the establishment of the coalition government between Communists and the ‘Left’ Kuomintang in Wuhan (Hankow), Trotsky delivered another prophetic warning to the Plenum of the ecci (May): ‘The leading Kuomintang people in Hankow, the likes of Wang Ching-wei and Company, are beginning to become involved with the bourgeoisie, holding back the agrarian movement, and the workers movement, and if they do not succeed in holding these back, they will unite with Chiang Kai-shek against the workers and peasants. Those who, under these conditions, oppose soviets and are for subordination to the Kuomintang, i.e. to Wang Ching-wei, are preparing the way for a new, perhaps even more serious defeat for the Chinese revolution.’⁴¹ Two months later, as we have seen, Wang unleashed a new white terror against the Chinese communists and the popular movement.

Trotsky’s foresight, the accuracy of his predictions and the strategic truth of his warnings are unquestionable. But at the same time he did not yet have an adequate understanding of the class dynamics and historical character of the Chinese revolution. His break with the stagist conceptions of Stalin and the ECCI remained incomplete; as late as March 1927, for example, he still considered that ‘in China what is occurring is a national-democratic revolution, not a socialist one’, and that soviet power in China would not be ‘an instrument of proletarian dictatorship, but of revolutionary national liberation and democratic unification of the country’.⁴² He still conceived the future popular power in China in accordance with the ‘old Bolshevik’ slogan (which he had rejected in 1905 as inapplicable for Russia) of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. Although he did not totally exclude the hypothesis of socialist revolutionary development in China, he argued—in a very one-sided and awkward formulation—that ‘the possibility of the democratic revolution growing over into the socialist revolution—depends completely and exclusively on the course of the World revolution, and on the economic and political successes of the Soviet Union.’⁴³

Now, Trotsky could not consistently, nor for a long time, advocate ideas that were so blatantly opposed to the perspective he had developed since 1905 to characterize the revolutionary process in Russia. And indeed a few months later, in September 1927, he clearly abandoned any remnant of a stagist framework in regard to China: ‘. . . for us it is no longer a question of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, but of

⁴¹'Statement to the Plenum of the ECCI' (May 1927), in On China, p. 217 (see also p. 248). ];

⁴²0n China, p. 135- jJ-

⁴*‘Class Relations in the Chinese Revolution', in On China, p. 143* 5;

the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the inexhaustible masses of urban and rural poor—a dictatorship that poses for itself the objective of solving the most urgent and vital problems of the country and its working masses, and in the process inevitably passes over to the path of making socialist inroads on property relations.'⁴⁴ This new formulation, explicitly permanentist, was beyond the theoretical and political horizon of most of the leadership of the Left Opposition, some of whom, like Preobrazhensky, reproached Trotsky for ignoring the extreme backwardness of China’s economic development. In reply, Trotsky, evoking the precedent of Lenin’s polemic against Sukhanov, stressed the methodological implications of the debate. ‘The gist of the matter lies precisely in the fact that although the political mechanics of the revolution depend in the last analysis upon an economic base (not only national but international) they cannot, however, be deduced with abstract logic from this economic base.’⁴⁵

While the policies imposed by Stalin were leading the Chinese urban proletariat to disaster, a young and unknown communist leader, Mao Tse-tung, was organizing—largely in defiance of Comintern directives—a radical peasants’ movement in Hunan province. It is interesting to note the attitude of the Left Opposition to his new and promising beginning. Under the heading, ‘The Sure Road’, Trotsky wrote an article in May 1927 on the Hunan movement, where he observed that ‘the workers and peasants of Hunan are showing the way out of the vacillations, and by that, the road to save the revolution.’⁴⁶ And a few months later, Victor Serge, a leading oppositionist and friend of Trotsky’s, wrote an enthusiastic review of Mao’s article on the Hunan peasant movement: 'I have read many things on the Chinese revolution, but I have found nothing in communist analysis more impressive than that of a young and unknown militant, Mao Tse-tung. ... If the other leaders of the Chinese revolutions had been inspired by as clear a conception as his of the class struggle, than all victories would have been possible. Alas!’⁴⁷

After 1927 the doctrine of revolution by stages and of the bloc of four classes were generalized and applied in different forms and variants, to all backward, dependent, colonial or semi-colonial countries. But its first ‘universal’ formulation—in the 1928 Draft Programme of the Comintern— was not very typical because it was elaborated as part of the Comintern’s ‘Third Period’ (1928-33) turn toward mechanical leftism, and, therefore,

⁴‘^l‘New Opportunities for the Chinese Revolution' (September 1927) in On China, p. 266.

⁴⁵‘Third Letter to Preobrazhensky' (March-April 1928), in On China, p. 286.

had a radical tone which would disappear after the middle 1930s. Even Trotsky in his severe critique of the Draft (which Bukharin had written) described it as ‘eclectic through and through’ rather than as completely opportunist.^{117 118} Indeed, compared to the quasi-Menshevik categories that the ECCI had applied to China in 1927, the Draft appeared as a partial return to Bolshevism circa 1905: the struggle for workers’ and peasants' soviets, the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, the denunciation of the treason of the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries, etc. Yet a careful reading of the document reveals the persistence of an underlying stagist conception and its inherent continuity with the 1927 line. First of all, the Draft Programme denied the validity of‘1917 Bolshevism’ (i.e. of the April Theses) for the colonial and semi-colonial countries. The rationalization for this distinction was principally economic. the ‘unequal maturity of capitalism in the different countries’. Thus Russia before 1917 was classified as a country with ‘half developed capitalism’ and a ‘minimum of industry’, conditions which permitted a ‘quick transformation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist revolution’. By contrast, in colonial and semi-colonial nations such as India and China, where ‘feudal-medieval relations predominate in the economic life of the country as well as in its political super-structure’, ‘the passage to the dictatorship of the proletariat is possible only by a series of preparatory

Not only was this thesis about the predominance of feudal relation of '] production in countries such as India or China highly debatable on purely | empirical grounds, but it also revealed something essential about the i method of Bukharin and Stalin. It testified to the resurgent economism, :^:which, in a manner reminiscent of Plekhanovite-Menshevik Marxism, j attempted to deduce directly the capacity of the proletariat to seize power | from the degree of industrialization and the ‘maturity’ of capitalism.¹¹⁹ ■ Thus the Draft Programme seemed to believe that the formula of the ‘demo- ; cratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ flowed necessarily from the level of economic and industrial development; while, at the same ¹time, through its ambiguity it opened the door for alliances with bourgeois ^;forces rebaptized as ‘peasant parties’ (like the Kuomintang in 1926). As a -matter of fact, the Draft Programme admitted the possibility of ‘temporary .

agreements’ with the national bourgeoisie in colonial and semi-colonial countries ‘insofar as the bourgeoisie does not obstruct the revolutionary organization of the workers and peasants and wages a genuine struggle against imperialism’.¹²⁰

With the adoption of the popular front strategy in the mid-1950s, and the discarding of Third Period rhetoric, the stagist character of the Comintern’s strategic policy in the dependent capitalist countries became gloriously explicit. From the Seventh World Congress (1935) through the dissolution of the Comintern (1943) until the present day, this ‘general line’ has gone through various ‘left’ and ‘right’ turns, and assumed various forms (popular front, national union, democratic alliance, etc.), but the basic strategy has remained the same. To chart the application of this strategy in different national contexts is beyond the scope of this book; besides, most of the national experiences and theorizations do not add anything decisively new to the doctrine elaborated in the late 1920s. The exceptions, of course, (which I will consider later) are those communist parties who in practice—and to a certain extent in theory—departed from the ‘general line’ and forged autonomous revolutionary paths: China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Cuba.

In his 1928 book, The Permanent Revolution, Trotsky presented his views on the dynamics of social revolution in the colonial and semi-colonial countries for the first time in a systematic, coherent and rigorous way as a theory that encompassed global historical developments and claimed a universal— and not only Russian or Chinese—significance and validity. Nevertheless, this text has some undoubted shortcomings in its form of exposition. First, it was an answer to a ‘non-book’ by Radek: a ‘non-book’ in the double sense that it was never published and was known only to a very small circle of Russian oppositionists, and that it did not contain any theoretical insights that justified such an extended polemical response. Second, Trotsky’s main critical thrust was directed against the formula of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’—a slogan that was soon abandoned by the Stalinized Comintern. Third, the book gave far more attention to the Russian experience (and to an exhaustive exegesis of Lenin’s views) than to the concrete problems of the revolution in the colonial and semi-colonial world (which became central only in the last section). These flaws notwithstanding, however, The Permanent Revolution remains one of the most seminal and consequential works of Marxist political thought in

the twentieth century. But to attain a full and accurate understanding of the many facets of Trotsky’s theory, one needs to ‘complete’ the theses of The Permanent Revolution with ideas and arguments developed in other writings—contemporary or posterior—concerning the problems of class struggle in areas of peripheral capitalism.

It is noteworthy that after the end of the 1920s Trotsky never really systematically returned to the subject again. To understand why not, one has to remember that after the defeat of the second Chinese revolution in 1927-8 there were no further major upheavals on an equivalent scale in the ’ colonial world during Trotsky's lifetime. Certainly the Vietnamese soviets; and the Chinese Long March of the 1930s were important events, but they: were not processes with a global impact and, thus, never impinged com-mensurately on Trotsky’s political awareness. As a result, Trotsky probably never felt the political exigency to produce a further theorization of permanent revolution in the colonial theatre. Instead his subsequent writings were principally focused on either the USSR or the imperialist countries of the West (Germany, France, Spain⁵² and the United States). But one can find, scattered here and there in his later texts, commentary on events in China, India, and Mexico which afford some valuable suggestions that enrich and extend the concepts of the 1928 book.

It is most likely that Trotsky’s generalization of the theory of permanent revolution to the entire colonial and semi-colonial (or ex-colonial) world was catalysed by the dramatic upsurge of the Chinese class struggle in 1925-7, much as his original formulation of the theory was prompted by the Russian revolution of 1905. Already in June 1928, in the chapter on ’Summary and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution’ of his book The Third International After Lenin, he argued that the lessons from China were significant for all the countries of Asia (Africa and Latin America were still outside his range of interest). In his view the Chinese events confirmed the conclusions drawn from the two Russian revolutions and revealed the fundamental similarities between Russia, China and the other ‘Oriental’ (i.e. colonial and semi-colonial) countries: the indissoluble dependence of the national bourgeoisie upon imperialism and the landowners, the political weight of the proletariat (disproportionate to its actual numerical strength), the impossibility of the peasantry playing an autonomous politi-

^,2The Spanish revolution of rhe 1930s was an intermediate case: it could have been analysed , from the angle of permanent revolution as well as within the context of the debate over the ; Popular Front. Trotsky's writings on Spain contain a few illuminating remarks on the dialec- : tics between democratic (or national, as in Catalonia) struggle and socialist revolution, but his main focus was on the problematic of the Popular Front.

cal role, etc. Moreover, the very historical reality of the Russian revolution jjad become, in his opinion, an enormously powerful stimulant toward a permanentist course, since it encouraged the indigenous proletariat to follow the example of October and, one could add, simultaneously reinforced the conservative tendencies of the local bourgeoisie and its fear of popular mobilization.

However, Trotsky’s universalization of the theory of permanent revolution was not only the result of an inductive reasoning from the Russian and Chinese experiences. It was also grounded on a general theory of the socioeconomic dynamics of the historical process (the law of uneven and combined development) and on a rather condensed analysis of the role of the main classes in the colonial and semi-colonial societies which he developed between 1928 and 1930.

Unquestionably the most general historical-theoretical foundation of the theory of permanent revolution was the law of uneven and combined development. Although, as we have seen, this conception was already implicit in the theses of Results and Prospects, its full, explicit elaboration awaited the first chapter of the History of the Russian Revolution (1930). A new understanding of human history is the point of departure for the formulation of the law: with the appearance of capitalism as a world system, world history becomes a (contradictory) concrete totality and the conditions of socioeconomic development undergo a qualitative change. ‘Capitalism . . . prepares and in a certain sense realizes the universality and permanence of man’s development. By this a repetition of the forms of development by different nations is ruled out. Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order.’ Backward societies are allowed, or rather compelled, to adopt some advanced features, skipping intermediate stages: ‘Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past. . . . The development of historically backward nations leads necessarily to a peculiar combination of different stages in the historic process.’ This more complex perspective enabled Trotsky to transcend the evolutionist conception of history as a succession of rigidly predetermined stages, and to develop a dialectical view of historical development through sudden leaps and contradictory fusions. ‘Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity, their backward culture is compelled to make leaps. From the universal law of uneveness thus derives another law which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the law of combined development—by

which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a I combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemp- ■ orary forms.’⁵³ (Once again one can see the central place that the method- i ological category of totality occupied in Trotsky’s theoretical constructions and in his interpretation of historical materialism.) |

There is little need to stress the obvious political and strategic con-elusions that flow from the law of uneven and combined development: J the articulation of modern industry with traditional (pre-capitalist or § semi-capitalist) rural conditions, creating the objective possibility for the leading role of the proletariat at the head of the rebellious peasant masses. Thus the amalgam of backward and advanced socio-economic conditions becomes the structural foundation for the fusion or combination of , i democratic and socialist tasks in a process of permanent revolution.⁵⁴ Or, -f to put it in a different way, one of the most important political consequ- % ences of uneven and combined development is the unavoidable persistence ; of unresolved democratic tasks in the peripheral capitalist countries. Despite i the claims of his critics, Trotsky never denied the democratic dimension of revolution in backward countries nor did he ever pretend that the revolu-tion would be ‘purely socialist’; what he did repudiate, however, was the .y

⁵⁴ A coherent and rigorous stagist conception of revolution in backward countries implies, therefore, a critical confrontation with Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development. Such an attempt has been made recently by David J. Romagnolo, an advocate of Mao's (and Stalin's) doctrine of alliance with the national bourgeoisie during the democratic, anti-imperialist stage of revolution. (See his essay, 'The So-called Law of Uneven and Combined Development', Latin American Perspectives, ii, 4 [Spring 1975].) According to Romagnolo, Trotsky’s theory of the global extension of capitalism was, indeed, based on Marx’s writings. But he argues that whereas it was true in Marx’s lifetime that capitalism in its competitive :■ phase can and does begin to develop in backward areas’, after Marx’s death, imperialism as an , outgrowth of monopoly capitalism, ‘arrests’ or 'retards’ the development of capitalism in ; colonial and semi-colonial nations (pp. 23-4, 27). Since no sources are mentioned, one \ wonders where Romagnolo obtained the extraordinary impression that capitalism had developed less in countries such as Brazil or Argentina (to take two examples) during the twentieth century (the era of imperialism) than during the nineteenth (the era of competitive capicalism). According to the author, ’like merchant capital, finance capital comes to backward countries from the outside and exploits its primitive forms through trade and large scale money-lending’ (p. 26). This way of defining imperialism is very peculiar since it ignores the central role of foreign investment. Of course, it is necessary to ignore productive industrial investment if one wishes to prove, like Romagnolo, that imperialism is ’retarding the extensive as well as intensive development of capitalism in colonial and semi-colonial countries’, or that ’far from innundacing the oppressed areas with capitalist relations of production, imperialism sustains the primitive forms of exploitation’ (p. 27). His reasoning is a perfect example of an undialectical methodology. Either the forms of exploitation are ’primitive’ or they are capitalist; he obstinately refuses to consider the possibility of a fusion or combination • between ‘primitive’ and capitalist forms. Thus his thoroughly dualistic approach is the logical consequence of his rejection of the law of uneven and combined development.

dogma of bourgeois-democratic revolution as separate historical stage that has to be completed before the proletarian struggle for power can commence. The democratic tasks solved by the advanced capitalist countries of Europe and jsforth America are well-known: abolition of autocracy, liquidation of feudal (or pre-capitalist) survivals in the agrarian relations of production, the establishment of parliamentary democracy based on universal (male) suffrage, national unification and/or liberation. The democratic tasks in backward and dependent countries of the twentieth century are similar, but not identical, since the existence of imperialism creates a new historical configuration. According to Trotsky—if one tries to systematize his scattered remarks on the question—these tasks comprise above all:

(1) The agrarian democratic revolution'. The bold and definitive abolition of all residues of slavery, feudalism and 'Asiatic despotism’; the liquidation of all pre-capitalist forms of explotiation (corvee, forced labour, etc.); and the expropriation of the great landowners and the distribution of the land to the peasantry.⁵⁵

(2) National liberation', the unification of the nation and its emancipation from imperialist domination; the creation of a unified national market and its protection from cheaper foreign goods; the control of certain strategic natural resources; etc.⁵⁶

(3) Democracy, for Trotsky this included not only the establishment of democratic freedoms, a democratic republic and the end of military rule, but also the creation of the social and cultural conditions for popular participation in political life by the reduction of the working day to eight hours and through universal public education.⁵⁷

Since it must solve these problems, the revolutionary process in countries of dependent or peripheral capitalism can be defined, to a certain extent, as democratic or even bourgeois-democratic, since these demands do not transcend the limits of bourgeois society. But this in no way entails the leading role of the bourgeoisie in the democratic struggle nor does it prevent the revolution from going beyond capitalism—‘I never denied the bourgeois character of the revolution in the sense of its immediate tasks, but only in the sense of its driving forces and its perspectives.’⁵⁸ Indeed, it was

’'Trotsky, ‘Sobre el segundo plan mexicano de seis anos’ (1939), in Trotsky, Sobre la liberation national, Bogata 1976, pp. 109-11.

⁵⁶The main examples mentioned by Trotsky ate China in the 1920s and Mexico in the 1930s. Cf. On China, p. 299 and Writings 1938-59, New York 1969, pp. 84-99.

⁵⁷Writings 1930-1, New York 1973, pp. 31-2, 136. ^iSThe Permanent Revolution, p. 56.

precisely the question of the ‘driving forces’ of the revolution that first | drove Trotsky into such radical opposition to the reborn stagism of the ■<, Comintern from 1926 onwards. According to Trotsky, the postulation of a $ ‘revolutionary’ bourgeoisie in the colonial countries, which is at the root | of the strategy of the ‘bloc of four classes’, only ‘reproduces inside out the | fundamental error of Menshevism, which held that the revolutionary na- | ture of the Russian bourgeoisie must flow from the oppression of feudalism ,f and the autocracy’.¹²¹ In reality uneven and combined development tends to | lead to the contradictory combination/articulation of the international and f national, modern and traditional, ruling classes. For example, in China, f ‘while at the bottom, in the agrarian base of the Chinese economy, the A: bourgeoisie is organically and unbreakably linked with feudal forms of f exploitation, at the top it is just as organically and unbreakably linked with f world finance. The Chinese bourgeoisie cannot on its own break free either f from agrarian feudalism or from foreign imperialism.’¹²² This did not mean '!■ that there could not exist contradictions either between the national | bourgeoisie and imperialism, or the bourgeoisie and the landlords. Cer- ■' tainly the Chinese bourgeoisie in 1925-7, for instance, was interested in enlarging its domestic markets through moderate land reforms and in 7 achieving greater economic autonomy vis-a-vis imperialism. But, as ■ Trotsky added, one must never for an instant forget that ‘its conflicts with ¹the most reactionary feudal militarists and its collisions with the inter- ; national imperialists always take second place at the decisive moment to its irreconcilable antagonism to the poor workers and peasants.’¹²³ Needless to say, this is a rule that transcended the Chinese case.

The democratic revolutionary victory over imperialism and the landowners could only come about through a mass upheaval, immense popular mobilization and violent explosions—all of which would soon seem menacing to the national bourgeoisie. Confronted with such a threat to its privileges, the indigenous bourgeoisie would tend to opt for a more moderate -and conciliatory policy towards foreign capital and domestic reaction. Rather than a popular revolution, the bourgeoisie would always prefer 'the Bismarckian way', a non-revolutionary path for satisfying its class aspirations.¹²⁴ It must be emphasized that Trotsky never denied that such a route might allow the national bourgeoisie, in collaboration with imperial-

ism, to achieve a certain degree of industrialization,^{125 126 127} or chat the bourgeoisie was a priori incapable of implementing any of the democratic tasks. What he did insist upon, rather, was the limited, half-hearted and frequently ephemeral character of such ‘progress’. Reforms in this mode would be ‘wretched, unstable and niggardly’ like the Kuomintang’s nationalism in China, they would achieve only ‘very partial results’, and eventually the ‘revolution’ would be halted and reversed like the 1906-7 aftermath in Russia.¹²⁸ In other circumstances a national bourgeoisie might be forced to wage a war of national liberation against colonial or imperialist occupation, but characteristically it would only do so at the service of another, more flexible imperialist power—as, for example, in the 1930s. ‘Chiang Kai-shek struggles against the Japanese violators only within the limits indicated to him by his British or American patrons.’¹²⁹ In short: a complete and genuine solution to the national and democratic tasks in the countries of peripheral capitalism would be impossible under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie.¹³⁰

Once again, this did not imply that the national bourgeoisie could not, under intense popular pressure, move to the left (generally followed by sharp turns to the right and brutal repression against the workers and peasants) and that purely tactical agreements with it for precise and limited aims might not be useful to the popular movement. What Trotsky clearly rejected was the perspective of long-term (strategic, programmatic or governmental) agreements, or ‘class blocs’, even if limited, as in the Draft Programme of the Comintern, by the condition that the national bourgeoisie ‘does not obstruct the revolutionary organization of the workers and peasants, and wages a genuine struggle against imperialism’. In contrast, Trotsky asserted that the main ‘condition’ for limited and temporary agreements with bourgeois forces was 'in not believing for an instant in the

capacity or readiness of the bourgeoisie either to lead a genuine struggle i'|j against imperialism or not to obstruct the workers and peasants’.¹³¹

In 1938, after his arrival in Mexico and during the presidency of Lazaro 3 Cardenas, Trotsky found himself confronted with a new phenomenon: the i Bonapartist and semi-Bonapartist regimes in backward or dependent coun- '$

agrarian and national questions for a limited period of time. For him, this development did not contradict the idea of the weakness and unrevolution- ,|| ary character of the national bourgeoisie, but was, in fact, an expression of f? it: the relationship of forces between classes in the dependent countries | ’creates special conditions of state power. The government veers between 3 foreign and domestic capital, between the weak national bourgeoisie and >: the relatively powerful proletariat. This gives the government a Bonapart- ;j ist character sui-generis. ... It raises itself, so to speak, above classes.’¹³²This conception of Bonapartism although insufficiently developed, was probably one of Trotsky’s most fruitful intuitions and an important _:1| contribution to grasping the specificity of a series of ‘national-populist’ Jj regimes, which have emerged, especially after the Second World War, in if Africa and Latin America. (We shall return to this in the last chapter.) As a J revolutionary tactic in relation to such regimes, Trotsky proposed to support any direct fight against imperialism and the landowners and any ij concrete step against them (expropriations, etc.) without giving any political ,]| support to the national bourgeoisie or the government, and without ceas- ;j| ing for one moment to struggle atainst them for leadership of the popular J (peasant) masses.¹³³

Refusing to recognize the national bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class, f Trotsky insisted that only the proletariat and the peasantry could act as the | driving forces of a democratic revolution. What would the respective roles | and position of the two classes be? One of the most typical accusations of |

Stalin and his followers against Trotsky was his supposed ‘denial’, ‘ignorance’ or ‘neglect’ of the peasantry. Already in 1924 Stalin had proclaimed _urbi et orbi that Trotsky ‘simply forgot all about the peasantry as a revolutionary force and advanced the slogan of “no Tsar, but a workers’ government”, that is the slogan of a revolution without the peasantry.’⁷⁰ By simply showing that he had, in fact, never proposed such a slogan (which in reality had been coined by Parvus) and that he had consistently emphasized in all his earlier writings the necessity of a workers’ and peasants’ alliance (whatever his misgivings on the future of such an alliance in power, Trotsky had little difficulty in refuting this criticism.⁷¹ When he universalized the theory of permanent revolution in the late 1920s as a strategy for all the areas of peripheral capitalism, Trotsky continued to stress the decisive role of the peasantry in any real revolutionary process. ‘Not only the agrarian, but also the national question assigns to the peasantry—the overwhelming majority of the population in backward countries—an exceptional place in the democratic revolution. Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry the tasks of democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even seriously posed.’⁷² What Trotsky denied was not the crucial weight of the peasantry in the revolution, but its capability of playing an independent political role and of becoming an independent ruling class. In his view the intermediate character and social heterogeneity of the peasantry (and the petty-bourgeoisie) compelled it ultimately to choose between either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat—a choice that usually polarized the upper and lower strata of the peasant ‘estate’.⁷³ Since the national bourgeoisie .was incapable of implementing a genuine revolutionary democratic solution of the national and agrarian questions, it became possible for the proletariat, through fierce political struggle against the bourgeoisie, to win over the bulk of the peasant masses and with their support establish a proletarian dictatorship.

As we shall see this conception contained a very deep political truth, but if understood in directly sociological terms, it was contradicted by the actual course of historical development in China and other dependent countries. For instance, some of Trotsky’s writings, particularly the texts on China, conceive of the strategic idea of proletarian hegemony in its immediate

⁷³Ibid., pp. 69-70, 153-4. This, as we have seen, was a principal divergence between Trotsky and Lenin in 1905-6, which was finally settled by events in 1917.

social meaning as being the urban struggle of the working class, the if locomotive of history drawing behind it the insurgent peasantry. Thus, at 3 the very moment when the Chinese communists were establishing a red ?! army and a soviet government in the Kiangsi countryside (1930), Trotsky | wrote: ‘Only the predominance of the proletariat in the decisive industrial S political centres of the country creates the necessary basis for the organiza- | tion of a red army and for the extension of a soviet system in the country- f side.’ It is clear that he was transposing the ‘classic’ paradigm of Russia in :| 1917 and not grasping the fact that a radically new form of revolutionary f process was unfolding in the wake of the 1927-8 defeats of the Chinese § proletariat. Indeed, he went so far as to recommend that the Chinese communists should ‘not scatter their forces among the isolated flames of the peasant revolt. . . . The communists must concentrate their forces on »: the factories and the shops and in the workers districts. . . . Only through | the process of activating and uniting the workers will the Communist Party J: be able to assume leadership of the peasant insurrection, that is, of the 1 national revolution as a whole.’¹³⁴ This is one of the few instances where ! Trotsky’s views can rightly be adjudged guilty of the error of‘sociologism’, ? and it prevented him from understanding the dynamics of the Chinese | revolution after 1928. 7

This error became even more visible a few years later in his analysis of the ? political nature of the Chinese red army, which he attempted to deduce ! directly from its social composition: ‘the fact that individual communists ! are in the leadership of the present armies does not at all transform the ! social character of these armies, even if their communist leaders bear defi-nite proletarian stamp . . . the majority of the rank-and-file communists in _;the red detachments unquestionably consists of peasants, who assume the \ name communist in all honesty and sincerity but who in actuality remain ; revolutionary paupers or revolutionary petty proprietors. In politics he who judges by denominations and labels and not by social facts is lost.’¹³⁵ In i fairness, however, it should be noted that in other writings Trotsky ; avoided this sociologistic reductionism and interpreted the concept of proletarian leadership in more specifically political terms as the leadership of a proletarian organization. For example, in the ‘Basic Postulates’ that sum up the contents of The Permanent Revolution he advanced the idea that ‘the realization of the revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and _the peasancry is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard organized in the Communist Party.’⁷⁶

Integral, of course, to this whole discussion of the workers’ and peasants’ alliance was the question of the precise socio-political nature of the peasant movement. Trotsky’s attitudes towards the Chinese peasantry were somewhat ambivalent: on the one hand, he clearly perceived the manifest antibourgeois dimension of the peasant insurgency;⁷⁷ but on the other hand, he still considered it as a fundamentally petty-bourgeois democratic movement—even when it was led by the Communist Party in the form of the red army.⁷⁸ Even more importantly, he did not envisage the possibility of large sections of the peasantry attaining a socialist consciousness before the victory of the proletarian revolution. These questionable assumptions of Trotsky’s explain why he almost totally neglected the significance of the red army in his articles on China during the late 1930s and why he did not appreciate the originality of the historical process taking place in the rural areas controlled by the Communist Party. At the same time, it is interesting to note that the Comintern leadership, despite their criticisms of Trocsky for underestimating the role of the peasantry, had a very similar attitude towards the developments in China during the 1930s. For example, the ECCI resolution on China in August 1931 forcefully insisted on ’the need to radically ameliorate the social composition of the party’, transforming it into a ‘proletarian party not only by its political line but by its composition’. It imperatively proclaimed that ‘the party has the obligation to re-establish as soon as possible the lost links with the party groups in the factories’, and that ‘the best functionaries of the party must be detached to the factory cells.’⁸⁰ Even Mao Tse-tung, although empirically prioritizing rural guerrilla warfare, as late as 1930 still insisted that the principal task of ^1&Permanent Revolution, p. 153.

⁷⁷'The peasants revolt in China, much more than it was in Russia, is a revolt against the bourgeoisie. A class of landowners as a separace class does not exist in China. The landowners and the bourgeoisie are one and che same'. ('Manifesto of the International Left Opposition', in On China, p. 482.)

⁷⁸‘While we refuse to identify che armed peasant detachment with the red army as the armed power of the proletariat and have no inclination to shut our eyes to the fact that the communist banner hides the petty-bourgeois contenc of che peasant movement, we on che other hand, take an absolutely clear view of the tremendous revolutionary democratic significance of the peasant war.' ('Peasant War in China’, in On China, p. 530.) '

^79<Under a proletarian regime, more and more masses of peasants become re-educated in the socialist spirit. But this requires time, years, even decades' (ibid., p. 524). ^aoHelene Carriere d’Encausse and Stuart Schram, Le Marxisme et I'Asie 1853-1964, Paris 1965, pp. 342-4.

the Party was its implantation in the factories, the red army and the rural soviets being merely auxiliary elements to the struggle in the cities(I)¹³⁶It is, thus, possible to see that Trotsky’s error was not the result of any particular tendency on his part to ‘ignore the peasantry’, so much as a result of the classical Marxist view of the peasantry as an atomized and petty-bourgeois class. This conception, of course, had been articulated most vividly by Marx in his writings on France (especially che Eighteenth Brumaire), where the peasantry was seen as a ‘sack of potatoes’, incapable of independent self-organization or social hegemony. Trotsky’s mistake—as well as that of most other Western Marxists—was to generalize this conception to the peasantry of the colonial and semi-colonial nations, which had quite different structural characteristics, for example communal or collectivist village traditions, massive uprootedness resulting from capitalist penetration, very high rates of demographic growth, proletarian or semi-proletarian status of rural labourers on the great plantations or haciendas, etc. Moreover, for Russian Marxists especially, the denial of the socialist-revolutionary potential of the peasantry was deeply ingrained since it had been the key issue in the earlier ideological battles with the populists. It was therefore not surprising that Trotsky should have been less perceptive of the specificity of the rural class structure of the non-Western nations than he was of other features of their historical evolution. Nevertheless, in one of his last works—The Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution (1939)—he considered the revision of this traditional Marxist .conception of the peasantry: ‘The Narodniks saw in the workers and peasants simply “toilers” and the “exploited” who are equally interested in socialism. Marxists regarded the peasant as a petty bourgeois who is capable of becoming a socialist only to the extent to which he ceases materially or spiritually to be a peasant. . . . Along this line occurred for two generations the main struggle between the revolutionary tendencies of Russia. ... It is, of course, possible to raise the question whether or not the classic Marxist view of the peasantry has been proven erroneous. This subject would lead us far beyond the limits of the present review. Suffice it _to state here that Marxism had never invested its estimation of the peasantry as a non-socialist class with an absolute and static character. ’¹³⁷

Trotsky’s analysis of the social motive forces of revolution in backward countries was complemented by a theory of how the political perspectives of the revolutionary process were also shaped by the action of uneven and combined development. Indeed, as we have already seen, the uninterrupted and combined character of the revolution—its fusion/articulation/overlap-ping of democratic and socialist tasks—was related to the uneven and combined character of the social relations of production. Writing about China in 1928, Trotsky repeatedly referred to the ties between urban capital and landownership, which determined that ‘the agrarian revolution is ... as much anti-bourgeois as it is anti-feudal in character’.¹³⁸ This did not imply, however, that Trotsky mechanically deduced political strategy from the economic structure; on the contrary, he insisted on the specificity and autonomy of the socio-political level. In a letter to Preobrazhensky in 1928, for example, he emphasized that the political process could not be related ‘with abstract logic’ to the economic base since ‘the class struggle and its political expression, unfolding on the economic foundations also have their own imperious logic of development.’¹³⁹ And it is precisely this ‘imperious logic’ which drives the national bourgeoisie toward reactionary positions and produces a profound social polarization to divide the intermediate layers. Thus, according to Trotsky, ‘between Kerenskyism and the Bolshevik power, between the Kuomintang and the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is not and cannot be any intermediate stage, that is, no democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants.’^{140 141} The experience of 1917 definitively bolted the door against the slogan of ‘democratic dictatorship’. ‘With his own hand, Lenin wrote the inscription on the door: No Entrance—-No Exit.’ During the second Chinese revolution ‘the Comintern picked up a formula discarded by him only in order to open the road to the politics of Plekhanov. ’^8<s

The central thesis of stagism as advanced by Stalin, Martynov and the ECCI—‘the idea of fixing an order of succession for countries at various levels of development by assigning them in advance cards for different rations of revolutions’—was attacked by Trotsky as a vulgar evolutionism, to which he counterposed the dialectical articulation of phases in a process of permanent revolution.¹⁴² While not denying that there could be various episodic stages at the beginning of a revolution, Trotsky stressed that there could be no separate and complete democratic stage, since ‘the victory of the democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat which bases itself upon the alliance with peasantry.’ This proletarian power first of all addresses the exigencies of democratic revolution, but very quickly it will be forced to make deep inroads into bourgeois property relations—‘the democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution’.¹⁴³ From a metaphysical, abstract logical viewpoint it might be possible to distinguish two separate stages; but in the actual logic of the revolutionary process they will be organically combined as a dialectical totality.¹⁴⁴ As Trotsky wrote in his Preface to Isaacs’ book on China, ‘revolutions, as has been said more than once, have a logic of their own. But his is not the logic of Aristotle, and even less the pragmatic semilogic of‘‘common sense”. It is the higher function of thought: the logic of development and its contradictions, i.e. the dialectic.’¹⁴⁵ In summary, Trotsky’s theory contains two sets of closely interlinked propositions:¹⁴⁶

(1) A proletarian revolution may take place sooner in a backward than in an advanced country; this proletarian revolution, moreover, will not follow the completion of the democratic revolution, but precede it and/or combine with it. Under proletarian (communist) leadership and with the support of the peasantry the democratic revolution will grow over into a socialist revolution.

(2) A radical and consistent democratic revolution is not possible under a non-proletarian (non-communist) leadership. The peasantry and/or the petty bourgeoisie are not capable of pursuing a truly independent policy and cannot therefore assume leadership of the democratic revolution. On the other hand, under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie a complete and genuine solution of the democratic tasks is impossible.

In Part Two we will discuss the extent to which the history of the twentieth century has confirmed or contradicted these two hypotheses, which constitute the core of the theory of permanent revolution.¹⁴⁷

Contrary to Trotsky’s expectations just before his death, the Second World War did not culminate in the victory of the world revolution and the defeat of imperialism; it did not even produce a revolutionary wave in the industrial metropolises comparable to the one at the end of the First World War. But it nonetheless led to some very important results from the standpoint of the international class struggle:

(1) The Soviet Union expanded its area of influence to Eastern Europe, where it imposed, through the Red Army and the support of local proletariats (Czechoslavakia, for example), a new regime, similar to its own, through a process of ‘structural assimilation’.

(2) Powerful anti-colonial and anti-imperialism movements, under bourgeois or petty-bourgeois leadership, developed in Asia, the Arab world, Africa and Latin America.

(3) Authentic proletarian revolutions succeeded in countries where the Communist leadership had won hegemony over anti-fascist resistance and was also willing to defy Stalin’s injunctions to conform to the Teheran and Yalta accords (Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam).

These events were complexly related to the profound economic and political crises provoked by the war, to the weakening of the European colonial empires, to the dramatic increase in the military and geo-political power of the USSR, and, above all, to the growing popular support for communist or nationalist parties in the dependent capitalist countries. The combined effect of rising anti-colonialism, new socialist revolutions and the restructuring of the imperialist camp under us hegemony was a process of generalized decolonization, which eventually resulted in the national independence of most colonial countries in Africa and Asia. But as we shall attempt to show in Chapter 5, decolonization did not succeed in abolishing

the dependency of even the most independent nationalist regimes on the major imperialist centres—indeed, in many cases economic subservience -actually increased after formal independence. At the same time, the great ■; post-war boom¹ triggered transformations in the structures of these depen- , dent societies, as the process of unequal and combined development was C intensified by massive imperialist investments in the periphery, resulting y in significant expansions of industry, increased proletarianization, accelerated expropriation/dispossession of the peasantry, rural exodus, the i_;demographic explosion of the urban population and a rapid, uncontrolled | expansion of the so-called 'marginal mass’ (unemployed, under-employed, '•>, shanty-town dwellers, etc.). ;?

It would be mistaken, however, to attempt to deduce directly from these % structural trends the trajectory of social revolution in the immediate post- I war period. It is of the greatest importance to remember that the new wave i of revolutions did not occur in the most industrialized nations, but rather ,! in those that constituted—for various historical, economic and political $ reasons—the "weakest links’ of the imperialist chain: Yugoslavia, China, = Indochina and Cuba. Furthermore, with the exception of Cuba and to a i certain extent South Vietnam, they were more directly linked to the spe- £ rifle conjuncture at the end of the Second World War than to the results of post-war capitalist development. Meanwhile, since the end of the sixties, 4 we have seen the evaporation of the post-war economic ‘miracle’ and the ; beginning of a recessionary ‘long wave’ of capitalism,² which is having an 4 especially critical impact upon the dependent, neo-colonial countries. But ■? again the revolutionary explosions and the most advanced forms of struggle i have not arisen first in those countries most profoundly affected by > the economic crisis, but rather in the politically ‘weakest link’: Central ^:America. It is also certain that the revolutionary triumph of the Sandinistas i in Nicaragua was considerably assisted by the temporary paralysis of us ^!capacity for direct military intervention, as a consequence of the American defeat in Indochina.

World revolution has unfolded during the twentieth century through an uneven and combined process resulting from the contradictions of capital- j ism as a world system, yet these contradictions have always materialized ‘ in one particular country and at one particular time. The relation between the national and international moments of the revolutionary process is_i 'On the reasons for this development, unexpected by Trotsky, see Ernest Mandel, Latt Capitalism, London 1978, esp. chapters 4, 5 and 6.

supremely dialectical, since, as Trotsky wrote, the national peculiarities represent an original combination of the basic features of the world process’. Moreover, ‘this originality can be of decisive significance for revolutionary strategy over a span of many years.'³ It would be an error, however, to analyse (as certain partisans of Trotsky have done) the characteristics of a given social formation as constituted only by the forces of the world economy and world politics. There are certain material and cultural supports of historical specificity that are irreducible to elements of the world economy or global political conjuncture: for example, the facts of geography, historical tradition, cultural heritage, the residues of precapitalist social relations, and so on. This unavoidable unevenness of world politics is the reason why it is necessary to examine concretely (as we will attempt in Chapter 4) the national specificity of some of the decisive elements of the social structure and class struggle in each of those countries where post-war proletarian revolutions were successful, as in others where more limited social transformations have occurred or been attempted (Chapter 5). Yet if we necessarily refuse to consider world revolution as a demiurge of the historical process irresistibly asserting itself in every corner of the globe, we must avoid the opposite extreme of submerging analysis in the national exceptionalism of every revolution. For if uneven development is highly inflected by national particularisms, it is also an expression of the combined nature of the historical process: each new historical development is conditioned by the totality of previous history, especially by previous revolutionary events.⁴ Thus, the Paris Commune and 1905 Revolution were amongst the essential historical conditions for October; and October became a crucial determination for the Chinese revolutions of 1926-7 and 1947-9- The Chinese Revolution, in turn, greatly influenced the struggle in Indochina, while Cuba played a decisive role for the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Above all the existence of the Soviet Union has been vital to the triumph of the Second Vietnamese Revolution and for the survival of revolutionary Cuba (while at the same time acting as a powerful stimulant to the bureaucratization of all post-revolutionary states).

⁴See Denise Avenas, Economic et politique dans la pensee de Trotsky, Paris 1971

The Socialist Revolutions in Backward Capitalism

Without exception all the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century have taken place in areas of peripheral capitalism, of economic dependency and backwardness. In this chapter we will discuss the four great anticapitalist revolutions that have triumphed since October 1917: Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Cuba.¹ The intention of this chapter is not to provide an historical description of the various revolutionary dynamics; this has been done elsewhere in much greater detail. Rather we will only attempt to answer the question: to what extent did these revolutions correspond to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution? Or, to put it in a slightly different way: to what extent is the theory of permanent revolution an operational instrument for analysing the social dynamics of the principal revolutionary events of this century? Answering this question, of course, will require certain historical digressions and even the occasional recourse to very precise historical data. In this chapter, however, we will confine ourselves to exploring—in the four different revolutionary contexts—the following problems relating to the salience of the theory of permanent revolution:

(1) Was socialist-proletarian revolution possible in backward and dependent societies?

(2) Did this revolution occur under the leadership of the proletariat—at the head of the peasant masses—and, more precisely, under the direction of a proletarian (communist) party?

'We leave aside any consideration of the ephemeral Hungarian Commune of 1919 which lasted only a few months. Likewise we do not examine the Albanian revolution, until 1948 intimately interlinked and similar in development to the Yugoslav case, or the Laocian and Cambodian experiences, which have such close affinities to the Vietnamese. This choice is also motivated by the world-historical significance of the Yugoslav, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions as compared to the lesser global resonance of the others.

(3) Was this proletarian revolution preceded by the completion of a democratic revolution under the leadership of a bloc of four classes (including J the national bourgeoisie), or were both revolutions combined in a single ^;l uninterrupted process under proletarian leadership?

Pre-war Yugoslavia was characterized by very limited industrialization, mainly of foreign origin, and one of the most archaic agrarian structures in Europe. With the restriction of emigration to the United States—an important safety-valve before 1921—and the laggardly pace of industrial growth, the expanding rural population had no place to go, and it piled up, year after year, in the already overpopulated and immiserated villages. It has been estimated that no less than 62 per cent of the rural population in 1930 was ‘surplus’ in the sense that it was not indispensable to the maintenance of agricultural output. This combination of rural overpopulation and very low agricultural productivity ‘created a vicious circle that paralysed the entire Yugoslav economy’.¹⁴⁸ At the same time, foreign capital controlled almost exactly 50 per cent of Yugoslavian industry, with this -domination rising in key branches such as metallurgy to over 90 per cent.¹⁴⁹Weak and dependent on imperialist capital (first French and English, later German), the ruling Serbian bourgeoisie was unable to develop the country ' or to establish a democratic state. The authoritarian monarchist regime ■ betrayed the project of a truly equal union of South Slav peoples {'Yugo-' slavia’), in order to perpetuate Serbian domination over the Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian and Albanian national groups. After the German occupation of the country in 1941, important sectors of the ruling class collaborated closely with the Nazis through the puppet government of General Nedich in Serbia and the fascist regime of the Ustashi leader Pavelich in Croatia. Although King Peter’s government-in-exile was recognized by the Allies, its official resistance movement inside Yugoslavia— Colonel Mihailovich’s Chetniks—became more and more obsessed with waging war against the communist partisans and eventually ended up collaborating with the Wehrmacht and the Ustashi.

As a result the Yugoslavian bourgeoisie played an insignificant role in the struggle for national liberation and was directly or indirectly comprom-

ised with the Nazi occupation. There were not real class alliances between the popular resistance led by the Communist Party and the bourgeois-monarchist forces. The August 1944 agreement between the National Committee of Liberation (under communist hegemony) and King Peter’s government in London was a purely diplomatic manoeuvre, which Britain and the USSR imposed on the partisans with little real effect. The same was true ^rhe ineffectual participation for a short period of bourgeois ministers in the government established by the partisans at the beginning of 1945. Since the only bourgeois armed forces, Mihailovich’s Chetniks, had retreated from Serbia in the wake of the Germans, these bourgeois ministers were actually just hostages of the partisans and preferred to resign after a few months.⁴

What was the political and social character of the revolutionary process in Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1946? At the level of official communist ideology, the struggle was presented in different and sometimes even in contradictory terms. In December 1941, Tito began the creation of the famed ‘Proletarian Brigades’ as the shock forces of a communist-led army of national liberation. Moscow, however, severely criticized this move, and in a letter to the Yugoslav communists, chided: ‘It seems that Great Britain and the Yugoslav government (in London) have good reasons to suspect the partisan movement of having a communist character and aiming at a sovietization of Yugoslavia. Why have you created, for instance, a special proletarian brigade? At the present moment, the main duty is to merge all anti-nazi trends. . . .’⁵ Following this urgent piece of‘advice’ from the Comintern, the avnoj (the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation)— a Partisan parliament under communist hegemony—approved at its first meeting in Bihac (26/27 November 1942) a very moderate programme that proclaimed ‘the inviolability of private property and the providing of every possibility for individual initiative in industry, trade and agriculture’ as well as guaranteeing that it aimed at ‘no radical changes whatsoever in the social life and activities of the people. ’⁶ However at the second session of the avnoj in November 1943, the partisans decided to struggle for a 'Democratic-Popular Yugoslav Republic’, based on the local Committees of National Liberation, and to prevent the king and his government-inexile from returning to the country. These decisions provoked a furious

“See Francois Fejto, Histoire lies democraties populates, vol. 1, Paris 1971, pp. 61-4.

⁵Quoced in -Carherine Samary, 'Les dynamiques conrradictoires de 1’accumulation dans une societe de transition entre le capitalisme et le socialisme: la Yougoslavie’, MS 1977, p. 50—my emphasis.

^sQuoted by Ygael Gluckstein, Stalin's Satellites in Europe, London 1952, p. 153.

reaction in Moscow. Manuilsky is reported to have forbidden the Soviet-based ‘Radio Free Yugolsavia’ to broadcast the avnoj decisions, warning i the radio’s chief that ‘the boss [Stalin] is extremely angry. He says it is a 3 stab in the back for the Soviet Union and the Teheran decisions.’¹⁵⁰ At the '■ same time, despite repeated, desperate requests from the partisans, the Soviets provided practically no military aid, although the collaborationistf Chetniks were receiving regular Allied air-drops.¹⁵¹ Only in May 1944, ins the face of the Wehrmacht’s greatest offensive, did the USSR finally send '! significant aid to the partisans. In return, however, the Yugoslav commun- 3 ists were forced to accept an accord with the exiled royal government and 3 Tito declared that the aim of the partisans was only the expulsion of the 5 Nazis and ‘not the establishment of communism, as our enemies pretend’.¹⁵² ,ij It seems indisputable that Stalin was not at all interested in a socialist^ revolution in Yugoslavia and was ready to leave it (together with Greece) in 3 the Western sphere of influence. Yet at the same time he insisted, with 0 Churchill’s acquiescence, that Hungary—a country where communist re-ji sistance had been extremely weak—should fall under Soviet hegemony. ^ Having just dissolved the Comintern (May 1943), it is obvious that Stalin’s 3 real concern was the creation of a protective belt of ‘friendly’ states around f the USSR. His ‘internationalist’ commitment to a country was inversely ;! proportional to its distance from the Soviet border; and any relationship 3 between the division of spheres of influence with the Western imperialist s powers and the real force of the communist movement in any particular 's country was ruthlessly eliminated from his strategic calculations.

If the official proclamations of the AVNOJ were contradictory and oscil-... lated according to diplomatic pressures and exigencies, the actual practice J of the Yugoslav communists and the partisan movement was much more j radical and consistent (a discrepancy which will be found, in different forms, in the other post-war socialist revolutions). From the beginning of 1 the German occupation in 1941, the primary and decisive element in the political strategy of the Yugoslav Party had been the systematic destruction of ; the bourgeois state apparatus— a task facilitated by the direct (Nedic, Pavelic) or indirect (Mihailovic) collaboration of bourgeois authorities with the invaders. The partisans fought not only the bourgeois armed forces and police and also destroyed local administrations despised by the peasantry ■; and workers (burning archives and land registries in the process). In place, of the collaborationist government, they established the foundations of a!

new, popular state. Its backbone was the partisan army, led by the communists who provided more than 94 per cent of its higher cadre.¹⁵³ This revolutionary military power was complemented by the civil structure of _the ‘Committees of National Liberation’ (cnls), initiated by the Communist Party, which organized economic, social and political life in the liberated areas. In a 1948 speech, Kardelj compared these popular committees with the soviets of 1917 as similar elected organs of direct democracy and the basis of proletarian dual power.¹⁵⁴ It is interesting to note that the Western powers (as well as Stalin) almost immediately perceived the danger of social revolution implied in the partisans’ destruction of the old state apparatus and their substitution of the new cnls. An article in the clandestine communist paper Borba replied to Allied misgivings in October 1941: 'The Committees of National Liberation should become the provisional organs of real popular power. . . . Some of our allies want to know why we formed these committees, and why we did not preserve the old municipal councils and police stations, of course, with a renewed staff. It is for the simple reason that it was precisely these organs of power which have constituted the apparatus through which the occupiers have plundered and oppressed the Serbian and other peoples. . . ,’¹⁵⁵These political inroads against the bourgeois state were soon followed again in the guise of anti-Nazi and anti-collaborationist measures—by equally radical economic initiatives. A partisan law of 24 November 1944, ordering the confiscation of the property of Germans and their Yugoslav collaborators, amounted to nothing less than a wholesale nationalization of most of the capitalist means of production in the country. Within a year more than 80 per cent of industry, most of the banks and almost all the big commercial enterprises were under state control. The formal nationalization legislation of December 1946 was to a large extent only the formal, judicial sanction of a de facto economic reality. As Boris Kidric stressed in 1948, ‘the predominant form of the assault against the main capitalist positions in our country were the trials of traitors, which usually resulted in the confiscation of their property.. The confiscation of property, although always judicially mandated by the crime of treason, always in its essence possessed a socialist character. . . . Treason itself, which was the direct pretext for confiscation, had clear class origins and class consequences because it was the counter-revolutionary resistance of the treacherous

bourgeoisie against the working people who had, armed with weapons, ' taken into their own hands the destiny of the country. The confiscation of a the property of the treasonable bourgeoisie was, therefore, a specific form of ; the expropriation of the expropriators, a form that corresponded to the 1 conditions of a war of liberation. . . .’¹⁵⁶ ;

In other words, despite the combined pressure of the Western powers ‘ and the USSR, the Yugoslav communists steadfastly refused to respect the legality or property relations of bourgeois society. As Tito himself said in I 1948, ‘we did not want to stop halfway . . . come to power and share it ; with the representatives of the capitalist class, which would have continued ; to exploit the labouring masses of Yugoslavia. . . . We decided, therefore, ; to enter boldly on the road of the complete liquidation of capitalism in ’ Yugoslavia.’¹⁵⁷ From the start of the guerrilla struggle in 1941 until the i expropriation of the capitalists in 1945-6, the leadership of the revolution- ! ary process remained firmly in the hands of the Communist Party of Yugo- ! slavia. The deep roots of the cpy were in the working class, and during its ’ brief period of legality (1918-21) it was a dynamic mass party (60,000 members) which dominated the trade-union movement and, with the ( broad support of the poor peasant strata, was the third largest party in the y Constituent Assembly of 1920 (out-polling even the Croatian Peasant ' Party). Although weakened by ferocious repression after being outlawed ' in 1921, it preserved in clandestinity its support in the working-class districts of Belgrade, Zagreb and other towns. It was, thus, scarcely fortuitous that the first nuclei of the partisan army were specifically denomin-ated as ‘Proletarian Brigades’. As Tito emphasized in 1948, ‘if we called these brigades—proletarian, this was because the proletariat was predomi- -nant in them: workers from the towns, the factories, the mines. . . ,’¹⁵⁸ ! These brigades, in turn, provided the cadre for the entire partisan army.¹⁵⁹ i As the war of national liberation progressed and the national liberation army grew to the huge figure of 800,000 fighters, its social composition became predominantly peasant.¹⁷ Even in the Cpy itself the majority of the rank-and-file militants were peasants: 49-4 per cent versus the 29.5 per _cent from the proletariat. Amongst cpy cadre, however, the proportions were reversed: 40 per cent worker, 23 per cent peasant.¹⁸ Although the Party would later attempt to play down the role of the peasantry in the partisan movement, there can be no question that it provided the broad social basis for the growth of the struggle. This was, of course, unavoidable in a country where almost three-quarters of the population lived in the countryside. At the same time, however, the proletariat remained, through its dominance in the higher cadre levels of both the Party and the army, the politically leading force of the revolutionary process.

Why did the Yugoslav peasantry—mainly consisting of small-plot owners, not of rural proletarians—support the Communist Party? Three reasons stand out:

(1) The penetration of capitalism into Yugoslav agriculture had destroyed feudal property, but simultaneously exposed the peasants to the equally harsh exploitation of the banks and capitalist entrepreneurs who wanted to expel them from their smallholdings. Thus the struggle of the peasantry, while not socialist, tended to assume an explicitly anti-capitalist character.¹⁹

(2) The national oppression of the non-Serbian minorities and the virtually genocidal war between Mihailovic’s Serbian Chetniks and Pavelic’s Croatian fascists created a situation where only the Communist Party appeared as a unifying force above traditional national hatreds and divisions. The communists, therefore, inherited the mantle of a democratic and federalistic ‘Yugoslavianism’ which the Serbian and Croatian bourgeoisies, had betrayed. The cpy’s 1940 programme, which provided for the right of self-determination for all oppressed national minorities, was especially attractive to sections of the peasantry.²⁰

¹⁸See Aleksander Rankovic, %e travail d’organisation’, in Le Cinquieme Congres, pp. 216, 225.

^1!>'Among the labouring peasants, there was a genuine revolutionary anger against the financial capitalist, an anger aggravated by the unresolved and explosive national questions. The labouring peasant became more and more, under the leadership of the CPY, the closest revolutionary ally of che proletariat, while never losing his mentality of being a landowner. Indeed, in mobilizing the labouring peasantry against finance capital and the bourgeoisie in general, che CPY has also pragmatically defended smallholdings against expropriation by the capitalist parasites.' (Kidric, p. 419.)

²⁰Mosa Pijade, ‘Rapport sur le projet de programme du pcy', in Le Cinquieme Congres, pp. 518-19.

(3) The fact that the CPY and its partisan. army quickly proved to bp the only force that really defended the population and resisted the! German-Italian occupation.

When, at the Fifth Congress of the Party in 1948, the Yugoslav leader!! ship no longer had any inhibitions about clearly defining the political! character and social dynamics of their revolution, they did so in terms that! irresistibly evoke the theory of permanent revolution. Thus, according tof Kardelj, ‘the war of national liberation had as a result in our country a| process of national revolution that assumed a more and more overtly social-1 ist character. This uninterrupted revolutionary process went through different! phases from the beginning of the war until now. . . . But what gives it its* essential character—from the start of the national insurrection until now-is the leading role of the working class with the Communist Party at its! head. . . . From the very beginning, our Party was conscious of the inevit-f able character of this process, and it was with such a perspective in mind! that it implemented its policies during the war. The question of the prepara-1 tion and the development of the socialist revolution was for the Party inseparable^ from the question of the development of the insurrection for national liberation Our Party would not be the Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the working class! if, under the given circumstances, it had not posed the problem in these! terms.’²¹ Can there be any question, then, that the Yugoslav revolution! was a process of permanent revolution defined by the combination of demo-/ cratic and national tasks with specifically socialist transformations in an;^:uninterrupted process of struggle under the leadership of a proletarian! party?

At the same time, however, the Yugoslav experience presents certain distinctive features—above all, that of partisan warfare based on the peasantry—which were not anticipated in Trotsky’s writings. As we shall| see, this same pattern of peasant guerrilla warfare was repeated, with some’ variations and particularities, in the other post-1917 revolutions.

The unequal and combined development of capitalism in China was to/! have some profound consequences for the development of the Chinese:! revolution:

treaty ports of the coastal area; this young, combative proletariat was to play the main role in the second Chinese revolution of 1925-9.

(2) The incredible level of peasant oppression operated through a complex articulation of capitalist and pre-capitalist systems of exploitation, and characterized by: centralization of land ownership (10 per cent of the population possessed 60 per cent of the arable land), very high rents (40 per cent to 60 per cent of the crop), rampant usury (average interest rates of more than 40 per cent per annum), exorbitant taxes, permanent military requisitions by government troops and warlord mercenaries, and so on.^{160 161}finally, on top of this vast parasitic and repressive pyramid there came the Japanese invasion of the 1930s. The awful despoliations and massacres of the Japanese armies were more than the peasantry could bear: they rebelled if only in order to survive.

(3) The Chinese bourgeoisie was from its origin doubly linked to rural property on one side and to imperialist capital on the other. Jean Chesnaux points out that ‘many urban bourgeois continued to receive land rents of the old style’; a fact that Mao emphasized when he observed that ‘the national bourgeoisie is not interested in fighting feudalism because it has close ties with the landlord class.'²ⁱ

Mao always insisted on the importance of distinguishing between two fractions of the bourgeoisie, or even two different bourgeois classes: the cmpradore and the national bourgeoisie. The term compradore, of Portuguese derivation (‘buyer’), designated in the nineteenth century the commercial agents or indigenous representatives of foreign enterprises in China. Chinese Marxists, however, used the term in a more general sense to encompass all those sections of the Chinese bourgeoisie intimately and directly associated with foreign capital. We would agree with Chesnaux, however, that ‘rather than opposing a “national" and a “comprador" wing of Chinese capitalism ... it would be better to say that the bourgeoisie oscillated constantly, according to economic conjuncture, between activities of the comprador type and activities of the "national” type.’¹⁶² The very fact that the Chinese Communist Party was forced to successively define the Kuomintang—the most representative political force of the Chinese

bourgeoisie—as being the expression of the ‘national’ bourgeoisie, the''! ‘feudal’ bourgeoisie, the ‘comprador’ bourgeoisie and/or the 'bureaucratic':! bourgeoisie—exemplifies the reasons for preferring Chesnaux’s formulation''! to Mao’s. The organic allegiances of the Chinese bourgeoisie to land-$ lordship and imperialism, as well as the fact that it was constantly under | seige by a powerful, communist-led mass movement, explain why it was! utterly incapable of accomplishing any of the decisive national-democratic! tasks. It was not able to establish a democratic state, or to implement's significant land reform, or to liberate the country from foreign domination’! Its only historic accomplishment was the reconstruction of a national state! power and the defeat of the warlords in 1926-7. But even this later success -I was vitiated by its failure to mount real resistance to Japanese aggression-a factor that was probably decisive in its eventual downfall. In this respect ! Chiang’s Kuomintang is comparable to the Yugoslav Chetniks of General Mihailovic: by giving priority—especially after 1940—to the war against! the communists, it lost hegemony in the national war of liberation against'i fascist occupation. (Indeed, Chiang once said ‘The Japanese are a disease of s the skin, the communists a disease of the heart. ’) The us Army’s own Chief ! of Military Intelligence, P. E. Peabody, charged in 1944 that the nation-1 alist army had concluded a virtual truce with the Japanese in order toj concentrate all its efforts on blockading the communist liberated areas.¹⁶³! The national default of the Kuomintang permitted the red army to become| the principal expression of popular resistance to the Japanese invasion, andi as a result the Communist Party was able to increase its membership from¹!; 30,000 in 1937 to 1,200,000 in 1945.¹⁶⁴

Mao had taken over the leadership of the CCP at the Tsuny Conference in! 1935 after a coven struggle against the Wang Ming faction that was directly linked to Stalin and the Comintern. The new strategic orientation that Mao’s group brought to the Party contributed vitally to the eventual triumph of the third Chinese revolution in 1949. This new orientation'^ implied a partial and incomplete rupture with Stalinism, especially with | Stalin’s concrete policies on China. Yet it remained much more a practicali and empirical distanciation than a theorized and programmatic break.¹⁶⁵Thus, at the methodological level Mao’s philosophical writings—however | superior they might be to Stalin’s scholastic exercises—remain largely | faithful to the framework of Soviet diamat. On Contradiction (1937), for ;

gjjmple, contains some pre-dialectical formulations of significant political consequence: first, the rigid analytical distinction between ‘internal’ causality, assumed to be primary, and external’ factors; and, second, a somewhat mechanical typology of the different contradictions—principal, secondary, new, old, and so on—which govern social reality. The former antinomy (internal versus external) tends to prevent a dialectical comprehension of imperialism as simultaneously internal and external to a dependent society; while the latter schema of contradictions tends to obscure the dialectical unity between them. According to Mao, ‘qualitatively different contradictions can only be solved by qualitatively different methods. For example: the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is solved by the method of socialist revolution; the contradiction between the great masses of the people and the feudal system is solved by the method of democratic revolution.’²⁸ Within the context of such a methodological approach ic is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp the possibility of a dialectical fusion between the two contradictions and their common solution in an uninterrupted and combined revolutionary process.

Mao’s incomplete methodological break with Stalinism partially explains why his theory of the Chinese revolution never clearly transcended the framework of the doctrine of the national-democratic stage and of the bloc of four classes—despite, as we shall try to demonstrate, the inadequacy of these concepts to explain the real course of the revolutionary movement. Already in December 1935, shortly after assuming leadership of the Party, Mao was declaring that: ‘We shall protect every national capitalist who does not support the imperialists or the Chinese traitors. In the stage of democratic revolution there are limits to the struggle between labour and capital. . . . It is perfectly obvious that the Chinese revolution at the present stage is still a bourgeois-democratic and not a proletarian socialist revolution in nature. Only the counter-revolutionary Trotskyites talk such nonsense as that China has already completed her bourgeois-democratic revolution and that any further revolution can only be socialist.’²⁹ Needless to say, the ‘nonsense’ that Mao attributed to the Trotskyists had not the slightest resemblance to their real conception, which, as we have seen, emphasized precisely the fact that the bourgeois-democratic tasks had not been achieved and could only be completed by a proletarian revolution. The most interesting point, however, is that while

^2aMao Tse-cung, On Contradiction (1937), in Mao Tse-tung, an Anthology of His Writings, New York 1962, p. 222. See Avenas’s interesting commentary on this famous text, pp. 124-7. ²⁹Mao Tse-tung, ‘On Tactics against Japanese Imperialism’ (27 December 1935), Selected Works, vol. 1, Peking 1967, p. 169.

Mao appears to faithfully, accept the central elements of the official Stalinist ! doctrine of revolution by stages, he simultaneously qualifies his ‘orthodoxy’. !; by a series of reservations and amendments. In order to decipher the real strategic thought of Mao—seeking, especially, to locate those new or 1 permanentist strategic ideas cloaked within stock formulas—we must carefully compare different contemporary texts of Mao in their original as well'! as later ‘official’ (1951) versions.

For example, Mao repeatedly insists after 1935 upon the necessity of | unity with the national bourgeoisie in order to realize the national-democratic revolution. Thus in 1937 he writes: ‘We cannot agree with the | Trotskyite approach, which rejects the bourgeoisie and stigmatizes the alliance in the semi-colonial countries with the revolutionaries among the! bourgeoisie as capitulationism simply because of the transitory nature of ! the bourgeoisie’s participation in the revolution.’³⁰ When this speech was| re-edited in 1951 for the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, a very curious thing | happened: the word ‘revolutionaries’ was replaced by ‘anti-Japanese faction’. This would seem to imply a very peculiar and extremely discreet self-,,1 criticism which retrospectly recognized that while certain sections of the if bourgeoisie may have been ready to resist the Japanese, they were scarcely ! willing to implement a democratic revolution. Moreover, during the same jji period when Mao was calling for unity with the bourgeosie against.? Japanese imperialism, he also continued to emphasize that in the rural | revolutionary war developing in China ‘the enemy ... is not imperialism % alone but also the alliance of the big bourgeoisie and the big landlords, j And the national bourgeoisie has become a tail to the big bourgeoisie.’³¹ \

Similar contradictions arise in the course of Mao’s analysis of the leader- f ship of the democratic revolutionary process. In various documents from different periods Mao clearly emphasizes that the leadership must be firmly !> exercised by the Chinese proletariat, that is, the CCP.³² Yet in other.-:; writings, sometimes coincident in time, he appears to admit the possibility j of bourgeois leadership during the anti-imperialist and democratic revolu-tion. For instance, in the original version of his report to the Sixth Plenum 1 of the CCP s Central Committee in 1938 there occurs this surprising pas- * sage (omitted from the official 1951 edition): ‘In carrying out the anti- ;

^}0Mao Tse-tung, ‘Let Us Strive to Draw the Broad Masses into the Anti-Japanese National ;; United Front’ (7 May 1937), in Stuart Schramm, The Political Thought of M.ao Tse-tUng, Harmondsworth 1969, p- 190. V

⁵ ‘Mao Tse-tung, 'Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War’ (1936), Selected Works, f vol. 1, p. 192. ;(

³²Mao Tse-tung, ’The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party’ (1939), A, Selected Works, vol. 2, pp. 330-1. j

Japanese war, and in organizing the Anti-Japanese United Front, the jCuomintang occupies the position of leader and framework. . . . Under the single great condition that it support to the end the war of resistance jnd the United Front, one can foresee a brilliant future for the JCuomintang. . . ,'³³ Similarly, the original text of The New Democracy (1940) contains a parallel formulation (although this time in hypothetical rather than categorical terms): ‘Today, whoever can show the people the _way to expel the Japanese imperialists and to establish a democratic government will become the peoples’ saviour. If the bourgeoisie knows how to assume this responsibility, it deserves the admiration of us all; but if it abnegates it, then the burden of this responsibility will inevitably fall upon the shoulders of the proletariat. . . .’³⁴ In the 1951 edition this passage was ‘rewritten’ to read that ‘history has proved that the Chinese bourgeoisie cannot fulfil this responsibility, which inevitably falls on the shoulders of the proletariat’³⁵—a very good example of 'a posteriori prediction’!

These manifold contradictions and ambiguities in Mao’s strategic thought were all condensed in his theory of the ‘New Democracy’ where he projected a state that is neither bourgeois nor proletarian, but rather the ‘common dictatorship’ of the four anti-imperialist classes. The New Democratic State—which he clearly conceived of not only as the necessary expression of the Chinese revolution, but of all revolutions in colonial and dependent societies—was envisioned as being led by the proletariat yet also remaining scrupulously respectful of the limits of bourgeois-democratic revolution.³⁶ Maoists have traditionally held that The New Democracy was a great theoretical-political breakthrough, testifying both to the powerful originality of Mao’s intellect and to the specificity of the Chinese experience. But as two well-known academic historians of the CCP have observed: 'Not only does the New Democracy not contain any essential novelty, but it fails to reflect the striking developments which had actually occurred with-

^Quoted in Carriere d'Encansse and Schram, Le marxism et I’Asie 1853-1964, p. 355.

”Mao Tse-tung, On New Democracy (1940), Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 350. Another sort of ambiguity appears concerning the policy of the ‘democratic revolution' towards capitalism. While certain documents acclaim the ‘progressive’ and ‘inevitable’ nature of the growth of capitalism after the victory over feudalism and imperialism, Mao simultaneously was speaking about the nationalization of'the great banks, the great industrial and commercial enterprises’ and of the ‘expropriation of the largest and most important sections of capital’ belonging to the imperialists and ‘their lackeys, the Chinese bureaucratic capitalists’. (Cf. On Coalition Government (1945), Selected Works, vol. 3, p, 281; New Democracy, p. 353; and ‘Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’ (1949), Selected Works, vol. 4, p. 386.)

in the Chinese communist movement. While the theory of the New De^f cracy is basically similar to the theories used to justify the first CCP-Kity? alliance of 1923-7, the realities which it supposedly reflects are entirely! different. In 1940 the Chinese Communist Party already possessed its owtj! territorial base, its own armed force, and its own growing peasant mass' base. It confronted the Kuomintang as an independent force with its own* effective sources of power. Why, then, did the New Democracy lay such little' stress on these truly original developments? ... In spite of the clai^t made for its theoretical originality, it actually fails to depict Mao Tse-1 rung’s genuinely original achievements, which lay in the field of activef statesmanship. It is rather in the area of political action, and in his writing which directly illustrate political action, that we must seek Mao’s true! originality.’¹⁶⁶ We generally endorse this opinion, with one important! exception. Despite Mao’s adherence to most elements of the Comintern’s! 1923-7 approach, he breaks with it at a decisive point when he advocates-the full autonomy of the Communist Party and the red army. In 1937| when the CCP was concluding a compromise with Chiang which formally? accepted the military and political authority of the Kuomintang govern-'! ment, Mao wrote, ‘concessions have limits. The preservation of the Com-| munist Party’s leadership over the Special Region [Yenan) and in the red) army, and the preservation of the Communist Party’s independence and ; freedom of criticism in its relations with the Kuomintang—these are the limits beyond which it is impermissible to go.’ There is no question that j; Mao had learned the bitter lessons of the 1927 defeat, which had resulted, ? as he recognized in this same document, from the CCP’s surrender of ; leadership to the bourgeoisie. Referring to the tragedy of the second Chinese revolution, he warned: ‘This piece of history should not be allowed J to repeat itself.’¹⁶⁷

To appreciate the concrete movement of the Chinese revolution, we must? turn away from The New Democracy and the doctrinaire stagist documents of? the CCP, and look, instead, at Mao’s writings on the peasantry, his reflections on the tactics of guerrilla warfare (which contain important contribu- ' tions to revolutionary theory), and, above all, the actual practice of the Party and the red army. This relative ‘underdevelopment’ of the CCP’s official ideology in contrast to its praxis is a complex phenomenon which has to be , explained by a combination of variables: (1) the need to ‘follow the line’ in

order to keep on good terms with the USSR and preserve its political and military assistance; (2) an element of self-indoctrination and internal factional politics (the need to appear resolutely ‘orthodox’); and (3) a manipulative attitude towards the masses (which was to grow into much more dangerous proportions after 1949)- The dissonance between practice and ‘line’ worked itself out in the following way: Mao continued to formally uphold the Stalinist doctrines of revolution by stages and alliance with the bourgeoisie, while he increasingly disregarded Stalin’s ‘instructions’ on the practical course to be followed in China.

The CCP’s practical disavowal of Stalinist strategy was not dissimilar to the pragmatic and independent approach that the Yugoslav Party adopted after 1941. Likewise Stalin’s advice to the Chinese prefigured his wartime admonitions to the partisans: rejection of an independent revolutionary orientation, unrelenting insistence on the necessity of collaborating with, and accepting the leadership of, the bourgeois nationalist forces. Both Mao and Tito deflected Stalin’s heavy-handed interventions with a combination of subtlety and audacity. Thus in 1937 when Wang Ming arrived from Moscow with instructions for a more ‘moderate’ orientation toward Chiang’s regime, Mao criticized the proposal as ‘right-wing opportunism’ and aggressively resisted the challenge to his leadership.¹⁶⁸ Recollecting this episode twenty years later, Mao noted: ‘In the course of the fight with Wang Ming which lasted from 1937 until August 1938, we had proposed ten major planks while Wang had produced sixty. If we had followed the methods of Wang Ming, which were in fact those of Stalin, the Chinese revolution would have never occurred.’¹⁶⁹ Unfortunately for the rest of the world Communist movement, this growing autonomy of the CCP and the rejection of stagism which its practice implied, were well-hidden by the Party’s ritual genuflections to the Comintern and Stalin. This explains the misjudgement of Trotsky writing in 1940: ‘At the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, the Kremlin again placed the Communist Party in bondage to Chiang Kai-shek, crushing in the bud the revolutionary initiative of the Chinese proletariat.’¹⁷⁰

The great turning-point of the CCP’s history, however, was in 1945-6 when Mao and the Party leadership decisively affirmed their independence

from Moscow and charted a course of bold revolutionary struggle. In the^f| summer of 1945 Stalin had officially recognized Chiang’s dictatorship aj| the sole legal government of China, and after the surrender of Japan he! turned over to it the Manchurian urban centres occupied by Soviet forces.^| At the same time Stalin was explicitly instructing the CCP to dissolve its? red army and join the Kuomintang government. We have, two first-hand¹testimonies on this crucial episode in the history of the Chinese revolution. The first comes from none other than Stalin himself, who indulged, during! a private conversation with Yugoslav communists, in what was pro the first (and last) self-criticism of his entire career. (After the war, wef„ invited Chinese comrades to come to Moscow and we discussed the situa_;J tion in China. We told them bluntly that we considered the development! of the uprising in China had no prospects, that the Chinese comrades' should seek a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-shek, and that they should join the Chiang Kai-shek government and dissolve their army. The Chinese! comrades agreed here in Moscow with the views of the Soviet comrades,';: but went back to China and acted quite otherwise. They mustered their! forces, organized their armies and now, as we see, they are beating Chiang] Kai-shek’s army. Now in the case of China we admit we were wrong.’^{171 172}J| The Chinese side of these events was finally revealed by Mao in a 1958,Jj speech to party cadre. In one of his rare public criticisms of Stalin, Mao? commented: ‘The Chinese revolution had achieved victory only by acting against the will of Scalin. The False Foreign Devil (in Lu Hsiin’s The True]| History of Ah Q) “prevented the people from making the revolution”. But. our September Congress advanced the slogans of boldly mobilizing the masses and of summoning every revolutionary force to create a new China.’¹⁷³

There can be little question, then, that the actual political practice of the CCP in the late 1930s and particularly in the 1940s was flatly in contradic-

tion with Stalin's policies—above all his advocacy of communist subordina-cion to the Kuomintang. Indeed, in its de facto divergence from Stalinist dogmas of stagism and the ‘bloc of four classes,’ the ccp followed a practical road which scarcely conformed to the strategic directions codified in The New Democracy. Official ideology aside, there was never during the anti-Japanese war the proposed ‘common dictatorship’ of the four anti-imperialist classes. Instead there were, on the one side, the red regions onder communist administration, and, on the other side, the nationalist government; between them was not an alliance, but only an uneasy and fragile truce. The Popular Republic established after the communist victory in 1949 was an equally problematic realisation of the ‘New Democracy’ or the ‘Democratic Dictatorship of the People’ (the last version of a ‘new democratic’ state which Mao formulated in 1949). Political power in the Popular Republic was entirely monopolized by the CCP; the noncommunist personalities associated with the Peoples’ Consultative Assembly or the Central Peoples’ Government were either fellow-travellers of the Party or honorary figures without real power—sometimes they were both, like Mme Sun Yat-sen. Although this state was theoretically a four-class ‘common dictatorship’ (symbolized by the four stars in the red flag of the Peoples’ Republic), it was in reality a dictatorship of a (significantly bureaucratized) proletarian party. It is simply impossible from a political standpoint to distinguish a ‘New Democratic’ or ‘Popular Democratic’ stage from a proletarian-socialist one; the exclusive hegemony of the CCP was a constant factor from 1949 onwards. Never at any time did political representatives of the national bourgeoisie ever share real state power or impose policies distinct from, or opposed to, the line of the CCP.¹⁷⁴

Economically the situation was slightly different. Beginning in 1947, a radical and sweeping agrarian reform was promulgated in the liberated zones which led to the confiscation without indemnification of the land and goods of the great landowners and of most of the land belonging to the rich peasantry. According to Chesnaux’s account, as the agrarian reform progressed, there was increasing polarization between rich and poor peasants as committees of the poor peasantry seized the initiative in implementing the

reform.¹⁷⁵ At this stage there were no collectivist measures, but neither had | there been in the early years of the October Revolution. Meanwhile in the cities, only the ‘bureaucratic capital’ of the great monopolies linked to the * Kuomintang was initially expropriated; but since these ‘bureaucratic capj. s talists’ dominated the key sectors of the economy, the result was clearly an r, anti-capitalist transformation of Chinese industry. By 1950 the revolution-ary state controlled 60 per cent of the metallurgical industry, 89 per cent of't the chemical, 70 per cent of the mechanical, 62 per cent of the electrical "■ and so on. Between two-thirds and four-fifths of all industrial capital was 1 nationalized.¹⁷⁶ It was true that for a few years a certain number of small \ and medium-sized capitalists were authorized to continue private produc- ■■ tion. But did the temporary survival of this marginal sector of capitalist ,s production signify the establishment of a non-socialist ‘New Democratic’ ’-economy characterized by the continuing dominance of capitalist relations $ of production as Mao’s 1940 programme and his 1949 writings proposed? I ; think that a far more accurate definition was offered by Brandt and ij Schwartz in 1950 when they argued that ‘the actualities of the present ;> Chinese situation appear to correspond most closely to the situation in the v Soviet Union during its New Economic Policy phase (1921-27)—a phase ■ in which the CP monopolized political power but granted the peasantry and l the nepmen a certain limited economic function’.¹⁷⁷ One could say that the '( Chinese revolution went directly from its ‘1917’ to its ‘nep’ without pas- i sing through a phase of ‘war communism’. The CCP’s assault on ‘bureau- “ cratic capitalism’ can be compared to the Yugoslav expropriation of ^:‘bourgeois collaborators’: in both cases formally juridical actions had an objectively anti-capitalist, socialist content. I

In an article written in 1950 Ernest Mandel emphasized the contradic-tions between the CCP’s official programme of ‘democratic capitalism’ and J the real anti-capitalist measures which it was obliged to initiate. He dis- | cerned the triumph of the logic of ‘permanent revolution’ over an ideology } of ‘New Democracy’ .¹⁷⁸ Neither on an economic nor on a political plane was >

there a clearly distinguished ‘new democratic’ stage, but rather an uninterrupted revolutionary process, combining and intertwining national, democratic, agrarian and socialist tasks. This is not an arbitrary interpretation of the Chinese revolution; indeed, as we shall see, it is quite similar to the a posteriori balance-sheet which the CCP itself made concerning the historical significance of the 1949 People’s Republic. Already in 1956, the report of _che Central Committee to the Eighth Congress recognized that the foundation of the People’s Republic was ‘the beginning of the stage of the socialist proletarian revolution’.⁵⁰ As Stuart Schram observed, ‘at the level of the tole of classes . . . Chinese thought draws closer to that of Trotsky. Even if the 1949 theory of the democratic dictatorship of the people was not formally abandoned, it was clearly stated, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the publication of Mao’s text, that the dictatorship of the people was, in its essence, identical to the dictatorship of the proletariat (Zhengfa Yanjiu, no. 3, 1959)’-⁵¹ Even more startling, at the State Conference of January 1958, Mao declared himself a partisan of the ‘theory of permanent revolution’, although taking great care to dissociate himself from Trotsky’s theory of the same name.⁵² Following Mao’s statement, a series of articles appeared in the Chinese press extolling the 'theory of permanent revolution’ of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao (no mention of Stalin. . .). In translating and publishing some of these essays, Stuart Schram discovered chat the Chinese term used to designate ‘permanent revolution’ {buduan geming) was exactly the same that had been employed as a brand of reproach in the 1930s against Trotsky’s theory. Most of the articles after Mao’s speech tried to reconcile the concept of permanent revolution with the previous orthodoxy of stagism, and the Central Committee even passed an official resolution (10 December 1958) emphasizing the ‘unity’ of the two theories. But in some of these documents the reconciliation of opposites is clearly belied; there are even instances, like the speech of Lu Ding-yi (member of. Central Committee) on the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s birth, where the affinity with Trotsky is quite strik-

'•‘'La ‘Revolution Permanente’ en Chine, Paris 1963, p- xxviii. See also Liu Shao-shi's report co the Eighth Congress of the CCP quoted in Carriere d’Encausse and Schram, p. 467.

⁵²'I am a partisan of che theory of permanent revolution? Do not be confused by Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. When one makes a revolution, it is necessary co strike while the iron is hot—one revolution must succeed another, revolution-must develop continuously.’ (Mao parle au peuple, p. 87).

situation imposed the conclusions of the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution.’ (Mandel,

ing. In this latter speech, Ding-yi stressed that ‘the democratic revolution -| must transform itself into a socialist revolution by the permanent revolu- j tion (buduan geming)' and that the proletarian revolution should be de-veloped ‘until capitalism has been destroyed in the whole world, and socialism has triumphed in the whole world’.⁵³

The third aspect of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution—uninter- • rupted revolutionary social change after the conquest of power—is also a s prominent theme in the Chinese writings on buduan geming. For example, ’H Wu Jiang wrote in 1958: ‘Comrade Mao Tse-tung said, “in our country -I revolutions succeed each other”. It has been so in the past, and it will be so ^ in the future. It will be so eternally; even the communist revolution is no exception, only that the nature and the form of revolutions in this era will not be the same as in class society. . . . The victory of the socialist revolution is not the end of revolution. ... It brings precisely the conscious * ’ permanent revolution, it brings an uninterrupted rise of humanity from the f realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.’⁵⁴ It is true, of course, that ‘ while Trotsky implicitly envisioned that the ‘permanent’ character of the revolution would disappear with the construction of world communism, J the Chinese theorized an ‘eternal’ process of struggle and change.⁵⁵ This distinctive moment of the Maoist interpretation of permanent revolution became one of the most prominent ideological themes of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

While the Chinese were boldly advancing the theory of buduan geming (and implicitly throwing overboard the stagist conceptions of The New ■ Democracy), the Russians were retrenching behind Stalinist orthodoxy. The : Soviet Handbook of Political Economy published in 1959 obstinately clung to the conception that China had evolved through successive stages of demo- ' cratic and then socialist revolution since 1949- The Chinese criticism of the .■ Handbook’s schema contained a vigorous and penetrating description of the ; real nature of the 1949. government and its first economic measures. ‘In China we had accomplished the tasks of the democratic revolution during the war of liberation. The foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 heralded the advent of the democratic revolution and the beginning of the transition towards socialism. Three years were still required to complete the agrarian reform. But from the moment of the establishment of the People’s Republic, we began to confiscate and nationalize the bureaucratic capitalist enterprises which represented 80 per cent of the ;

’’Quoted by Schram, La ‘Revolution Permanente' en Chine, pp. xxxix-xl (also see p. ix).

country’s fixed investment in industry and transport. . . . The struggle against bureaucratic capital had a dual character: on one hand, the fight within the framework of the democratic revolution against comrador capital; on the other hand, the combat against big capital as a whole which was integrally part of the socialist revolution. . . '. In this period the ratio of bureaucratic capital to ‘national’ capital was on the order of four to one. Thus after Liberation we had destroyed, by confiscating the entirety of bureaucratic capital, the principal bulwark of Chinese capitalism.’ The conclusion of this text was a direct polemic against a quotation from the Handbook: ‘It is, therefore, erroneous to believe that after Liberation “the Chinese revolution, in its first stage, was essentially a democratic revolution which only later evolved little by little into a socialist revolution.”’ The author of this critique, which offers such a remarkable explanation of the combined and uninterrupted nature of the Chinese revolution, was no other than Mao himself.¹⁷⁹ Again, as in the Yugoslav case, it is only post festum that the revolutionary leadership reveals—or discovers?—the underlying dynamic obscured by the ambiguities of official doctrines.

The very important question still remains, however, of the respective roles of the peasantry and the proletariat in Chinese revolution. Indeed, in this respect we shall see that events contradicted Trotsky’s writings, if not the theory of permanent revolution. It is difficult to put together an accurate portrait of the social composition of the red army and the CCP; according to Soviet sources, only 3 per cent of the Party membership in 1949 were workers.¹⁸⁰ The great majority of the leading cadre were of intellectual origin, while there can be scarcely any doubt that the peasantry comprised both the majority of Party membership and the main social force of the revolution, which took the form of a protracted ‘people’s war’—that is, a modern peasant war. How can we explain this in Marxist terms? One . tack, taken by certain Trotskyist writers, is simply to see it as the result of the decimation of the proletarian vanguard in 1927-30 as a result of Comintern misleadership.¹⁸¹ Obviously the defeat of the second Chinese revolution was the immediate determinant of the retreat of the CCP into the countryside and of the development of rural guerrilla warfare. But this hardly provides a sufficient explanation of why the CCP was able to sink

such deep roots amongst the peasantry (unlike Russia) or of how it har-1 nessed such prodigious revolutionary energies from the countryside. Thef question is all the more central given the emergence of similar patterns i_n3| Yugoslavia, Vietnam and Cuba despite very different historical* circumstances. We shall return to this question later. ^

As for Trotsky’s own position, let us recall that after the defeats of the t| late 1920s, he believed that only a new urban proletarian upsurge could* save the Chinese revolution, and he proposed the struggle for democratic?! rights and a constituent assembly as central slogans for re-awakening the!

popular masses.⁵⁹ According to some true believers, if such an orientatiohlf had been adopted the course of the Chinese revolution would have been'tf different and a ‘classic’ proletarian revolution would have been possible.¹⁶°j| At best this is an extremely tenuous and speculative hypothesis. In any|| event, the fact is that the Chinese revolution did assume the form of rural partisan warfare—a possibility specifically excluded by Trotsky and hiij^ Chinese supporters. Recently one of the ‘historical’ leaders of the Chinese 1 Trotskyists has self-critically admitted this error; while demonstrating thatJ¹it was not integral to the theory of permanent revolution but rather flowed I,

from an incorrect analysis of China’s social and political reality. ‘We| Trotskyists underestimated this revolutionary force of the poor peasantry of i| China. We dogmatically said that we should go to the workers and direct the peasantry only through the workers. . . . We thought that if we went directly to the peasantry, we would degenerate into a peasant party. We |j; acted according to our dogma. But we were wrong. . . . We always said ■$ that Mao’s party was a petty-bourgeois party. But, according to the theory _:of permanent revolution, no petty-bourgeois party can ever lead a proletarian revolution. . . . We cannot decide whether a party is proletarian or not by the criterion of the class composition of its membership. I think the most important criterion is the party’s political programme.’^{182 183 184} | These candid and insightful remarks bring us to one of the most complex | and puzzling problems of the Chinese revolution: the vast discrepancy between the cep’s social base and its political character. .Although from at)! least 1930 the overwhelming majority of the membership were peasants, the Party maintained its political allegiance to the working class and the programme of socialist transformation. Despite its long ‘detour’ through the countryside, the CCP retained its original nature as the organic party of $ the Chinese proletariat. As a matter of fact, only such an urban, proletarian

and ‘modern’ force could lead and centralize the dispersed and politically limited peasant rebellions, transforming them into organized revolutionary ■warfare on a national scale.⁶² As Brandt and Schwartz emphasized, ‘the party had never become a peasant party in terms of the ultimate aims of its leaders’.⁶³ To a certain extent the peasantry was the instrument which the CCP used to achieve proletarian ends. Denise Avenas has forcefully summarized the paradoxical relationship between the CCP’s social composition and its political aims: ‘Mao always took great care in defining his party as a proletarian party, even if it was composed almost exclusively of peasants and intellectuals. The Chinese revolution was sociologically a peasant revolution, led by ‘petty bourgeois’ intellectuals, but it would be absurd to deduce from this that it was equally true politically,'^M One thus discovers the operation of what Isaac Deutscher termed a ‘double substitutionism’: socially, the peasantry substituted for the proletariat as the revolution’s mass base; while politically, the Communist Party substituted itself for the working class. Nonetheless, the political leadership of the revolutionary process must be characterized as ‘proletarian’ to the extent that the CCP was—historically, politically and ideologically—a working-class party (albeit with significant bureaucratic tendencies).

As we have seen, a similar substitutionism took place in the course of the Yugoslav revolution, but with the very important difference that at least the majority of the cadre element of the ycp were of proletarian origin. In China, by contrast, the intelligentsia was probably the predominant origin of party cadre (although accurate information on the social composition of the CCP leadership is difficult to obtain). Indicative research during the late 1930s on the social background of seventy CCP leaders, for example, revealed that only 17 per cent were of working-class origin, while 70 per cent were ‘students from the families of small farmers, professionals, merchants and even aristocratic official families’.⁶⁵ The decisive role of the intel-

⁶²'A11 these peasant struggles . . . were directed against the excesses of the feudal system, not against the system itself. The political consciousness of the peasantry could not, by itself attain such a fundamental social critique. The passage from revolt to revolution had to place through the intervention of an outside catalyst: communism. ... In order that this dust of dispersed peasant revolts could be fused into a movement of national scope, the intervention (from 1925 onwards) of political forces coming from the towns (ideas, cadre, politico-military structures) was necessary.' (Chesnaux, p. 15). A contemporary Trotskyist assessment of the class nature of the CCP emphasizes that 'these peasant armies were led by a party which-=—as much by its programme and political perspectives as by its cadres’ tradicion, consciousness and temper—was not the outgrowth of the peasantry but rather had remained for nearly three decades the main spokesman for the Chinese proletariat.’ (Mandel, p. 181.)

ligentsia in the organization of the CCP and the leadership of the revolution! has often been neglected in studies of China. This is rather surprising when one considers that the CCP was originally founded in 1920 by the initiative! of two lecturers (Chen Du-hsiu and Li Ta-chao) and their students—amone f them a university librarian named Mao Tse-tung. Moreover in certain off Mao’s latter speeches, he refers to the early CCP simply as the ‘intellectuals’.⁶⁶ Successive generations of Chinese students replenished the| CCP s cadre; during the Sino-Japanese war thousands of them left the cities! to enrol in the red army and help with the agrarian reform.⁶⁷ In 1939 thef Central Committee issued a statement on ‘the absorption of intellectuals; elements’, which emphasized the importance of recruiting intellectuals and integrating them into the Party. Indeed, the statement went so far as to't declare, ‘without the participation of the intellectuals, victory in the'-/ revolution will be impossible’.⁶⁸ During the Second Civil War in 1945-9 there was a great wave of student rebellion against the Kuomintang; after] the rape of a Peking student by an American soldier at the end of 1946, ] more than a half-million high school and university students participated ] in demonstrations and strikes.⁶⁹ Thousands of these students subsequently] went over to the ranks of the red army; in a single ten-day period of 1948,1 4,500 students crossed the lines to join Mao’s forces.⁷⁰ As we shall see in latter pages, students and intellectuals also played outstanding roles in the? other socialist revolutions of the postwar period—Vietnam, and especially,!) Cuba. Obviously the contribution of the intelligentsia to revolution in countries of dependent or peripheral capitalism is a problem which/ ‘classical Marxism’ did not sufficiently take into account or analyse in properly specific terms.

Modern capitalist relations of production were introduced in Vietnam by French colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century, where they were articulated in a complex and explosive combination (not simply juxtaposition) of contradictions with traditional pre-capitalist agrarian structures.⁷¹The result, as in pre-1917 Russia, was a radical disproportionality between

“See ‘Some Experiences in Our Party's History', p. 325. Also see Maurice Meisner, Li Ta Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism, Cambridge, Mass. 1967.

⁷‘See Pierre Rousset’s remarkable book, Le parti communist vietnamien, Paris 1975, p. 12.

the social and political weights of the proletariat (urban and rural) and the national bourgeoisie. As Le Duan, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party ₀f Vietnam and a leading theoretician of Vietnamese communism, emphasized in a 1957 speech: ‘While giving birth to a weak bourgeoisie, the economic situation of Vietnam, on the contrary, created a quite strong proletariat, because in Vietnam the proletariat did not come into being at the same time as the local bourgeoisie, but was born and developed long before, with the exploitation and growth of French imperialist capitalism. The ruin of the small productive branches in the countryside and of small industries, dragged tens of thousands of peasants into the towns and French colonialist-owned rubber, coffee and rice plantations, and turned them into proletarians . . . the weak and dependent character of the bourgeoisie and its rapid submission to imperialism . . . have given the proletariat—a class oppressed and exploited by feudalism, imperialism and the national bourgeoisie—a predominant role in Vietnam’s political stage. . . ,’¹⁸⁵This underdevelopment of a native Vietnamese bourgeoisie was a direct consequence of the virtually complete domination of all important sectors of the economy by French colonialism.¹⁸⁶ In this respect, the experience of Vietnam (and of the whole of Indochina) differed from either China or India. In China the various concessionary enclaves of European and Japanese imperialism were never able to dominate the entire economy and a significant Chinese bourgeoisie did develop. In India, moreover, the English adopted more far-sighted imperialist policies than the French, favouring to a certain extent the growth of an indigenous bourgeoisie which could act as buffer and transmission belt between the British Raj and the masses. (As we shall see this difference would have profound political consequences.) Although certain sections of the weak Vietnamese bourgeoisie (particularly in Tonkin and Annam) did manifest anti-French feelings, Le Duan is correct to add the qualification, that ‘the anti-French imperialist spirit of a small section of the Vietnamese bourgeoisie was

nothing but the spirit to get rid of the French yoke to be subordinate to'i| another imperialism. With this economic situation and hence with the" class character of the Vietnamese bourgeoisie as said above, no national-liberation revolution led by the bourgeoisie was possible.’¹⁸⁷ The Viet-'"i|| •namese bourgeoisie’s incapacity to play a leading role in the anti-colonial ’7 movement was also directly related to their fear of a mobilization of thec peasantry. Many members of the Vietnamese bourgeoisie were also land- f owners or usurers who directly exploited the peasants. Indeed, the perva-1 sive character of usury in the countryside and the astronomical interests i rates which were charged (30-48 per cent per annum on the average, but ^ sometimes as high as 300 per cent), acted as a positive disincentive to industrial investment. It was generally easier, less risky and more profit- y, able for the Vietnamese bourgeoisie to lend money to the peasantry then to" i invest it productively.¹⁸⁸

In Vietnam, more clearly than in other Asian nations, the distinction between the bourgeoisie and ‘feudal’ landowners, or between ‘national’ and \ ‘comprador’ fractions of the bourgeoisie, appears as quite artificial- This % was recognized by a well-known communist historian, Nguyen Khac Vien I who, after making the ritual distinction between ‘compradors’ and the,| ‘national bourgeoisie’, acknowledged that ‘the limit between the two * groups was blurred, since the same bourgeois passed frequently from one | category to the other’. Moreover, ‘the Vietnamese bourgeoisie frequently ;• invested its profits in the acquisition of land which it exploited according | to feudal methods’.⁷⁶ This striking absence of an important native bourgeoisie—and, therefore, of a significant national-democratic bourgeois party like the Kuomintang or the Indian Congress Party—is one of the | reasons why the concept of the ‘bloc of four classes’ played a much less | important role in the strategy of Vietnamese communists than in the orientation of the CCP. Although the Vietnamese Party’s official line (at least until 1954) continued to pay homage to ‘revolution by stages , it never crystallized, as in Mao’s writings on ‘New Democracy’, into a rigorous dogma. Unlike in China, the alliance with the national bourgeoisie or !■[

the struggle for the ‘democratic revolution’ never coalesced into a coherent theoretical system that putatively guided Party policy for a long period. Instead Ho’s writings and Party documents in the 1930-1954 period reveal _{a w}ide variety of strategic approaches reflecting changes in the conjuncture Jn Indochina and/or the Comintern line. In this spectrum of positions, some stand out as strikingly left-wing. The 1932 programme of the Indochinese Communist Party, for example, defined a local version of the Third Period ‘class against class’ strategy. 'It is only under the leadership of the party that the revolutionary bloc of the toilers of Indochina—workers, peasants, labourers and poor population of the towns—will triumph in its fight against the counter-revolutionary bloc of the imperialists, feudalists, landowners, mandarins, notables and the traitorous native bourgeoisie.’⁷⁷Together with an assertion of the hegemonic role of the communists, this programme also recognized the revolution as a necessarily uninterrupted process: ‘Through the anti-imperialist and agrarian revolutions, the Communist Party will lead the revolutionary masses forward towards the struggle for the transition to socialism.’⁷⁸ By the period of the Popular Front (1936-9), however, not only did the Party abandon the perspective of socialist transition, but it greatly toned down all agrarian and anti-colonial demands; in the name of ‘unity against fascism’ it even temporarily set aside the call for national independence. In November 1945 the Party further accommodated the requirements of Allied unity by officially dissolving itself! Of course all this was merely formalistic and principally intended for diplomatic consumption, since the communists continued to exist under the cover of an ‘Indochinese Association for Marxist Studies’ (only in 1953 was the Party formally re-established as the Lao Dong—the Workers’ Party of Vietnam). Nonetheless, it is clearly symptomatic of the highly instrumental employment of ‘overt’. doctrine by the Vietnamese communists.⁷⁹ Historically the relationship between theory and practice in

¹¹VInternationale Communist, 30 July 1930, reprinted in Partisans, 48 (July-August 1969), p. 40.

¹⁸lbid. The Trotskyists considered this to be a 'reflection of the so-hated theory of permanent revolution’ (Anh-Van, p. 53). Since they were the only leftist force maintaining a public commitment to national liberation in the 1937-9 period, the Trotskyists won significant victories in the April 1939 elections in Saigon, receiving 80 per cent of the vote and electing three members to the Council of Cochin-China (South Vietnam), (p. 58.)

⁷⁹Le Chau, a remarkable communist intellectual, tried to justify the decision by the exigencies of negotiations with France, fheTTnited States and Kuomintang China. See his Le Vietnam socialists: une ecorumie de transition, Paris 1966, p. 76. On the other hand, most official histories of Vietnam have preferred to ignore this awkward episode. Cf. Breve histoire du parti des travailleurs du Vietnam (1930-1975), Hanoi 1976; and Nguyen Khac Vien, Histoire du Vietnam, Paris 1974.

Vietnamese communism has been complex and variable: sometimes the j official line has been a purposeful occultation of the real practice (as was obviously the case during the period of the Party’s ‘dissolution’ between 1945 and 1953), while at other times it has genuinely reflected the dy-namics of the revolutionary movement. The tension between doctrine and practice was also complicated by the differences between the Party line per' / se and the programmes of the different fronts (Vietminh, NLF, and so on) '\i under the Party’s leadership.

Thus the official line of the Party at a particular momenc in the 1930-54 ;; period may be a far from accurate description of the Party’s actual practice. ,) In order to understand the real strategic direction and line of march of the Vietnamese revolution, one has to look, similarly to the Chinese case, at the Party’s concrete actions as well as at certain a posteriori theorizations. which emerged after 1955- Since the Indochinese Communist Party was a,-faithful follower of Comintern (and later Soviet) policies at the level of its official ideology, it is revealing to catalogue some of its more important#! ‘heresies’ and autonomous initiatives on a practical plane: (1) the construe-tion of a united front with the Vietnamese Trotskyists through a common |? newspaper (La Lutte) and common electoral lists from 1933-1937—an■: event unparalleled in the history of the Comintern during the 1930s;¹⁸⁹ (2)% the organization of the Vietminh in May 1941 as a fighting front against Vichy French and Japanese occupation, only one month after the signing of a Soviet-Japanese peace and neutrality pact; (3) the seizure of power and the,,) declaration of independence in August 1945 despite Soviet acceptance at i Potsdam of the division of Vietnam into English (South) and Kuomintang „ (North) ‘spheres of influence’ (the USSR did not officially recognize the j Democratic Republic of Vietnam until 1950). |

congruity of the theory of permanent revolution with the history of the Vietnamese revolution, is the nature of the concrete policies implemented by the Vietnamese communists after the 1954 victory. The official Vietnamese documents from 1951-4 speak of a ‘new democracy’ and a ‘national-democratic stage’, while at the same time declaring that the ‘national-democratic popular revolution will inevitably progress towards a socialist revolution’.⁸¹ What was the real nature of the state established after the defeat of the French, and what kinds of revolutionary measures did it pursue? In 1945, largely under pressure from a concerned Kuomintang, some bourgeois-nationalist forces joined the coalition government led by Ho Chi Minh, but they quickly broke away, leaving the Vietminh under uncontested communist hegemony. Likewise after the establishment of the Democratic Republic in North Vietnam in 1954 there was no token attempt made (like in China in 1949) to include bourgeois representatives. Meanwhile, beginning in 1953, the Vietminh had launched a very radical agrarian reform in the liberated zones. After the Geneva agreements, the northern regime undertook a programme of strategic nationalizations which drastically reduced private capitalist control in industrial and commercial sectors. The state sector expanded very quickly and by I960 was completely dominant in the urban economy. The rapidity of this development is illustrated in the following table, which shows the percentage growth of state ownership in five key sectors.⁸²

Le Chau, a prominent Vietnamese communist economist living in France, openly acknowledged the impossibility of distinguishing two stages in the revolutionary process between 1954 and I960. ‘In spite of the distinction between the stages or tasks of the revolution, the socialist transformation of the economy . . . started during the period of economic reconstruction (1955-8), and even earlier in the liberated zones. The building of state industry and the establishment of a monopoly of foreign trade, im-

^a‘Resolution of the Second Congress, 1951, in Le Chau, p. 76. “Statistics from ibid., p. 260.

plemented since the beginning of the National Revolution, are activities ^ which belong to the sphere of the construction of socialism. Meanwhile to pursue the agrarian reform during the stage of transition to socialism is to 1i complete a task of the national democratic popular revolution. This is what permits the leadership of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to proclaim that there was no wall between the two revolutions.’⁸³

A similar course of events followed the liberation of South Vietnam in 1975. Although the programme of the National Liberation Front had not .; formally proclaimed any socialist aims—unless implicitly through the de- v* mand for eventual unification with the DRV—a socialist transformation of the southern economy began shortly after the installation of the Provisional -Revolutionary Government in power in Saigon. The banks, foreign trade, the wholesale rice sector, and so on, were nationalized, while the government also took possession of the many enterprises abandoned by owners --who fled with the US troops. A year after Saigon’s fall, Le Duan proposed to .f the first session of the National Assembly of a reunified Vietnam a fully- ,/ fledged program for eliminating capitalism in the south: ‘In the south we have to immediately liquidate the comprador bourgeoisie as a class together' ^:| with all the survivals of landlord domination and of the feudal regime; | implement the socialist transformation of capitalist industry and com-7j merce, of agriculture, the artisanate and small commerce under appropriate || forms and stages; combine the work of transformation and construction so to rapidly put the southern economy in the orbit of socialism and, thus, integrate the economies of the two zones into a single, great system of socialist production.’⁸⁴ Furthermore, no ambiguities were left about the § nature of the state or the possible contribution of bourgeois participation in 4 some ‘first stage’; according to the Declaration of the first unified National | Assembly, ‘the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a state of proletarian (j dictatorship which includes the whole country, based on the alliance of j workers and peasants, and led by the working class.’¹⁹⁰ As in China, it is / only a posteriori, after the conquest of power, that a coherent and accurate -picture of the revolutionary process begins to appear in official statements. / But while in China the most illuminating retrospective assessments by Mao ; were somewhat improvised and remained secret until the Cultural Revolu-tion, Le Duan and the Vietnamese leadership after 1955 were much more s

The Socialist Revolutions in Backward Capitalism 137 public and also systematically theoretical in their discussion of the nature of

Another, rather striking, difference between the Chinese and the Vietnamese communists was the existence of a certain plurality of formulations amongst various Party leaders. For instance, Truong Chinh, the former General Secretary of the Party, who was relatively more influenced by Soviet and Chinese stagist doctrines, insisted in his writings until the late 1960s that imperialism had been defeated by ‘the four classes of the people: the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie’.^{190 191} A distinctly different (and, in my opinion, more accurate) characterization was proposed by Le Duan, who speaks of bourgeois individuals, particularly intellectuals, rather than the bourgeoisie as asocial class, as joining the revolutionary front.¹⁹² Similarly, in a 1965 discussion of the war of liberation in the south, General Giap explicitly distinguished between some progressive individuals and the national bourgeoisie per se, which ‘has not completely severed its ties with the imperialists’ and therefore ‘is not determined to take the road of the revolution’.¹⁹³ And while Truong Chinh emphasized the National United Front as the cornerstone of the Vietnamese revolution’s success,¹⁹⁴ Le Duan ironically pointed to the gap between the idyllic image of national unity and the harsh realities of class struggle: ‘Under foreign domination, every Vietnamese longed to regain independence and freedom. . . . This was the general revolutionary viewpoint of the Anti-imperialist National United Front. It was not so in the historical reality. Immediately after the country was subjugated there were sections of the Vietnamese people which split off to side with imperialism and fight back against the people. . . . Like others, the Vietnamese society is made up of many classes, with contending interests!¹⁹⁵Other nuances are visible in the leadership’s differing definitions of the revolutionary state: Truong Chinh carefully demarcates the ‘dictatorship of popular democracy’ established in 1945 from the dictatorship of the proletariat which he claims only came into being after 1954;¹⁹⁶ Le Duan, on the other hand, simply states that ‘people’s democracy is also a form of proletarian democracy’.¹⁹⁷

We should not, however, exaggerate the extent of these differences. Vietnamese communism has been based on a common strategic perspective, one of the central elements of which has been the conception of an uninterrupted revolutionary process. Even Truong Chinh has declared that the line of the Party is based ‘on Lenin’s doctrine of Marxist-Leninist “uninterrupted revolution’”, which means that ‘the people’s national democratic revolution must develop into a socialist revolution, completely abolishing, by means of socialist transformation and building, exploitation of man by man.’¹⁹⁸ Although Truong Chinh tries to sustain the theoretical distinction between the two revolutions, he recognizes their inevitable combination in the actual historical process.¹⁹⁹ In a similar vein, Le Duan draws upon Lenin’s 1905 slogan (‘We do not stop halfway’); while in another essay written to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the ICP in 1930, he summarizes the general strategic lessons of the Vietnamese (and implicitly, Chinese) revolution in terms immediately reminiscent of Trotsky’s definition of permanent revolution. ‘In countries where the workers and the peasants play the decisive role and where the vanguard of the working class holds the leadership of the revolution, the victory of the national and democratic revolution is not only a victory of the people against imperialism and feudalism but also a victory of the proletariat over the native bourgeoisie, the victory of a new state power. To carry out well the national democratic revolution also means to begin the socialist revolution. The workers’ and peasants’ state under the leadership of the proletariat immediately takes up the historic tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat: to promote the socialist revolution and build socialism. In our time, the national democratic revolution led by the working class is, therefore, necessarily linked to the socialist revolution.’²⁰⁰ Ho Chi Minh's writings are not so explicit, but there are frequent references to the fact that although Vietnam is ‘a backward agrarian country’, the revolution takes the form of a ‘direct passage to socialism . . . without going through the capitalist stage’.²⁰¹

It is probable that this greater clarity of the Vietnamese communists concerning the question of the states and class composition of the revolutionary process is related to the relative weakness of the Vietnamese bourgeoisie compared to the Chinese. At the same time, the general pattern of class struggle—that is to say, the central role of rural guerrilla warfare—is similar to China. But there is also a significant difference: while in China after 1930 the rural areas became the almost exclusive terrain of revolutionary struggle, in Vietnam the locus of battle shifted several times between town and countryside, proletariat and peasantry. Before 1930, the Than Nien (Revolutionary Youth Movement—direct precursor of the icp) had a very solid base in the trade unions and amongst the urban working class in general. On the other hand, the first communist-led insurrection, the ‘Nghe-Tinh Soviets’ (1930), was essentially a rebellion of peasants. Then in 1936-8, during the French Popular Front, political activity again shifted back to the towns, where the icp and the Trotskyists organized strikes, mass demonstrations, action committees, electoral campaigns, and so on. From 1939 to 1945 the communists were forced back into clandestinity, retreating deep into the countryside where the first guerrilla units of the Vietminh were formed. The August 1945 uprising was the last great urban revolutionary mass movement of the first Indochinese revolution. In Hanoi, Hue, Saigon and the other important towns, the Vietminh launched a general strike which brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets. The Vietminh was rapidly able to disarm the demoralized Japanese and puppet garrisons as well as taking possession of all the important administrative centres.²⁰² After the counterattack by the French and the shelling of Hanoi-Haiphong in 1946, however, the revolutionary movement resumed its form as rural guerrilla war.

Considering that some 90 per cent of the population of Vietnam (at least before 1965) lived in the countryside, and that the modern proletariat was proportionately even smaller than in China, it was inevitable that the

'Cr. Le Duan, La revolution vietnamienne, pp. 25, 89-90; On the Socialist Revolution in Vietnam, vol. 1, p. 38; arid Sur quelques prohlmes intemationaux actuels, Hanoi 1964, p. 70.

⁹⁷Cf. Pierre Rousset, Communisme el nationalisme vietnamien: le Vietnam entre les deux guerres mondiales, Paris 1978, p. 88; and Nguyen Khac Vien, Histoire du Vietnam, pp. 190-1.

peasantry would become the largest social base of the revolution. As Giap himself has noted, 'the popular army grew in an agricultural country and in its ranks there was a stong majority of labouring peasants and urban petty' bourgeoisie.’^{200 201 202 203} Crushed under the weight of colonialism, taxation, usury, landlordism and militarism, the peasantry—mostly composed of landless labourers, sharecroppers, or very poor smallholders—spontaneously rebelled time and time again. From 1930 onwards, this rural insurgency was given an organized and articulate political expression by the communists.^{204 205}Although the Vietnamese communists acknowledged the predominant social weight of the peasantry in the revolutionary struggle, they have always maintained that the peasants were not, and could not become, the leading class. In a 1957 article Le Duan developed an analysis of the political role of the peasantry which strikingly resembles classical Trotskyist positions: The peasantry, representing 90 per cent of the population was a tremendous revolutionary force. But it had no independent political position in history, because the political leadership must always be held by the classes which represent a given mode of production. . . . While feudalism was colluding with imperialism to sell out the country and exploit the peasantry, the latter had two alternatives: to place itself under the leadership of the bourgeoisie or under the leadership of the proletariat. . . . Because the bourgeoisie was impotent and easily betrayed the interests of the peasantry, as the Chinese revolution had already shown, the great majority of the peasantry embarked upon the path laid out by the proletariat. . . .’¹⁰°

As a matter of fact, the leadership of the revolutionary movement in Vietnam (as in China) was invested in a party which—by virtue of its programme, historic perspectives, and international alignments—was proletarian in character. Moreover, as Le Duan has emphasized, this proletarian character was not at-all dissonant with the overwhelmingly peasant origins of the most of the rank and file. ‘Our Party is a party of the working

class; its political line, which reflects the viewpoinc and the platform of the working class, concretely answered the deep aspirations and the vital demands of the peasantry.’¹⁰¹ Although there is no doubt about the peasant background of most of the Party’s base, it is difficult to acquire any accurate information about the social composition of the Party’s cadre and leadership. It is likely that, as in China, a very significant proportion of the leading cadre were from the intelligentsia. We know, for example, that the immediate forerunner of the ICP, the Than Nien, was at first primarily composed of students. In 1926 there was a great strike of high school students against the French schools (a movement which, incidentally, the moderate bourgeois nationalists condemned) which led to the expulsion of more than one thousand pupils. Many of them subsequently joined the communist movement, while others returned from schools in France or China (where Ho had founded the first Vietnamese communist nuclei).¹⁰²In his investigation of the social origins of the main communist leaders in the south during the 1930s, Daniel Hemery has proved that most of them were intellectuals, and in particular, school teachers.¹⁰³' The semi-proletarianized layers of the native intelligentsia, therefore, were probably one of the major social sources of communist cadre; according to the communist historian Nguyen Khac Vien, ‘the first Marxist militants were mainly “petty intellectuals’’, forced to stop their studies before graduation from secondary school and working as employees in the civil service, the factories and the plantations. Many were village school teachers, frequently in private schools, acting as the old literati. “Pen handling coolies”, they shared with the workers and poor peasants the same misery, the same fear of unemployment, the same humiliations.’ Nguyen Khac Vien points very suggestively to a connexion between the communist intellectuals and the traditional pattern of relationships between the rural literati and the peasantry (an organic linkage that was integral to the great nationalist rebellions between 1885 and 1895). ’By entrenching themselves in the villages, by educating the peasants and by organizing them . . . the Marxist militants continued the tradition of the revolutionary literati of former times, although they took the peasant struggle to a much higher level by exposing ic to entirely new perspectives.’¹⁰⁴

¹⁰⁴Nguyen Kha Vien, 'Confucianisme et marxisme au Vietnam’, in Tradition et revolution au Vietnam, Paris 1971, pp. 50-1.

Unlike China or Vietnam, the unequal and combined development of the Cuban social formation in the mid-1950s did not take the form of an articulation of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production. The Cuban economy was thoroughly capitalist and its contradictions reflected a characteristic pattern of dependent capitalist development: latifundia versus minifundia, modern foreign industries versus backward local enterprises, and so on. Although Bias Roca, leader of the pre-1959 Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular—psp), spoke about the existence of‘semi-feudal latifundia’,²⁰⁶ the great sugar plantations were, in fact, capitalist agricultural units, frequently US owned, which exploited a rural proletariat and produced commodities for the world market. Ranking third in the volume of US direct investment in Latin America (just behind Venezuela and Brazil), Batista's Cuba was virtually a semi-colony of the United States, which controlled its largest banks, biggest factories, a majority of import commerce, 90 per cent of its utilities and communications, and 40 per cent of its sugar production.²⁰⁷

The Cuban national bourgeoisie was intimately bound to both the land-owners and foreign capital; tending to dilute itself, as a minor partner, in mixed Cuban-US enterprises or to deracinate itself completely by the export of capital to the United States. As Robin Blackburn has emphasized; ‘Cuban capital was invested not in competition but in collaboration with US capital. The result was the structural integration of the Cuban bourgeoisie within the economy of an alien capitalism.’ On the other hand, ‘from the 1940s onward, the countryside was increasingly repossessed by the urban nouveaux riches of Cuba’, who effectively fused with the landowning elite.²⁰⁸ Obviously such a bourgeoisie could not lead or even participate in a consistent revolutionary national-democratic movement, and it made little serious effort to implement any agrarian reforms or anti-imperialist measures. Each succeeding bourgeois government in Havana, whether civil or military, dictatorial or nominally democratic, accepted Cuba’s economic and political subordination to the United States as a necessary, inevitable and very profitable state of affairs. As Hugh Thomas bluncly put it, for Cuban businessmen and entrepreneurs ‘power ... lay in jvjew York, not Havana.’²⁰⁹

Although Cuban society was more completely capitalist than prerevolutionary Russia, it lacked the numerous and very concentrated large-factory proletariat that had provided a social base for Bolshevism. According to the Industrial Census of 1954, Cuba possessed only fourteen factories employing more than 500 workers, and the biggest one, the textile centre of Ariguanato, had only 2,500 workers.²¹⁰ Moreover, the largest sector of the proletariat, the rural labourers and sugar cane workers, were dispersed on the plantations in the countryside. Furthermore, if one compares the Cuban with the Chinese, Vietnamese or Yugsolav revolutions, the most obvious difference is in the nature of the leadership. In Cuba it was not a workers' party that was in the vanguard, but the July 26 Movement (M-26-7)—a radical-democratic, ‘jacobin’ formation of petty-bourgeois and populist origins. One cannot, therefore, adequately compare the ideology of the m-26-7 before 1959 with the official doctrines of, say, the Chinese Communist Party in the Civil War years. When Mao spoke of a ‘democratic stage’ in Marxist terms, he was under the influence of Stalinist conceptions propagated through the Comintern; when, on the other hand, Castro spoke in 1953-8 of a purely democratic revolution, he was simply expressing his own revolutionary-democratic ideology. In the first case, the gap between theory and practice corresponded to a misinterpretation of Marxism or the exigencies of orthodoxy, while in the second case it was a reflection of the limitations of a pre-Marxist perspective, eventually transcended in the course of the revolution.

What were the social and political dynamics of the Cuban struggle that led it to grow over into a socialist revolution? It should be recalled that the programme of m-26-7 during the 1953 period, as expressed in Fidel’s History Will Absolve Me (1954) and the various documents promulgated from the Sierra Maestra, were scarcely more radical than, for instance, Jacobo Arbenz’s platform in Guatemala in 1954. What really distinguished M-26-7, indicating its revolutionary potential, was its method of struggle: rural guerrilla warfare supported by a clandestine urban resistance network. By 1959 two years of revolutionary warfare had succeeded in smashing the main pillars of the Cuban state—above all, its organs of repression. It is important to emphasize that the guerrilla columns were

only the first act of the Cuban revolution, but their achievements were decisive, as they opened the way to a process of uninterrupted revolutionary mobilization and transformation. Not only Che, who had personally witnessed the treason of the Guatemalan army against the people in 1954, but also Fidel possessed a deep intuition of the need to sweep away entirely the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state. In the Sierra Maestra Fidel polemicized against bourgeois opposition groups who proposed to win away sections of the armed forces against Batista.¹¹⁰ On the eve of victory in December 1958 he stubbornly rejected an approach to share power with some of the military top brass opposed to the dictator; and when, after Batista’s flight to the Dominican Republic, a military junta took power with aim of negotiating concessions from the rebel army, Fidel called for a general strike. This political liquidation of the coercive apparatus of the bourgeois state—soon followed by the dissolution of other political institutions of Batista’s regime—was the concrete, material precondition for the rapid development and deepening of the revolution over the next two years. As a social-democratic historian of the Cuban revolution observed with astonishment a few years later, ‘the train had no brakes’.¹¹¹ Indeed, the well-oiled and time-proofed brakes that had stopped all previous popular revolutionary processes in Latin America—the armed forces—had been smashed in Cuba by January 1959. In his first ’Marxist’ speech (December 1961) Fidel returned to this crucial question and its historical significance: ‘What do reaction and imperialism always do? What do they try to conserve during every crisis? The history of Latin America is full of examples— they try, at any price, to preserve the system’s military apparatus. In the last analysis, it does not really matter to imperialism or the ruling classes who is president, member of parliament or senator. . . . When there is a situation of crisis, as in Cuba on 1 January 1959, the crux is whether the people will take up arms or whether the military apparatus remains intact, with all the weapons in its hands and the people unarmed. . . . The first thing that a revolution must do is destroy the military apparatus of the old regime and seize the arms. Of course, this is not the only necessary condition for revolution, but it is an indispensable one.’¹¹²

The implications of the destruction of the state machine were not immediately apparent in Cuba because a kind of ‘dual power’ continued for six

"°Fidel Castro, ‘Carta a la “Junta de Liberacidn Cubana’” (14 December 1957), in La Revolution Cubana, Havana I960, p. 134. s

^1I2Fidel Castro, 'Discours du 2 Decembre 1961’, in Trois discours sur la formation du parti uni de la revolution socialists de Cuba, Paris 1962, pp. 34-5- s

_or seven months between the legal power of a coalition government which included a number of moderate, anti-Batista bourgeois notables (e.g. President Urrutia, Minister Agramonte, and so on) and the real power vested in the rebel army under a radical, ‘jacobin’ command. This situation, as Fidel later explained, was less a result of a diplomatic ruse by the guerrilla leadership, than the product of their naive political illusions at the time, ■phis uneasy coalition and ambiguity of power quickly broke down, how-ever, after the ‘real power’ began to impose the first revolutionary-democratic reforms on the moderate ministers. One of the first important acts of the new regime after Fidel replaced the pro-American Jose Miro Cardona as First Minister in February 1959 was the creation of an ‘Embezzled Assets Recovery Administrate ’ charged with the expropriation of the property of Batista, his friends and his collaborators. What followed was comparable to the Yugoslav’s confiscation of ‘traitor’ capitalists in 1945, as the Cubans swiftly nationalized 2,000 firms and transferred more than $500,000,000 to the state sector. Given the complicity of the Cuban bourgeoisie in Batista’s looting of the country, the Recovery Administration hung over their heads like the sword of Damocles. Their apprehensions were further increased on 6 March when the government initiated a drastic reduction of rents by 30 per cent to 50 per cent. As J. P. Morray pointed out, ‘this shocked the wealthy, many of whom had money invested in real estate. For them this amounted to confiscation without compensation, a bad sign.’²¹¹The bourgeoisie’s reaction was to sabotage the economy by stopping investments, laying off workers, and, in increasing numbers, absconding to Miami with as much money and valuables as they could sneak away with. This flight of the Cuban middle classes continued through the middle 1960s, and, as we shall see, it provoked the government to appoint ‘inter-ventors’ to assume management of the deserted or paralysed enterprises.

At this crucial turning-point in March-April 1959 the leadership of the revolution generally proceeded pragmatically without clearly defined socialist perspectives. The main exception was Che Guevara, with his seasoned Marxist background, who was already emphasizing that there had to be an ‘unending development of the Revolution’ until 'the dictatorial social system and its economic foundations’ were abolished.²¹² The revolutionary decree that finally splintered the illusory unity of the government and M-26-7, polarizing the bourgeois and socialist currents, was the bold

Agrarian Reform. This definitive act ‘realized the worst fears of the land- -± lords’. ‘The expropriation of their land in excess of 30 caballerias (999 ' acres) was condemned as “worse than communism”, since the Partido Socialista Popular programme of 1956 had contemplated exemption from:? expropriation for sugar estates of any size, however large, where they were '-in efficient production. . . . The compensation promised for these expro-r priations was greeted with scorn by the landlords: bonds of the revolution-! ary government payable in 20 years at 4.5 per cent interest. What investor was going to purchase these at any fraction of their face value?’¹¹⁵ Moreov-er, the Agrarian Reform was simultaneously a major blow against imperial-ism since 40 per cent of the best sugar land belonged to American com-;! panies, including the infamous United Fruit. Against the fierce resistance:? of ranches and landowners the ex-guerrilla commanders in charge of the) inra (National Institute of Agrarian Reform) began to implement the! reform in a much more militant way, relying on the mobilization of the) peasants and plantation workers. As a hostile observer remarked, thisjf upsurge of the rural poor undermined ‘confidence in law and legal security’.¹¹⁶ On their side, the sugar planters, urban bourgeoisie and Yank-| ee companies—all of whom were linked by their common interests in the’!' exploitation of the countryside—created a united front against the reform;! With the open support of the Eisenhower administration, the right-wing ? of the government (Urrutia, Agromonte, etc.) and the right-wing of m-2 6-!| 7 joined forces to attack Castro for his ‘communist sympathies’. A few! months later (November 1959) the last ‘moderate’ was removed from pow-) er as Felipe Pazos handed over the presidency of the national bank to Che!) Simultaneously the labour minister was given the power to intervene and: assume control of all enterprises whose management was ‘not satisfactory’,' By this point, ‘the State control and the absence of legal protection rendered the normal functioning of the private sector and of the market; economy virtually impossible.’¹¹⁷ 3

^u7Ibid., p. 355- Very few observers were able to foresee in 1959 the full revolutionary dynamic of the Cuban upheaval. An interesting prefiguration, however, can be found in an editorial which appeared in Quatrieme International in September 1959: 'The Cuban "demo-: cratic revolution", whatever may be its "local colour", does not escape from the laws of permanent revolution in our epoch. . . . Necessarily beginning as a “bourgeois-democratic”: revolution in its leadership as well as in its immediate tasks (independence from imperialism, agrarian reform), it has seen itself entangled in the contradictions specific to every authentic revolution of our time; in order that its “bourgeois-democratic” casks may find a radical, solution, one has to fight resolutely against imperialism and indigenous reaction, including : the bourgeoisie, by openly depending upon the revolutionary mobilization and organization of

Jit the time of the Rebel Army’s entry into Havana in Januray 1959 jhere had still been hopes of cooperation with the United States, and Fidel's _visit to the United States in April 1959 was the expression of a moderate jnd conciliatory attitude. But the increasingly aggressive stance of the American government, particularly after the inauguration of the Agrarian Reform, was leading toward a showdown. The initial us weapon was Cuba’s historical dependence on American markets, and on 16 January i960 Vice-President Nixon threatened Cuba’s sugar quota because of the supposedly ‘inadequate’ compensation of us plantation interests. Eleven days later President Eisenhower asked Congress for power to cut the quota, while in the beginning of February the USSR came to the revolution’s aid with the promise to buy a million tons of sugar a year.

The decisive anti-imperialist turn of the revolution, however, was triggered off by the refusal of the Cuban subsidiaries of American oil companies in June I960 to refine the crude oil that had been purchased from the USSR at a cheaper price. The revolutionary government met the challenge of the oil companies by placing their refineries under the control of interventors. This step precipitated the inevitable confrontation between the revolution and the full power of American imperialism. On July 5 I960 Washington suspended the importation of Cuban sugar; the next day the Cuban government authorized the Prime Minister to expropriate the assets and inventory of us capital. The first massive nationalization took place a month later when the utilities, the telephone company, oil refineries, and the thirty-six largest sugar mills were repossessed by the Cuban people. In a speech to the First Latin American Youth Congress, where he announced these radical measures, Fidel also declared that the government was organizing a workers and peasants militia to defend the revolution. This was a decisive and irreversible step in the building of a new state apparatus with a radical class composition and political role. Ironically, just a few days before this body-blow to American imperialism, the PSP had published a document entitled Trotskyism: Agents of Imperialism’, which argued that ‘the Trotskyist ptovocators lie when they claim that “the Cuban people are seizing the assets belonging to the imperialists and their national allies". This is what the ap, upi and other imperialist mouthpieces say every day. But it is not tme. The revolutionary Government has not seized the North American the peasant and proletarian masses. This obliges the revolution literally to break through the bourgeois framework and organically develop its proletarian and socialist character.' (‘Ou va la revolution cubaine?’, Quatrieme Internationale, 17e annee, 17, (September-October 1959) pp. 29, 32).

properties; only in the cases where they have violated Cuban laws—like the | oil companies—has it intervened in order to maintain production and ^ prevent the economic sabotage of the revolution.’²¹³ ■

The confrontation with the United States transformed the insecurity ' of the Cuban bourgeoisie into panic, and che one-way flights to Florida $ became more common than ever. The government, in turn, increased the scale of its ‘intervention’ in shut-down or abandoned factories, as ex-guerrilla cadre collaborated with rank-and-file workers to restore pro- _rduction. These de facto nationalizations combined with the official’ expropriations of ‘embezzled assets’ increasingly gave the revolution an objectively anti-capitalist character. Although socialist aims had not yet * been explicitly proclaimed, Che stressed the incompatibility of free enter-prise with the ‘revolutionary development’ of the economy.^{214 215} On Septem- i ber 2 the ‘First Declaration of Havana’ conveyed the programmatic message'^ of the Cuban revolution to the peoples of Latin America, condemning th£f exploitation of man by man. Although broad sectors of private ownership'! still remained (at least in de jure sense), the revolution had unquestionably began to transcend a bourgeois-democratic framework.

Once again, however, the old Cuban communist party (psp) lagged far ' behind the march of the revolution, trapped in the sterile and irrelevant'" slogans of its stagist perspective. At the very moment that Che and Fidel*! were embarking on an anti-capitalist course, Bias Roca was informing the¹'! Eighth Assembly of the PSP (August I960) that the revolution was in its! ‘democratic and anti-imperialist stage’, and that it must, ‘inside limits that! will be established’, continue to ‘guarantee the profits of private enter-! prises, their functioning and growth’. He singled out the increasing nuni-fi ber of government take-overs as a symptom of dangerous ‘leftism’: ‘Therejf have been excesses, there have been arbitary interventions which could have!" been avoided. . . . One should not intervene for intervention’s sake. The intervention must have a serious reason. ... To intervene, without suffi-'; cient reason, in an enterprise or factory, does not help us, because this: irritates and turns against the revolution or the revolutionary institutions;; some elements that should and may support her, elements of the national bourgeoisie that should and could remain on the side of the revolution in^;this stage. . . .’¹²° One could hardly imagine a more striking example of the contradiction between the dogma of the revolution by stages (and of the bloc of four classes) and the real uninterrupted development of a revolution, fortunately the Cuban revolution was already too powerful a movement to become imprisoned in the Stalinist procrustean bed of the psp.

A few weeks after the PSP Assembly, on October 13 1960, the final blow _was delivered to the Cuban bourgeoisie and, more generally, to the capitalist mode of production. Two revolutionary laws nationalized the entire banking sector and almost four hundred firms—most of them Cuban-owned and many already under state ‘intervention’. The following day an Urban Reform was passed which nationalized all urban dwellings and transformed tenants inf permanent occupants. Finally, on October 25, the remaining American companies—including the giant Nicaro nickel plant, Coca Cola, Remington-Rand, General Electric, and so on—were nationalized. Together with the enterprises previously expropriated, the October measures gave the state ownership of approximately 80 per cent of the country’s industrial capacity.²¹⁶ The significance of these measures was undeniable: the democratic revolution in Cuba had grown over, through an uninterrupted and permanentist deepening, into a socialist one. Although Fidel and the revolutionary leadership only publicly acknowledged the socialist character of the revolution in April 1961, on the eve of the counter-revolutionary invasion at Playa Giron, the revolution had already abolished capitalism in October I960.

As Morray aptly put it, 'the conscious struggle against capitalism began as a struggle against foreign capital. The Cuban revolution knew that it was anti-imperialist before it knew that it was socialist. But the logic of the struggle quickly added October 13 to August 6.’²¹⁷ But is this logic anything other than that explained by the theory of permanent revolution? According to an observer hostile to both Trotskyism and the Cuban revolution, the latter ‘revealed itself as a "permanent revolution” in Trotsky’s meaning, of course without knowing it. It transformed itself, without interruption, from a democratic and national into a socialist and international one. . . . It is no surprise therefore that Trotskyists were among the first to recognize the socialist character of the revolution. Already in Octo-

^l22Ibid., p. 146.‘Because the Cuban bourgeoisie was structurally integrated into the neocolonial economic system, nationalism became a force directed against the whole social order, not merely the imperialist power/ (Robin Blackburn, p. 90.)

ber I960 the Secretariat of the Fourth International characterized Cuba as _a\f workers state. . . ,’²¹⁸ ff

This accelerated radicalization of the revolution was not the result of any | pre-established plan; both the leadership and the masses empirically dis-l covered the need to cut the gordian knot and take anti-capitalist measures'! in order to complete and guarantee the democratic revolution. As Che saijf in a speech to the First Congress of Latin American Youth: ‘This revolulf tion, if it happens to be Marxist, is so because it discovered by its ownf means the path that Marx pointed out.’²¹⁹ The first revolutionary initial tives taken in 1959 created an explosive situation which left the M-26-t| leadership only two choices. On the one hand, it could retreat, making¹?? some substantial concessions to the property owners and alienating itself! from the mass of mobilized workers and peasants. Or, on the other hand, ift could advance, rapidly and ruthlessly; taking bold anti-imperialist an? anti-capitalist steps with the support of an armed popular movement]!? Thus, in order to preserve consistency with their original revolutionary^ democratic programme, Castro and the m-26-7 had to transgress the limits; of capitalism and take the road towards socialist transformation. Che wrotjtj at the beginning of I960 that the revolutionary measures of the previous* year had built ‘a logical chain which leads us from the first to the last, in'a progressive and necessary scale’.²²⁰ This characterization, of course, applied; even more closely to the dynamic leading to August 6 and October lj I960. The dialectical unity between anti-imperialist and socialist measures¹was stressed by Fidel during his famous speech of December 2 1961. ‘Out! country had to choose between two politics: the politics of capitalism, of imperialism, or the politics of anti-imperialism, of socialism. One has to recognize that there is no middle ground between capitalism and social^ ism. ... It was necessary to make an anti-imperialist revolution, a social-,' ist revolution. But these are one and the same revolution, because therej no other. This the great dialectical truth of humanity: socialism is the only alternative to imperialism.’²²¹ 1

^ain and to keep the revolutionary process wisely within the limits of the ‘national democratic stage’, it is understandable why only a political force | _ceither formed nor deformed within the ideological mould of Stalinism _could cross the Rubicon and audaciously undertake the revolutionary socialist road. Correlatively, the non-Stalinist origin of the revolutionary leadership in Cuba probably was a major reason why the regime has undergone a lesser degree of bureaucratization than most of the other states created by the postwar anti-capitalist revolutions. A well-known Latin American Trotskyist leader, Hugo Gonzalez Moscoso, has offered this description of the dynamics of the 1959-60 period in Cuba: The events _were inseparably linked. The national measures went hand-in-hand with ! the socialist ones. No matter how one tries, it is difficult to separate the Cuban process into two stages, each with its distinct and specific measures. ’²²² One of the few attempts to discern such a separation occurs in ! the book by Vania Bambirra, an independent Brazilian Marxist. Bambirra considers that the first year and a half was a democratic revolution, during which time the government of the M-26-7 was equivalent to Mao’s ‘New Democracy’ or to Lenin’s ‘Democratic Dictatorship’ of 190 5.²²³ In my ' opinion, however, such a demarcation is totally misleading. True, one can say that the revolution started as a democratic one and then developed a socialist content, but there was never a self-contained or accomplished ‘democratic revolution’. Indeed, one of the principal tasks of the democratic revolution—national liberation—was not really achieved until August-October I960, that is, during what Bambirra believes was a second, socialist stage. Conversely, during the first, putatively ‘democratic’ period (before June I960) there had been the massive expropriations of 'embezzled assets’ and the growing ‘interventions’ in paralysed enterprises— measures which clearly transcended the limits of any merely democratic programme. As in the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the democratic, agrarian, national and socialist tasks were dialectically articulated and combined in the same unified revolutionary process.²²⁴ Since there was, in fact, a continuity of leadership between mid-1959 and October I960, and not, as in Russia in 1917, a radical change from February to

October, it is even possible to say that the revolutionary process in Cuba¹' had an even greater unity than the Russian.²²⁵

If the permanent character of the Cuban revolution has been recognized _f-as undeniable by most analysts, the same cannot be said of another key thesis of Trotsky’s theory: the concept that the revolution can only take place ‘under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard, organized! in the Communist Party’.²²⁶ For not only did the old Cuban communist^, party, the PSP, not play any significant role in the revolution, but the'l: actual revolutionary leadership—the rebel army and the M-26-7—both in' H ideology and in social composition was far from being a ‘proletarian van-’’ guard’. Moreover, the proletariat itself does not seem, at least until 1959, ,' to have been the driving force of the revolution. Under such circumstances how can one speak of a ‘proletarian revolution’ in Cuba? -Il

First of all, there is no doubt that the peasantry—similarly in Yugosli|§ via, China and Vietnam—played a decisive role in the Cuban revolution as| the major social base for guerilla warfare. According to most estimations^ three-quarters or even four-fifths of the fighters in the Sierra Maestra were"’ peasants;²²⁷ and it might be added that the peasantry was also the social; milieu which supported and protected the guerrillas. Even before the?! embarcation of Granma in December 1956, M-26-7 had organized a’S peasant militia near the Sierra Maestra region with the support of the/ respected veteran peasant leader, Crescensio Perez; this important network? of militants and sympathizers was crucial in saving the lives of the survivors"! of the Granma expedition and in permitting them to entrench themselves^ in the mountains.²²⁸ What kind of peasantry lived in the mountains of! Oriente province? According to Che, ‘the Sierra Maestra, locale of the first-

peasants who struggle daily against the landlords. Thus the peasants went? there as squatters on land which belonged to the state or some rapacious? landowner, searching for a small piece of land that would yield some small: wealth. They struggled continuously against the extortions of the soldiers: who were always allied with the landowning power, and their horizon; ended with the document of title to their land. The soldiers who formed our first guerrilla army of rural people came from that part of this social class which was most aggressive in demonstrating love for the possession of its own land and which expresses most perfectly the spirit catalogued as petty-bourgeois.’¹³⁴ This frank testimony belies the simplistic and oft-repeated view of the rebel army as the expression of the ‘rural proletariat’. Most of _the peasants in the Sierra Maestra region were minifundist share-croppers (colonato or aparceria) or squatters (precaristas) dependent on coffee production. All lived under the threat of local land speculators {geofagos—‘land eaters’) or coffee-plantation owners who, with the help of the Rural Guard, expelled the peasants and burned their huts.¹³⁵ Aside from these predations, the peasants were usually forced to go down to the plains to work as macheteros during the sugar harvest izafra) before returning during the tiempo muerto (‘dead season’) to the mountains. The precariousness of their existence and their incessant conflict with landowners and the state naturally predisposed the Sierra Maestra peasantry to sympathize with the guerillas. At the same time their mobility and seasonal labour created deep social and political links between them and the rural proletariat of the sugar plantations.¹³⁶

The peasantry’s paramount role in the guerrilla war should not obscure the important contributions made by the working class on other fronts. Any view of the Cuban revolution as an exclusively peasant phenomena is one-sided and superficial. As a matter of feet, the proletariat played a more important role in the Cuban revolution than in the Chinese. Working-class support for the rebel army was apparent from 1957. Following the murder of Frank Pais, the popular leader of M-26-7 in Santiago, the workers of that city and other towns of Oriente province paralysed the whole region with a political general strike on August 1; an action which was repeated on April 9 1958 following an appeal from m-26-7 (the strike failed in Havana because of political and organizational errors by the local leadership). Moreover many young workers from Santiago either joined the guerrillas or the urban sabotage and propaganda network of the m-26-7. As Rene Ramos Latour, the leader of M-26-7 in Santiago, explained to the national leadership after the August 1957 strike: ‘This shows clearly that the work-

¹³'’Guevara, ‘Cuba; Exceptional Case ot Revolutionary Vanguard’ (1960), in Selected Works, p. 60. The similarity with Yugoslavia is striking—see footnote 19.

¹³³See Guevara, 'Guerra y poblacion campesina'-(26 July 1959) in Okras vol. 1, p. 157; also Castro, Trois discours, pp. 27-8.

^l36,The Cuban working-class movement found through this mobility the natural representatives of its revolutionary ideology. An invisible belt united the Sierra Maestra to the giant proletarian concentration of the Zafra and through ic, to the urban and suburban areas, where part of the sons of the tiempo muerto sooner or later ended up.’ (Winocur, p. 395.)

The proletarian class has now entirely identified with us.’²²⁹ When, at th^| end of 1958, the columns of Che Guevara, Raul Castro and Camilio CienS fuegos reached the plains, they were reinforced by the massive support off the sugar mill and plantation workers. While Cienfuegos was organizing *1 Congress of Sugar Workers in December to prepare a general strike of mill! workers, Raul Castro was convening a Rural Workers Congress of three' thousand workers in his Second Front zone for the same aim.²³⁰ Finally, New Year’s Day 1959, as General Cantillo and other us-backed officers! were trying to form a military junta, a vast week-long general strike inf Havana and the rest of the country administered a coup de grace to alj: eleventh-hour attempts to save the regime. As Fidel himself recognized in| his first speech after victory: ‘The general strike was a decisive factor i|f assuring a complete triumph.’²³¹ ||

However, what distinguished the Cuban experience from previous anti-f capitalist revolutions in the peripheral capitalist regions—and what seenjf to particularly contradict the theory of permanent revolution—was not so| much the composition of its social base (the respective weights of the peasantry and proletariat), but the distinctive political and class character of its leadership. The pre-1959 M-26-7 was certainly not a proletarian! organization comparable to the Chinese, Vietnamese or Yugoslav communist parties, but it would be equally misleading to define its social composi-' tion, as several American authors have done, as primarily ‘middle class’. As! a matter of feet, the majority of the movement’s cadre belonged to a very] precise social category: the intelligentsia. It is important to emphasize that' while the intelligentsia shares important social links with the petty! bourgeoisie, it nonetheless constitutes a specific collectivity with auton|

oflious political and ideological characteristics. It was, above all, the university that was the real birthplace of M-26-7 and the leadership of the Cuban revolution: no less than seventeen out of eighteen ministers of the revolutionary government in the summer of I960 had university backgrounds.²³² Moreover, the revolutionary oppositon of broad sectors of the intelligentsia to the status quo was scarcely confined to Cuba; as Robin Blackburn points out, ‘in the plundered and subordinated Latin American societies of today, the formation of a dissident intelligentsia in revolt against the social order as a whole . . . is a widely attested phenomenon. A movement or revulsion and protest which in other countries has been limited to individuals, has in these societies taken on collective, near-sociological dimensions.’²³³

Yet the role of intelligentsia was not the singular attribute of the Cuban revolution, since, as we have seen, intellectuals were also extremely important in the Yugoslav, Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions. What was really unique about Cuba was the political and ideological profile of m-26-7. Neither Marxist nor Leninist, it was pre-eminently a revolutionary democratic movement with self-conscious jacobin aspirations. In a letter from prison in March 1954, Fidel wrote: ‘Robespierre was idealistic and honest until his death. . . . Cuba needs a Robespierre, many Robespierres!’²³⁴ With its combination of romantic idealism, incorruptible virtue, authoritarian democracy and social egalitarianism, the ideology of M-26-7 was almost classically jacobin. Furthermore, its class referents were neither bourgeois nor proletarian, but ‘plebeian’. In an important programmatic essay written in April 1956, Fidel declared: ‘The 26th of July Movement is the revolutionary organiztion of the humble, by the humble and for the humble. The 26th of July Movement is the hope of redemption for the Cuban working class, to whom the political cliques cannot offer anything; it is the hope of land for the peasants who live as pariahs in the fatherland that their elders liberated ... it is the hope of bread for the

hungry and of justice for the forgotten.’¹⁴³ The direct inspiration of this ideology came, of course, from the famed martyr of Cuban independence

Jose Marti (1853-95); whom Fidel referred to as the 'intellectual author’ off’ the 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks. Indeed, the leaders of M-26-7|| frequently spoke of themselves as the ‘generation of the Centenary’, since“!i the one-hundredth anniversary of Marti’s birth coincided with the begin.’ 1 ning of the revolutionary struggle against Batista in 1953. Marti’s thought combined traditional jacobin radicalism with modern revolutionary ideas,; and nothing provides a clearer guide to the ideological roots of Castroisnfi than Marti’s famous pamphlet, The Social War in Chicago, which was an;! evocation of the struggle of the Haymarket Martyrs for social emancipafj tion. Marti compares Parson and Spies to Robespierre and Marat, and the! entire text is a sui generis linking of jacobinism and anti-imperialism with a| burning sympathy for the workers’ struggle.¹⁴⁴ If Marti’s neo-jacobinism*,

ff¹

was the mainstream ideology within m-26-7, there was also a ‘girondin’,3; anti-communist right-wing (Hubert Matos, Diaz Lanz, Manuel Rey) af| well as a Marxist left-wing represented by Che. Moreover, other members* of the leadership also had a certain familiarity with Marxism: Raul Castrcf) had been briefly affiliated to the PSP’s youth movement, while Fidel had’ read texts of Marx and Lenin in prison (in a 1954 letter he expressed hisj enthusiasm for these ‘authentic revolutionaries’).¹⁴⁵ ||

After the rebel army’s entry into Havana, the class base and ideology of the revolution began to undergo a profound transformation. First of all, the| rural and urban proletariat began to assume an increasingly decisive role. Iff the agrarian reform of 1959 quickly satisfied the land hunger of the share-j croppers and the squatters, it unleased radical demands for collectivization! amongst the plantation workers and rural labourers. Precisely because a| the proletarian character of such large sections of the rural population, thej collectivization of the key sectors of Cuban agriculture (especially sugar)! had already advanced quite far by I960 and did not generally encounter thej kinds of peasant resistance that had occurred in Russia and in China.¹⁴⁴J

^M3FideI Castro, ‘El movimiento 26 de julio,' Bohemia, 1 April 1956, in Pensamiento CriticQ,. 31, August 1969, p. 11.

¹⁴⁴Jose Marti, La guerre sociale a Chicago (1887), in Notre Amerique, Paris 1968, pp. 244-76.^ ¹⁴⁵In Franqui, p. 93- J

^14sHuberman and Sweezy describe a conversation in I960 with a group of cane cutters who _:were asked if they were anxious to own their own plots of land: ‘what struck us was not their answer to the question, but that they didn’t understand the question at all until it had bees , repeatedly rephrased and explained. When they finally understood, they showed no desire for individual ownership but made it dear that what they did want was better houses, morej schools and steadier work.’ (p. 116.) See also Goldenber, p. 348. 7

Meanwhile the urban working class in the 1959-60 period moved more to the centre-stage of political life through a sustained mobilization in support of the revolutionary leadership. New mass organizations—workers’ militias, the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), etc.— increasely integrated the proletariat with the revolutionary state. At the same time, working-class initiatives ‘from below’ were a principal factor in jjje growing number of interventions and expropriations of capitalist firms (that is, for the growing over of the democratic into the explicitly socialist revolution). 'The pages of the magazine of the Labour Ministry, Trabajo . . supply evidence of the thousands and thousands of demands (expedients) made upon the Ministry of Cuban workers in the years 1959 and i960. In some cases the demand was highly specific—removal of a personnel manager who had collaborated with the former secret police—in others the demand was simply for ‘intervention’ or nationalization. In many cases the workers warn that unless the enterprise is taken over the owner will sell off its stocks and abscond to Miami.’¹⁴⁷The decisive point was reached during the battle of Playa Giron ('Bay of pigs’—April 1961), when the workers’ militia played the main role in the 72-hour combat which saved the revolution and crushed the US-instigated invasion (supported by a broad reactionary coalition ranging from ex-Batista henchmen to the former right-wing of m-26-7). As Fidel stressed in a subsequent speech: ‘Who provided the essential forces of the National Revolutionary Militia? The workers. Who died at the battle of Playa Giron, fighting against the invaders? The forces from the Havana batal-lions, although there were also units from Matanzas and Cienfuegos, who fought bravely; most of them were workers. This all means that the main force of the revolution, its backbone, is the working class.’¹⁴⁸ The American sociologist Maurice Zeitlin has characterized the class composition of the Cuban revolution in the following terms: ‘The revolution in Cuba is a ■working-class revolution; the workers in the cities, in the sugar centrals, and in the countryside are its social base. . . . The workers’ active and armed support of the Revolutionary Government has been decisive in the consolidation and defence of its power. Without their support the revolutionary leadership could not successfully have transformed the old order

^M7Robin Blackburn, ‘Class Forces in the Cuban Revolution: A Reply to P. Binns and M. Gonzalez’, International Socialism, 2, 9 (Summer 1980), p. 86. ^waFidel Castro, Trois discours, p. 52. Anyone who visits the old working-class districts of Havana will be struck by the number of commemorative stones wich the names of residents who fell fighting at Playa Giron.

and created Cuban socialism. The revolution was not a workers revolution »' in the classical Marxian sense, however.’¹⁴⁹

This so-called ‘classical’ case, represented by the October Revolution,?) involved the role of the proletarian masses as the direct and primary social?) actor through every phase of the revolutionary process. However, j_nCuba—as in Yugoslavia, China and Vietnam—the political mediations were decisive (particularly the political character of the organized revolutionary^ vanguard), allowing the proletarian content of the revolution to be estabsf

lished or maintained even in periods when the working class was not the | principal actor. As we have seen, the vanguard of the Cuban revolution ;? until 1959 was a jacobin intelligentsia with a profoundly plebeian inflec-l;, cion. After viccory, however, the vanguard was first polarized, then deeply radicalized. While the ‘moderate’ wing of m-26-7 defected to American? imperialism, the ideological mainstream of the movement chose the side of,, socialist revolution. What was involved was a phenomenon of ideological| metamorphosis on an unprecedently mass scale. It is typical for individual, intellectuals to be attracted to Marxism and the labour movement, but the? evolution of an entire revolutionary-democratic mass movement towards? Marxism and Leninism was very exceptional, if not utterly unique.]? Although the abstract possibility of such a metamorphosis was already? immanent in the Marti-inspired ideology and programme of M-26-7, the); real catalyst was the logic of the revolutionary process itself: first, the'; dynamic relationship between M-26-7 and the poor peasantry until 1959,? and with the proletariat afterwards; second, the new political field opened] up by the destruction of the repressive apparatus of the state; and, third,) the inevitable confrontation with imperialism and the national bourgeoisie? set in motion by the first revolutionary-democratic reforms. Fidel himself; has vividly described how his own ideological evolution was intimately' linked to empirical revolutionary praxis. ‘It is thanks to the revolution that we are going to accumulate a great deal of experience. The revolution ‘revolutionizes’ us inwardly. . . . The more we face the reality of the] revolution and of the class struggle, the more we discover what is in reality the class struggle; in the theatre of the revolution, the more we are convinced of the truth of Marx’s and Engels’ writings. . . .’¹⁵°

In his pivocal speech of December 2 1961, Fidel insisted chat the revolutionary leadership was ultimately driven to a choice between betrayal of the] masses and socialist revolution.¹⁵¹ Their own practical experience revealed

^l‘*⁹Maurice Zeitlin, Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban 'Working Class, Princeton 1967, p. 276.

_to the former commanders of the rebel army that the realization of the ideals of Marti and their own democratic programme necessitated socialist treasures. The only alternative would have been to abandon their radical-democratic aspirations, halt the revolutionary process and repress the militant workers and peasants. In other words, the ideological metamorphosis of Fidel and m-26-7 was in itself a very dramatic demonstration of the tinfolding of the theory of permanent revolution.

From the middle of I960, therefore, the m-26-7 and the rebel army must be considered as a movement that- was politically committed to socialism and the proletariat; even if this commitment was only formally declared in 1961. The unique and distinctive feature of the Cuban revolution was that its leadership was not initially a proletarian (communist) party at the beginning of the revolution (as in the other cases), but became so in the course of the revolutionary process itself. Such a possibility had obviously never occured to Trotsky (or, for that matter, to any other Marxist), but it is not at all contradictory to the main theses of the theory of permanent revolution. Rather it demonstrates that Trotsky, and classical Marxism in general, underestimated the revolutionary potentialities and the political importance of the radical sections of the intelligentsia in the peripheral capitalist societies.¹⁵² ¹⁵‘Ibid., p. 76.

¹⁵²On the other hand, although the USSR (or China) did not serve as a model for most of the Cuban revolutionaries in 1959-61, Soviet economic, military and political support was certainly a most decisive objective condition for the development of the revolutionary process.

The Unfinished Bourgeois Revolutions

In the previous chapter we asked, in effect: Is the completion of a s' national-democratic revolution an indispensable precondition for socialist- ■'% proletarian revolution? Is an alliance with the national bourgeoisie a neces- f sary stage before an anti-capitalist revolution of workers and peasants? Is it true that a society that has not solved its democratic tasks is not ‘mature’ v for a socialist revolution? In our view, all the successful socialist revolutions ^!of the twentieth century have resoundingly shown the fallacy of these 3 propositions. But there is another question, which should not be confused I with the first: Are national-democratic revolutions, under bourgeois lead- f erships, in fact possible in the dependent and peripheral capitalist countries? ■■ In this chapter we shall try to show why the answer to this question is much more ambiguous and contradictory.

Trotsky explicitly denied the possibility of further bourgeois-democratic ' revolutions. To adjudicate whether his negative view has been borne out by the subsequent course of history, we need to analyse more carefully the ^Ji presuppositions of his forecast. In The Permanent Revolution there two parallel assertions: first, that under bourgeois (or non-proletarian) leadership the ^ ‘complete and genuine solution’ of democratic and national tasks is not S possible; and, secondly, that under such leadership the democratic movement will attain ‘only very partial results’ or ‘wretched, unstable and niggardly’ solutions.¹ The difficulty in evaluating these hypotheses is that : the terms of the question are themselves far from unambiguous. What, for ' example, are the standards for measuring the ‘completeness’ of the revolutionary solution of democratic tasks? What are the appropriate historical ' models for such a comparison: 1789? 1917? How should we define^ ‘democracy’? Was, for instance, West Germany in the 1950s (when the " Communist Party was outlawed) more or less ‘democratic’ than Sukarno’s ^lTbe Permanent Revolution, pp. 132, 152.

Indonesia (where the Communist Party and its mass movements enjoyed full freedom)? And what constitutes the ‘genuine’ solution to the agrarian question: the French, American or Prussian roads (to use Lenin’s famous classification)? Finally, what is ‘complete’ national liberation? If it means more than formal-juridical independence, then what are its economic specifications? Indeed, what is the meaning of ‘economic independence’ in the framework of the world market and the international capitalist system?

Since we are, first of all, engaged in judging the accuracy of Trotsky’s views on these questions, the most coherent approach is undoubtedly to employ as a bench-mark his own definition of a ‘complete and genuine solution’ of national-democratic tasks (a definition that, at any event, is quite similar to the general understanding of Marxists). Three criteria are absolutely crucial in Trotsky’s definition:

(1) Solution to the agrarian question: the definitive abolition of all precapitalist modes of exploitation of the rural labour force, the expropriation of the great landowners and the distribution of their domains to the peasantry (if not to cooperatives or the revolutionary state).

(2) National liberation-, the unification of the ‘nation’ and its political and economic emancipation from foreign (imperialist) domination. Trotsky used the term ‘colonial and semi-colonial’ domination, but today it would be more familiar to speak of ‘dependency’, meaning the domination of the decisive sectors of the economy by imperialist-transnational capital.

(3) Democracy: a secular democratic republic based on universal suffrage and democratic freedoms, especially for the labour movement.²³⁵

One could, of course, argue that even the ‘classical’ bourgeois revolutions in the Netherlands, England and Scotland, the United States, and France did not always implement ‘complete and genuine’ solutions of these tasks: one might instance the persistence of the monarchy in Britain and Holland, the disfranchisement of blacks in the United States, and so on. However, it must be emphasized that these survivals of the past involve either largely symbolic structures (the ‘kingdom’ in the United Kingdom) or affect only a minority of the population, whereas the agrarian, national and democratic questions are urgent social and political issues for the vast majority of the population in the countries of the Third World. Alternatively, one could raise the objection that Germany, Italy and Japan all skipped the ‘classical’ path and solved their bourgeois tasks without a

popular revolution. After a series of protracted internal struggles, world wars and political convulsions—through, that is, a semi-revolution from i above (or, in Gramsci's phrase, a ‘passive revolution’)—these countries have ' finally established stable bourgeois-democratic states on advanced industrial bases. It is essential to recall, however, that Germany and Italy achieved their original ‘passive revolutions’ before the ‘closure’ of the space of politico-economic autonomy in the high imperialist era; likewise Japan ^;managed, rather uniquely in Asia, to remain relatively secure from im- ; perialist penetration until it had created its own infrastructure for capitalist k development. This contrasts with the situation of most of the present Third ‘ World which is firmly and extensively integrated into structures of dependency and imperialist domination. Nevertheless, in evaluating Trotsky’s theses we will examine not only cases of popular-democratic revolu- ;i tion in the peripheral countries, but also possible examples of ‘passive revolution’ from above. ;

It is very important to emphasize, however, that Trotsky never saw ■> industrialization per seas a. revolutionary-democratic task, and he never denied the possibility that the indigenous bourgeoisie in backward countries might, even under imperialist domination, achieve a significant degree of t industrial development. As a matter of fact, the most industrialized countries of peripheral capitalism, Brazil and Iran (South Africa is in a special category, since its classification is debatable), have undergone recent industrial booms precisely because of their thorough subordination to imperialism. In both cases democracy was ruthlessly suppressed, while in Brazil the latifundia have also remained untouched (under the Shah, Iran experienced a very limited, ‘Stolypin’ agrarian reform). In other words, industrial development was possible without revolutionary-democratic transformation—indeed, perhaps thanks to its absence.³ Discussing the most rapidly -■ growing semi-industrialized countries of the periphery, a team of American researchers has stressed that 'the Third World countries with the highest rates of “fragmented” industrialization are the ones with the highest concentration of foreign capital in modern industrial sectors, highest rates of exploitation of labour, lowest proportion of workers in autonomous class-anchored social movements; most are police states; many of the influential ²³⁶

officials came to power with aid from the imperial state apparatus. . . .’⁴Moreover, it is crucial to recognize that this industrialization has not implied anti-imperialist confrontations with the capitalist metropolises, or a struggle for independent national development, but rather, in most cases, a conscious strategy of integration and collaboration with imperialist capital. ‘In recent decades . . . rapid industrial growth seems to have taken place only, or at least mainly, in those capitalist countries most obviously satellitized by the advanced countries.’²³⁶

If most scientific observers are agreed on the dependent character of industrialization in the capitalist periphery until now, they are more divided about its future prospects. But Sutcliffe, for example, cautiously avers that ‘it is not impossible that, as a result of changes in the structure of imperialism we shall see further attempts at independent capitalist industrialization’.⁶ Bill Warren is one of the few authors who has actually tried to demonstrate that such an independent industrialization process is already under way in parts of the Third World. Yet to sustain this argument Warren is forced to resort to such egregious devices as the assertion that the massive take-over of Latin American industry by US capital over the last twenty-five years is only ‘conjunctural and temporary’! Or the non sequitur that because the technological development of Third World is ‘certainly not stagnant’, that, therefore, the technological independence of these countries is ‘on the way to being fulfilled’.⁷ While such eventualities cannot be totally discounted, the evidence so far marshalled to demonstrate the imminent or even medium-term emancipation of the peripheral countries from dependency is not very convincing. At any event, this debate is largely beyond the scope of this book, which does not deal with Zukunf-tsmusik and prospects for the twenty-first century, but, more modestly, with the balance-sheet of past and present developments in the light of the theory of permanent revolution. Returning, therefore, to the criteria cited above for defining a genuine and ‘complete’ revolutionary-democratic

“Philip McMichael, James Petras and Robert Rhodes, ‘Imperialism and the Contradictions of Development', New Left Review S3, May-June 1974, p. 94.

⁵Bob Sutcliffe, ‘Imperialism and Industrialization in the Third World', in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe, Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, London 1972, p. 192.

⁷Bill Warren, 'Imperialism and Capitalist Industrialization', New Left Review 81, September-October 1973, p. 34. Warren also argues that the growing 'bargaining strength’ of the Third World is further proof of their economic independence; buc, as McMichael, Petras and Rhodes correctly note in their polemic against Warren, he ‘never distinguishes between "bargaining” over the terms of dependence, diversification of dependence and national development. . . . He confuses efforts by a country to alter the exchange relationship with foreign capital . . . with the elimination of imperialist exploitation’ (p. 89).

transformation, the question is to determine whether any movements under bourgeois (or non-proletarian) leadership have been able to accomplish all three historical tasks.

Some countries—Mexico, Bolivia, Algeria, Peru, etc.—have implemented relatively radical agrarian reforms, while others—Mexico, India, Vene- ?$j zuela, etc.—have established more or less stable parliamentary democratic || states. Finally, some countries have attained a significant degree of political and economic independence in relationship to imperialism: Algeria, Bur- i| ma, Egypt (at least in Nasser’s time), Mozambique, etc. Yet these results ;'r, must be qualified in two ways: first, each of these accomplishments has 3; been incomplete, limited and often ephemeral; secondly, no country has so ') far succeeded in successfully combining all three revolutionary-democratic J transformations, and, as a result, explosive and unresolved contradictions have persisted in the core of their social formations. Moreover, it is impor- I tant to distinguish the two social modalities assumed by most of these | revolutionary-democratic movements: i

(1) Interrupted popular revolutions', where the popular masses, workers and/or ^;peasants, burst onto the scene of history, smash the old political structures, j but are eventually neutralized by bourgeois or petty-bourgeois forces who usurp leadership and ‘institutionalize’ the revolution. Classic cases include; J Mexico (1910-20), Bolivia (1952-55) and Algeria (1954-65).

(2) Semi-revolutions from above-, characterized by a Bonapartist leader with : broad popular support who implements some important reforms. Examples include: Kemal Ataturk (Turkey 1919-38), Getulia Vargas (Brazil 1930-45, 1950-54), Lazaro Cardenas (Mexico 1934-40), Juan Peron (Argentina 1944-55), Nehru (India 1947-64), Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala 1951-54), / Nasser (Egypt 1952-70), and Sukarno (Indonesia 1945-66). These ‘semi- f. revolutions’ are unstable and tend to dissipate or disintegrate altogether > after the death, retreat or overthrow of the Bonapartist and charismatic . leadership (although some reforms may survive).

This taxonomy, of course, is relative, not absolute: in every actual historical case movements ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ interacted with each other, sometimes as a conflictual balance of forces, at other times as a succession of phases. Moreover, we are faced with a number of contemporary revolutions or semi-revolutions which embody aspects of both processes, but whose ultimate fate still remains to be arbitrated by history: South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Afghanistan and Ethiopia.

These are certainly among the most advanced revolutionary-nationalist regimes in the Third World, but sooner or later they will have to cross the Rubicon between the ‘Algerian’ or ‘Cuban’ roads; that is, between a Bona-partist capitalist ‘normalization’ or a deepening toward socialist revolution—a choice that will inevitably provoke a deep crisis in their present leaderships (outright counter-revolutionary military coups, of course, are not excluded either).

It is important to emphasize that we are considering here only developments in the so-called Third World, since in the relatively backward countries of Europe, bourgeois solutions seem, at least for the moment, to have successfully prevailed. The prototype of all European colonies, Ireland, is the most important example: through a protracted and violent national liberation struggle—involving massive popular mobilization, insurrection and guerilla warfare—a bourgeois/petty-bourgeois leadership was able to achieve national independence (except for six of the Ulster counties), establish small capitalist agriculture and preserve bourgeois democracy without interruption for more than a half century. The result has been the consolidation of the one of the most stable and conservative socio-political orders in Western Europe. More recently, the backward capitalist countries of the Iberian peninsula have undergone bourgeois-democratic transformations. In Portugal the failure of the bourgeoisie to end the colonial wars or to introduce democratization created a pre-revolutionary crisis and the beginning of a process of‘uninterrupted revolution’ (1974-75); but because of the divisions within the workers’ movement and the reformist strategies of its leadership, a bourgeois stabilization has been achieved. Meanwhile in Spain the Moncloa pact between the bourgeois and workers’ parties seemed to guarantee an orderly transition from dictatorship to a modern ‘European’ bourgeois-democratic state; the failure, however, to dismantle the old Francoist repressive apparatus now threatens this experiment in moderate democratization with a ‘Turkish’-type military coup. With this last qualification, all the belatedly developed capitalist societies of Europe have solved—via revolutionary, semi-revolucionary or non-revolutionary means—most of their outstanding democratic tasks. Certainly some major anti-democratic residues remain: the monarchy, the unpurged Francoist army/Guardia Civil, and Basque national question in Spain; the agrarian problem in Southern Portugal; the continuing-partition of Ireland; etc. But it would be obviously anachronistic to set these problems in a ‘per-manentist’ problematic, when a classical proletarian-socialist revolution is, in fact, the order of the day in Ireland and Mediterranean Europe.

the contradictions were and are much more deeply rooted in imperialism,⁸how do we evaluate the success of the attempts at bourgeois-democratic transformation? As a rule, the interrupted popular revolutions achieved far more important and lasting results (with the exception of Bolivia), than the ‘semi-revolutions from above’. The explanation of this difference, of course, is not difficult: the conquests won by armed and insurgent mass movements are generally deeper and more radical than the concessions granted by bourgeois or petty-bourgeois Bonapartist regimes. To judge, however, whether either of these roads has produced reforms sufficiently profound and durable to qualify or refute Trotsky’s prognosis, we now need to consider some of the more ‘successful’ examples (since the failures would obviously tend to confirm the theses concerning the impossibility of finished bourgeois revolution in the backward countries).

Mexico is unique as the only democratic revolution in the twentieth cen- § tury that took place before October 1917. This is a crucial difference because '|i it meant that until 1917 the danger of a proletarian revolution was a rather | abstract threat to the native bourgeoisie of the non-European countries. % Nowhere did indigenous proletarian organizations with clear anti-capitalist and collectivist programmes appear as a serious competitors or menaces to the bourgeois leadership of the revolution. This is probably the reason why % the Mexican bourgeoisie, or at least some of its fractions, was still able to | play a certain revolutionary role. Thanks to its role in the revolution, and $ through the mediation of a Bonapartist state, it has consolidated a popular .:§ hegemony that has allowed it to build one of the few relatively stable and if democratic states in the Third World. §

At the same time, it is, of course, true that the most advanced social ? measures of the Mexican Revolution were not granted by the bourgeoisie, ; but rather violently wrested by insurgent peasant masses. From its begin- j

“This, of course, is one of rhe primary differences berween rhe backward capitalist countries of Europe and those of the Third World; despite their relative economic tecardation and penetration by multinational capital, both Portugal and Spain (like Russia before 1917) were also imperialist powers in their own right. Ireland, of course, is a different case; but it is , important to remember that the Irish national liberation movement is probably the oldest in j; the world, and that Irish republicanism was incubated in the Revolutions of 1789 and 1848. Moreover the crucial agrarian reforms that consolidated a native Irish rural bourgeoisie had j been largely accomplished by the eve of the First World War. Thus Ireland belongs to a different temporality (closer to the European 'semi-revolutions' of the later nineteenth cen-tury) than that of most of the twentieth-century Third World revolutionary-democratic movements. f

ning in 1910, the Revolution had a double character. From below, the immense movement of armed peasants under the leadership of Villa and Zapata crushed the old rural oligarchy of the Porfiriato and introduced a radical ad hoc land reform, which in certain regions (e.g. Morelos, Zapata’s state) took on an anti-capitalist character. This mass peasant insurrection reached its highest level in December 1914 when the armies of Villa and Zapata entered Mexico City; but, as Trotsky was later to stress, the peasants were unable to wield central power or establish their own regiem. Both Villa and Zapata were too radical to accept the moderate reformist programme of the bourgeois forces; but, on the other hand, there was no independent proletarian political movement to ally with, so they were left in a stalemate. After a few weeks of occupation, therefore, the peasant armies left the capital and returned to their home bases (Villa to the North, Zapata to the South).²³⁷ Apart from this quixotic interlude of peasant power, bourgeois politicians of various stripes—moderate-reformist (Madero) or conservative (Carranza)—maintained control of the fluctuating authority of the national government, attempting to channel and ‘institutionalize’ the revolutionary wave for their own ends. The relatively progressive Constitution of 1917 provided the reformist bourgeoisie with a popular platform, to contain the revolutionary momentum that had begun to ebb as a result of sheer exhaustion and mortality (over one million people died between 1910 and 1920). The murder of Zapata in 1919 symbolized the interruption of the popular revolution and the beginning of bourgeois consolidation. The reformist government of General Obregon initiated a ‘constitutional’ agrarian reform, while his successor, General Calles, shattered the political and economic power of the Catholic Church. A new step forward was taken by General Lazaro Cardenas (1934-40) who implemented a kind of semirevolution from above with massive land redistributions and the expropriation of the Anglo-American oil monopolies. Following Cardenas there was a long period of conservative stabilization which was only temporarily broken by the student-worker unrest of 1968. This brief contestation of the so-called Institutionalized Revolution was ruthlessly crushed by the state in a series of clashes that culminated in the Tlatelolco Massacre (800 dead).

How far did the Mexican revolution of 1910-19 (and its reformist sequel under Cardenas in the late thirties) succeed in accomplishing the three historical democratic tasks?

There is no doubt that the Mexican state is formally one of the most democratic structures anywhere in the peripheral capitalist countries. But

this 'Bonapartist democracy’ has narrow limits, even in terms of classical liberal-democratic criteria. Mexican ’democracy’ has been aptly described as a peculiar brand of populism and corporatism, authoritarianism and persuasion, cooptation and repression. The same party, the Partido Revolu-cionario Institutional (pri) has held a monopoly of power for sixty years, while potentially important opposition parties, like the Communist Party, have frequently been outlawed or excluded from electoral competition. The weakness of the organized opposition, in turn, makes the electoral process a simple formality and largely meaningless event (the real choice of the president is the result of secret negotiations within the upper echelons of the pri hierarchy). The President of Mexico is an almost autocratic ruler, whom no institutional, judicial or parliamentary power can check. Analysing the President’s discretionary powers, Lorenzo Meyer writes: ‘If, for some reason, he decides to act against a group or an individual citizen, there is little they can do to protect their position and, in some instances, their lives. There is still truth in the popular view that the President can do as he wishes.’²³⁸ The Tlatelolco Massacre was only the most dramatic recent example of this presidential absolutism and the limitations that it imposes on the exercise of substantive democracy in Mexico.

As to the second question, agrarian reform, there can be no doubt that the land reforms initiated by the 1910 Revolution and extended later by Cardenas destroyed the semi-feudal hacienda system and paved the way for the emergence of modern capitalist agriculture. But is it accurate to claim that in Mexico the great landowners have been expropriated and their land distributed to the peasants (the classical definition of the revolutionary-democratic solution of the agrarian question)? As a matter of feet, since 1940 there has been an accelerating reconstitution of latifundia, but now with a clearly capitalist character and employing wage labour. In I960, for example, 0.5 per cent of all owners possessed 42 per cent of total ararable land, while 65 per cent of farmers were left with only 17 per cent. Moreover, the rural bourgeoisie is extremely concentrated, with 3,854 very large private latifundists owning ferns of over 5,000 hectares and aggregately controlling more than half the total land surface organized in farms of over 200 hectares. At the other pole of the rural social structure, there is a massive and rapidly increasing concentration of landless poor: in 1966, 57 per cent of the active agricultural population owned no land at all.²³⁹

Although agrarian reform and the periodic redistribution of land have been one of the secrets of the relative stability of the Bonapartist regime in Mexico, it is obvious that the land question is far from ‘solved’. Indeed, the polarization between the new latifundia and the landless (or minifundist) peasantry is becoming an increasingly explosive contradiction that generates violent confrontations and permanent social unrest in the countryside.

The nationalization of infrastructure (utilities, communications and transport) and petroleum has created a powerful state-capitalist sector in Mexico and has given the state a relatively powerful bargaining position vis a vis American imperialism. However, notwithstanding the official ‘nationalist’ rhetoric favoured by the pri, Mexico has an increasingly dependent capitalist economy, whose key industrial growth sectors are dominated by multinational (principally North American) corporations.¹² Foreign investment in Mexico grew from $1,080 million in I960 to $2,300 million in 1969; an increase of more than 100 per cent in less than a decade. Foreign enterprises account for 45 per cent of the share capital of the 290 largest industrial firms, and in the areas of greatest concentration (where the four largest firms control at least three-quarters of total production), foreign domination rises to 71 per cent. In general terms, foreign firms are more capital-intensive, own larger plants, have higher labour productivity and grow faster than Mexican companies.¹³ It is, thus, not surprising that a United States Senate sub-committee study of American firms operating in Mexico referred to a trend towards the ‘denationalization' of Mexican industry.¹⁴ Moreover, Mexican national capitalists have been eager to link themselves to foreign capital through technological agreements, coparticipation, etc. To this must be added the burgeoning foreign debt, which has risen from $842 million in I960 to around $20 billion in 1976.¹⁵The result, according to one leading Mexican economist, is an irreversible process of integration into the ‘imperial orbit’, while another writer has warned that ‘there is no possibility of a national development dominated by the national bourgeoisie. . . . The history of nineteenth-century Europe will not be the history of twentieth-century Mexico.’¹⁶

¹²See Richard S. Weinert, 'The Stare and Foreign Capital’, in Reyna and Weinert, esp. p. 117.

¹³Cf. David Barkin, ‘Mexico’s Albatross: The United States Economy’, Latin American Perspectives, II, 2, Summer 1975, p. 71; and Fernando Fajzylber, ‘Las empresas transnacionales — y el sistema industrial de Mexico', El Trimestre Economics,-A2-,448yT)ctober-December 1975, pp. 909-11-

^,<5Jose Luis Cecena, Mexico en la orbita imperial, Mexico 1970; and Jose Luis Reyna, ‘Redefining the Authoritarian Regime’, in Reyna and Weinert, p. 157.

In this context it is salient to note the formation of a vast manufacturing free trade zone along the Mexico-US border as hundreds of Yankee firms have taken advantage of a special treaty arrangement to locate assembly plants to exploit cheaper Mexican labour. Comparing the advantages of the Mexican frontier to East Asia, an executive of an important Mexican bank declared: ‘Here the dockers’ strikes do not disturb the movement of commodities, the transport costs are low, while American technicians and managers can live in the United States and commute across the border every morning . . . the wages are now far more attractive to business than in Japan; and finally Mexico is a politically stable country which has never implemented foreign currency controls.’²⁴⁰ Of course the recent discovery of huge new oil reserves may to a certain extent mollify the extreme bilateral orientation of the Mexican economy towards the United States and increase the bargaining power of its national bourgeoisie. But as the example of Iran has made dramatically clear, the formal ownership of oil fields is not in itself a way out of dependency and imperialist domination.²⁴¹

An overall balance-sheet of the achievements of the Mexican Revolution, therefore, shows that, although some significant democratic and agrarian reforms have been implemented (especially under the pressure of the insurgent masses), one cannot say that all three major tasks of democratic revolution have been accomplished. In particular, the ‘Institutionalized Revolution’ has never radically challenged imperialist domination in Mexico, and economic dependency, if anything, seems to be increasing.

As in all anti-colonial revolutions, the peasants constituted the main social force in the Algerian war of national liberation (1954-61). The Front de Liberation Nationale (fln) was a heterogenous coalition in which nationalist petty-bourgeois forces predominated. The distinguishing feature of French colonialism in Algeria had been the massive influx of European settlers who displaced the once thriving Arab mercantile bourgeoisie. In 1956, for example, only forty out of some 1,140 firms in metropolitan Algiers still belonged to indigenous capitalists. The social disintegration of the Algerian bourgeoisie was matched by the relative disorganization of the

Algerian proletariat. On one hand, some of the most combative elements of the Algerian working class had been forced to join the diaspora of North African labourers in France (400,000 in 1962); on the other hand, the Algerian proletariat lacked a political leadership of its own. The Algerian Communist Party, composed primarily of French colons, was in its origin only the local section of the PCF, and its vacillating attitude toward the national struggle generally compromised it in the eyes of the Algerian masses.¹⁹ In these circumstances, it is understandable why the leadership of the popular struggle fell into the hands of the nationalist petty-bourgeoisie who formed the fln in 1954 and continued to furnish most of its leading cadre during the protracted anti-colonial war.

After the victory of the fln, a radical wing of the petty-bourgeoisie under the leadership of Ben Bella and his friends came to power. A mass flight of French colonial landowners and entrepreneurs left behind a significant number of farms and factories which workers and peasants seized and attempted to run. Ben Bella encouraged this mass initiative, and between March and October 1963 the government legalized the expropriation of 2,700 million acres of land as well as hundreds of urban enterprises, ranging from large factories to hotels and cinemas. The nationalized units were to be self-managed by workers and peasants, and the Algerian Revolution seemed well on its way to become a new Cuba.²⁰ In the event, however, nothing of kind happened, and it is important to consider some of the reasons why the Algerian Revolution, unlike the Cuban, did not grow over into a socialist revolution:

(1) The authoritarian, hierarchical and relatively traditional structure of the so-called Frontier Army headed by Boumedienne which took power with ^iyFor instance in 1945 its Secretary-General, Caballero, explained in a speech to the Tenth Congress of the PCF that the Algerian people ‘does not want to separate itself from France’, and those who demand independence are ‘the conscious or unconscious agents of another imperialism’. (Quoted in Jacob Moneta, Le PCF et la question coloniale, 1920-1956> Paris 1971,p. 155.)

²⁰Some Trotskyist leaders living in Algeria believed that the country was bound to follow the ‘Cuban road’. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International, however, was more cautious and referred to the Ben Bella regime as a 'workers and peasants government'. This term had been conceptually elaborated by the Comintern in its early days and was used by Trotsky in the Transitional Programme. It indicated ‘a government characterized by the displacement of the bourgeoisie from political power, the transfer of armed power to the popular masses and the initiation of far-reaching measures in property relations’. While the ‘possible forerunner of a workers' state’, ‘as is characteristic of a workers and peasants government, the Algerian government has not followed a consistent course ... its consciousness is limited by its lack of Marxist training and background.’ (‘The Character of the Algerian Government’, Statement of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International [February 17 1964], Fourth International, 18, June 1964, pp. 36-7.)

Ben Bella in 1962 stands in sharp contrast with the Cuban workers’ and peasants’ militias or guerrilla forces directly linked to the peasant masses. 5

(2) The relative continuity of the state apparatus: of the 70,008 members of ■ the Algerian public administration in April 1963, 13,729 were French,

22,182 came from the schools of the colonial administration, and 34,097 from the fln. The proportion of the first two categories was 43 per cent at : the highest levels of the bureaucracy and 77 per cent at the medium levels.²⁴²

(3) Marxism had much less ideological influence over the radical wing of the fln than on the left of the m-26-7.

Gaulle prefered to cultivate new neo-colonial ties by avoiding head-on confrontations or embargoes. -if

The victim of his own contradictions, Ben Bella was overthrown by J Boumedienne in the military coup of 19 June 1965. The new regime brought ‘order and stability’ to Algeria and foreclosed all hopes of a social- | ist transformation. Yet, at the same time, it implemented a ‘semi- |? revolution from above’ by introducing a series of agrarian reforms and :* anti-imperialist measures. A precise definition of the Boumedienne regime is not easily found: perhaps it can best be described as a Bonapartist power (i.e. an authoritarian regime with a populist ideology, appearing as an arbiter of class conflict, but in the last instance serving capitalism) that uses the state as the main instrument for capital accumulation. The hegemonic 1 , force in this state-capitalist system is a social layer of petty-bourgeois origin, which in the course of excercising power tends to become a kind of ‘bourgeois bureaucracy’ as a transitional stage towards the establishment of i; a ‘normal’ bourgeoisie. As Ralph Miliband has pointed out, a similar l dynamic has operated in the case of several other peripheral capitalist ; countries. ‘In such cases the relation between economic and political power has been inverted: it is not economic power which results in the wielding of i political power and influence and which shapes political decision making. ;

It is rather political power (which also means here administrative and military power) which creates the possibilities of enrichment and which ; provides the basis for the formation of an economically powerful class,_i _ which may in due course become an economically dominant one.’²⁴³

After twenty years of holding power, how far can we say that the fln has proceeded in accomplishing the three generic tasks of a democratic

First, the present Algerian state is manifestly not democratic. The official party, the fln, has a monopoly of power and firmly controls trade unions and other mass organizations. There is no freedom of press or organization for the working class, although repression has been moderate and some independent Marxist activity (including that of a communist party, the Parti d’Avant-Garde Socialiste) is tolerated insofar as it does not oppose the government.

Second, the agrarian reform implemented by Ben Bella in 1963-64 expropriated practically all foreign landowners; it was followed after 1971 by Boumedienne’s ‘agrarian revolution’ aimed at Algerian big proprietors (but with significant indemnification) and absentee landlords. However, according to some authorities, only one-third of the targeted land (353,000 out of 900,000 hectares) belonging to these two groups had really been expropriated after several years of‘agrarian revolution’.²⁴⁴ Moreover, official sources recognized in 1978 that ‘some landowners have escaped, so far, from nationalization’, but did not give any estimate of the amount of land still concentrated in their hands.²⁴⁵ It is quite difficult, in the absence of accurate public statistics, to establish a precise balance-sheet of agrarian reform in Algeria.

Third, Algeria emancipated itself from French colonial rule through a long and heroic war of liberation. Superficially, it would appear that quite extensive nationalization has taken place: the expropriations of the Ben Bella era (1963-65) were reinforced by Boumedienne’s nationalization of remaining foreign enterprises between 1968 and 1974, including the major oil and gas corporations (Elf-Erap, Compagnie Framjaise des Petroles, etc.). However, nationalization did not exclude foreign capital from the Algerian economy, but rather reintegrated it through mixed corporations in which the state retains a 51 per cent share. Such joint ventures have been particularly characteristic in the crucial energy sector where the government has cooperated with such multinationals as Elf, Gecty Petroleum, CFP

²⁴Mohamed Tayeh Nadir, 'L’agriculture devrait poursuivre le redressemenc amorce', he _ Monde Diplomatique, June 1978, p. 27. --------

and El Paso Natural Gas. This situation of lingering dependency upon imperialism has been further aggravated by Algeria’s heavy foreign debt: $6.6 billion in 1977. In the two years from 1975 the cost of servicing this enormous debt doubled from 8 to 16.5 per cent of the nation’s foreign trade.²⁴⁶

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Algeria is among the peripheral capitalist countries that have achieved a very high degree of autonomy within the world imperialist system. Some observers have questioned, however, whether this relative economic independence is a stable character- v istic of this Bonapartist regime, or only a transitional phase leading to more classical forms of dependence, perhaps through a process of’opening’ similar to Egypt’s infitah during the seventies. Portentously, the number of ‘joint ventures’ seems to be increasing, and the government is now discussing a projected code for foreign investors that would grant very significant guarantees and concessions (integral repatriation of profits, two-year tax holiday, etc.).²⁴⁷ Buc it is still too early to see how far the new code will carry the government towards an open door to foreign investment. In the meantime, the revolutionary-democratic achievements of Algeria, although partial and incomplete, remain quite impressive and are quite beyond the scope of the reformist attempts of most Third World regimes.

In Algeria as in Mexico, the mass popular/peasant upsurge found no proletarian-socialist leadership, and this led inevitably to the interruption and channelling of the revolutionary process by petty-bourgeois and bourgeois reformist strata entrenched in the revolutionary army. Eric Wolf has summarized some of the common features of both revolutions: in Algeria, ‘while a socialist rhetoric was used to promise a measure of reward to peasants and workers, as in Mexico, the state has placed its reliance on a guided maximization of private enterprise. In both cases, then, the peasant rebellions of the hinterland set fire to the pre-existing structure; but it fell to the army and its leadership to forge the organizational balance wheel which would enable the post-revolutionary society to continue its course.'²⁴⁸

At various times, Trotsky emphatically denied that the Indian bourgeoisie could play even a limited revolutionary-democratic role. He particularly insisted that Gandhi’s Congress Party would be capable neither of obtaining India’s independence nor of establishing a democratic state. In an open letter to the workers of India (July 1939) he wrote: 'Gandhi and his compeers have developed a theory that India’s position will constantly improve, that her liberties will continually be enlarged and that India will become a Dominion on the road of peaceful reforms. Later on, perhaps even achieve full independence. . . . This entire perspective is false to the core.’²⁸ And in a manifesto of the Fourth International, written in May 1940, Trotsky asserted that non-proletarian nationalism in backward countries ‘will unavoidably erect dictatorships against the people—such is the regime of the ‘People’s’ Party in Turkey, the Kuomintang in China; Ghandi’s regime will be similar tomorrow in India’.²⁹

Despite Trotsky’s predictions, the Indian bourgeoisie, through the Congress Party, was able not only to achieve independence from Britain, but also to establish perhaps the only genuine parliamentary-democratic state in a classical liberal sense in the entire Third World. Moreover, this accomplishment (together with a series of limited social and economic reforms) was not the product of a great popular upheaval like the Mexican or Algerian Revolutions, but instead resulted from a policy of protracted negotiation and lobbying ‘from above', complemented by episodic mass mobilizations under the leadership and control of the bourgeois-nationalist movement. At the same time, however, the Indian case demonstrates, to a much greater extent than the Mexican or the Algerian, the limits of bourgeois-democratic transformation in a peripheral capitalist country.

Whereas in Mexico and Algeria some radical changes were actually made in the agrarian structure, India’s official policy of slow, piecemeal land reform has resulted, as periodic famines and mass starvation grimly testify, in tragic failure. As a matter of fact, the per capita availability of grain ictually decreased from 16.10 ounces per day in 1954 co 14.72 ounces in 1969-³⁰ During the seventies per capita food production continued to itagnate or even to slightly decline (according to FAO figures, based on a 1969-71 index of 100, per capita food production in 1977 had fallen to )9)-³¹ Furthermore, the future trend will probably continue to be one of ncreasing grain deficit relative to minimum nutritional need; in 1974-75

“‘India Faced With Imperialist War’ (25 July 1939), in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-1940), New York 1969, p. 29. Trotsky also excluded the possibility that a British Labour ’ovemment would grant independence to India.

ⁱ⁰Meghnad Desai, ‘India: Contradictions of a Slow Capitalist Development', in Robin llackbum, ed., Explosion in a Subcontinent, London 1975, p. 16.

the cereal deficit was 6.7 million tons while the projected 1985-86 short- f fall is 14-17 million tons.³² The low productivity of Indian agriculture is intimately related to the limitations of agrarian legislation, which, as ! Charles Bettelheim has emphasized, ‘refused to make a tabula rasa of the innumerable past privileges enjoyed by the great landowners: far from eliminating these privileges, it proceeds from them. It accepts them as a •; given fact and it tries only to reduce their scope or to modify their from’.³³,!; Certainly in this regard Trotsky’s conviction that in India ‘only the pro- ! letariat is capable of advancing a bold, revolutionary agrarian''! programme’,³⁴ would seem to have been vindicated by the country’s experience since independence.

In retrospect, the fate of Indian agrarian reform is somewhat ironic. The first plan proposed by the Congress Party in 1949 was relatively radical! from a bourgeois-democratic standpoint, and seemed to envision what;! Lenin called an ‘American path of land distribution’—extensive peasant! ownership. Yet the end result, after a quarter-century of various reforms '! (the last of which was the so-called ‘Green Revolution’), resembles much ! more what Lenin termed the ‘Prussian path’—a capitalist agriculture dominated by large landowners. Not only did the various land reforms not ! succeed in abolishing the great properties in most states, but in some states ! they actually increased the concentration of land ownership.³⁵ Meanwhile7 the proportion of landless peasants jumped from 50.7 per cent in 1950-5 IS to 61.17 per cent of the rural labour force in 1963-64.³⁶ Moreover, a i majority of the peasantry are still under the yoke of endemic usury, an ’ archaic form of exploitation as well as a major fetter to the development of i the productive forces in agriculture. In 1961, for instance, 54 per cent of all rural households were indebted and private usurers controlled 62 per'! cent of total rural credit.³⁷ It is difficult not to agree with the Indian|

^32,Meeting Food Needs in the Developing World’, Development Digest, XV, 2, April 1977,^Jp. li. _ ;i

³³Charles Bettelheim, L'Inde independente, Paris 1971, p. 64; see also Prabhat Patnaik, ‘Imperialism and the Growth of Indian Capitalism’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe, p. 219: ’Agrarian reforms, while eliminating some excesses like the very large absentee landlords who often controlled dozens of villages, left the old structure essentially intact.’

³⁵In the state of Saurashtra, for example, a sample study of 124 landowners showed chat after the land reforms, their holdings had been enlarged from 4,455 to 5,764 acres. See Paresh Chattopadhyay, ’Trends in India’s Economic Development’, in Kathleen Gough and Hari P. Sharmaeds., Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia, New York 1973, p. 105- Our analysis of Indian agrarian conditions is based largely on this study.

³⁶Agricultural Labour in India, Labour Bureau, Government of India, Delhi 1968, Table!

³⁷Reserve Bank of India, All India Rural Debt and Investment Survey, 1961-2. 4

economist Paresh Chactopadhyay that the catastrophic agricultural condition of India is due to ‘the incapacity and unwillingness of the Indian bourgeoisie—given its relative weakness and its solidarity with the semi-feudal elements in the countryside in the face of the growing mass struggle-—to effect radical agrarian reforms and thereby remove the obstacles to the development of productive forces for the immense majority of the Indian people.’²⁴⁹

Although the Congress Party was able to negotiate India's independence from British colonialism, it has scarcely achieved comparable economic autonomy from world imperialism. Indeed the American and Western European grip on the Indian economy has been steadily increasing since independence. After an initial period of state capitalism and nationalist protectionism, India, since 1958 (but particularly after 1962) has been progressively opened up to foreign capital. As the economist, A. K. Bagchi, has stressed: ‘India’s economic policy has been periodically checked by various International Monetary Fund and World Bank missions, and by other Wise Men from the West. Under pressure from the US government and US-controlled international agencies, the government of India has relaxed many controls on foreign investment.’²⁵⁰ In June 1966 the World Bank forced the Indian government to devalue the rupee and to liberalize the imports of a number of commodities. Indira Gandhi’s government has attempted to use Soviet bloc assistance as leverage in its relations with the imperialist powers; but since Soviet aid comprises only about one-fifth of the total foreign aid to India, it has not had a decisive impact. Instead during the sixties, ‘foreign capital, collaborating with and often dominating Indian capital, seems to have acquired a strategic hold over the most profitable and dynamic sectors of the economy.’²⁵¹ Such key branches of Indian industry as machinery, machine tools, pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals and fertilizers are now dominated by multinational corporations, and there is every indication that this dependency will continue to increase.

Nasser’s Egypt was the classical example of’a ‘semi-revolution from above’, led by a Bonapartist military regime, and it has served as a model for many similar experiments throughout the Third World. During the sixties there

was a discussion in some Marxist circles about the class nature of the Nasserite state and whether any possibility existed for its ‘growing over’ into a socialist revolution. History has resolved this debate, as the Sadat government has dissipated the last illusions of an ‘Egyptian path’ to socialism. At the same time, however, the question remains of how far the nationalist military governments of Egypt have succeeded in mastering the great historical tasks of bourgeois-democratic revolution.

First of all, the ‘Egyptian Revolution’ never involved a revolutionary mass mobilization as in Mexico, Bolivia or Algeria. The anti-Farouk putsch of 1952 was the product of a classical military conspiracy organized by the nationalist ‘Free Officers’ group. Furthermore, at every stage of development, the Nasserite regime kept the popular masses firmly under control through a panoply of political, trade-union and ideological structures tied to the state apparatus. In the beginning Nasserism pursued a consistent nationalist course: the core leadership of patriotic petty-bourgeois officers led by Nasser refused to enter the us-backed Baghdad Pact in 1955 and in the following year stood up to Anglo-French imperialism in the brief war that followed the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Moreover, in 1957 Nasser expropriated practically all foreign property in Egypt, and in July 1961 nationalized most of the big Egyptian-owned financial and industrial monopolies (beginning with the pivotal Misr group). However, the result of this extensive process of nationalization was not an anti-capitalist revolution, since the structure of the bourgeois stace apparatus had not changed and because private capital still held half of total assets in industry and commerce.²⁵² What actually happened was a shift in power from the old comprador strata to an ascendent nationalist small bourgeoisie and its state-capitalist homologues. Yet at the same time, the broad schedule of expropriations combined with massive Soviet economic support allowed Egypt to achieve (temporarily) a degree of independence vis a vis Western capital that was unprecedented in the modern Arab World.

Bolstering industrial nationalization was agrarian reform from above. The first legislation in 1952 restricted large holding to a surface of 200 feddans (1 feddan = 0.42 acres) and affected only 6 per cent of arable land. A second reform in 1961 further reduced the size of maximum holdings to 100 feddans; both reforms combined now included 10 per cent of cultivable surface. The social impact of these reforms was primarily the transformation of tenants into small proprietors, but only one million peasants directly benefited out of an oppressed rural mass of sixteen millions: As Hassan Riad has concluded, ‘the Egyptian village has not become a place of small owners. Despite the agrarian reforms, great inequalities remain: 80 per cent of the peasants remain without (or almost without) any land. . . .’²⁵³

Moreover, Nasser’s record of limited economic reforms must be balanced against his almost total disregard for popular democracy: there has been since 1952 a process of‘systematic repression of all independent initiatives of the masses, which has been the fundamental condition for the various transformations'.²⁵⁴ One of the first acts of the new regime in 1952, for instance, was the hanging of the well-known labour leader, Mustapha Khamis, and the violent suppression of the strike at the big Kafr Ed Dawwar factory. In 1959 Nasser jailed most of the cadre of Egyptian communism, releasing them five years later on the strict condition that they dissolve their organizations and refrain from mass activity. Finally, the large-scale student and popular rebellions of 1968 were crushed by the police and regular army. Both the political structure of the Nasser regime (one-party system, statified trade unions, etc.) and its ideology of monolithic ‘national unity’ excluded the democratic rights of self-organization or political expression for the proletariat. The real logic of the Nasserite experience was the manipulation of state power by a military stratum of petty-bourgeois origin who aspired to become a ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’; and the last years of Nasserism witnessed epidemic public corruption, as the managers of state enterprises enriched themselves in collaboration with private contractors and businessmen.²⁵⁵

The growth of this nouveau riche layer from within the Nasserite state ultimately provided the social base for the liquidation of che more populist and radical reforms of the fifties and sixties. With the succession of Anouar Sadat to leadership in 1972, the new bourgeois forces shed their old radical nationalist veneer and launched a full-scale restoration of private-sector hegemony. First, the regime broke its political and economic alliance with the USSR and rapidly moved back toward the us sphere of influence. Second, it passed the so-called infitah policy which reopened the doors to foreign capital. The investment law ofjune 1974 admitted foreign capital back into the industrial, banking and insurance sectors which Nasser had nationalized, while the Canal Free Trade Zone encouraged multina- /’ tional investment with the promise of long-term tax exemptions and the lifting of currency controls. Third, foreign debt rocketed to disturbing levels, with interest costs alone rising from 353 million Egyptian pounds in 1972 to 1.2 billion in 1975. Moreover, World Bank loans have been • granted to the Suez Canal Company and the Egyptian National Railway "i; Company strictly on condition that the Bank be ceded the right to super- g-vise their operation.²⁵⁶ Fourth, agrarian reforms were rolled back after 1973 ft* by a process of ‘desequestration’ which returned to many landowners their • former property. In June 1975 the land reform legislation was ‘amended’ to authorize the eviction of tenants, increases in rents, and the return to i payment in kind (strictly forbidden since 1952).²⁵⁷ Similar acts of -vi ‘desequestration’ were also passed to the benefit of expropriated urban capitalists.

The overall strategy of the Sadat regime, therefore, has been aimed at a "₍rapid ‘re-privatization’ of the economy and the fusion of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie and private sector capital. This pattern of ‘normalization’ by ' the elimination of national-democratic ‘excesses’ and the re-establishment of traditional dependencies on Western capital is, of course, not peculiar -to Egypt, but rather typifies the precariousness and ephemerality of reforms implemented ‘from above’ by transiently radical bourgeois or petty-bourgeois nationalist regimes.

Exactly one year before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, in January g 1958, a popular insurrection followed by a military rebellion overthrew the -5, notorious US-backed dictatorship of General Perez Jimenez. A general strike initiated on January 21 quickly developed in widespread street- j, fighting as the working-class districts of Caracas were barricaded against the police. Two days later the air force refused orders to bomb mutinous j ships under the command of Vice-Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal, and Perez Jimenez fled the country. A military government was formed under the : direction of Larrazabal and supported by the Junta Patriotica, a popular front of the principal opposition parties (Accion Democratica, COPEI, URD ■ and the Communist Party). During the next year two unsuccessful right-, wing military putsches provoked further popular mobilizations, and armed g

left-wing groups occupied the ranchitos (shanty towns) in the hills overlooking Caracas. The Communist Party of Venezuela (CPv), which had broad popular support, adopted a strategy of ‘national union’ with the ‘democratic bourgeoisie’. As Teodoro Petkoff, one of the best-known cpv leaders (he left in 1970 to form the Movimiento al Socialismo—mas), explained twelve years later: ‘To pursue the strategic aim of “national unity" as the party did in 1958, meant nothing less than placing the party and the working class at the tail of the non-revolutionary parties and of the dominant bourgeoisie. The line of “national unity” followed after January 23 1958 was only a new formulation of the class collaborationist line which had characterized the Browderist period. . . .’²⁵⁸

The general elections held at the beginning of 1959 were won by Romulo Bettancourt, traditional leader of Venezuela’s mass populist party, Accion Democratica (ad). (In Caracas, however, Vice-Admiral Larrazabal, who was supported by the cpv, received a majority of votes.) Like Haya de la Torre in Peru or Pepe Figueres in Costa Rica, Bettancourt was a moderate reformist who was also deeply committed to the us world crusade against communism. By the middle of I960, moreover, he emerged as one of the leading enemies of the Cuban Revolution in Latin America. Bettancourt’s rabid anti-Castroism, however, split the AD, and its youth section left the party to become the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolu-cionaria (mir). In November a massive strike against the regime, organized by the MIR and CPV, was violently repressed by the police with nineteen dead and 265 injured. Bettancourt suspended the constitution while the police raided the headquarters of left-wing newspapers. This was the start of a process of escalating confrontation between the AD and the left, which led to outlawing of the mir and cpv, followed by the emergence in 1962-66 of an urban and rural guerrilla struggle organized by the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (faln)—a political and military front of the MIR and CPV. Despite some initial successes, the faln focos never gained sufficient popular support to take the offensive, and by the late sixties the guerrillas were militarily and politically defeated. With the accession of the Christian Democratic (COPEi) government of Rafael Caldera, the left gave up armed struggle and both the MIR and CPV were allowed to return to legality.

Although Bettancourt’s government was far from democratic—consti- ' tuional rights were supended, the left was outlawed, its deputies and senators were imprisoned, and its activists tortured and murdered by the police—the ad did preserve some of the facade of bourgeois democracy. Moreover, since the end of the sixties, democratic rights have been progres-sively restored, and Venezuela has become (by normal bourgeois standards) one of the most democratic countries in Latin America. Indeed to have ;■ stabilized bourgeois domocracy in a period when other Latin American countries were succumbing to terroristic dictatorships of the far right was a rather exceptional achievement.

One of the secrets of this successful stabilization (as well as the defeat of the focos) was the moderate agrarian reform carried out by Bettancourt. Only 60,000 peasants received land (and only half the land was actually expropriated), but still the reform generated great hopes and expectations amongst the peasantry.⁴⁸ In the crucial period of guerrilla struggle, the; land distributions swung rural support towards the ad regime and away from the Faln. Moreover, this political and ideological victory was ) achieved without a substantive transformation of rural property or social' relations. In 1971 the latifundistas (proprietors of farms larger than 1,000 hectares) comprised only 1.7 per cent of landowners, buc controlled 67 per cent of the land. The minifundistas (less than 10 hectares), on the other hand, were 60.3 per cent of farm-owners, but occupied a tiny 2.5 per cent of the land area.⁴⁹ Agrarian reform virtually ceased during the seventies: in 1974 only 519 families received land, while in 1975 the number fell to 328. This happened despite the desperate calls of the Peasant Federation of Venezuela for a massive land distribution to ensure the survival of 250,000 landless families.⁵⁰ Finally, one of the consequences of the maintenance of this archaic rural social structure has been a serious crisis of agricultural production, as Venezuela, despite a gigantic untapped agricultural potential, is forced to import most basic foodstuffs.

Bettancourt's slight concessions to the peasantry were quite unmatched by any effort to achieve greater national autonomy. Instead, he actively worked to reinforce the traditional dependence on the United States in every sphere of Venezuelan life. In 1965, for example, after seven years of ad rule, us enterprises are estimated to have expatriated $504 million in profits from Venezuela: an amount that was equal to almost half of the total

^AVCertso agropecuario 1971, cited in Armando Martel, La agricultura entre la carraplana y el despehte, Caracas 1976, p. 38.

income of US investment in Latin America ($1,170 billion).²⁵⁹ Until the sixties US investment had primarily been concentrated in oil, but following a general Latin American pattern, capital was increasingly attracted to manufacturing industries and services. In March 1968, the Chicago Daily News observed that ‘us businessmen calculate that the profits in Venezuela, a prosperous country, are high enough to permit the amortization of investments in only five years.’²⁶⁰

In 1975 the ad President, Carlos Andres Perez, nationalized the oil industry, a measure the was depicted in official propaganda as ‘the second independence’ of Venezuela. Although this act reinforced Venezuela’s position on the world market, it was far from breaking the bonds of dependence. In fact, the great multinational oil monopolies regarded the act as a ‘reasonable agreement’, a solution in which ‘both sides are satisfied’ and even as ‘profitable business’.²⁶¹ Why did the foreign oil companies regard nationalization with such apparent equanimity?

First, the multinational received a very handsome indemnification: 5 billion bolivares ($1 = 4.2 bolivares). Second, the more profitable and more easily extracted light oil was virtually exhausted, leaving Venezuela with reserves mainly composed of heavy crude oil. Nationalization meant that the much higher level of investment required to exploit the heavy crude would be borne by the Venezuelan state rather than the oil companies. Third, through secret agreements, the multinationals received a virtual monopoly over the marketing and distribution of Venezuelan oil. The marketing contract not only guaranteed 88 per cent of exportable production to the companies, but also restrained the government from selling its remaining share of production at lower prices. Fourth, through agreements on ‘technical assistance’—whose clauses have also remained secret—the multinationals preserved real control over production and exploration, continuing to siphon off huge profits. According to official sources, for example, the profits from this source were 1,413 million bolivares in 1976 and 1,457 in 1977. These secret marketing and technical assistance agreements were ‘leaked’ to the leftist journal Proceso Politico, which published them in 1978. After reviewing all the stipulations made to the multinationals, the editors of Proceso Politico concluded: ‘the operational contracts of technical assistance and marketing are cast in terms that

leave untouched the control of the trans-national oil companies over the ■ fundamental decision-making centres of the Venezuelan oil industry, i_naddition to guaranteeing them higher levels of profit.’⁵⁴ It is interesting to compare this judgement with the opinion of Julius Freidin, a specialist in foreign investment for the US Department of Commerce: The agreement liberates capital which can be used for the exploitation of fresh oil. In : synthesis, the net profit can be greater than before the nationalization.’⁵⁵Moreover, as already noted, the general trend of US investment in Latin : America has been away from oil and minerals towards manufacture and banking. If oil nationalization was largely superficial in its real consequences, it is important to note that absolutely no initiatives were taken by the nationalist government of Carlos Perez Andres against the other—and increasingly important—spheres of imperialist penetration of the Venezuelan economy. The United States invested more in Venezuela in 1975 ($678 million) for example, than in Chile, Colombia and Peru combined; and one of the key branches of Venezuelan industry, automobiles, is now entirely owned by multinationals (the US Big Three alone controlling 73 per cent of production).⁵⁶ Furthermore, the general future of the Venezuelan economy is probably prefigured in the recently unveiled plans for , the development of the Guayana area—one of the main poles of industrial concentration in the country—which links together state capital, local private capital and a number of giant foreign enterprises (Reynolds, John Deere, Mitsubishi, Swiss Aluminum, etc.) in permanent ‘partnership’.⁵⁷

The Turkish ’semi-revolution from above’ began in 1908 when the ‘Young Turks’ convened a Constitutional Assembly and ended the absolute power of the Sultan. This experience in national reform was brought to a temporary halt in 1919 with the occupation of the Ottoman Empire by Allied armies (British, French, Italian and Greek), and the establishment of a

^,4Equipo Proceso Politico, CAP 3 anos, unjuicio critico, Caracas 1971, p. 147. Most of the data quoted above are to be found in this publication, esp. pp. 16, 22, 182, 185.

^,5In Sanford Rose, ‘Why the Multinational Tide is Ebbing', Fortune, August 1977, p. 118.

⁵⁶Repertoire mondial, Chambre syndicale des constructeurs automobiles, Paris 1976; and Survey of Current Business, US Department of Commerce, 1974-75.

⁵⁷Corporation venezolana de Guayana, Departamento de Contabilidad, Caracas, 31 August 1978. Another significant example: the gigantic steel complex at Zulia which combines the state corporation Corpozulia (51 per cent of capital) with Davy Ashmore International (financed by Morgan, Deutsche Bank, etc.), Krupp, Creusot, and others. See Banque Fran?aise et Iralienne pour l'Amerique du Sud, Etudes economiques, 4-5, April-May 1978, p. 33-collaborationist regime in Istanbul linked to Sultan Mehmet vi. In the beginning the Turkish resistance to the foreign occupation, led by the provincial bourgeoisie of Anatolia, took the form of an appeal for the Americans to intervene and establish a protective mandate over Turkey!!).⁵⁸ However, under the leadership of General Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), and with the military and diplomatic support of the Soviet Union, a protracted war of national liberation was initiated which finally drove the Greek forces into the sea (they had been abandoned in the meanwhile by the Great Powers) and abolished the Sultanate forever. Thus in 1923 Turkey became a secular republic with Ataturk as its president and Ankara as its capital. Unlike the Algerian or Mexican Revolutions, the Turkish struggle for independence was conducted primarily by the traditional military apparatus under the command of former Ottoman generals. As Caglar Keyder has noted, ‘it is impossible to consider the independence movement as a social revolution from below: the mass of the peasantry was not involved except as conscripted soldiers, and the leaders of the movement were inspired by a mutation of the CUP [Committee of Union and Progress = ‘Young Turks’] tradition of an autonomous bureaucratic military elite defending the State.’⁵⁹

Soviet support for the Turkish independence struggle was, first of all, motivated by the fact that it was an uprising against Franco-British imperialism at a moment when that same enemy was intervening in the Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks, however, never ignored the limitations of the Kemalist leadership. The resolution presented by Bela Kun and approved by the First Congress of the People of the Orient (Baku 1920) emphasized: ‘The Congress expresses its sympathy to all Turkish fighters against world imperialism. . . . However, the Congress notes that the national revolution in Turkey is only directed against foreign oppressors and that its success will not mean the liberation of the workers and peasants from oppression and exploitation in general. The success of this movement will not bring with it the solution of the most important questions for the Turkish toiling classes: the agrarian question and the question of taxes, nor will it eliminate one of the greatest obstacles to the liberation of the East—national conflicts.’⁶⁰ As a matter of fact, the republican state did abolish the old Ottoman tithe which had so burdened the peasantry, but its ^,8See Caglar Keyder, 'The Political Economy of Turkish Democracy¹, New Left Review 115, May-June 1979, p. 7.

^mLe Premier Congres des Peuples de I'Orient, Baku 1920, facsmile reproduction, Paris 1971, p. 112.

solution for national minorities was purely repressive, if not genocidal. '■ Most of the Greek and the Armenian population was expelled from the j country (the latter having already suffered mass murder in 1915), while the : Kurds were denied national rights (during the thirties there was even a policy of forced dispersion of the Kurdish population).⁶¹ Let us briefly ■ survey the results of the Turkish Republic’s various attempts over the last i half century to resolve the outstanding tasks of bourgeois-democratic $ revolution.

First, the state established in 1923 was modern, secular, constitutionalist—but far from democratic. Indeed, until at least the end of the Second 1 World War it was a de facto one-party regime of an authoritarian type, in ) which the Republican Popular Party (rpp) of Ataturk and his successor, . Inonii, exercised a virtual monopoly of political life. During the thirties a i Mussolini-inspired labour law had been imposed that outlawed strikes and l trade unions.⁶² After the war, however, there was a relative democratiza- ■ tion, and the government permitted the constitution of an opposition party, the conservative Democratic Party. Later, during the sixties, other : parties were also legalized, including the social-democratic Turkish Work- ■ ers Party (founded in 1961), but the Communist Party continued to be ^;banned as it had been since 1921. Turkish parliamentary democracy, j moreover, has always been carefully supervised by the Army, which has intervened three times in the last twenty years (1960-61, 1971-73, 1980-^:?) whenever partisan conflict has appeared to threaten the cohesion and stability of the Kemalist state structure. The military, therefore, has always_;exercised a veto power over the sovereignty of civil government.

According to Keyder, the key to understanding the relative success of Turkish ‘democracy’ is the traditional structure of the Anatolian village: a few rich landlords, a few landless peasants, and a great mass of poor middle peasants. The prevalence of an independent middle peasantry distinguishes Turkey from other Middle Eastern regimes as well as from typical Latin American examples. Yet significant rural inequalities persist, especially in those Kurdish areas of Eastern and South-eastern Anatolia where landlordism and share-cropping are common.⁶³ Overall, smallholders (owning less than 50 hectares), 62.12 per cent of the rural population, control 18.65 per cent of the land area, while great proprietors (more than 500 hectares) own 24.81 per cent.⁶⁴ It was only after the Second World War that the RPP

leadership envisioned a moderate agrarian reform which planned to distribute state-owned land and some share-cropped estates. However this project met with fierce opposition from within the RPP and the measures finally adopted involved only a desultory distribution of some state land: ‘the bureaucratic elite did not have the capacity to over-ride the interests of the developing agrarian and small-town merchants and landlords.’⁶⁵ It seems, then, that the Turkish state was unable fundamentally to solve the agrarian question; on the other hand, it was fortunate in inheriting from the Ottoman Empire a rural structure characterized by a massive small and medium peasantry. Thus in the absence of explosive agrarian contradictions, the inability of the regime to undertake more substantive land reforms did not prevent either the stabilization of bourgeois power in Turkey or its relative democratization after 1945.

As far as the political independence and unification of Turkey are concerned, Kemal’s historical achievement is indisputable. But the same cannot be said of Turkey’s economic independence. During the twenties, for instance, the government accepted the trade clauses imposed by the Lausanne Treaty (1923), which encouraged foreign investment and allowed import-export trade to continue to be monopolized by German, French and British companies. It is true that during the Depression there was a sharp turn towards etatisme and a closed ‘national economy’, but after 1945 ‘the level of world economic integration within the post-war conjuncture . . . did not alow Turkey the possibility of an insulated pattern of capitalist development ... it had to submit to the pattern of economic relationships characterizing a typical periphery economy during the 1950s.’⁶⁶ Increasing foreign penetration of the Turkish economy occured in two ways: (1) direct foreign investments and private credits (e.g., 78.2 per cent of the chemical industry, 79.1 per cent of agricultural machinery, 96.7 per cent of detergents and soaps, etc.);⁶⁷ and (2) the state debt. The latter is particularly important because of its role as a kind of Archimedean lever in opening the Turkish economy to imperialist domination. Turkey’s addiction to foreign borrowing began when the government used Marshall Plan aid to finance imports, then accelerated when it turned after 1955 coward short-term loans. Growing indebtedness provoked a crisis in 1958 which obliged the government to introduce ‘stabilization’ measures demanded by a consortium of its international creditors. A similar situation recurred in 1978,

^s7Harputlu, p. 261. Keyder speaks of an ‘absence of foreign capital on any significant scale' (p. 24), but fails to provide corroborative data.

except that foreign debt had now grown to a rather staggering 15 billion dollars. ‘Turkey’s creditors, among whom one could find most major capitalist governments, international finance organizations and more than two ’ hundred private banks, began to stage a rescue operation, featuring, notably, an “austerity package”, compliments of the IMF.’⁶⁸ Thus, even if the Turkish economy is not in the same position of neo-colonial dependency as most Latin American or African economies, it is still far from having achieved real economic independence. In general, Turkey’s bour- ' geois-democratic achievements place it somewhere between the peripheral European capitalist nations and most Third World countries, with little i guarantee that it will not regress to a situation more comparable to the latter case. - >

The idea of permanent revolution only appears in chrysalis in the writings of Marx and Engels: as a series of brilliant but unsystematized intuitions that were largely ignored in the codification of the Marxism of the Second International. It remained for Trotsky in his Results and Prospects to develop the first coherent and operational conceptualization of a permanentist problematic that was rigorously grounded in a sweeping historical theory and socio-economic analysis. Trotsky’s perspective, as we have seen, was a major theoretical and political breakthrough. In particular, it offered a radical alternative to the economistic and vulgar-evolutionist interpretation of Marxism that was hegemonic in the pre-1917 socialist movement, and whose mechanical and pre-dialectical strategic corollary was the theory of stages. This permanentist strategy prevailed only during the revolutionary high tide of 1917-23 when it informed the practical activities of the Bolshevik Party and the Comintern. After Lenin’s death, however, a new variety of stagism became official doctrine because of its congruence with the shortsighted realpolitik that increasingly dominated the thinking of the Soviet bureaucracy. In its consistent and thorough application, Stalin's variant of stagism invariably produced tragic defeacs for the labour movement; and only those communist parties who in practice went beyond the official limits and pursued an implicitly permanentist line were able to triumph. For their part, those forces that programmatically embraced Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution remained too small to compete as real alternatives in the eyes of the popular masses. (A history of the Fourth International founded by Trotsky in 1938 and its efforts to win the masses in the colonial and semi-colonial countries lies outside the scope of this book.)

The disasters of stagism, it could be argued, provide very significant 'negative tests’ for the theory of permanent revolution. While we cannot

undertake a systematic historical analysis of all the conjunctures in which Stalinist stagism played a destructive role, it may be useful to attempt a brief resume of some of the most salient examples.

In inter-war Europe, Spain was perhaps the country that reproduced most the structural features of late Romanov Russia: semi-feudal relations of production in the countryside, oppressed national minorities, an authoritarian state apparatus, and a concentrated, combative proletariat in the big urban centres (Madrid, Seville and Barcelona) and the mining regions (Asturias). However, from 1931 the Comintern insisted upon the necessarily ‘bourgeois-democratic’ character of the impending Spanish revolution, while denouncing the 'petty-bourgeois anarchism’ of sections of the Spanish working class that was ‘expressed in a tendency to ignore the stage of bourgeois-democratic revolution’.²⁶² In 1936 the Comintern further declared that the Popular Front was the concrete expression of this struggle for the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. In a remarkable essay on this period, Fernando Claudin, a former leader of the pce, shows how the ‘hard Comintern team established in Spain’ (Togliatti, Codovilla, Geroe, etc.) together with ‘the equally hard team of military advisers and Soviet politicians' had the very difficult task of ‘nothing less than forcing the proletarian revolution back into the bourgeois democratic framework it “should not have” left. . . . For a start, it was necessary to deny the anti-bourgeois reality of the revolution, so that action aiming to restore bourgeois reality could appear to be something other than what it was.’²⁶³ As is well known, the Soviet-Comintern team, with the help of the pce, was only too successful in carrying out this arduous mandate. By the end of 1937 ‘bourgeois reality’ had been restored, and all the partisans of a socialist revolution—Trotskyists, left communists of the POUM, anarchists of the CNT and Caballeristas in the PSOE—had been politically defeated (and, in some cases, physically liquidated). One year and a few months later, Franco’s legionnaires entered Madrid. . . .

Other examples of the disasters of stagism can be found in Latin America; indeed, in no other continent did the communist movement so strictly apply the stagist ‘general line’ of the Stalinist Comintern. Yet at the same time, rigid and sycophantic adherence to Stalinist doctrine was achieved relatively late; and during the 1920s and early 1930s some of the most

’Togliatti (‘Ercoli’), ‘Sulk parcicularita della rivoluzione spagnola’ (1936), in Sul movimento operaio mternazionale, Rome 1964, p. 196.

²Femando Claudin, ’Spain—The Untimely Revolution’, New Left Review 74 (July-August 1972), p. 16.

important Latin American communist leaders refused to accept the new orthodoxy and even sympathized with the Left Opposition. For example, Jose Carlos Mariategui, founder of the Peruvian Communist Party (1928) and one of the most original of Latin American Marxist theoreticians, wrote in 1927: ‘There does not exist in Peru, nor has there ever existed, a progressive bourgeoisie with a nationalist sensibility.’^{262 263 264} Although he did not dispute the adequacy of the Comintern’s strategy in China, he refused to apply the same orientation in the Americas. He was, in fact, convinced that ‘against capitalist, plutocratic and imperialist North America, one can effectively oppose only a socialist Latin (or Iberian) America. . . . The Latin American countries came too late in the capitalist competition . . . [and] the fate of these countries in the capitalist order is that of simple colonies. . . . The Latin American revolution will be . . . purely and simply a socialist revolution. To this term you may add, according to the circumstances, all the adjectives you wish: “Anti-imperialist”, “agrarian”, "revolutionary nationalist”. Socialism implies, precedes and incorporates all of them.’²⁶⁵ Similar views were held in the same period by Julio Antonio Mella, the founder of the Cuban Communist Party and its principal ideologue until his murder by henchmen of the Cuban dictator Machado in 1929- Mella argued that ‘a complete national liberation will only be obtained by the proletariat through a workers’ revolution’, and he refused to make alliances with the national bourgeoisie (‘this classical betrayer of all national movements for true emancipation').²⁶⁶ Furthermore, these conceptions did not remain merely theoretical: they provided the strategic impulse for the 1932 revolutionary uprising in El Salvador—the only mass armed insurrection under Communist Party leadership in Latin American history. The aim of the movement, according to the documents and manifestoes of the Party, was the establishment of a government of workers’,

soldiers’, and peasants' soviets in order to pursue the ‘relentless destruction ■ of the national bourgeoisie and imperialism’.⁶

However after the mid-1950s there were no longer dissidents in the leadership of any Latin American communist parties, and a monolithic adherence to the ‘general line’ was implemented throughout the continent. The most important historical experience that resulted from this orienta- ■ tion was probably the Chilean Popular Front, a governmental coalition between the Communist, Socialist and Radical parties that lasted almost a decade (1938-47). According to Carlos Contrera Labarca, General Secretary of the CPC, the Front was made possible because the Party had abandoned its sectarian leftist position of 1932 which had expressed itself 'in premature slogans that attempted to leap over the bourgeois-democratic stage of i the revolution’. He defined the 1938 Popular Front as a ‘broad alliance of ! classes’, including ‘certain sectors of the Chilean bourgeoisie which can and t must be won for national liberation by a progressive and democratic % policy’; moreover, he emphasized that the Front should, if possible, also be H extended to ‘important sectors of the political parties of the right which 7 have had moments of vacillation . . . inviting them to enter the popular movement with assurances of the satisfaction of their desires for order, s progress and democracy.’⁷ During the ten years of the Popular Front, the | Radical Party, firmly controlled by large landowners and sections of the v bourgeoisie, maintained its hegemony by playing off the other parties 7 against one another. Finally in 1947 the communists were expelled from :_:the government and the CPC was formally outlawed, with hundreds of.{is members imprisoned. What assessment can be made of the achievements of : this ‘broad class alliance’? According to James Petras, the Popular Front M created an industrial infrastructure and increased the government’s role in :{ the development process, but ‘these changes tended to enrich the upper and i middle class in status, wealth and power, at the expense of the workers and peasants. Popular Front politics weakened the left. ... At the end of a -decade of working class—middle class coalition, the Rightist parties were : politically, socially and economically stronger than ever.’⁸

^<5Cf. Roque Dalton, ‘Miguel Marmol: El Salvador 1930-32', Pensamiento Critico, 48 (January 1971), p. 102; and T. P. Anderson, Matanza, El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932, Lincoln, Nebraska 1971, p. 68.

’Carlos Contreras Labarca, ‘The People of Chile Unite to Save Democracy', The Communist, XVII, (11 November 1938), pp. 1037-8. i

⁸James Petras, Politics and Social Forces in Chilean Development, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1970, p. 132. The demoralization of the labour movement can be gauged by the fact that J when the Socialist and Communist parties finally decided to stop quarrelling and unite in an

In the other countries of Latin America no real Popular Front was within reach of the communist parties. Nonetheless they persisted in defending its strategic primacy. In a 1936 speech, for example, Cuban communist leader Bias Roca quoted Stalins warning of 1925 against the underestimation of the importance of the alliance between the working class and the ‘revolutionary’ bourgeoisie. Roca stressed that in Cuba ‘all the layers of our population from the proletariat to the national bourgeoisie, fraternally onited by the common interest of liberating our country, can and should constitute a broad popular front against the foreign oppressor. '²⁶⁷ Who was to be the political representative of this progressive national bourgeoisie? After some years of hesitation, the Cuban communists decided that it was a certain Colonel Batista, and they established a political alliance with him that lasted from 1939 to 1944.

It is also important to understand that the stagist orientation of the Latin American communists was continuous through the various tactical turns ordered by the Comintern and Soviet leadership. Indeed it is instructive to comp^{are the} underlying immunity of the strategic framework to ‘right’ and ‘left’ shifts at a tactical level. Consider the following examples of‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ stances:

(I) The end of the Second World War was a highpoint of communist 'moderation and class collaboration. Thus in November 1945, the official newspaper of the Mexican Party proposed the following thesis: ’The goal of developing capitalism in Mexico is a revolutionary aim, because it means the development of a national economy ... the disappearance of semicolonial vestiges and the conclusion of the agrarian reform, the democratic and general development of the country as far as it can be developed by an agrarian anti-imperialist revolution.’ According to this article, the measures proposed by the Communist Party ‘are, like the agrarian reform, bourgeois measures that correspond to the goal of allowing the development of a Mexican capitalism, that can industrialize the country and free it from imperialist intervention. . . ,’²⁶⁸ This conception, as well as analogous ideas advanced by other Latin American communist parties, is scarcely even Menshevik in its essence; it evokes, in fact; the so-called 'Legal ’Quoted by Saverio Tutino, L'otiobre cubano, Milan 1968, p. 148.

¹⁰Cailos Sanchez Cardenas, "La revolution mexicana y el desarrollo capitalista de Mexico’,'La Voz ck Mexico (20 November 1945), p. 1.

Marxism’ that Piotr Struve elaborated as a programme for ‘progressive’ i? Russian capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century.¹¹

(2) Although the onset of the Cold War in 1947-8 forced a left turn (particularly in relation to American imperialism), the Latin American ' communists still retained their stagist conceptions. This was most dramati- ' cally evident in the case of Guatemala in the early 1950s—the most impor- S tant left-wing experience of the period. The coalition government of Col- § onel Arbenz, composed of populists and communists, decided to imple- ' ment an. agrarian reform that included the expropriation of parts of the extensive holdings of the US-owned United Fruit Company. For the communists of the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (pgt) the major aim of this reform was to finish, in alliance with the national bourgeoisie, the ; tasks of the bourgeois-democratic stage of Guatemalan development. In his 7 report to the Second Congress of the PGT (December 1952), the General 5 Secretary, J. M. Fortuny, announced: ‘We communists recognize that : because of its particular conditions, the development of Guatemala will ( still have to take place, for a certain time, along capitalist lines.’¹² In the pgt’s conception, therefore, the armed forces were the representatives of a ‘progressive and anti-imperialist’ national bourgeoisie, and it rejected proposals to arm the workers and peasants as nothing less than the ‘manoeuvres of internal reaction, attempting to counterpose a workers’ and peasants’ front to the Armed Forces’. Fortuny specifically emphasized his , confidence in the ‘progressively inclined sympathies of the officers and commanders of the Army’.¹³ In June 1954, a mercenary army, financed by United Fruit and commanded by Colonel Castillo Armas, invaded Guatemala and overthrew Arbenz. Needless to say, the ‘progressive’ armed forces rallied to Armas, outlawed the PGT and established the white terrorist _:-dictatorship that has survived until the present day.

’ ‘Revealingly, the Soviet historian Anatol Shulgovsky in his book on Mexico makes precisely a comparison between ‘Legal Marxism’ and the ideology of Lombardo Toledano, then head of the Mexican trade unions and very close politically to the Mexican communists. See A. Shulgovsky, Mexico en la encrucijada de su historia, Mexico 1969, p. 414.

¹²Jose Manuel Fortuny, Relatorio sobre la actividad del Comite Central al Segundo Congresso del Partido_y Guatemala 1952.

¹ ^Manuel Pinto Usaga, Guatemala, apuntes sobre el movimiento obrero, 1954, p. 15. In a self-criticism written in 1955, the PGT recognized that it ‘did not follow a sufficiently _ independent line in relation to the democratic bourgeoisie’, and that it did ‘contribute to breeding illusions about the army’. Yet at the same time, the PGT continued in its advocacy of a bloc with the national bourgeoisie and the struggle for a ‘democratic and patriotic revolution’. See Comision Political del PGT, La intervencion norte-americana en Guatemala ye el derroca-miento del regimen democratic, 1955, pp. 31-2, 42.

scale; indeed, the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party (pki) in 1965 ranks as the greatest defeat suffered by the international labour movement in the post-war epoch. It is necessary to recall that the pki was the largest communist movement in any capitalist country and the third biggest Communist Party in the world (exceeded only by the Soviet and Chinese Parties). This mass party of three million members organized a periphery of almost ten million people through its various trade unions, peasant organizations, and mass movements of all kinds. Despite its immense resources the PKI provided virtually uncritical and unconditional support to the bourgeois Bonapartist regime of Sukarno. Aidic, the PKl’s Chairman, explained the raison d'etre of this policy by stressing that ‘the Indonesian revolution is at the present stage bourgeois-democratic in character and not socialist and proletarian.'²⁶⁹ Further, he insisted that to confuse the two stages of the Indonesian revolution was ‘demagogic, subjective and reactionary’, and that ‘the socialist stage cannot be achieved without first completing the national-democratic stage.’^{270 271} Classically, this democratic stage was supposed to be implemented by a ‘four class bloc’, including the Indonesian national bourgeoisie, conservative Muslim forces, Sukarno’s nationalists and the PKI. In a speech before leading Chinese communists in 1963, Aidit painted a glowing account of the successes of this alliance: ‘We have now collaborated with the Indonesian bourgeoisie for nearly ten years, and the revolutionary forces have continually grown . . . whereas the reactionary forces have experienced failure after failure.’²⁶⁹Although the Soviets repeatedly expressed their support for the PKl’s strategy, the Party’s closest fraternal links were with the Chinese, and Mao's writings on the ‘New Democracy’ provided the principal inspiration for its class collaborationist line. There was, however, a central difference between New Democracy as applied in Chinese and Indonesian contexts: the pki had no red army. True, the pki had begun to organize a red army in 1945, but it was soon dissolved, and in the following years the pki recanted this ‘sectarian and leftist’ deviation. As M. H. Lukman, the Second Secretary of the pki, explained, ‘in face of the propaganda of the reactionaries, we feel it necessary to affirm the possibility of a transition to socialism by peaceful means.’²⁷² As a matter of fact, Sukarno derived most of his power

acting as a Bonapartist broker between the social camps of the pki and the army. In October 1965, this precarious equilibrium was exploded and the military deposed Sukarno. With the support of fanatic Muslim civilian groups, the Indonesian military launched a campaign of mass murder against the pki and its supporters that made the defeat of the Shanghai Commune in 1927 look like a minor episode. According to most estimates, at least 500,000 people, including the entire leadership of the pki, were ; massacred, while several hundred thousands ‘suspects’ were imprisoned in 1 concentration camps. Sixteen years later, tens of thousands of Indonesian j leftists and democrats still languish in this huge capitalist Gulag i Archipelago. ■

Finally, the most recent example of the depressing chain of disasters associated with stagist strategies is, of course, the Chilean coup of 1973. The Chilean Communist Party, despite the experience of its previous Popular Front fiasco, remained the most indefatigable advocate of a stagist approach. Its General Secretary, Luis Corvalan, had earlier distinguished 5 himself by his sharp polemic against the line of the 1967 OLAS conference ^;in Havana; as he vehemently rejected the possiblity of socialist revolution in Latin America and insisted on the need to traverse an ‘anti-oligarchic and 5 anti-imperialist’ stage. On the eve of Unidad Popular’s electoral victory, the C Fourteenth Congress of the Chilean Party (November 1969) solemnly re- ’ affirmed these principles. Corvalan singled out for attack the ‘unserious’ (i and ‘unscientific’ positions of the sections of the left (mainly the mir, the 7 Trotskyists and the left wing of the Socialist Party) which sought to j implement a socialist revolution, rather than concentrating (as the CPC i' demanded) upon ‘anti-oligarchic and anti-imperialist transformations’.¹⁸ ; This strict adherence to the formalist schema of stages was consistently | carried through in the CPC’s policies: the search for a rapprochement with the Christian Democratic Party, the return to the national bourgeoisie of ( enterprises that had been seized by the workers (in response to the employers’ lock-out of October 1972), and stout faith in the armed forces’, loyalty to the parliamentary system. . . .

The Soviet leadership, of course, has continued to be the principal source of the official formulations of stagism that have been adopted by the ; communist movement in the peripheral capitalist countries. Without ever ; abandoning the basic premises of Stalin’s doctrinal elaborations of the¹1920s, Soviet theoretical production in this field has nonetheless undergone various twists and turns over the last half-century. The latest of these;

^iaLuis Corvalan, Camino de victoria, Santiago 1971; and Carlos Corda, El leninismoy la victoria' popular, Santiago 1971, pp. 111-2.

schemas, worked out by eminent Soviet academicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is the theory of the "non-capitalist way", which has become the orthodox line for so-called ‘developing countries’. It was probably Professor R. A. Ulyanovsky who first proposed this theory, but its development and elaboration owed most to V. G. Solodovnikov, Director of the Africa Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. According to Solodovnikov, the ‘non-capitalist development toward socialism’ is the path of ‘National Democratic’ states like Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Iraq, the Congo, Guinea, Somalia, Burma and others, where there exists a ‘democratic dictatorship of the revolutionary people’. This National Democracy ‘represents mainly the interests of the national bourgeoisie, the radical intelligentsia, the peasantry and the proletariat’ (a barely modified version of the bloc of four classes). The fact that this ‘democratic dictatorship' is frequently the authoritarian and most undemocratic dictatorship of the armed forces does not seem contradictory to the Soviet academician: ‘the military intelligentsia is the most organized anti-imperialist force. In order to withstand the pressure of the imperialists and the exploiter classes in general, the democratic military intelligentsia takes political power into its own hands. . . .’^15>

Although the term ‘non-capitalist’ might seem to introduce some ambiguity, this theory is manifestly continuous with classical stagism. According to Solodovnikov, for example, ‘at the present stage’ the national democratic states ‘cannot resolve . . . full liquidation of all the exploiter classes and . . . the building of socialism’. The historical mission of national democracy is to prepare the ‘political, economic and social preconditions for a further transition to the building of a socialist society’, to create ‘the material prerequisites ... to the future socialist reconstruction of the economy’. Although these ‘preconditions’ and ‘prerequisites’ are never concretely explicated, their absence is nonetheless deemed sufficient reason for the contemporary impossibility of socialist transformation in these countries.²⁰ In this context, what meaning is ascribed to the pivotal term ‘non-capitalist’? Solodovnikov himself concedes that the countries in question ‘have not fully pulled themselves away from the system of the world capitalist economy’; that they have a ‘mixed economy’ (including state, national capitalist and foreign capitalist sectors), and that the exploiting classes have not been abolished. The only real argument advanced by Solodovnikov for considering these states to be ‘non-capitalist’ is the

^1?V. G. Solodovnikov, The Present Stage of the Non-Capitalist Development in Asia and Africa, Budapest 1973, pp. 13-21.

importance of the state-controlled sector, which constitutes in his view ‘the ■; economic basis of the non-capitalist development’. The principal example f that he evokes—Egypt—could not demonstrate more ironically the frag- ' ility of his thesis. Equally the mass murder of communists in Iraq is a sad commentary on the true nature of the supposedly ‘democratic dictatorship of the revolutionary people’. Despite one huge contradiction after another, however, the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy will continue to discover if new ‘non-capitalist national democracies’—Egypt and Somalia exeunt, i Ethiopia enters, and so on.

The theory of permanent revolution, in contrast, was largely able to pre-diet, explain and illuminate the red thread that runs through the twentieth century: the social revolutions in the peripheral capitalist countries. In this sense, it is, in our opinion, a crucial key to the understanding of our epoch. What occurred in Russia, Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Cuba corres- ; ponded closely to Trotsky’s central thesis: the possibility of an uninter- i, rupted and combined (democratic/socialist) revolution in a ‘backward’, ; dependent or colonial country. The fact that, by and large, the leaders of the post-October revolutionary movements did not acknowledge their ‘permanent’ character, or did so only a posteriori and wich a different terminology, does not alter the unmistakenly permanentist character of these ; revolutions. The concrete unfolding of the global revolutionary process can hardly fit inco Plekhanov’s or Stalin’s rigid stagist models; while the dogma of national democratic revolution as a necessary and anterior stage to anticapitalist transformation is too narrow and rigid to contain the turbulent movements of real history.

This does not mean, of course, that there were no 'phases’ or moments in ; the revolutionary process. Trotsky himself wrote in The Permanent Revolu-tion: ‘No matter what the first episodic stages of the revolution may be in the individual countries . . . the victory of the democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat which bases itself upon the alliance with the peasantry and solves first of all the tasks of the democratic revolution.’²¹ If one examines the dynamics of the various revolutions mentioned above, one can find such ‘episodic stages’, particularly in Russia (from February to October 1917) and in Cuba (from January 1959 to the summer of I960); but the ‘victory’ of the democratic revolution (i.e. the full achievement of its tasks) was attained only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, or, more precisely, through a revolutionary state power which politically represented the proletariat. In Yugoslavia,

China and Vietnam the revolution was from its beginning under the leadership of communist parties, and during its first period—lasting from a few months (Yugoslavia) to a few years (China)—it accomplished the agenda of urgent democratic tasks. But this was scarcely a ‘democratic stage’ in terms of traditional stagist scenarios, since these reforms were inseparably combined (‘chemically’ not merely mechanically) with socialist measures implemented by proletarian parties holding state power.

As we have seen, however, the question of the possibility of successful bourgeois-democratic revolutions in the twentieth century is both more controversial and ambiguous. The ambiguity resides partially in the question itself: what defines a ‘complete’ solution of bourgeois-democratic tasks? Since the distinction between a limited and a complete solution is open to various interpretations and assessments, it is very difficult to construct a clear-cut, rigorous and uncontestable answer from the historical data surveyed in Chapter 5. Some authors, for example, would claim that the development of capitalism in agriculture is tantamount to a bourgeois solution of the agrarian question. But this is obviously nonsense: for instance, practically all Mexican Marxist scholars agree today that agriculture in Mexico during the last twenty years of the Diaz dictatorship was largely capitalist.²² Thus if this had ‘solved’ the agrarian question, one is left wondering why millions of peasants rose up between 1911 and 1919 in one of the most important social explosions of the century. Certainly the mere substitution of capitalist exploitation for pre-capitalist relations of production only tends to intensify in most Third World settings the rampant contradictions of rural society as it accelerates a polarization between the landless poor and the big capitalist landowners.

If one adopts the criteria (as Trotsky implicitly did) of the long-term achievements of the great historical bourgeois revolutions, it seems not unreasonable to conclude that none of the bourgeois revolutions or ‘semi-revolutions’ in the non-European peripheral capitalist countries have yet been able to achieve both a stable and complete solution to all three genera of national democratic tasks.²³ As Ernest Mandel has recently argued, the

²²See Adolfo Gilly, Arnaldo Cordova, Armando Bartra, Manuel Aguilar Mora, and Enrique Semo, Interpretations: de la revolution mexicana, Mexico 1980.

²³Even non-Marxist critiques of Trotsky are ready to concede this point: 'That, in feet, the bourgeoisie of these underdeveloped countries, dependent on foreign capital and lacking a strong dedication to national purposes, would fail to realize its own “historical tasks"—this part of Trotsky’s theory has been all but entirely vindicated by experience. He, and not the Mensheviks, nor even Lenin, has been proven right on this point. . . . That the bourgeois revolution would now have to be completed without the leadership of, and often in direct opposition to, the bourgeoisie of the underdeveloped nations—this has been shown to be a reality of our time.’ (Irving Howe, Trotsky, London 1978, p. 35.)

decisive test for this aspect of theory of permanent revolution is whether | any dependent country has become through its processes of development i;; actually ‘ripe’ for a purely socialist revolution of the same kind that has 1 become the order of the day in the advanced capitalist societies. ‘Is there a A dependent capitalist country, or ex-colony, that has undergone sufficient A socio-economic transformation that the tasks now facing the proletariat in A that country are substantially identical to the tasks now facing the proletar- Af iat of countries such as Germany, France, Britain or the United States? Once we pose the question in this manner, the answer becomes evident. , There is no such country, and there is no reason to expect that there will be one.’²⁷³ At the same time, however, it must not be forgotten that even the v ‘classical’ French Revolution did not immediately bring about a stable ■ bourgeois democracy: this historical task was only achieved eighty years A afterwards with the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870-1. And if ; we further examine the cases of Italy and Japan, we discover that not only :■ the achievement of democracy, but also the resolution of the agrarian A question, were only completed seventy or eighty years (and two world wars) { after the inauguration of their semi-revolutions from above. Could it not be ; the case, then, that some Third World countries are in the middle of their / long march towards such a protracted solution of their bourgeois historical -tasks? While such a possibility can certainly not be ruled out a priori, it -does not seem very probable, especially since the process of ‘semiindustrialization’ in leading Third World countries seems to be increasing [ rather than reducing their dependence upon imperialism.²⁷⁴ J

However, what the historical evidence examined in Chapter 5 does show is that one should not underestimate the capacity of bourgeois or petty- ; bourgeois-led revolutions or semi-revolutions to accomplish important re- i forms and to establish relatively stable regimes—even, in some cases, stable parliamentary states—with a considerable degree of political and \

economic autonomy. To invoke an analogy: Lenin repeatedly warned against the revolutionary complacency that the Stolypin reforms were doomed, stressing that they might actually succeed in giving Tsarism a _new lease on life. A similar injunction might be made about the contemporary Stolypins of the Third World. The thesis that the bourgeoisie in the peripheral capitalist countries is incapable of democratic reforms, or of achieving a relative socio-political stability through populist demogo-guery, are recipes for comfortable passivity and fatalism. Why try to prevent what will never happen anyway? A more sober assessment of the potentialities of bourgeois/petty-bourgeois leadership arms revolutionaries with a more active understanding of their own role in fighting to prevent bourgeois stabilization, as well as a dynamic determination, not to rely on events, but to creatively struggle for an alternative future.

Trotsky himself, in his 1908 polemic against the Menshevik Cherev-anin (see Chapter 2), stressed that the bourgeois or proletarian character of the Russian revolution could not be defined a priori. 'The question as to what stage the Russian revolution will reach can, of course, be answered only conditionally.’ Such a ‘conditional’ perspective—intrinsic to the theory of permanent revolution—is the opposite of mechanical fatalism, even where such fatalism is ‘optimistic’ about the inevitable outcome (as in the outlook of the Second International at the beginning of this century). As a matter of fact, from the perspective of the theory of permanent revolution, the acknowledgment of the possibility of the bourgeois forces establishing a long-term hegemony over the popular masses through national-democratic reforms is the sharpest of all stimuli to a correct understanding of the urgency of forestalling such an outcome through the unremitting fight for proletarian hegemony. Such an approach, while recognizing the capacity of bourgeois (or petty-bourgeois or ‘Bonapartist’) regimes to implement significant reforms, does not call upon the proletariat to support the bourgeois leadership or to help it accomplish its tasks. Instead the strategy of permanent revolution implies that Marxists must learn to seize the advantage from every hesitation or indecision of the bourgeoisie in order to conquer leadership over the popular/peasant masses and to develop the revolutionary process uninterruptedly toward socialist goals. In other words, a combined socialist-democratic revolution under proletarian leadership is an objective possibility in the areas of peripheral capitalism and this possibility does not depend upon the previous completion of bourgeois-democratic revolution (Stalin’s classic doctrine of stages). On the contrary, it depends on the partial or total failure of the bourgeoisie to accomplish these tasks, and/or the capacity of the proletarian vanguard to win the leadership of the bloc of popular forces.

As this book is finished, several new revolutionary experiences are occurring that provide new evidence for the contemporary salience of the theory of permanent revolution. The two most successful cases so far are Iran and Nicaragua. Although it is much too soon to attempt a balance-sheet of these complex ongoing historical processes, it may be useful to sketch a provisional and comparative analysis of some of their central features.

In both countries, powerful, well-equipped armies were defeated by vast popular insurrections in which the proletariat and the urban poor played the decisive role. Moreover, in both countries the leadership of the revolutionary movement was overwhelmingly of petty-bourgeois extraction and had developed, through protracted struggle with terroristic dictatorship, an anti-imperialist and anti-autocratic programme. Also in both Iran and Nicaragua (and unlike Eh Salvador), significant sectors of the local bourgeoisie rallied in the end to the movements against the dictatorships. With these similarities acknowledged, however, enormous differences between the two cases are immedately evident. There is, for example, an abyss between the nature of the leadership and programme represented by the ayatollahs in Iran and the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (fsln) in Nicaragua. The Iranian Shi’ite clergy is trying to channel the mass movements into a peculiar form of anti-imperialist bourgeois solution: the ‘Islamic state’ with an attendant nationalist-capitalist framework that would suppress any independent proletarian politics. The fsln, in contrast, is a movement with Marxist leanings, very profoundly influenced by the Cuban revolution, and with deep roots amongst the workers, peasants and the slum poor. Its emergent perspective seems unmistakably committed to socialist revolution in Nicaragua and the whole of the Central American isthmus.

The example of the Cuban Revolution and the support that it gave to the FSLN since the early 1960s have certainly contributed to the radicalization of the Sandinistas and the popular movement in Nicaragua. Contrariwise, the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies’ outspoken support for the Shah weakened the influence of the left in the Iranian anti-imperialist movement. If the rabidly anti-communist forces of Khomeini attained hegemony over the popular masses, this was not the inevitable result of some ‘innately reactionary’ characteristic of Islam perse—indeed, significant left-Muslim forces (the Mujahadeen, for instance) were active in the anti-Shah struggle—but, to a large extent, the result of the negative image projected by the USSR and China, which helped discredit communism in the eyes of broad sections of the Iranian population.

Further contrasts: The Iranian religious nationalists executed many generals and police officers, organized a new paramilitary ‘Revolutionary Guard’, but failed to destroy the old imperial army. It is precisely this traditional military apparatus, now ‘rehabilitated’ by the war with Iraq, which still constitutes the basis for any restoration of the pro-imperialist forces (with or without the support of the Islamic clergy). In Nicaragua, on the other hand, there were practically no executions, but the fsln completely dissolved Somoza’s Guardia Nacional and replaced it with the Ejercito Popular Sandinista, composed of its own guerrilla columns and armed popular militias. Moreover, the Islamic leadership in Iran, despite its vehement anti-imperialist orientation, has failed to establish a real democracy, to emancipate oppressed nationalities or to solve the agrarian question. Indeed it has continued the repression of national minorities (Kurds, Arabs, etc.), attacked the most militant sectors of the labour movement, suppressed the rights of women, and, in general, paved the way for a counter-revolution.²⁷⁵ The FSLN, in contrast, organizing the masses through an array of unions, militia organizations and the ‘Sandinista Defence Committees’, has taken increasingly radical measures that have undermined Nicaraguan capitalism: nationalization of Somoza’s immense properties (numerous banks, stores, plants and almost half of the country’s arable land), a basic agrarian reform, the institutionalization of workers control in factories, and so on. The current sharpening of the economic and political conflicts between the FSLN majority and the bourgeoisie (represented by ‘COSEP’) suggests that the Sandinista revolution is already organically, and without intermediary stages, growing over into an anti-capitalist revolution.

The particular dynamics of the permanent revolution in Nicaragua can perhaps best be illustrated by comparison with its Cuban predecessor. In the first place, the Sandinista experience reproduces many familiar motifs of the Cuban revolution: (I) the formation of a radical anti-imperialist movement under the banner of a legendary jacobin revolutionary leader of the past (Marti, Sandino); (2) this movement (m-26-7, fsln) leads the struggle against a brutal dictatorship protected by us imperialism (Batista, Somoza); (3) through a combination of guerrilla warfare and urban insurrection, the old state apparatus and its repressive organs are thoroughly destroyed; (4) a new revolutionary army is organized on a basis of guerrilla units and popular militias, but the government remains a coalition with representatives of the anti-dictatorial bourgeoisie (Urrutia in Cuba, Robelo

in Nicaragua); (5) as the masses are mobilized and armed, and as the revolution takes increasingly radical measures (beginning with attacks against the rural oligarchy and foreign capital), the coalition disintegrates ' and the bourgeois forces go over to the counter-revolutionary camp.

At the same time, however, there are important differences between the two revolutions. The FSLN, for instance, was from its origins in 1961 a movement with a clearer and more left-wing programmatic definition than y the m-26-7 at comparable stages of development (between 1954 and 1959). y Both the founders of the Frente Sandinista, Carlos Fonseca (killed by Somoza’s troops in 1976) and Tomas Borge (present Minister of the Interior), were Marxists who had left the Stalinist Partido Socialista de ■ Nicaragua in protest against its reformist orientation. In a seminal essay on the fsln’s strategy, published in Cuba in 1969, Fonseca wrote: ‘Our main goal is the socialist revolution, a revolution which intends to drive out Yankee imperialism and its local agents ... we must be alert to the danger _;that the insurrection will be manipulated by the reactionary forces within the anti-Somoza opposition. The aim of the revolutionary movement is : dual. On the one hand, the task is to smash the treacherous and criminal 7 clique that has usurped power for so many years, and, on the other hand, to " prevent the capitalist component of the opposition, whose submission to ; imperialism is well known, from profiting from the crisis created by the ^:: guerrilla struggle to seize power for themselves.’²⁷⁶ Another distinctive ? feature of the Nicaraguan revolution was the relationship between the respective roles of urban insurrection and rural guerrilla warfare: the decisive political/military moment in the destruction of Somoza’s well-oiled war machine was the massive armed upsurge of workers, urban poor and youth in the towns—first in the provincial centres (Masaya, Leon, Esteli), then in the capital (Managua). These two differences suggest that the Sandinista y revolution has had, since its beginning, a more consistently ‘proletarian’ and socialist character than the Cuban struggle in its first years. The relative maturity of the FSLN, however, is easily understandable, since the Nicaraguan revolution has profited from the very beginning from the example of the Cuban permanent revolutionary process.²⁷⁷

Now, if the politics of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution have on the whole passed the tests of history, his sociology—that is, his analysis of the roles of the various social classes in the revolutionary process—requires some important clarifications and amendments. Let us re-examine Trotsky’s theses on the roles of the five principal social strata—the national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, the peasantry and the proletariat—in the light of the modern historical experiences of the countries of peripheral capitalism.

Although it is true that Trotsky sometimes underestimated the capabilities of the indigenous bourgeoisie in certain countries (expecially India), his general views concerning the historical role of this class have been decisively vindicated on a world-historical scale. As a matter of fact, the most advanced democratic revolutions have been specifically distinguished by the petty-bourgeois, rather than bourgeois, character of their leadership.

The national bourgeoisie appears most of the time as a moderate, if not conservative, force, unwilling to initiate social struggles, and obsessed with containing, ‘institutionalizing’ and halting (if not overtly repressing) popular democratic revolutions.

In Permanent Revolution Trotsky insisted that the petty bourgeoisie, in either the advanced or the backward countries, would not be capable of playing a leading revolutionary role because the logic of capitalist development ‘condemns the petty bourgeoisie to nullity’.²⁷⁸ Yet a few years later he was forced to acknowledge that the petty bourgeoisie was, in fact, the leading force of the nationalist movement in Catalonia;²⁷⁹ while in the Transitional Programme (1938) he even envisioned the possibility that under exceptional circumstances (war, financial, crash, mass revolutionary pressure and so on) the petty-bourgeois parties might ‘go further than they wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie’ and the establishment of a workers and farmers’ government.²⁸⁰ The advents of such ‘workers’ and peasants’ governments’ were, of course, quite exceptional; the most notable examples being probably Algeria under Ben Bella (1963-5) and the 1959-60 phase of the Cuban revolution.

But there has been a much more frequent phenomenon, of central importance in the Third World, which Trotsky did not foresee: that petty-bourgeois nationalist forces (particularly the military) would substitute themselves for the weak or faltering national bourgeoisie, assume the leadership of the democratic revolution or semi-revolution, and implement important reforms whose radicalism would far exceed the desires or capacities of the bourgeoisie. This, of course, is what happened in Nasser’s Egypt, in Boumedienne’s Algeria, in Velasco Alvarado’s Peru, and, to a certain extent, in both Mexico and Bolivia. Although these substitution-alist petty-bourgeois forces have generally opened the way to the rule of nouveau riche bourgeois fractions (Mexico, Bolivia, Egypt and so on), they have sometimes—at least in Algeria—transformed themselves into a sui generis ‘bourgeois bureaucracy . In any event, they have played a hegemonic social role for a certain historical period, and have imprinted a specific, petty-bourgeois character on the revolutionary process under their leadership. More recently, one has seen petty-bourgeois jacobin nationalist movements come to power in several African and Asian countries which claim allegiance to scientific socialism, Marxism and sometimes even to Leninism. Furthermore, these states—Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, South Yemen, Ethiopia and Afghanistan—have established strong economic, political and military ties with the Soviet Union, Cuba and the Eastern bloc. To what extent this might correspond to the beginning of a permanentist process of social transformation, in a 'Cuba-like’ pattern, remains to be seen. Perhaps it can be equally well a transitional stage towards neo-bourgeois stabilization and the renewal of dependence upon imperialism. Whatever may be the actual ourcomes, these experiences demonstrate the continued revolutionary vitality of the leftist petty bourgeoisie, the general attraction of Marxism, and, more specifically, the renewed influence of the USSR in the 1970s, following China’s complete retreat from the anti-imperialist struggle.

Thus, we must conclude that although Trotsky's thesis of the petty bourgeoisie as a class that must in the last analysis support either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat is ultimately vindicated, the course of modern history has also demonstrated that the nationalist petty bourgeoisie can, for distinct periods of years or even decades, hold power and forge its own distinctive policy. Trotsky verged on recognition of this phenomenon in his notes on Bonapartism in Latin America, but he did not clearly distinguish between a Bonapartism under the hegemony of petty-bourgeois fractions and another variety linked to the national bourgeoisie. This consequential analytical oversight was probably related to the fact that the concrete example most carefully observed and written about by Trotsky— Cardenas’s Mexico—was uniquely a border-line case becween the two modes of Bonapartist rule.

The intelligentsia is not a social class but a social category, defined by its relationship to the sphere of what Marx called ‘spiritual production’, and with traditional links to the petty bourgeoisie (although more recently it has been increasingly transformed by the tendency toward the proletarianization of intellectual labour). In his unfinished biography of Lenin (1936), Trotsky developed a remarkable analysis of the role of the intelligentsia in fin de siecle Russia, which included the recognition that ‘after the abolition of serfdom, the nourishing body for revolutionary ideas was almost exclusively the intelligentsia, or rather its young generation, the

poorest elements of the youth in the schools, students, seminarists, high-school pupils, most of whom by their living conditions were not above the proletariat, and frequently even below it.’³² Unfortunately, however, Trotsky never attempted to extend the implications of this analysis to other ‘backward’ countries, and the question of the role of the intelligentsia was virtually neglected in the bulk of his writings on the permanent revolution in the colonial and semi-colonial areas (China, India, Mexico, etc.)- This is a serious lacuna, since, as we have seen, the intelligentsia (or rather its radicalized sections: intellectual labourers) has played a crucially important role in most of the socialist revolutions in the countries of peripheral capitalism. Moreover, the problem of the intelligentsia cannot be waived away by references to individuals ‘breaking with their class’; for, even though only fractions of the intelligentsia have ever participated in revolutionary struggle, they have furnished very considerable proportions of the cadre of the communist and revolutionary socialist movements of the Third World. Thus we are confronted with a massive phenomenon, mostly ignored by ‘classical’ Marxism, and demanding a rigorous sociological explanation.

Amongst non-Marxist scholars, Alvin Gouldner has provided some of the most provocative hypotheses about the general role of revolutionary intellectuals. In particular, his essay ‘Prologue to a Theory of Revolutionary Intellectuals’ is full of fertile insights, but his central thesis on the dynamic of the revolutionary intelligentsia in the Third World is far from convincing. In his view the struggle of the intelligentsia against the national bourgeoisie is 'an internecine struggle within the ‘elite’, a struggle

"Trotsky, La jeunesse dt Lbime (1936), Paris 1970, pp. 35-6. This analysis was prefigured to a certain extent by Trocsky’s earlier writings on students, particularly his 1910 essay, The Intelligentsia and Socialism (London 1966): "The student, in contrast both to the young worker and to his own father, fulfils no social function, does not feel direct dependence on capital or the state, is not bound by any responsibilities and—at least objectively, if not subjectively—is free in his judgement of right and wrong. At this period everything within him is fermenting, his class prejudices are as formless as his ideological interests, questions of conscience matter very strongly. ... If collectivism is at all capable of mastering his mind, now is the moment, and it will indeed do it through the nobly scientific character of its basis and the comprehensive cultural content of its aims, not as a prosaic “knife and fork” question.’ (p. 12) However, Trotsky developed in this essay a tather pessimistic view of the possibility of winning significant numbers of scudents and intellectuals to the Western European socialist movement before the victory of the proletarian revolution. We know from his later writings that he was aware of the revolutionary role of students in countries such as Spain, but he never attempted to elaborate the larger implications of the phenomenon. Finally it is important to note that while the students and young intellectuals had been a key source of revolutionary cadres in the peripheral capitalist countries from the beginning of ^fie century, in the advanced countries, by contrast, they remained rather conservative, if not reactionary, in their majority until the 1960s.

within the ruling group itself.²⁸¹ The vague term ‘elite’ is not able to establish any real social link between the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals, while the characterization of the latter as being members of the ‘ruling class’ is highly debatable. Moreover, as Eric Wolf has shown in a comparative study of revolutions in Mexico, Russia, China, Vietnam, Algeria and Cuba, the intellectuals who played the leading roles in these movements were by and large ‘rootless’, ‘marginal’ and divorced from the traditional sources of power.²⁸² In order to defend his analysis, therefore, Gouldner is compelled to define the intelligentsia—including professionals, technicians, clerks, journalists, lawyers, and so on—as a 'cultural bourgeoisie whose capital is knowledge and language acquired during their education’²⁸³—a definition that completely empties the concepts of ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘capital of any determinate socio-economic meaning and reduces them to simple metaphors.

In our opinion, the opposition of the intellectuals o the bourgeoisie, far from being an internecine struggle within the ‘ruling group’ or a conflict between two fractions of the bourgeoisie, is above all related to their links with a different social class: the petty bourgeoisie. The spontaneous ideology of the so-called ‘democratic petty bourgeoisie’, of which intellectuals comprise the most vocal and active segment, is not boi -geois liberalism but rather jacobinism', the specific combination of plebeian democracy and romantic moralism of which Rousseau and Robespiere were the first historical representatives. In the countries of ‘belated’ capitalist development (e.g. Germany in the nineteenth or Russia in the early-twentieth centuries), where the bourgeoisie was non-revolutionary and allied by fear of the masses with landowners and/or imperialism, this petty-bourgeois jacobinism tended to become more radicalized. In some cases, such a radicaliza-tion eventually led sections of the petty bourgeoisie, particularly the intellectuals, to a complete break with the bourgeoisie and to the adoption of a socialist stance. The two classic examples were, first, the case of Marx himself and the ‘Hegelian left’ in Germany before 1848, and, second, the Russian intelligentsia at the end of the nineteenth century.²⁸⁴ Gouldner has discussed this process in one of the most perceptive passages of his essay: ‘Marxism arises in part as an outcome of the propertied middle-class ther-midorian halt to its own revolution. After that, revolutionary intellectuals

could no longer ally themselves with the propertied middle class and had to move in search of another "historical agent”, an identity they later assigned to the proletariat.’²⁸⁵ During the twentieth century, moreover, this process of the radicalization of the intelligentsia in the countries of peripheral capitalism has become increasingly massive. This is the combined result of the growing penetration of imperialism (and its destructive impact on native culture, bitterly resented by nationalist intellectuals), the conciliatory or even openly pro-imperialist positions of the local bourgeoisie and the cumulative impact of the victorious socialist revolutions. The convergence of these three developments has produced an explosive fusion of anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois and socialist sympathies in broad sections of the intelligentsia.

The crucial role of the peasantry in all the victorious socialist revolutions after 1917 reveals some important common traits: First, the peasants constituted the main social base for the revolutionary process, at least until the seizure of power. They furnished the vast majority of members of both the revolutionary party and the popular army. Second, unlike the experience of Russia in 1917, where peasant unrest was stimulated by the working-class upsurge in the towns, the mobilization of the peasantry in these other cases was not a result of the mass activity of the urban proletariat. Third, the peasants massively supported and were recruited to parties that proclaimed allegiance to communism and did not hide their socialist revolutionary aims (with the exception of Cuba until I960). Fourth, the progressive collectivization of agriculture after the seizure of power (with the exception of Yugoslavia where a small peasantry has remained entrenched) was supported by vast sections of the rural poor and did not encounter the massive opposition of the peasantry as had been the case in the Soviet Union.

These facts, while being perfectly compatible with the fundamental postulates of the theory of permanent revolution, do, however, contradict several of Trotsky’s specific assertions about the peasantry, especially with regard to China. (Although, as we have seen, he was ready to revise in 1939 the classical Marxist conception of the peasantry as a ’non-socialist class’.) Moreover, Trotsky’s views on the peasantry reflected traditional Russian Marxist views, and these attitudes, because of their profound purchase on modern revolutionary theory, require a thorough re-assessment. The revolutionary role of the peasantry is simply a huge historical fact that occupies _a central place in the unfolding dynamic of revolution in the twentieth century. It cannot be pushed aside as an ‘historical accident’ or as an episodic ‘deviation from the norm’. It must be squarely confronted and scientifically explained.

In our view it is precisely the theory of permanent revolution itself that offers the most consistent and comprehensive explanation of the two most important underlying determinants of the peasantry’s revolutionary inclinations: (1) the unequal and combined development of capitalism in agriculture has produced a deep crisis in the rural life of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. As Eric Wolf has stressed, ‘the spread of the market has torn men up by the roots and shaken them loose from the social relationships into which they were born’. A situation of acute instability has been created where ‘new wealth does not yet have legitimacy, and old power no longer commands respect. Traditional groups have been weakened, but not yet defeated, and new groups art not yet strong enough to wield decisive power.’²⁸⁶ A similar view has been expressed in a recent essay by James Petras, who rightly insists on the social consequences of imperialist penetration: ‘The immediate effect of imperial domination has been to accentuate the uprootedness of the rural labour force: the decomposition of the village through force, commercial relations and/or corporate expansion has been a central feature of pre-revolutionary societies. . . . It is the dispossessed former peasant, uprooted by the combined politico-military-economic efforts of imperial powers, who has set in motion the movement of peasants toward political action. . . . Indeed this transformation of the peasantry is clearly the reason that rural labour has been so prominent in all successful socialist revolutions to date;’²⁸⁷ (2) the failure of the national bourgeoisie to provide radical democratic solutions to the agrarian and national questions has, thus, led the rebellious peasantry to support and/or join communist movements.

The ‘peasantry’ is, of course, a very broad concept that conflates heterogeneous social strata which have engaged in quite different ways with the revolutionary process. Rich peasants, obviously, have in general been hostile or at least neutral to communist-led revolutionary movements. Paradoxically, the first section of the peasantry who usually have been mobilized have not been the poorest strata, but rather the middle peasantry, peasant smallholders. In his well-known essay on peasants and revolution, Hamza Alavi exposes as mythical the famous assertion of Mao’s that the

struggle in Hunan was waged and led by primarily poor peasants; in fact, it -was the middle peasants who were from the first the most militant of the rural masses.⁴⁰ Similar trends, as we have seen, characterized the Cuban 7 revolution; indeed, as Eric Wolf has observed, the central role of the middle peasantry has been common in all the great ‘peasant wars’ of the i century (Mexico, Russia,''China, Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria). ‘Possession ;! of some land grants the property-owning peasant a measure of independ-) ence not possessed by the peasant who depends for his livelihood primarily on his immediate overlord. The property-owning peasant thus has some 7 independent leverage which he can translate into protest more easily than a' man who options are severely restricted by a situation of total dependence.’⁴¹

The poor and landless rural population (sharecroppers, tenants, wage-labourers and so on), potentially more radical than the middle peasants and more objectively inclined to the collectivist aims of the communist : movement, generally join the 'peasant war’ only at a second stage when the power of the landlords and local authorities has already been shaken. Comparing the various experiences of peasant insurgency in the Third World, ? Wolf concludes that ‘the poor peasant or landless labourer who depends on ) a landlord for the largest part of his liveliehood, or the totality of it, has no : tactical power: he is completely within the power domain of his employer, ; without sufficient resources of his own to serve him as resources in the power struggle. Poor peasants and landless labourers, therefore, are unlike- ■ ly to pursue the course of rebellion, unless they are able to rely on some j external power to challenge the power which controls them.’ As examples of such ‘external’ forces, he cites the peasant soldiers who returned to the villages, weapons in hand, after the collapse of the Russian army in 1917, ^ and the role of the red army in China’s rural areas.⁴² Analysing the Chinese^ ‘peasant war’, Alavi criticizes the distorted portrait of the struggle in Mao’s writings: ‘The poor peasant is depicted to be spontaneously and unconditionally playing a revolutionary role; a picture which obscures the crucial role of the Communist Party, a party with a proletarian revolutionary perspective, and the Red Army which broke the existing structure of power in the village, which prevented the Chinese revolution from degenerating

■’“Hamza Alavi, 'Peasants and Revolution', Socialist Register 1965, pp. 258-61. _

⁴ 'Wolf, p. 202. According to Wolf, another section of the rural classes with a propensity to rebellion are the 'marginal', ‘free’ or ‘tactically mobile' peasants not directly under the control of the landowners, (pp. 290-3) Our analysis of the role of the peasantry of the Sierra Maestra in the Cuban revolution would tend to confirm this hypothesis.

;_nto an ineffective peasant uprising.’^{288 289 290} In this respect Trotsky was correct 'in insisting that the peasantry could only play a consistent revolutionary _f0le under proletarian and communist leadership. The rebel peasants required an urban Intellectual and working-class revolutionary vanguard in order to attain socialist consciousness and to become organized on a national scale. In the absence of such leadership, the peasant movement either remained local and ineffective, or followed bourgeois or petty-bourgeois leadership, as in Mexico and Algeria. The peasant movement by itself could not seize power or undertake the transformation of society.⁴⁴ Even Wolf, a particularly sympathetic historian of peasant insurgency, recognizes this fact: ‘Marxists have long argued that peasants without outside leadership cannot make a revolution; and our case material would bear chem out. Where the peasantry has successfully rebelled against the established order—under its own banner and with its own leaders—it was sometimes able to reshape the social structure of the countryside closer to its heart’s desires; but it did not lay hold of the state, of the cities which house the centers of control. . . ,’²⁹⁰It may be predicted, however, that because of the accelerated urbanization and industrialization of many peripheral capitalist countries, especially in Latin America, the revolutionary class struggles of the next decade may increasingly shift to the cities, and the working class will play a more central role. The end of the twentieth century may see a return to the ‘classical’ October pattern of proletarian revolution.

In October 1917 the working class was directly the principal social actor and architect of the revolution through its organization into soviets. Simultaneously, the Bolshevik Party was proletarian, not only by its ideology and programme, but also in social composition. Contrary to Trotsky’s

expectations, however, this configuration of a hegemonic proletarian party and massive working-class self-organization was not repeated in the Chinese or other post-1917 revolutions. Although the proletariat did play a seminal role in the early stages of the struggle in China, Vietnam and Yugoslavia (as well as in Cuba in the 1930s), it was largely absent during the actual revolutionary seizure of power. The situation in Cuba was somewhat different because of the role of the general strike of January 1959, but ■, it was still the peasantry that provided the main social support for the revolutionary war. We cannot enter here into a detailed discussion of the ^:reasons for the subordinated role of the urban working classes in the final phases of these revolutions, except to note the fateful consequences of repression. In all societies in question, the proletariat was the victim of terrible, systematic white terror: China after 1927, Vietnam after 1939, Yugoslavia during the Nazi occupation and Cuba after 1957. This wide-scale repression not only desjroyed or disorganized the workers’ vanguard, but also precipitated a mass displacement of revolutionary cadre to the relatively more secure areas. It must also be recognized, however, that internal political factors also contributed to a weakening of the urban labour movements. In China, for example, there was the CCP’s policy of ... seeking an alliance with the national bourgeoisie, while in Cuba an impor- ; tant factor was the non-revolutionary character of the political leadership of the organized workers’ movement (the old Stalinist psp). All the post-1917 revolutions, therefore, can be designated as ‘proletarian’ only indirectly, by ; the nature of the political leadership of the revolutionary process. Indeed, not only was the proletariat not directly the social agent of revolution, but the revolutionary party was not the direct, organic expression of the proletariat. How can we, then, meaningfully describe the Chinese, Vietnamese, ; Yugoslav or Cuban communist parties as ‘proletarian movements’? In our view, these parties acted as ‘representatives’ of the proletariat in the four following ways:

(1) With the exception of m-26-7, all parties had their historical roots in the labour movement and the struggles of the urban proletariat.

(2) The working class was socially present in the party structure, especially among its middle cadre. This was most of all true of the Yugoslav Party, but also in differing degrees true of the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban movements.

(3) The parties were the political and programmatic expression of the proletariat by virtue of their adherence to the historical interests of the working class (abolition of capitalism, etc.).

(4) The parties’ ideologies were proletarian and the membership and periphery were systematically educated to accept the values and world-view of the international working-class movement.

These last two aspects are the decisive ones, and the only ones indisputably present in all four post-1917 cases. This implies that these parties were not directly proletarian in the sense of the Bolshevik Party, but only through certain political and ideological mediations. They are proletarian in an indirect sense not merely because of the predominance of nonproletarian layers (peasants, intellectuals, etc.), but especially because of the presence of a bureaucracy which, whatever its specific social origins, constitutes a ‘separate body’ with characteristics and interests distinct from che proletariat. Some authors have tended to confuse such bureaucracies with intellectual strata, and present the revolutionary party as an instrument for the seizure of power by intellectuals. But the two social categories are not identical; indeed, in certain European communist parties a large proportion of the apparatchiks are of working-class background. The crucial element in the bureaucratization of the communist movement, including those parties that actually led revolutions, was not tne hegemony of intellectuals, but the dominance of the political and ideological model of the Soviet Union.

If the political forces that led the uninterrupted revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Cuba were, directly or indirectly, proletarian, can the same be said of the states which they established? Trotsky, as we know, developed the concept of a ‘bureaucratically degenerated worker's state’ to characterize the USSR after Stalin’s ‘Thermidor’ of the 1920s. In the post-war era the Fourth International extended Trotsky’s theory to the new Yugoslav, Chinese and Vietnamese regimes, which they designated as ‘bureaucratically deformed states’; the terminology indicating that since the bureaucratic dimension had been inherent from the beginning, there was no need for a bureaucratic counter-revolution to destroy the old proletarian party, as in the USSR.

The problem is that the character of bureaucratization in a state is qualitatively distinct from that of a party, for the simple reason that the state bureucracy holds real power and can assure itself access to broad social and economic privileges. A thorough discussion of this problem of the nature of the so-called socialist states is beyond the scope of this book and would demand another volume, at least. Nonetheless it seems to us that it would be more accurate to characterize these regimes—with the possible exception of Cuba—as bureaucratic states of proletarian origin-, meaning that while

they are the products of socialist revolutions under the leadership of pro- i letarian-socialist parties, the real power in these states is monopolized by a bureaucratic layer with specific social and economic interests. In these post-capitalist societies, the transition to socialism which began with the revolution has been arrested by the bureaucratic character of the regime and the absence of socialist democracy. But the proletarian-socialist origin ofV; the bureaucratic state generates a series of contradictory structural traits:

(1) Its economic system still incorporates certain revolutionary features: the V abolition of private ownership, state planning and so on. This also means that certain limits are imposed on social inequality and unemployment. But the economic plan expresses the interests of the bureaucracy first and " above all, and not the needs and aspirations of the population.

(2) The power of the bureaucracy is also constrained, within certain limits, -¹in its appropriation of the means of production (which it cannot dispose of J as private property) and, particularly in Yugoslavia, in its control of the labour process.

(3) A significant percentage of the bureaucracy is from a proletarian back- V ground; moreover, the bureaucracy tends to reproduce itself through a j system of selective, working-class ‘upward mobility’.

(4) Marxism is the official doctrine of the regime, although it has been ‘ transformed into an official dogma which empties it of its critical dimen- ' sion and transforms it into a device for the ideological legitimation of the bureaucratic system.

(5) The state remains integrated in the world communist movement and continues to give support to other socialist revolutions, but the principal objective of its foreign policy becomes the promotion of national interests as interpreted by the bureaucracy.

Thus the working class per se is excluded from the direct exercise of power, which becomes concentrated in the bureaucratic apparatus. The dictatorship of the bureaucratic layer can assume more totalitarian or more enlightened, more terrorist or more liberal, more personal or more institutional forms: in any case, its foundation is the absence of democratic rights for the mass of working people. The bureaucratic stratum enjoys a broad spectrum of material, social and political privileges, ranging from special shops to differential access to education.

The most complex problem is accurately defining the precise nature of this bureaucratic layer: is it a ‘new class’, a ‘caste’, a ‘new bourgeoisie’, or

just a ‘fraction of the proletariat’? Although the bureaucracy—particularly in the USSR—has its historical roots in the working class and the labour movement, it cannot be considered merely a special 'fraction of the proletariat’. As the Soviet Left-Oppositionist Christian Rakovsky showed in his remarkable essay, ‘The Professional Dangers of Power’ (1928), the functional differentiation between those who exercise power and those who do not, tends to become a determinate social difference as well: the life conditions and the socio-economic privileges of the bureaucracy increasingly separate them from the working class. With time, Rakovsky emphasized, ‘the function modifies the organ’, and individuals exercising the tasks of political and economic leadership, objectively and subjectively, materially and morally, become a distinct and consolidated layer.²⁹¹

If we take the classical Marxist definition of a social class—a group of individuals who occupy the same position in the social process of production and share the same relationship to property in the means of production—it is difficult to consider the post-capitalist bureaucracy as a social class in a rigorous sense. The high-ranking officer in the KGB, the professor of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and the manager of a hydro-electric trust, scarcely hold the same places in the production process and certainly are not owners of the means of production. What they do have in common are the following political and ideological characteristics: first, their membership of the ruling political institution, the party; second, its monopoly of social power; and third, as a consequence of these first two conditions, their access to a system of socio-economic privileges.

Trotsky refused to characterize the Stalinist bureaucracy as a social class, designating it, instead, as a ‘caste’. But he was the first, however, to recognize that ‘this definition does not of course possess a strictly scientific character’ and that ‘the makeshift character of the term is clear to everybody, since it would enter nobody’s mind to identify this Moscow oligarchy with the Hindu caste of the Brahmins’.²⁹² Indeed, the term is not at all accurate, since the caste system as it exists in India is a totally closed and

hereditary system of social stratificaction without social mobility: character- s istics that obviously are not applicable to the Soviet bureaucracy. The i rationale for Trotsky’s employment of the term, however, becomes clearer : when some of his other writings are considered. In an analysis of Tsarist society, for instance, he refers to the several social estates as ‘castes’. It is i‘ likely, therefore, that Trotsky used ‘caste’ as synonymous with ‘estate’.²⁹³ ■-Now, we would argue that this concept of‘estate’, defined by political and i ideological criteria, actually is the most adequate for grasping the specific- ' ity of a system of social stratification based on a bureaucracy. According to Max Weber’s well-known definition, a social estate (Stand) is a plurality of individuals which has been able to impose special rights and (Standische) -monopolies; these monopolies can take different forms, one of the most important being the monopolistic appropriation of political power.²⁹⁴ ;

Estates are not social classes, but a separate and subordinate system of •{ stratification. In the feudal mode of production, for example, a structure of l estates (nobility, clergy, third estate) existed side-by-side and partially ? combined with the class structure: the nobility, largely, but not complete-. ^:ly, coincided with the landowners as a social class. The third estate, in ’ contrast was primarily an inter-class layer, composed of the bourgeoisie, ; petty bourgeoisie, peasants, urban plebs, and so on. The clergy was an even > more complex case: on one side, it was also an inter-class bloc, divided between an aristocratic high clergy and a plebeian low clergy; on the other ; side, however, its unity as an estate was quite real and assured to the s totality of its membership certain juridical and socio-economic privileges. | Thus the pre-capiitalist clergy, constituted as an estate, possessed several salient characteristics that are analogous with the post-capitalist bureaucra- f cy: first, its institutional definition; second, institutional forms of property ^;(absence of private accumulation or the hereditary transmission of wealth); ; third, an elaborate hierarchical structure with a concentration of power and privilege at the top; fourth, the central role of ideology in che cohesion of the estate and operation of its social power (as a corollary, ideological monolithicity had to be defended at any price: thus witch hunts, inquisitions, confession and abjuration of sinners, dogmatism, scholasticism and so on).

The Stalinist party has frequently been compared to the medieval church. It is obvious, however, that the two phenomena are radically

distinct and it would be superficial and ahiscorical to see them as similar or equivalent. The feudal mode of production has nothing in common with post-capitalist society, and the Communist Party of the USSR is not a new incarnation of the Roman Ecclesia. Nevertheless, we would suggest that it is a fruitful hypothesis to consider the post-capitalist bureaucracy as a new form of estate, defined by policical/ideological criteria, with an articulated institutional unity and a de facto monopoly of power in society. Further, we would argue that very nature of the post-capitalist social formation, especially its economic structure, founded on state property and centralized planning, determines in the last instance the possibility (although certainly not the inevitability) of the bureaucracy constituting itself as the dominant and privileged estate. Without being a class, the post-capitalist bureaucracy nonetheless fulfills some of the traditional functions of a ruling class: appropriation of the surplus, exercise of power and so on. The same, of course, can be said of a pre-capitalist estate such as the clergy. But while the mode of exploitation of the producing classes operated by the clergy was similar or overlapping with that of the feudal lords, the economic parasitism of the bureaucracy is sui generis and different from any social class. Thus, we can say that while the high energy of pre-capitalist society was partially assimilated to a ruling class (the feudal landowners); the high bureaucracy of the post-capitalist states takes the place of a non-existent ruling class.

In 1905 Trotsky expressed the hope that the permanent revolution would lead to the establishment of a workers’ democracy. Although this was indeed briefly realized in Russia during the first year of the revolution, none of the post-1917 revolutions have achieved real proletarian deomcracy or even temporary phases of ‘soviet’ or councilist mass democracy. It is an essential question for the future of the socialist movement whether this absence of democracy has been inscribed as an inevitability in the nature of the objective conditions prevailing in backward and underdeveloped countries.

Some famous Marxist thinkers, following the example of Karl Kautsky, have interpreted the evolution of the USSR and other post-capitalist states in precisely such a fatalistic framework. Such a ‘neo-Menshevik’ perspective differs from traditional Menshevism in that it does concede the possiblity of anti-capitalist revolution in peripheral countries, but at the same time it insists that such a revolution is doomed to degenerate into totalitarian despotism. Because Kautsky was the first to coherently formulate such a position and because he contributed to an important reconstruction of the

stagist problematic, it is useful to briefly chart the evolution of his analysis of the Russian revolution.

Initially Kautsky clung to traditional Menshevik orthodoxy, arguing as late as 1918 that the Russian revolution could not escape its fundamentally , bourgeois-democratic destiny. In his first anti-Bolshevik pamphlet (The Dictatorship of the Proletariat—1918), for example, he argued that according to Marxism, ‘the coming revolution . . . owing to the economic backward-ness of Russia, could only be a middle-class one’; che Bolsheviks were 7 repudiating Marx when they 'attempt to clear by bold leaps or remove by ■■■. legal enactments the obstacles offered by the successive phases of normal ; development’ (our emphasis). He emphatically denied that the Soviet regime could accomplish durable socialist tasks: That it has radically destroyed capitalism can be accepted by no one . . . capitalism will again rise, ' and must rise. Probably it will reappear very quickly. . . .’²⁹⁵ But a year later, in Terrorism and Communism, there was a certain change in Kautsky’s 7 emphasis; the main argument revolved around the inevitable collapse of Bolshevism in the near future.²⁹⁶ It was only in the 1920s, when the post-capitalist character and stability of the USSR had become irrefutable, that Katusky began to create a new theoretical formulation. He acknow- ; ledged that the Soviets had been capable of smashing capitalism, but he ■’ claimed that the new regime—which he sometimes designated as ‘state capitalism’—was, if anything, worse than capitalism and even compared it unfavourably to Mussolini’s Italy. By 1930 he arrived at a position that ■ seemed like almost an exact mirror image of the ‘social fascist' conception ■ of Third Period Stalinism: Bolshevism and Fascism are basically identical (‘Mussolini is only the ape of Lenin’), while the main enemy of the working : class became no longer the ‘primitive’ or ‘white-guard’ counter-revolution so much as the ‘Fascist-Bolshevik’ (faschistisch-bolchevistisch) threat.²⁹⁷

Of course, these polemical excesses should not be taken too seriously, particularly because they were vehemently rejected by Kautsky’s own Menshevik and Austro-Marxist friends. Rather more important and interesting, are Kautsky’s contributions to the fatalist doctrine of the inevitable degeneracy of ‘premature revolution’. In all of his post-1917 writings, for instance, he repeatedly argued that che Bolsheviks' unbridled subjectivism and voluntarism led them to violate the limitations of historical conditions - and to attempt a socialist project on an imma_ture_socio-economic base that

inevitably generated a brutal bureaucratic dictatorship.⁵³ Interestingly, he did not attribute the responsibility for this historical catastrophe solely to the Bolshevik Party, but also blamed the 'debasement' of the Russian proletariat itself-—the same proletariat which he had so extolled in his pre-1917 writings. ‘The World War led to the moral and intellectual debasement of the toiling classes, not only because it brutalized nearly all strata of the population and elevated the least developed section of the proletariat to the vanguard of the social movement, but above all because it aggravated the proletariat’s misery enormously, and thus replaced calm deliberation with the most bitter exasperation.⁵⁴ He went as far as to criticize the Bolsheviks for opportunistically yielding to the radicalism of these backward masses: The Bolsheviks owe their accession to power to the fact that they said Yes and Amen to all that the masses wanted, whether it was reasonable or not’.⁵⁵ The Bonapartist dictatorship in the USSR was, therefore, the punishment sent by the laws of history for the foolish, ‘unreasonable’ and ‘exasperated’ radicalism of the Russian working class.

In Kautsky’s view, the only alternative to this bureaucratic dictatorship was the re-establishment of the ‘successive phases of normal development’: the restoration of democratic capitalism (the proper successor to feudal absolutism). In 1930 he advanced a ‘democratic programme’ for Russia which actually called for the abolition of the state monopoly of foreign trade in order ‘to make room for free exchange’ and for the establishment of capitalist, rather than state enterprises, ‘when it is advantageous for consumers and workers’.⁵⁶ The rationale for this retrogressive programme had already been formulated back in 1919: ‘The more a State is capitalistic on the one side and democratic on the other, the nearer it is to socialism.’⁵⁷ Only through capitalist democracy would the proletariat grow in numerical strength and acquire the necessary socio-cultural maturity that would allow it to implement a socialist transformation. Indeed, for Kautsky capitalism and democracy are virtual synonyms, and he had averred in the 1920s that fascism would necessarily be confined to backward agrarian countries such as Italy, since modern industrial capitalism was not compatible with such forms of reaction or authoritarianism.⁵⁸ Thus, no one was more tragically surprised or taken unawares by the events of January 1933 than Kautsky

’’Kautsky, Der Bolschewismus, p. 46. See also Salvadori, p. 271. ’^sDer Bolschewismus, p. 137.

himself. But it is important to recognize that his arguments were only V restatements and reformulations of the premises of classical and inflexible f stagisr doctrine: the only road to socialism is through the evolution of advanced, democratic capitalism.

Kautsky and his followers, however, consistently turned their heads away from one of the most fundamental contradictions in their theory: ! if the 'backward' Russian masses had wanted socialist revolution, and if the original sin of the Bolsheviks had been to say ‘Yes and Amen to all the 1 workers demanded’, then how could the October Revolution have been $ avoided without a bloody repression of the ‘unreasonable’ proletariat? In ;§ other worlds, was not the rule of Denikin’s white terror the only real 4 historical alternative to the relentless defence of proletarian revolution? j And, after the formation of the USSR, would not the attempt to restore capitalism inevitably lead, as Max Adler argued against Kautsky in 1932, not to a ‘normal’, ‘democratic’ capitalism’, but rather to counter- 4 revolutionary dictatorship hardly conducive to further democratic or 5 socialist evolution?²⁹⁸ Furthermore, has not the historical record of the ,‘| overwhelming majority of unrevolutionized dependent capitalist countries i shown that democracy is a rare, episodic exception, and that the most jij common form of state rule has been some form of autocratic or military dictatorship? ’

The central motif in Kautsky’s stagist conception of history is precisely this fetishism of ‘maturity’. It is part of a general theoretical pattern in j which socio-historical development is conceived, in neo-Darwinist terms, .1 as ‘the evolution of an organism’ obeying laws of ‘historical necessity’.²⁹⁹Furthermore, Kautsky directly linked the political ‘immaturity’ of the -Russian proletariat to that country’s economic immaturity, and attempted | to explain that the virtual economic collapse of the Soviet Union at the end ; of the Civil War ‘does not mean that socialism is impossible in itself. . . . But it means that the proletariat of a certain country and at a certain time is not yet mature for socialism, for industrial self-administration. That the productivity of its labour decreases as soon as the worker is no longer under / the lash of the capitalist whip; that he lacks the necessary economic know- ; ledge and the necessary feeling of duty, which are as much a presupposition of socialism as a certain level of the concentration of capital’.³⁰⁰ Only

by going through 'the school of capitalist production’ could the proletariat, in Kautsky’s opinion, achieve the level of maturity requisite for socialism and self-management.⁶²

It is interesting to note the paradoxical affinity between Kautsky’s schema and certain emphases of the early Lenin on the crucial educative role of che factory in acculturating the proletariat to discipline and organization.⁶³ Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, had already anticipated and criticized this theory of the ‘maturation’ of the proletariat in the ’capitalist school’, in the course of her polemic with Lenin in 1904: ’Whac is there in common between the regulated docility of an oppressed class and the self-discipline and organization of a class struggling for its emancipation? . . . The working class will acquire the sense of a new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and sefvility. '^M

Although the direct descent of Kautsky’s theses was limited, more diffuse versions of his ideas can be encountered, in diverse contests, amongst many Marxist writers from the 1920s to the present day. For instance, the argument that capitalism and bourgeois democracy are the indispensable ‘bridge to socialism’, requisite for the political and moral ‘ripening of the proletariat’, is central to Bill Warren’s recent (posthumous) book, Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism (1980). According to Warren, ‘bourgeois political democracy would provide the working class the best conditions to acquire the cultural depth required to becoming a ruling class.’ This is a typically Kautskian theme, as Warren himself recognizes in an adjoined footnoce (‘Cf. K. Kautsky: “Democracy is indispensable as a means of ripening the proletariat for social revolution. ...” ’).⁶⁵

There are some undeniably strong points in Warren’s work, which could be considered as healthy antidotes to the Khomeini-type irrational rejections of Western heritage, to other similar nationalist-religious mythologies in the Third World and even to certain anti-industrial, romanticist tendencies in the First World. Warren, for instance, is unquestionably correct to stress that imperialism has developed the productive forces in the peripheral countries and that this development has, in turn, brought some

^Luxemburg, ’Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’ (1904), in Selected Political Writings, London 1972, pp. 100-1.

important social improvements in terms of health, life expectancy, educa- -tl tion, and so on. Moreover, his criticism of the famous 1928 Comintern resolution, which proclaimed that imperialism necessarily retarded the >f. development of the productive forces and industrialism, is also cogent and useful, expecially since such vulgar and propagandistic conceptions are still M flourishing in the revolutionary and/or nationalist movements of the Third World. .-1

Warren’s opus, however, is compromised by a very astonishing (for a it Marxist) bias in favour of the ‘progressive historical roles’ of capitalism and | imperialism, which, in turn, supports a stagist conception of socialist t transformation. Warren’s prejudices on these matters are so extreme that it c reminds one less of classical Menshevism, and more of Piotr Struve and the > ‘Legal Marxist’ apologia for Russian capitalism. Warren refers frequently to ? Marx’s admiring remarks about the progressive role of world capitalism | while forgetting the proper context of Marx’s statements: the fact that Marx consistently emphasized the contradictory character of capitalism and 3 its peculiar combination of progressive and regressive features vis a vis the S development of social productive forces. Warren systematically opposes | Marx to anti-capitalist romanticism, but seems to forget the interest and sympathy that Marx demonstrated cowards some of the most famous | romantic critics of industrial capitalism (Sismondi, Carlyle, Balzac and so | on) precisely because they were able to grasp—albeit in a one-sided and | utopian way—the dark side of capitalist civilization. He quotes extensively | from an article by Marx on India, where the ‘progressive’ role of British J imperialism is praised (railroad building, integration into the world market and so on), but omits mentioning its conclusion: after the triumph of socialism (‘when a great social revolution shall have mastered the results | of the bourgeois epoch’), 'then only will human progress cease to resemble | that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the ? skulls of the slain’.⁶⁶ Nor does Warren draw any of the proper conclusions I from Marx’s hope that Russia, through the alternative socialist path of the ; mir, might spare itself the ‘fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime’.⁶⁷

In his eagerness to prove the beneficial and civilizing destiny of imperial- ; ism—and, therefore, by implication to demonstrate that socialist revolu- ; tions in ‘less developed’ countries are a costly and useless detour—Warren systematically minimizes the horrors of the-imperialist era, becoming a _ kind of modern Doctor Pangloss who tries to convince the wretched of the /

“See Marx, ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’ (1853), in Marx and Engels, On | Colonialism, p. 90.

earth that they actually live in the best of all possible worlds. He goes so far as to claim that the ‘colonial record, considering the immense numbers of people involved, was remarkably free of widespread brutality’.⁶⁸ The least that can be said of such an intepretation is that it obviously owes more to Cecil Rhodes than to Karl Marx (whose chapter in Capital on ‘The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist’ is one of the fiercest indictments of colonial brutality every written). But Warren does not stop here. Indeed, he goes on to deny that imperialism is intrinsically responsible for malnutrition or starvation in the Third World. In his rather astonishing view, famines are only ‘the result of mistaken policy, lack of suitable incentives and allocation of insufficient resources to agriculture’. Moreover, there is no need to worry about the future, since ‘these policy errors are now being rectified’, and ‘sooner or later major advances will result, as agrarian capitalism becomes sufficiently developed to use more productive methods and inputs’.⁶⁹ When confronted with the fact that social inequality tends to rise as backward countries industrialize, Warren cavalierly observes that this 'cannot be regarded automatically as negative, since there are strong, though not yet conclusive, reasons to believe that this rising inequality is as much a cause as a consequence of growth’. Furthermore, ‘the pursuit of economic equality for its own sake is both unjust and undemocratic’. ‘Unjust’ because ‘it would tend to equally reward different groups and individuals with different value judgements about consumption, leisure, intensity of work’ and so on. And ‘undemocratic’, because the majority of the inhabitants of the Third World have a deep ‘aspiration to keep up with the Joneses’ which does not imply ‘a desire for an egalitarian economic policy’.⁷⁰ Translated into present Third World reality, Warren’s arguments, if they are to be taken in their literal sense, would mean that to abolish the rising inequality between, say, Birla, the big Indian tycoon, and the pauper masses of Calcutta would be ‘unjust’ since they have ‘different value judgement about leisure and consumption’ (indeed!); and ‘undemocratic’, since the hungry urban poor are obsessed with the ‘aspiration to keep up with the Joneses'. . . .

Although Warren does not make an assessment of the socialist revolutions in the peripheral capitalist countries explicitly, the scattered remarks in his book tend to suggest that imperialism offers a preferable, less costly and more efficient path to the modernization and industrialization of the ‘less developed countries’ (his stock phrase). While recognizing that the

Soviet Union did industrialize in a fantastically short period, he says this was ‘due to specific factors that are not necessarily or easily repeatable’; and China is only mentioned to stress that ‘several decades of civil war were necessary for the establishment of an egalitarian regime in China, with all that implied in terms of economic loss.’⁷¹ For Warren, as for Kautsky, socialism can only be the direct outcome of advanced industrial capitalism, and he insists on the necessary economic and cultural continuity between them.⁷² The idea that socialism should inaugurate an entirely new civilization, radically breaking wich present modes of production/consumption and eliminating the irrationalities inherent in capitalist development (waste, planned obsolescence, consumerism, ecological destruction, and so on), seems totally alien to him.

But the principal pillar of Warren’s neo-stagist conception, as well as his most obvious point of intersection with the Kautskian tradition, is the idea that a whole era of bourgeois democracy is an indispensable precondition for ‘schooling’ the working class for socialism. As was Kautsky, Warren is deeply convinced that ‘capitalism and democracy are linked virtually as Siamese twins’⁷³; but, as he explains in a footnote, he limits his discussion of this assertion to Western Europe. This is most unfortunate, since the fundamental problem is precisely whether this putative equation between capitalism and democracy can be discerned as tendentially true of the less developed countries as well. As we have already had several occasions to emphasize, the political norm in the most rapidly industrializing peripheral countries (and with a few partial exceptions such as India or Venezuela) is authoritarian or military rule, not parliamentary democracy. Thus, what kinds of skills ‘for running a socialist society’ are likely to be acquired under such despotisms? And, even in the advanced capitalist democracies, what level of socialist culture is developed by working classes whose main political activity is to vote every four, five or seven years, while technocrats and politicians of the bourgeoisie run both economy and state in the meantime? Finally, if bourgeois democracy is the decisive ‘training ground’ for socialism—or as Kautsky puts it, ‘the indispensable means of ripening the proletariat’—why is ic that the US proletariat, after more than a century of representative democracy, is still politically one of the most backward and ‘unripe’—from a socialist standpoint—in the world?

It seems to us that Warren, like Kautsky before him, has simply ignored the basic ^difference between bourgeois and socialist democracy:

while the first is grounded on the passivity of the workers, the second can only exist through their self-activity on both political and economic planes. The proletariat can learn the skills required to become a new ruling class only through its own experiences, its own revolutionary praxis and its own exercise of power, from the level of the factory floor to the overall administration of the state. It is only by riding that one learns to ride and not by watching other people ride or helping them—every few years or so—climb on the horse’s back. There is a fundamental and unbridgable contradiction between the naturalistic ideology of evolutionary ‘maturation’, so typical of the Kautskian school, and the decisive conception of historical materialism, first formulated by Marx in his ‘Third Thesis on Fuerbach’: ‘the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

Other echoes of the Kautskian neo-stagist problematic, albeit in a very different inflection from Warren, have appeared in the recent work of Rudolf Bahro. At first glance, Bahro does not seem co have much in common with the Kautskian tradition. For example, he considers the Soviet Union and other post-capitalist countries as ‘proto-socialist’ societies, representing real historical progress from backwardness: 'Revolutions such as the Russian and the Chinese are the precondition for victory over hunger.’³⁰¹ At the same time, however, Bahro shows in his remarkable book (without doubt one of the most important Marxist contributions to a theory of post-revolutionary society) that none of those states has yet achieved real socialism and that cheir political nature is bureaucratic and despotic. Where Bahro does overlap with the fatalist historiography of Kautsky and company is his assertion that his ‘industrial despotism’—the bureaucratic dictatorship—is an inevitable stage along the 'non-capitalist road’ of the underdeveloped, post-revolutionary societies. In the case of the USSR, for example, Bahro is convinced that Stalinism corresponded to an objective necessity. Although he readily concedes that most extreme forms of terror and absolutism (the ‘Caesarist folly’) might have been avoided by a leader with different subjective qualities than Stalin; he nonetheless insists that the divergence between material progress and socio-political emancipation was inevitable since ‘only a greac leap in the technical and cultural level of the masses could create the preconditions for socialist relations of production’.³⁰²

The double functions of the Soviet state in the Stalin era—to discipline labour and to resist the egalitarian tendencies of the masses—were a necessary condition for the country’s economic development, given the backwardness and uneven development inherited from the ancien regiem. Furthermore, Bahro criticizes Trotsky for considering only the subjective determinants of Stalinism, dismissing The Revolution Betrayed as only an early version of the thesis of the ‘cult of the personality’. In Bahro’s view, Trotsky did not appreciate that if Stalin had seized power and brutally centralized it around himself, this was due to the fact that ‘he possessed the historically necessary passion to create the apparatus of power for the terroristic transformation from above that Russia then needed’.³⁰³

In a similar vein, Bahro polemicizes against Mandel and argues that a socialist democracy in the USSR of the 1920s and the 1930s would have been impossibly inefficient and economically disastrous.³⁰⁴ Yet at the same time he makes no attempt to show why ‘bureaucratic despotism’, with its attendant waste, corruption and general irrationality, is a more ‘efficient’ management of the economy than socialist democracy, and, therefore, the only alternative that guaranteed the development and survival of the USSR.

But Bahro’s historical analysis goes well beyond the Soviet case, and he argues that not only in the USSR, but also in China and all the countries of the Third World, the state is ‘the taskmaster of society in its technical and social modernization’.³⁰⁵ In all the not yet fully industrialized countries ‘the discipline of obedience to instructions, which can only be made effective with a despotism of some kind or other, is the surest guarantee that the progressive interests will carry the day’.^{306 307} He honestly and frankly recognizes that such a perspective easily incurs the danger of appearing as apologetic, but he insists that ‘critical realism’ shows that the various forms of despotic domination that arise in the course of non-capitalist industrialization are ‘practically unavoidable consequences of a definite historical

Only after the creation of the industrial and cultural infrastructure for socialism can proletarian democracy become a concrete historical possibility: such is now the stage attained in the USSR and the industrial states of Eastern Europe.

Thus, in contrast to Kautsky, Bahro clearly opts for the non-capitalist road for the industrialization and modernization of the underdeveloped countries, but, at the same time, he shares the Kautskian belief that in the absence of the crucial preconditions of proletarian democracy—industrialization, modernization, and the ‘technical-cultural qualification of the masses’—bureaucratic despotism is inevitable. Furthermore, Bahro implies that only after the (non-capitalist) industrialization of these postrevolutionary societies will the proletariat be competent to rule directly as a class. Once again, Rosa Luxemburg had anticipated precisely such an argument, and in her 1918 polemic with the Bolsheviks she asserted: ‘Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginning of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism ... it must arise out of the growing political training of the masses of the people’.⁸¹ In other words, the decisive precondition for socialist democracy—far more important than the degree of industrialization or level of technical skills—is the accumulated revolutionary praxis of the proletariat as a class, both before and after the seizure of power.

What Bahro shares, then, with the Kautskian tradition, is a passive conception of ‘maturation’ (mechanically linked to modernization, economic development, and so on), which does not grasp the centrality of mass self-activity and self-organization in the ‘education’ of the proletariat to become masters of the new society. Behind Bahro’s historiography lurks the old materialist philosophy of the eighteenth century, which believed that ‘circumstances make men’ and that, therefore, backward conditions make ‘backward’ classes. This doctrine (which Marx criticized devastatingly in the Theses on Feuerbach and other writings) leads logically to an impasse whose classical resolution was the idea of an ‘enlightened despot’ who would alter circumstances and open the way for a pedagogical transformation of the people. In this respect, Bahro is a socialist Diderot explaining the historical role of Stalin as the simulacrum of Catherine the Great. . . .

In conclusion, however, we must recongize a certain ‘rational kernel’ in the views of Kautsky, Warren and Bahro: it is_undoubtedly true that social, economic and political underdevelopment are major obstacles to the establishment of socialist democracy and constitute a very favourable environ-

Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution (1918), in Selected Political Writings, p. 249.

ment for the growth of bureaucratic parasitism, economic authoritarianism and ideological monolithism. Trotsky himself was keenly aware of this and, in his The Revolution Betrayed, emphasized the powerful role of objective conditions—particularly scarcity—in facilitating the triumph of Stalinism. He was also convinced that in an advanced country such as the United States, with a high level of industrialization and a long tradition of democracy, the danger of bureaucratic degeneration in the wake of proletarian revolution would be much smaller. But at the same time he believed in the realistic possiblity of combating, even in the poorest and most underdeveloped countries, the tendencies toward bureaucratization and the usurpation of proletarian democracy. In contrast with Kautsky and his ilk, Trotsky never accepted the thesis thar bureaucratic despotism is somehow the unavoidable punishment inflicted upon those mass movements who dare to smash capitalism and imperialism before their full ‘maturation’.

Historical evidence does not yet allow us to weigh definitively the balance between the antagonistic positions of Kautsky and Trotsky, but it does seem to support the politics of the latter more strongly than those of the former. For at the very least, it shows that there is no direct relationship between the degree of the industrialization of a post-capitalist society (or its parliamentary traditions) and its level of bureaucratic ossification. Indeed, the most important variable seems to be whether or not—and to what degree—the post-capitalist state was the product of an authentic popular revolution. Certainly this is what distinguishes Cuba and Yugoslavia on the one side (where the post-revolutionary state enjoys a genuine popularity and where certain forms of local popular power—in the factories or neighborhoods—exist) from the GDR or Czechoslavkia on the other (notwithstanding their industrialization or the democratic traditions of the latter). The USSR is not, as it might seem at first glance, an exception to this rule: the Bolshevik Revolution produced a revolutionary state with more elements of pluralism (until 1920-21 other socialist groups were legal and participated in the soviets) and socialist democracy than any other post-capitalist regime. Unquestionably these elements of democracy were deeply corroded by the Civil War and the forced retreat of the nep, but it took a massive and systematic extermination of the old revolutionary party to definitively establish the bureaucratic dictatorship in the 1930s.

It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that the intervention of the so-called ‘subjective factors’—the participatory character of the revolutionary process, the democratic/pluralistic outlook of the socialist vanguard, the degree of proletarian self-activity and popular self-organization, and so on—can, if not abolish, then at least limit and counterbalance the tendencies toward bureaucratizacion inherent in the transition toward socialism in a poor and underdeveloped country. Considering the bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR, for example, we must count amongst the negative ‘subjective’ determinants, the lack of socialist-democratic awareness on the part of the revolutionary leadership. The mistakes of the Bolsheviks in 1917-23 paved the way for the emergence and, later, the triumph of the Stalinist bureaucratic estate. The revolutionaries of October created, by default of maintaining the vigour of proletarian democracy, a Golem—a bureaucratic apparatus—that soon escaped their control, ran amock and finally destroyed them. Once again, the prescience of Rosa Luxemburg commands admiration. In opposition to Kautsky and the Mensheviks, she expressed her full solidarity with the audacious project of the Bolshevik Revolution, but at the same time, she warned Lenin and Trotsky that the curtailment of socialist democracy would, sooner or later, lead to a bureaucratic Thermidor.³⁰⁸

It is, therefore, far from clear that bureaucratic despotism is inevitably in-built into the process of permanent revolution in peripheral capitalist countries. In particular, it remains to be seen whether the existence of massive forms of popular self-organization combined with a profound commitment to socialist democracy by the hegemonic revolutionary political organizations cannot check the ‘natural' tendencies towards bureaucratism that arise out of scarcity and backwardness. Historical research and sociological analysis cannot provide unequivocal replies to this question; the answer belongs to the realm of future praxis, in the classical Marxist sense of the word.

Index

Accion Democracies (Venezuela), 180—3 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (Marx & Engels), 14, 16, 17, 47 Adler, Max, 222

Afghanistan, 164, 204n, 205n, 207 Age of Permanent Revolution (Deutscher ed), 44

Agramonte, 145, 146 La agricultura entre la carraplana y el despelote (Martel), 182

Vagriculture devrait poursuivre le redressement amorce (Nadir), 173 Aidit, P. N., 195 Alavi, Hamza, 211—3 Albania, 107

Algerian Communist Party, 171, 173 All India Rural Debt & Investment Survey ■ (Reserve Bank of India), 176 Allende, Salvador, 193 The Alternative in Eastern Europe (Bahro),

Althusser, Louis, 84 Alvarado, Velasco, 206 Amador, Carlos Fonseca, 204 Amin, Hafizullah, 205n Anarchists, 33, 190 Anderson, Perry, 32n Angola, 164, 207

Aux origines de la revolution permanente, la pensee politique du jeune Trotsky (Brossat), 27n, 42n, 44n, 53n Austria, 29 Australia, 42

Authoritarianism in Mexico (Reyna & Weinett), 168, 169 Axelrod, Pavel Borisovitch, 25, 44, 45

Babeuf, Francois Noel, 19 Bagchi, A. K., 177 Baghdad Pact, 178 Bahro, Rudolf, 227—9 'Balance de la labor del partido’ (Bias Roca), 148

The Balkans Since 1453 (Stavrianos), 108 Balzac, Honore d£, 224 Bambirra, Vania, 151, 154 Basques, 165

Batista, 142, 144, 145, 156, 193, 203 ‘Before the 9th January’ (Trotsky), 4l, 44 Ben Bella, 171-3, 206 Bernstein, Eduard, 16, 17, 26 Bettancourt, Romulo, 181, 182 Bettelheim, Charles, 176 Bianco, Lucien, 213n Birla, 225

Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, 8n, 16, 20 Blum, Leon, 134 Bolivia, 164, 166, 178, 206 Bolsheviks, 2, 20, 33—6, 43, 44n, 46, 48, 57-64, 68, 70, 73, 75-9, 84, 97, 185, 189, 213, 215, 220, 221, 229, 231 The Bolshevik Revolution (Carr), 61

Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir, 60 Borba, 111 Borge, Tomas, 204 Boumedienne, Houari, 171-3, 206 Brazil, 142, 162, 164 The Brazilian Economic Miracle (Serra), 162 Breve histoire de parti des travaileurs du Vietnam, 1930-75, 133 Britain, 6, 12, 14, 18-21, 74, 109, 161, 175, 200

Brossat, Alain, 27n, 42n, 44n, 53n Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovitch, 56, 74—76, 80, 84

Camino de victoria (Cotvolan), 196 Cancillo, General, 154 Capital (Marx), 2n, 3, 23, 24, 225 Le capitalisme d’Etat algerien (Raffinot & Jacquemot), 172—4

Cardenas, Lazaro, 92, 164, 167, 168, 207 Cardona, J6se Miro, 145 Carlyle, Thomas, 224 Carr, Edward Hallecr, 61, 8 In Carranza, Venustiano, 167 Castro, Fidel, 143-50, 153-159 Castro, Raul, 152n, 154, 156 Catalonia, 206

Challenge of the Left Opposition (Trotsky), 68 The Challenge of Red China (Stein), 127n Chang Tso-lin, 78

Che Guevara, 144—6, 148, 150, 152—4 Le chemin du pouvoir (Kautsky), 2 ChenTu-hsui, 78, 80, 130 Chernov, Victor, 64

Chicago Daily News, 183 Chile, 184, 192, 194, 196 Chilean Communist Party, 192, 196 Chilean Trotskyists, 196 China, 12, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 75-87, 89, 98, 103-5, 107, 114-132. 134-7, 139, 143, 151-159, 175, 191, 195,

China Shakes the World (Belden), 130 La Chita, 3 La marche de la revolution, 1921-1949 (Chesneaux & Barbier), 115, 116, 123, 124, 129, 130 Chinese Communism (North), 116 Chinese Communist Party, 12, 77-82, 85, 94-6, 115, 116, 118-25, 127-130, 132, 137, 139-141, 143, 148, 154, 195, 212, 214

"The Chinese Revolution & the Chinese Communist Party’ (Mao), 119 Chinese Trotskyists, 117, 128, 140 Christian Democratic Party (Chile), 196 Cienfiiegos, Camilio, 154 Le cinquiime congres du Parti Communiste Yougoslave (Tito et al), 108, 110, 111, 113

The Civil War in France (Marx), 61 'Class Forces in the Cuban Revolution’ (Blackburn), 157

Comintern, 64-9, 75-85, 90, 91, 95, 97, 98, 109, 110, 116, 120, 121, 127, 133, 134, 143, 17 In, 189, 191, 193, 224 Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, 157

Communisme et nationalism vietnamien: le Vietnam entre le deux guerres mondiales (Rousset), 139, 140 Communist League, 7, 16 Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels), 4, 5, 11, 12, 14, 26, 47

The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform (Claudin), 122, 127 Compagnie Franjaise des Petroles, 173 La conception materialista de la historia (Labriola), 46

The Conflicts & Dilemmas of the Marxist Path ofGV Plekhanov (Feldman-Belfer), 33n, 34

Congo (Brazzaville), 197 COPEI (Venezuela), 180, 181 'Corporadon Venezolana de Guayana’ (Deparrmento de Contrabilidad), 184 La correspondance intemationale, 67 n Corvalan, Luis, 196 COSEP (Nicaragua), 203 Costa Rica, 181

bonapartism en Algerie (anon), 173, 174 Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx), 74 Cuando fui communista (Claraval), 19 In Cuba, 85, 104-7, 128, 130, 142-159, 165, 171, 172, 180, 181, 191, 193, 198, 202, 203, 206, 207, 209, 210, 212, 214, 215, 230

‘Cuba: Exceptional Case or Revolutionary Vanguard’ (Guevara), 153 Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (Thomas), 143 Cuba: sucre, cafe et revolution (Winocur), 143, 153

Dan, Fedor, 75, 77 Daud, Mohammed, 205n 'Declaration de 1’assemblee nationale de la RepubLique Socialiste du Vietnam’, 136 ‘Declaration en vue du XVI congres du PCUS’ (Rakovsky et al), 217 Democratic Association of Cologne, 12, 13 Democratic Party (Turkey), 186 ’Democracy & Narodism in China’ (Lenin), 65

Denikin, Anton, 222 Desai, Meghnad, 175 Deutsch, Leo, 34 Deutsche Bank, 184 Deutscher, Isaac, 70, 8In, 129 Development Digest, 176 Diaz, Porfirio, 199

‘A Discussion with Trotsky on Latin American Questions’ (Intercontinental Press), 92

A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (Brandt, Schwartz & Fairbank), 120, 123, 124, 129, 130 Dominican Republic, 144 Doung Bach Mai, 134 Draft Programme of the Comintern (Stalin & Bukharin), 83—5, 91 The Driving Forces & the Perspectives of the Russian Revolution’ (Kautsky), 36, 43n

‘Les dynamics contradictoire de 1’accumulation dans une soci£t£ de transition entre le capitalism et le socialisme: la Yougoslavie’ (Samary), 109

Econamique et politique dans la pensee de Trotsky (Avenas), 45, 49, 105 Edinstvo, 33

Egypt, 164, 174, 177-180, 197, 198, 206 L'Egypte. Latte de classes & liberation nationale (Hussein), 179

L'Egypte nasserienne (Riad), 179 L’Egypte nasserienne entre deux revolutions (Rouleau), 178, 179 Egyptian Communist Party, 179 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx), 20, 96

Eisenhower, President Dwight, 146, 147 El Salvador, 191, 192, 202 El Salvador Communist Party, 191, 192 ‘Las empresas transnacionales y el sistema industrial de Mexico’ (Fajzylber), 169 Engels, Frederick, 1—31, 46, 47, 74, 125, 158, 189, 218 Espartero, General, 21 Ethiopia, 164, 198, 207 Etudes Economiques (Banque Francaise et Italienne Pour L'Amerique du Sud), 184 Eurocommunism & Socialism (Claudin), 74 Explosion in a Sub-Continent (Blackburn, ed), 175

fain (Venezuela), 181, 182 Farouk, King, 178 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 31, 227, 229 Fifty Years of World Revolution (Mandel ed), 151

First Declaration of Havana, 148 The First Five Years of the Comintern (Trotsky), 69 FIN (Algeria), 170—3 'Foundations of Leninism’ (Stalin), 70 ‘Foreign Capital & Economic Development in India: A Schematic View’ (Bagchi), 177

Fourth International, 150, 17 In, 189, 215 Fourth International, 17 In France, 4, 7, 11, 12, 18-21, 28, 54, 86, 96, 141, 161, 171, 200 Frankfurt Assembly, 13 Free Officers Group (Egypt), ,178 Freidin, Julius, 184

French Communist Party, 134, 171 ‘From the Great Logic of Hegel to the Finland Station of Petrograd' (Lowy),

Gandhi, Indira, 177 Gandhi, Mahatma, 91, 175 De Gaulle, General, 172 German Democratic Republic, 230 The German Ideology (Marx & Engels), 218 German Marxism & Russian Communism (Plamenatz), 16

Georg Lukdcs — From Romanticism to Bolshevism (Lowy), 155 German Communist Party, 160 German Social Democratic Party, 59 Germany, 4, 9, 10-21, 23, 27-9, 52, 59, 75, 79, 86, 108, 109, 160-2, 200, 209 Geroe, Emo, 190

Geschichte Frankreichs im Revolutionsalter (Wachsmuth), 9n Gouldner, Alvin, 208, 209 GPU, 56

Gramsci, Antonio, 2, 3, 4n, 29, 46, 162 Guatemala, 143, 144, 164, 194 Guatemala, apuntes sobre el movimiento obrero (Usaga), 194n

'La guerra de guerrillas’ (Guevara), 150 ‘Guerra y poblacidn campesina’ (Guevara), 153

Guerrt du people, armee du people’ (Giap), 140 ‘La guerre et 1’Internationale" (Trotsky), 58 Guinea, 197

Harputlu, Kamuran Bekir, 186, 187 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 17, 60 Helvetius, Claude-Adrien, 31 Herman, R. H., 183 Hilferding, Rudolf, 64 Hillquic, Morris, 64 Histoire de la guerre froide (Fontaine), 116 Histoire des democraties populaires (Fejto), 109, 110

History & Class Consciousness (Lukacs), 48 History of the Russian Revolution (Trotsky), 51, 87, 88.

The Holy Family (Marx & Engels), 8 Howe, Irving, 199n Hungary, 18, 29, 75, 107, 110 Hussein, Mahmud, 179

'Imperialism & the Contradictions of Development’ (McMichael, Petras & Rhodes), 163

'Imperialism & the Growth of Indian Capitalism’ (Patnaik), I76n, 177 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lenin), 60

‘Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia’ (Gough & Sharma), 176n, 177 L'lnde independents (Bectelheim), 176 In Defence of Marxism (Trotsky), 217 ‘In Defence of the Party’ (Trotsky), 57 India, 69. 84, 86, 91n, 131, 164, 174-180, 205, 208, 224-6 ‘India: Contradictions of a Slow Capitalist Development’ (Desai), 175 ‘India Faced with Imperialist War’ (Trotsky), 175, 176 Indian Congress Party, 132, 175—7 Indonesia, 161, 164, 195, 196 Indonesian Communist Party, 161, 195, 196

The Indonesian Revolution, Its Historical Background and Its Future (Aidit), 195 The Indonesian Revolution Ft the Immediate Tasks of the Indonesian Communist Party

Informe (Banco de Mexico), 169 Inonu, General, 186 Inprekorr, 78 INRA (Cuba), 146 Inside Red China (Wales), 129 ‘The Intelligentsia & Socialism’ (Trotsky), 208

La International, 170n L'lntemationale communiste, 67n, 133 Intemationalimus und Klassenkampf (Luxemburg), 38

La intervention norte-americana en Guatemala ye el derrocamiento del regimen dmocratico (PGT), 194

Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Theory of Right (Marx), 9, 11 Investment in Cuba (US Department of Commerce), 142 Iran, 162, 170, 202, 203 Iraq, 197, 198, 203 Ireland, 165, 166n Iskra, 41

The Jewish Question (Marx), 8 Jimenez, General Perez, 180 Journal de la revolution cubaine (Franqui), 152,

Kamenev, Lev, 46, 61, 62, 68 Kardelj, Edvard, 111, 114 Karl Marx (Nicolaievski Sc Maenchen-Helfen), 13n, 16 Kautsky, Karl, 1, 2, 26, 36, 37, 39, 40, 43, 59, 61, 64, 219-223, 226-231 Kemal Ataturk, 164, 185—7 Karl Kautsky & the Socialist Revolution (Salvadori), 2n, 36n, 39n, 220n, 22 In, 222n

Kennedy, John F., 172 Khamis, Mustapha, 179 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 202, 223 Kidric, Boris, 108n, 111, 112, 113n King, Martin, 183

Kommunismus in Latein Amerika (Goldenburg), 144, 146, 150, 152, 156 Kossuth, Leo, 18 Krasso, Nicolas, 9, 49, 50 Kun, Bila, 185

Kuomintang, 12, 67n, 75—82, 84, 91, 97, 115, 116, 119, 120, 122-4, 130, 132, 134, 135, 175 Kurds, 186, 203

Labarca, Carlos Conrrera, 192 Labriola, Antonio, 46 Landvai, Paul, 112n Laos, 107 Lamettrie, 31

Lassalle, Ferdinand, 44, 48 Late Capitalism (Mandel), 104 Latin America: From Dependence to Revolution (Petras), 162

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 12, 18, 33—8, 40, 41, 43, 44n, 45, 48, 49n, 53, 54, 57, 59-67, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 83, 85,

93n, 97, 125, 138, 151, 156, 176, 189, 199, 200, 207, 217n, 220, 223, 231 Lenin, Collected Works, 36, 54, 63, 64, 72 Leninism (Stalin), 39

Letter to the Tricontinental (Guevara), 150n Letters from Afar (Lenin), 60 Letters on Tactics (Lenin), 62 ‘Let Us Strive to Draw the Broad Masses into the Anti-Japanese National United Front’ (Mao), 118 LiTa-Chao, 130

Long Live Mao-Tse-tung Thought (Red Guards), 127n Longuet, Jean, 64 Lu Ding-yi, 125, 126 Lukacs, Georg, 48, 155 Lukman, M. H., 195 _ LaLutte, 134

Macdonald, Ramsey, 64 Machado, Gerardo, 191 Madero, Francisco, 167 Maenchen-Helfen, O., 13n

‘Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War & Proletarian Revolution’ (Trotsky), 9 In ‘Manifesto of the International Left Opposition’ (Trotsky), 94, 95n Mannheim, Karl, 45 Man's Estate (Malraux), 78 Manuilsky, Dimitri, 110 Mao Tse-tung, 76, 83, 88, 95, 96, 115-130, 132, 136, 143, 151, 195, 211

117n, 120n, 127n, 128, 129 Marat, Jean-Paul, 18, 19, 156 Mariategui, Jos£ Carlos, 191 Marshall Plan, 187 Marti, Jos6, 156, 158, 159, 203 Martov, Julius, 40, 46, 64 Martynov, General E. G., 75, 77, 80, 81, 98

Marx, Karl, 1-31, 37, 46, 47, 53, 74, 79, 96, 125, 156, 158, 189, 209, 218, 224, 225, 227, 229

Marx, ‘Early Writings’, 8, 10, 11 Marx & Engels, ’Ausgewahlte Briefe’, 7, 22, 24, 26

Marx & Engels, Werke 13, 28n Marx & Engels, Werke 19, 24 Marx et la revolution franpaise (Bruhat), 9 Marx, Engels y la revolucion de 1848 (Claudin), 12

Marx und das Russiche Problem (Nicolaievski), 25 Marxism (Lichrheim), 16 Marxism & Politics (Miliband), 172 ‘Marxism: Theory of Permanent Revolution’ (Blackburn), 16 he marxisme et I’Asie (d'Encaussee & Schram), 65n, 95, 119, 125n Le marxisme et la question nationals et coloniale (Stalin), 76n mas (Venezuela), 181 Matanza, El Salvador's Communist Revolt of 1932 (Anderson), 192

Mehmet VI, Sultan, 185 Mehring, Franz, 39 , 40 , 47 Mella, Julio Antonio, 191 Memoirs of a Chinese Trotskyist (Wang), 128 Mensaje Presidential (Bettancourt), 182 Mensheviks, 27, 32—6, 40, 43, 44, 46—8, 50-7, 61-4, 77-9, 81, 84, 90, 193, 199, 201, 219, 220, 224, 231 Merchant of Revolution: The Life of A. I. Helphand (Parvus) (Zeman & Scharlau), 41, 42

Mexican Communist Party, 168, 193, 194 Mexico, 86, 89, 92, 164, 166-70, 174, 175, 178, 185, 193, 194, 199, 206-9, 212, 213

Mexico en la orbita imperial (Cecena), 169 ‘Mexico’s Albatross: The United States Economy’ (Barkin), 169 Meyers, S., 6n

Mihailovic, Draza, 108, 110, 113, 116 Miliband, Ralph, 172 Miliukov, Paul, 33, 41, 51 mir (Chile), 196 MIR (Venezuela), 181 Mora, Manuel Aguilar, 203n Moscoso, Hugo Gonzalez, 151 Mouvements nationaux et lutte de classes au Vietnam (Anh-Van & Roussel), 132, 133 Mozambique, 164, 207 Mujahadeen, 202 Mussolini, Benito, 186, 220 My Life (Trotsky), 38, 40, 45, 46

Napoleon III (Louis Bonaparte), 5, 22, 28 Narodniks, 24-6, 32, 45, 47, 51, 65, 96 Nashe Slovo, 58

Nasser, Colonel, 164, 177—9, 206 ‘Nasser’s Egypt: On the Way to a Workers Scare?’ (Hansen), 178n Nedic, General Milan, 108, 110 Nehru, Pandit, 164 Netherlands, 161

Neste Rheinische Zeitung 3, 12, 13n, 14, 18 Neste Zeit, 37, 39, 42, 57 The New Course (Trotsky), 39, 68 New Left Review, 9, 16n, 32n, 142, 163, 180, 185, 190, 211 New York Daily Tribune, 21

Nguyen Khac Vien, 132, 133, 139, 141 Nicaragua, 104, 105, 202—4 Nicaragua heart H (Amador), 204 Nicaraguan Communist Parry, see psn Nicolaievski, Boris, 13n, 16, 25n 1905 (Trotsky), 9, 39, 47, 48n, 51, 52, 57, 58, 68

On Britain (Marx & Engels), 6n On China (Trotsky), 67, 78, 80—3, 89-91, 92n, 94, 95, 97, 98, 121, 128, 205 'On Coalition Government’ (Mao), 119 "On Contradiction’(Mao), 116, 117 ‘On Cooperation’ (Lenin), 73 ‘On New Democracy’ (Mao), 119, 120, 123, 126, 132

‘On Tactics' (Lenin), 62 ‘On Taccics Against Japanese Imperialism’ (Mao), 117

‘Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’ (Luxemburg), 223 Open Society & Its Enemies (Popper), 1 Ottoman Empire, 184, 187 L’ottobre cuhano (Tutino), 193 ‘Our Controversies’ (Plekhanov), 32 ‘Our Differences’ (Trotsky), 68 ‘Our Political Tasks’ (Trotsky), 43 ‘Our Revolution’ (Lenin), 61, 64

Pais, Frank, 153, 154 Paris Commune, 24, 36, 45, 61, 105 Parson, Albert, 156 Le parti communist vietnamien (Roussec), 130n, 138, 39-^3, 44n, 51, 54, 93 Pavelic, Ante, 108, 110, 113 Lespaysans dans la revolution (Bianco), 213n Pazos, Felipe, 146

PDPA (Afghanistan), 204n, 205n Peabody, P. E., 116 Peasant Federation of Venezuela, 182 The Peasant War in Germany (Engels), 29 ‘Peasants & Revolution’ (Alavi) 211—3 Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (Wolf), 174, 209, 211-3

Peking Review, l49n Pensamiento Criticio, 142, 156, 192 The People of Chile Unite to Save Democracy’ (Labarca), 192 People’s Party (Turkey), 175 Perez, Crescencio, 152 Perez, Carlos Andres, 183, 184 The Permanent Revolution (Trotsky), 17n, 38n, 57, 58n, 59n, 63n, 68, 70, 72n, 73, 84-6, 89, 91, 93-5, 97, 98, 105, 152, 160, 198, 206 Peron, Juan, 164 Peru, 164, 181, 184, 206 Peruvian Communist Party, 191 Peter, King (Yugoslavia), 108 Petkoff, Teodoro, 181 Petras, James, 192, 211 ‘El petroleo acerta la dependencia de Mexico con eua’ (Rios), 170 PGT (Guatemala), 194 Philosophical Notebooks (Lenin), 59, 60 Pijade, Mosa, 113 Pilsudski, Marshal J., 81 Plekhanov, George, 25, 26, 30—8, 45, 47-9, 59-61, 84, 97, 198 Plekhanov, ‘Liternaturnie Nasledie’, 32 Plekhanov, Oeuvres philosophique, 31 Plekhanov, Sochinermya, 32n Poland, 5, 81

‘The Political Economy of Turkish Democracy’ (Keyder), 185—8 ‘Politics & Social Forces in Chilean Development' (Petras), 192 ‘The Political Ideas of Marx & Engels’ (Hunt), l6n

‘Political Parties in Russia Sc Tasks of the Proletariat’ (Lenin), 62 Political Power & Social Classes (Poulantzas), 4n

The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (Schram), 118, 119 Portugal, 165, 166n Poulantzas, Nicos, 4n POUM (Spain), 190 Pravda, 61, 64, 77 ‘Preface to "Before the 9th October" ’ (Parvus), 41, 44n

Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx), 6,31 Preobrazhensky, Evgeni, 83, 97 Les presupposes du socialisms (Bernstein), 16, 17

pri (Mexico), 168, 169 The Present Stage of the Non-Capitalist Development in Asia & Africa (Solodovnikov), 197

Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 46 Problemes economiques, 170 Problem of Leninism (Stalin), 93 ‘Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War’ (Mao), 118 Proceso Politico, 183, 184 Production Yearbook (FAO), 175 The Professional Dangers of Power' (Rakovsky), 217

Die proletariscbe Revolution und ikr Programm (Kautsky), 222, 223 ‘Prologue to the Cuban Revolution’ (Blackburn), 142, 157 Prologue to a Theory of Revolutionary Intellectuals (Gouldner), 209, 210 The Prophet Armed (Deutscher), 40, 51 PSN (Nicaragua), 204 PSP (Cuba), 142, 146-8, 150, 152, 156, 193, 214

‘Que es el APRA?‘ (MeUa), 191 La question chinoise dans tInternationale Communiste (Broui), 76 Les questions fondamentales du marxisme (Plekhanov), 31

‘Raices indigenas de la lucha anti-colonialista en Nicaragua’ (Wheelock), 204n Rakovsky, Christian, 217 Ramagnolo, David J., 88n Rankovic, Aleksander, 113 ‘Reassessment of the Leadership of the Vietnamese Proletariat’(Le Duan), 131, 137, 138, 140

Reformes et mystification agraires en Amerique Latine. Le cos du Mexique (Gutelman), 168

Repertoire mondiale (Chambre syndicla des constructeurs automobiles), 184 Republican Popular Party (Turkey), 186, 187

Results & Prospects (Trotsky), 27, 30, 47-58, 67, 87, 189 A Revolucao Cubana, una remterpretacao (Bambirra), 151, 154

La Revolution Cubana (Castro), 144, 154 La revolution cubana, su signification historica (Frondizi), 148

La revolution interrumpida (Gilly), 167 La revolution mexicana y el desarrallo capitalista de Mexico (Cardenas), 193 Revolution Betrayed (Trotsky), 70, 72, 98, 228, 230

La revolution chinoise (Serge), 83 La revolution de Castro, mythes et realties (Draper), 155

La revolution democratique bourgeois en Allemagne (Engels), 28, 29 Revolution en Asie et marxisme (Yew), 213 La revolution espagnole (Trotsky), 206 Revolutionary Marxism Today (Mandel), 200 La revolution doctobre (Golikov), 60 ‘Die Revolution in Permanent’ (Mehring), 39, 47

The Revolutions of 1848 (Marx & Engels), 4, 7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18 La 'Revolution Permanente’ en Chine (Schram), 126, 215

La revolution russe de 1911 (Sukhanov), 61 La revolution vietnamienne, problbnes

Revolutionaires vietnamiens et pouvoir colonial en lndochine (Hemery), 134, 141 Rheinische Zeitung, 9, 14 Rhodes, Cecil, 225 Riad, Hassan, 179 Riazanov, David, 25, 32n Robespierre, Maximilien, 155, 156, 209 Roca, Bias, 142, 148, 193 ‘Le role du CP Chinois’ (Martynov), 77 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 209 Rousset, Pierre, 139, 140 Roy, M. N., 65

rsdlp(Russia), 4, 30, 33, 38, 40, 45, 47, 54, 57, 77, 223 Ruge, Arnold, 10, 11 Russia, 1-3, 7, 15, 20, 23-7, 30-79, 82, 84-7, 90, 91, 94, 96, 103, 105, 109, 110, 112, 122, 124, 126, 128, 130, 147, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158, 159, I66n, 185, 190, 194, 195, 198, 202, 207, 209, 210, 212, 215, 217-222, 224, 226-8, 230, 231

“The Russian Menace to Europe' (Marx & Engels), 23, 25, 26 The Russian Revolution (Liebman), 63n The Russian Revolution (Luxemburg), 229, 231

Sadat, Anwar, 178—180 'Sadat’s Egypt’ (Aulas), 180 Sandino, Augusto Cesar, 203 Sandinistas, 104, 105, 202—4 Schram, Stuart, 96n Science of Logic (Hegel), 59 Second International, 1, 3, 4, 7, 30, 33, 35, 39, 42, 43, 46, 58, 59, 64, 189, 201

The Second Revolution in Cuba (Morray), 145, 146, 149 Serge, Victor, 83 sfio (France), 134 Shachtman, Max, 67n Shulgovsky, Anatol, 194n La sierra y el llano (Raul Castro), 152 Siete ensayo de interpretation de la realidad peruana (Mariategui), 191 Si£yes, Abbe Emmanuel, 10 Sismondi, Jean Charles Simonde de, 224 'Sobre la liberation nacional’ (Trotsky), 89 Social Revolutionaries, 62 The Social War in Chicago (Marti), 156 ‘Socialism & Political Struggle' (Plekhanov), 32

Socialism: Scientific & Utopian (Engels), 4n Socialism) para Venezuela (Peckoff), 181 Socialist Party of Chile, 192, 196 'Socialist Revolutions Sc their Class Components' (Petras), 211 Solodovnikov, V. G., 197, 198 Somalia, 197, 198

'Some Experiences of Our Party’s History’ (Mao), 115, 130 •Somoza, Anastasio, 203, 204 South Africa, 162 South Yemen, 164, 207 Sozialdemokratie und Leninismus (Mandelbaum), 26n Spain, 14, 21-3, 86, 165, l66n, 190, 208n

Spanish Communist Party, 190 Spanish Socialist Party, 190 Spanish Trotskyists, 190 Spies, Frederick, 156

Stalin, Joseph, 21, 38—40, 56, 62, 68—84, 88, 93,98, 103, 110, 111, 116, 121-5, 189, 191, 193, 196, 198, 201, 215, 227-9

Stalinism & Bolshevism (Trotsky), 72 ’The State & Foreign Capital’ (Weinert), 169

Stolypin, Piotr, 201 Struve, Piotr, 42, 194, 224 Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (Owen & Sutcliffe), 163, 176

Sukarno, President, 160, 164, 195, 196 Sukhanov, N. N., 61, 64, 83 Sul moviemento operaio intemazionale (Togliatti), 190 Sun Yat-sen, 64

‘Sur quelques problemes intemationaux actuels' (Le Duan), 139 Sur la voie track par Karl Marx (Truong Chinh), 137, 138

Survey of Current Business (US Department of Commerce), 183, 184 Surveys from Exile (Marx Sc Engels), 19—21 Sutcliffe, Bob, 163 Syria, 197

‘The Tasks of the Chinese Communist Party in the Period of Resistance to Japan’ (Mao), 120 Tchemy Peredel, 25n Terrorism & Communism (Kautsky), 220 Than Nien, 139, 141 Tha Thu Thau, 134

Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 31, 227, 229 Theses, Resolutions & Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, 65, 66

Third International After Lenin (Trotsky), 72, 73n, 74n, 75, 86 'The Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution’ (Trotsky), 42n, 96 Tito, Marshall, 109—112, 121 Tito (Dedijer), 122 Tito, A Biography (Autry), 110

Tito & Goliath (Armstrong), 113 Togliarti, Palmiro, 190 Toledano, Lombardo, 194 de la Torre, Haya, 181 Trahajo (Havana), 157 Tradition et revolution au Vietnam (Nguyen Kha Vien), 141

'Trends in India's Economic Development’ (Chattopadhyay), 176n, 177 Trente ans de lutte du parti (Ho Chi Minh),

Trvis discours sur la formation du parti uni de la revolution socialiste de Cuba (Castro), 144, 150, 153, 157, 158 La troisieme revolution Chinoise (Mandel), 115n, 116, 124, 125n, 129 Trotsky, Leon, 1, 3, 9, 15, 17n, 18, 21, 27, 28, 30, 33, 35, 38-59, 62^1, 66-99, 103-5, 107, 114, 121, 125-8, 138, 149, 152, 159-162, 166, 167, 171n, 174-6, 189, 191, 198, 199, 201, 205-210, 213, 215, 217-9, 228, 230, 231

Trotsky (Howe), 199 'Trotsky y la opposicion comunista’ (Mariategui), 19 In Trotsky' (Johnstone), 62 Trotsky, Writings, 89, 92, 96, 97, 175 ‘Trotsky’s Kampf um die Nachfolge Lenins . . (Brahm), 70n Trotsky’s Marxism’ (Krasso), 9 The True History of Ah Q (Lu Hsun), 122 Tmong Chinh, 137, 138 Turati, Augusto, 46, 64 La Turquie dans I’impasse (Harpudu), 186, 187

Turkey, 91, 164, 165, 175, 184-8 Turkish Communist Party, 186 Turkish Workers Party, 186 Les 20 Ameriques Latines (Niedergang), 183 The Two Revolutions (Martynov), 77 Two Tactics (Lenin), 34, 35, 6l, 62

Ulyanovsky, R. A., 197 United States, 53, 86, 103, 108, 148, 161, 169, 170, 182, 184, 200, 226, 230 URD (Venezuela), 180 Urrutia, Manuel, 145, 146, 203 Usaga, Manuel Pinto, 194n

Vargas, Getulia, 164 Venezuela, 142, 164, 180—4, 226 Venezuela Communist Party, 180, 181 La vie economique de Chine (Tsu Ti Tsiu), 124 Vietminh, 134, 135, 139 Vietnam, 86, 103-5, 107, 128, 130-143, 152, 155, 158, 198, 199, 209, 212, 214, 215

Vietnamese Communist Party, 85, 130-141, 143, 154, 214 Vietnamese Trotskyists, 132n, 133, 134, 139, 140

Le Vietnam socialiste: une economic de transition (Le Chau), 133 Villa, Pancho, 167 Volna, 62 Vogt, Karl, 6n Vo Nguyen Giap, 137, 140 ‘La voie algerienne: les contractions d'un developpement national’ (Ammour et al), 172

Wage Labour & Capital (Marx), 13, 14 Wang Chin-wei, 79, 80, 82 War and Revolution (Parvus), 41

Warren, Bill, 163, 223-9 Weber, Max, 218 Weydemeyer, Joseph, 7 What is to be Done (Lenin), 43, 77 'Why the Multinational Tide is Ebbing’ (Rose), 184

Wolf, Eric, 174, 209, 211-3 Workers Association of Cologne, 13 World Bank, 177, 180 Wang Ming, 116, 121 Wu Jiang, 126

Young Turks, 184, 185 Yugoslavia, 103, 104, 107-114, 116, 124, 127-9, 143, 145, 152, 153, 155, 158, 198, 199, 210, 214-6, 230 Yugoslav Communist Party, 85,

Zapata, Emiliano, 167 Zasulich, Vera, 23—6, 45 Zinoviev, Grigori, 68 Zur Deutschen Geschichte (Marx et al), 12n, 18n

Preface to A Contribution towards the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow 1970, p. 21.

Cf. Marx, ‘Montesquieu lvi’ (21 January 1849), Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 266; Engels, ‘The Movements of 1847’ (20 January, 1848), ibid., pp. 520-529; Introduction to Class Struggles in France, pp. 646-47.

^‘England, being the metropolis of capital, the power which has hitherto ruled the world market, is for the present the most important country for the workers’ revolution, and moreover, the only country in which material conditions for this revolution have developed up to a certain degree of maturity.’ (Marx to S. Meyer and A. Vogt, 9 April 1870, in Marx and Engels, On Britain, Moscow 1957, p. 507).

^,7'Minutes of the Central Committee Meeting of 15 September 1850,' in Revolutions of 1848, p. 343.

^2QIn Collected Works, vol. 4, p. 123. What is the origin of the phrase 'permanent revolution’? Many authors have attributed it to Blanqui, but I have not been able to find any instance of it in his writings, and, besides, Marx began to use the term at a time when he was unacquainted with any work by Blanqui. It may be, however, that the phrase comes directly from Jacobin usage. During moments of revolutionary crisis the Jacobin Club would declare irself assembled ’en permanence’—in permanent session. This expression appears in a German study of

the Revolution that was certainly known to Marx, who took notes on it in Kreuznach in 1843: W. Wachsmuth, Gtschichte Frankreichs im Revolutiomalter, Hamburg 1842, vol. 2, p. 341— ‘Von den Jakobinem ging die Nachricht ein, dass sie in Permanenz erklart flatten.’ On this, see J. Bruhat, ‘Marx et la revolution fran^aise’, Annales d'Histoire de la Revolution Frangaise, 184, April-June 1966, p. 138.

‘Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks', Early Writings, p. 201. For a more detailed analysis of this period, see my La theorie de la revolution chex le jeune Marx, Paris 1970.

Ibid., pp. 253, 255. (Cf. p. 257: 'Germany can emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage.’)

^2<s'CricicaI Notes on the Article "The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian'” (1844), in ibid., p. 417.

It is instructive to compare the different commentaries of twentieth-century Marxists regarding the legitimacy of this tactic. Lenin, for example, wrote in 1905 that such collaboration with the bourgeoisie appeared 'astonishing and unbelievable from our current point of view’ and was only explicable in light of the ‘petty-bourgeois atmosphere in the Germany of this period’. Rose Luxemburg, moreover, in 1905 averred that this tactic could only fail and had been grasped at by Marx in a ‘totally hopeless and isolated’ situation. In contrast, Stalin, writing in 1927 to justify the Chinese Communist Party’s suicidal alliance with the Kuomin-tang, argued that Marx’s tactic was entirely ’correct’. (Cf. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Zur Deutsche.n Geschichte, Band n, J. Halbband, Berlin 1954, pp. 213, 576; and Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, Band 2, Berlin 1974, p. 212.)

'But we say to the workers and the petty bourgeoisie: it is better to suffer in modern bourgeois society, which by its industry creates the material means for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you all, than to revert to a bygone form of society, which, on the pretext of saving your classes, thrusts the entire nation back into medieval barbarism.’ (Marx, ‘Montesquieu lvi’, p. 266.) This extreme formulation is highly atypical of Marx’s general orientation in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and is obviously dissonant with his overall perspective. Nonetheless, the Russian (and Menshevik) historian_Nico!aievski in his biography of Marx has seized upon this anomalous quotation with great zest: 'never before nor later in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, does Marx express himself with “such clarity’”. (B. Nicolaievski and O. Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx., Paris 1937, p. 157.)

³'The Uprising in Frankfurt’ (20 September 1848), Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 444.

³³’The Kolnische Zeitung on the Elections’ (1 February 1849), Collected Works, vol. 8, p. 289.

'The workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers.^- (ibid., p. 326.)

'¹⁰Cf. J. Plamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism, London 1963, p. 127; and George Lichtheim, Marxism, New York 1962, p. 125.

Karl Marx, p. 173. This thesis is shared by other authors ^especially Richard Hunt (The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, London 1975) for whom the 1850 text is the expression of j Marx’s ‘tactical concessions'. Robin Blackburn criticizes these artificial interpretations in '» ‘Marxism: Theory of Proletarian Revolution’, New heft Review 97 (May-June 1976), pp. 12-13.

‘In despair and disappointment at the Napoleonic restoration, the French peasant will abandon his faith in his smallholding, the entire state edifice erected on the smallholding will fell to the ground, and the proletarian revolution will obtatrTiBf chorus without which its solo will prove a requiem in all peasant countries'. {The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in Surveys From Exile, p. 245.)

‘The Revolutionary Movement' (1 January, 1849), Collected Works, vol. 8, p. 215.

On this subject see the editorial note on page 279 of The Russian Menace to Europe. Equally significant is the interpretation given to this letter shortly after its publication in 1924 by the eminent Menshevik historian Nicolaievski. Aware of the contradiction between this document and the Menshevik version of‘orthodox¹ Marxism, he tried to explain the letter as the product of tactical needs: because of his sympathy for the courageous fight of the Narodnaya Volya against Tsarism, Marx did not want to expose his differences with the populists or provide ammunition which the proto-Marxists in Tcherny Peredel (led by Plekhanov, Axelrod and Zasulich) mighc use in their polemical battles against Narodnaya Volya. (See B. Nicolaievski, ‘Marx und das Russiche Problem, Die Gesellschaft, I Jahrgang, 4 (July 1924), pp. 364-66). However any comparison of the original draft with final version sent to Axelrod is sufficient to rebut this rationalization.

⁷⁴‘Russia and the Social Revolution' (1873) in ibid., p. 213. Another of Engels’s arguments for the necessary link between revolution in Russian and the industrial West was that only when capitalism had been defeated in its heartland, that is, 'only when the backward countries see by this example "how the job is done", how modern industrial productive forces can be

made to serve the collectivity as socially owned property’, could backward countries like

Russia hasten their march toward socialism. (See "Russia and the Revolution Reconsidered’” (1894) in ibid., pp. 234-5.)

^7<This does not mean, however, that he began to accept all the positions of Plekhanov, especially his violent actacks against the Narodnaya Volya. On Engels's reservations concerning Pekhanov, cf. his letter to Vera Zasulich (23 April, 1885) in Ausgewdhlte Briefe, pp. 455-57 and Kaucsky’s latter to Bernstein (30 June 1885), cited by Kurt Mandelbaum, Sozialdemokratie und Leninismus, Berlin 1974, p. 76.

London 1962, p. 189- Also see Alain Brossat's excellenr study, Aux origines de la revolution permanente: la penseepolitique du jeune Trotsky, Maspero, Paris 1974, p. 18.

‘EinIeitung zu den "Klassenkampfen in Frankreich’", (1895) in Marx, Ausgewdhlte Schrif-ten, Band II, Moscow 1934, p. 187. Also see Marx, ‘Die Erfurterei im Jahre 1859’, Werke, 13, p. 414. In ‘semi-revolution from above’ I include all those important structural transformations—social, economic and political—which are implemented by authoritarian state power in the interests of ‘historic compromises' by new classes or dominant fractions (especially the bourgeoisie) with the old oligarchy. Because these changes occur with little or no authentic popular mobilization (indeed, often hand in hand with the crushing of the masses), they remain partial, unfinished and incomplete. As we shall see later, this phenomenon is scarcely limited to the nineteenth century.

Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Collected Works (henceforward CW), vol. 9, Moscow 1962, p. 49. See also p. 49: ‘Marxists are absolutely convinced of che bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does this mean? It means that the democratic reforms that become a necessity for Russia, do not in themselves imply the undermining of capitalism, the undermining of bourgeois rule; on the contrary, they will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European and nor Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class.'

ⁿ‘Blanquisme et social-democrarie’, Czerunmy Sztander 82 (June, 1906) translated in Quat-

Some Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism’, in Leninism, London 1940, p. 392. See the excellent analysis of the relationship between the strategic perspectives of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky in Norman Geras, op. cit.. Chapter ii.

²³‘Die Folgen des janpanischen Sieges und die Sozialdemokratie’, Neue Zeit, xxiii, 1904-5, vol. 1, p. 462, quoted in Salvadori, op. cit., p. 102.

^2&The New Course (1923) in Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1923-1925, New York 1975, p. 102.

'Z. A. Zeman and W. B. Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus) 1867-1924, London 1965, p- 66.

“Preface to Trotsky’s pamphlet, Bis zum 9 Januar 1905 (Before the 9th January), in Zeman and Scharlau.

^3<s'His prognoses indicated, therefore, not the transformation of the democratic revolution into the socialist revolution but only the establishment in Russia of a regime of workers' democracy of the Australian type, where on the basis of a farmers' system there arose for the first time a labour government which did not go beyond the framework of a bourgeois regime.' (‘The Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution’ (1939), Writings 1938-39, New York 1969, p. 115.)

See Brossat’s excellent analysis of the differences between Parvus and Trotsky: ‘Although Parvus possessed the concepts and historical understanding to grasp how the maturity of objective conditions on a world scale might lead to that apparent aberration implied by the possibility of proletarian revolution in backward Russia, he stopped at the threshold of his discovery, without doubt constrained by his adherence to the orthodox school of thought of German social democracy. Therefore Trocsky alone will cross the threshold of the new understanding of Marxism needed in this period, leaving Parvus behind him. . . .’ (Brossat, p. 101.)

Trotsky pointed out how Marxism, understood above all as a doctrine of the 'necessity and the historically progressive character of capitalist development' became at the end of the nineteenth century in Russia an ideology for the ‘reconciliation of large strata of the intelligentsia with the role of intellectual servants of Capital’. (‘Uber den Marxismus in Russland’, Neue Zeit, xxvi, Band I, Stuttgart 1908, p. 8.)

In his well-known essay, ‘Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution’ (see note 36), Trotsky simplified the picture by ignoring one of these positions.

Excerpted as ‘The Proletariat and the Revolution', in I. Deutscher, The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology, New York 1964, pp. 42, 44, 49. In my opinion Brossat is wrong to consider this text as the pivotal transition—‘the complex, uncertain and contradictory process of a break or a changing of ground’—toward a permanentist perspective. (Brossat, pp. 87, 90.) Actually the key concept of the pamphlet, the hegemonic role of the proletariat, was common to Russian Marxism, especially to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The real novelty was rather the preface by Parvus, which advanced for the first time the conception of a workers’ government in Russia.

⁵³‘The Proletariat and the Russian Revolution', in 1905, p. 295. ⁵⁴Results and Prospects, pp. 217-8.

‘The Proletariat and the Russian Revolution’, p. 289; see also in 1905, 'Our Differences’, pp. 306-12. One can hardly take seriously the superficial and ludicrous idea advanced in a recent pamphlet of the British communists that the difference between Trotsky and tl.e Mensheviks was 'not theoretical, but a very specific tactical-political difference'. (Loizos Michail, The Theory of Permanent Revolution, London 1977, p. 28.)

ⁱ⁷Rech Pertd Sudom Prisyamicb, p. 27 (partly quoted in Results and Prospects, p. 240).

^ai1905, p. 294 ('A government supported directly by the proletariat and, through it, by the revolutionary peasantry does not yet mean a socialist dictatorship.’) See also Trotsky, ‘Zur Verteidigung der Partei’ (1907), in Schriften zur revolutionaren Organisation, Hamburg 1970, p. 154.

^‘Political Parties in Russia and Tasks of the Proletariat’, Cw, vol. 24, p. 97.

^9,Cf. Monty Johnstone, ‘Trotsky—Part One’, Cogjto, 5, pp. 11-2; and Michail, pp. 31-40.

'Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International’ (23 June, 1921), in The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 1, New York 1972, p. 223.

See, for example, his well-known declaration during the 1918 Congress of Soviets: 'The complete victory of the socialist revolution in one country alone is inconceivable and demands

the most active cooperation of at least several advanced countries, which do not include

Russia'. (‘Speech on the International Situation' (8 November 1918), cw, vol. 28, p. 151.)

'"Permanent 'Revolution, p. 22. See also Third International After Lenin, pp. 52-3: 'Socialism, however, must not only take over from capitalism the most highly developed productive forces but must immediately carry them onward, raise them to a higher level and give them a state of development such as has been unknown under capitalism. The question arises: how then can socialism drive the productive forces back into the boundaries of a national state which they have violently sought to break through under capitalism?’

'Theses sur la situation en Chine’, in Pierre Broue, La question cbinoise dans 1’lnternationale Communiste, Paris 1976, pp. 69, 71.

²''Prospects of Revolution in China', in Stalin, On the Opposition, pp. 509, 515- Actually Stalin had first floated this conception back in May 1922 when he severely criticized the 'deviation' which consisted in ‘underestimating the alliance of the working class with the revolutionary bourgeoisie against imperialism’. He considered as guilty of such a dangerous deviation those communist parties of Asia that had launched the slogan of soviet power. ('Des caches politiques de l’Universiti des Peuples de l'Orient', in Stalin, Le Marxism et la question nationals et colonials, Paris 1937, pp. 252-3.)

Martynov, ‘Le role du PC chinois’ (1927), in Broue, pp. 116-7. In 1902-3 Marrynov was one of the leaders of the so-called 'economist' wing of Russian Social Democracy which Lenin attacked in What Is To Be Done? He was also the author of a Menshevik pamphlet in 1905 (The Two Revo/arwnjrXwhich also fell under Lenin's severe polemical censure for its advocacy of an alliance with the bourgeoisie. He may, thus, be considered as one of the most coherent advocates of the Menshevik doctrine of the bouregois-democratic stage in Russia. He joined the Communist Party after the initiation of the NEP and immediately joined the polemic against Trotsky and che Left Opposition.

Sotsialistichesky Vestnik, 23 April 1927, p. 4, quoted by Trotsky, ‘The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin' (7 May 1927), in Leon Trotsky On China, New York 1976, p. 165.

^2r,lnprekorr, 30 March 1927, quoted by Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Stanford 1961, p. 160—my emphasis.

Ibid, p. 163. One can find an interesting literary presentation of the debates between a Comintern emissary (Vologin) expressing Stalin’s views and some revolutionary Chinese communists in Andre Malraux, Man’s Estate, Harmondsworth 1961, pp. 126-48.

The Revolution in China and the Tasks of the Comintern' (24 May 1927), in On the Opposition, p. 714.

^31,I might refer to the example of Marx himself in 1848, at the time of the German

revolution, when he and his supporters joined the bourgeois-democratic league in Germany.’ (Stalin, Talk with Students of the Sun Yat-sen University’ (13 May 1927), in On the Opposition, p. 671.) -

Projet de programme de l’Internationale Communiste, 1928, Supplement of Internationale Com- : muniste (15 June 1928), pp. 27-8.

Althusser is correct to stress that economism was one of the decisive tenets of Stalinism, J but wrong to consider Stalinism as a primarily ideological ‘deviation’. See Essays in Self-Criticism, London 1976, p. 88-9.

Projet de Programme dt VIC, p. 38. A similar formula had been employed by Lenin in 1920.

Ibid., pp. 297-8. Trotsky refers to bourgeois attitudes during the 1848-71 period as an example of such an orientation.

See for instance his remarks on che possibility of industrial development in India: ‘In the

near future the antagonism between the Indian masses and the bourgeoisie promises to become

sharper as the imperialist war more and more becomes a gigantic commercial enterprise for the Indian bourgeoisie. By opening up an exceptionally favourable market for raw materials it may rapidly promote Indian industry.’ ('Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and che Proletarian World Revolution’ {1940], in Writings 1939-40, p. 39.)

See Permanent Revolution, p. 152. Sometimes Trotsky formulated this idea in a very sharp and one-sided manner, as, for example, when he wrote that ‘the independence of a backward stace inevitably will be semi-ficcious and its political regime, under the influence of internal class contradictions, and external pressure, will unavoidably fall into dictatorship against the people—such is the regime of the ‘People's’ Party in Turkey, the Kuomincang in China; Gandhi’s regime will be similar tomorrow in India’ (Trotsky, ‘Manifesto of the Fourth International’, Writings 1939-40, p. 39-)

On China, p. 292. For Trotsky, 'purely practical agreements, such as do not bind us in the "■? least and do not oblige us to anything politically, can be concluded with the devil himself if 3 that is advantageous at a given moment. But it would be absurd in such a case to demand chat the devil should generally become converted to Christianity, and that he use his horns not j against workers and peasancs but exclusively for pious deeds. In presenting such conditions we I act in reality as the devil's advocates. . . .’ (Ibid., pp. 292-3).

“‘Nationalized Industry and Worker's Management’ (1938), Writings 1938-39, p- 87.

“See ‘A Discussion with Trotsky on Latin American Questions’, Intercontinental Press (12 May 1975), p. 668. $

‘Manifesto of the International Left Opposition’ (1930), On China, pp. 480-1.

'The most important organizational tasks of our party are the creation of a proletarian base and the organization of factory cells in che urban centres. At the same time, however, the development of the struggle in the councryside, the creation of small soviet zones and the birth and growth of a Red Army, are also conditions which can aid the struggle in the cities and contribute to the growth of che revolution. This is why it would be a very great error to renounce the struggle in the towns and to relapse into the mentality of rural guerrillas.' (In Stuart Schram, Mao Tst-tung, Paris 1963, p. 233. Schram published the original version of this document (a report to the Central Committee of the CCP, 5 April 1929, which differs considerably from its ‘official’ 1951 abridged re-edition.)

‘Summary and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution’ (1928), in On China, p. 303.

‘Three Letters to Preobrazhensky', in On China, p. 288—my emphasis. Trotsky also insisted that the political dimension was not identical with its class base. This distinction emerged clearly in his critique of Radek’s idea that che fundamental issue in the 'democratic dictatorship’ was che class correlation and not political institutions. 'Radek has abstracted himself so violently from "political institutions” that he forgets "the most fundamental thing" in a revolution, namely who leads it and who seizes power. A revolution, however, is a struggle for power. It is a political struggle which the classes wage not with bare hands but through the medium of “political institutions" (parties, etc.)’ {Permanent Revolution, p. 80).

⁵'For Trotsky, 'the conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the revolution but only opens it', both on a national and international scale. Moreover, this permanent character of the socialist revolution, this continuity of the revolutionary process after the seizure of power, is valid for the backward as well as for the advanced countries. (See Permanent Revolution, pp. 8-9 ) Unfortunately, this highly fruitful and suggestive hypothesis is not emphasized or developed by him to the same extent as the other two dimensions of the theory, and it remains quite marginal in his The Permanent Revolution. Yet it can be argued that this conception implicitly runs through The Revolution Betrayed (1936) where Trotsky examines how the bureaucratic degeneration in Russia paralysed the process of socialist transformation and how the doctrine of socialism in one country became the ideological rationalization of this reactionary practice by proclaiming that socialism had already become established.

There axe rwo ocher meanings of 'permanent revolution’ attributed to Trocsky by his, mainly but not exclusively Stalinist, critics: first, the idea that the revolution is possible at any moment everywhere (a ‘permanent possibility' hie a nunc)\ and, second, the principle that the revolution must occur simultaneously all over the world. There is no need to stress that nothing in Trotsky's writing bears the faintest resemblance to these fantastic theses.

See Boris Kidric, X’edification de l’economie socialiste en Yougoslavie', in Le Cinquibtu Congres du Parti Communistc Yougoslave, Belgrade 1949, p. 431, for precise figures of the degree of foreign control in the various industrial branches.

Tito, p. 81. Ic is unclear whether the ‘allies' referred to were England or the Soviet Union; probably both.

Next to the workers and peasants, another important social force in the Yugoslav revolution was the students. According to Landvai, ‘perhaps no other Communist Party has ever been based to such an extent on students' as the Yugoslav. (Paul Landvai, Eagles in Cobwebs, , Nationalism and Communism in the Balkans, New York 1969, p. 88.) The Universities of , Belgrade and Zagreb, in particular, were strongholds of the Young Communists,-who won -the student body elections in 1940. On the eve of the German invasion in 1941, the ^:Communist Party had only 12,000 members, but the Young Communists had more than

18,000. These red students, including hundreds who had fought in the International Brigades ] in Spain, became vital cadres in the partisan army, providing many outstanding commanders and two elite detachments of the Proletarian Brigades, (ibid.' pp. 88-9).

See Ernest Mandel, ‘La -Troisieme Revolution Chinoise', in La longue marcbe de la revolution, Paris 1976.

Jean Chesneaux and F. Le Barbier, La Chine, 3- La marcbe de la revolution 1921-1949, Paris 1975, p. 17, and Mao Tse-tung, 'Some Experiences of Our Party’s History’ (25 September 1956), Selected Works, vol. 5, Peking 1977, p. 328.

Cf. Robert North, Chinese Communism, London 1966, p. 166; and Andre Fontaine, Hissoin I de la guerre froide, vol. 1, p. 433-

C. Brandt, B. Schwartz, and J. Fairbank, A Documentary History of Chinese Communism,; Cambridge, Mass., 1952, pp. 262-3.

The Tasks of the Chinese Communist Party in the Period of Resistance to Japan’ (3 May 1937), Selected Works, vol. 1, pp. 270, 273. See also Avenas, pp. 108-10.

See J. Guillermaz, Histoire du parti communiste chinois, vol. 2, Paris 1975, pp. 369-70.

^40,Discours a la Conference deChengtu' (Marchl958)rin-Scuarc-Schramm (ed.), Mao parte aupeuple, Paris 1977, p. 96. According to some sources, the CCP intervened to save Chiang's life during the so-called 'Sian incident’ (the arrest of Chiang by one of his own generals in December 1936) only as a result of an urgent telegram from Stalin. (See J. Guillermaz, pp. 281-3.)

Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, Harmondsworth , 1975, p. 556. a|

^4}Quoced in Vladimir Dedijer, Tito, New York 1953, p- 322. As a typically near-sighted ? realpolitiker, Scalin believed in revolution only when it was already a [ait accompli-, the CCP, on the other hand, proved its mastery of an old Chinese art of statecraft summarized in the traditional slogan of 'open respect, hidden rebellion'.

^‘Discours a la Conference de Chengtu', p. 95. During another speech four years later (September 1962), Mao added: 'Stalin tried to prevent China from making the revolution,^ saying that the nation would perish unless we cooperated with Chiang and avoided civil wat. ■■ But we didn’t do what he ordered us to do. The revolution was victorious. Then, after our ;; triumph, he began to suspect that China was another Yugoslavia and that I was a second Tito : in power.' ('Discours au dixieme Plenum du huitieme Comite Central', in Maoparle aupettplt, -X p. 180.) I

InJune 1949, Mao up-dated the theory of‘New Democracy’ in his text, 'On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship’, and unequivocally prolaimed the leading role of the proletariat. He continued to emphasize, however, that ‘the national bourgeoisie at the present stage is of great importance’ and that ‘our present policy is to regulate capitalism, not to destroy it.’ (Selected Works, vol. 4, p. 421). As Brandt and Schwartz have argued, however, after 1949 ‘in the realm of political power, the theories of "New Democracy" and even of the ’’People’s Democratic Dictatorship" no longer correspond to any reality', (p. 448.)

Cf. Mandel, p. 169; Mandel cites as his source for these figures Tsu Ti Tsiu, La vie -eamomique de Chine. !

The CCP wished to build a “democratic” capitalist economy, but three-quarters of industry • happened co be nationalized beforehand. It wanted a pause before the stage of struggle against * the “national" bourgeoisie, but the launching of land reform in the south made this struggle > an immediate priority. It temporarily wanted to avoid the introduction of planning, but the I; challenge of industrializing the Chinese continent was so immense that state planning was j; indispensable. It hoped to give free reign to accumulation by the rich peasants, but the class ' struggle in the countryside flared up more intensely than ever. The whole logic of the

His notes on the Soviet Handbook were written in I960, but were apparently not intended for publication; they were first published by the Red Guards in 1967 in a volume entitled Long Live Mao Tse-tung Thought (French translation by Hu Chi-hsi in Mao Tse-tung et la construction du socialism, Paris 1975, pp. 67-8).

Cf. Gunther Stein, The Challenge of Red China, New York 1945, p. 32; and Claudin, p. 570.

F. Wang, ‘Memoirs of a Chinese Trotskyist', International, II, 2 (Sommer 1974), p. 34.

Le Duan, ‘Reassessment of the Leadership of the Vietnamese Proletariat’ (1957), On the Socialist Revolution in Vietnam, vol. 1, Hanoi 1965, p- 64.

'In its exploitation of Indochina, French capitalism held the commanding heights in every sector—monopolizing banking, the issuing of currency, foreign trade, inland transport and transportation. The major branches of production based on Indochina's natural resources— rubber, coal and rice—were in its hands, as were the branches supplying building materials (cement, bricks, tiles, lime and timber). Meanwhile the other means of the people's livelihood, such as weaving, basket-making, and so on, were almost completely ruined by the competition of French industrial capital. The local bourgeoisie, composed mostly of the various landlord strata, held only the subsidiary economic branches and the marginal spheres of commerce. There were no Vietnamese enterprises or trading firms possessing sufficient capital to compete with French capital.’ (Le Duan, p. 62.)

Ibid., p. 63. A very similar analysis had been developed earlier by the Vietnamese i; Trotskyists: ‘. . . che national bourgeoisie, in Indochina as elsewhere, wants not so much to get rid of imperialism, as to modify the forms of its domination. ... It would even be happy j to replace one imperialism by another, on the condition that the new one was more accommo -dating and flexible. This is why it counted on the support of Japan or China, and now looks toward Anglo-Saxon, particularly American, imperialism.’ (Anh-Van and Jacqueline Roussel, ^ Mouvements nationaux el lutte de classes au Vietnam, Paris 1947, p. 41.)

See Daniel Hemery, Revolutionnaim vietnamiens a pouvoir colonial en Indochine, Paris 1975. ¹Despite the combined pressure of the Comintern, the French Communist Party and even Leon ;) Blum’s SFlO, the icp hesitated in 1937 to break its united front with the Trotskyists, who were led by Tha Thu Thau. In response to criticisms, Doung Bach Mai, one of the principal leaders of che ICP in Saigon, wroce in La Lutte (6 June 1937): ‘The rupture of our front of struggle, the only one that can be established between the Trotskyists and ourselves, would create terrible confusion amongst the masses and destroy the combative ardour of our people. We do not overestimate the Trotskyists. However, at the same time as they err in a sterile revolutionism, we will continue to recognize them, unless the situation changes, as anti-imperialist elements deserving of our support.’ (Ibid., p. 413.) However, when the Trotskyists won hegemony in the editorial board of La Lutte, the ICP members decided to leave. This was the beginning of a bitter factional struggle that was to end in 1945 with che murder), of Ta Thu Thau and other Trotskyist leaders by Stalinist cadres of the icp in Saigon, in circumstances that remain obscure.

Truong Chinh, Sur la vote trade par Karl Marx, Hanoi 1969, p. 41. Truong, however,

immediately adds that this historical task was accomplished ‘essentially by the working class and the peasantry’ and under the leadership of the proletariat.

‘Confronted with the powerful revolutionary movement of the masses, with the great successes achieved by the revolution, some intellectuals coming from che national bourgeoisie, and even some national bourgeois, mainly their children, becoming conscious of historical evolution, step-by-step changed their fundamental position and came over entirely to the side of the workers and peasants. . . .’ (Le Duan, La revolution vietnamienne, problemes fondatnentaux, taches essentielles, Hanoi 1970, p. 35L___

Vo Nguyen Giap, ‘The Liberation War in South Viecriam: Its Essential Characteristics', Vietnamese Studies, 8, 1966, p. 22.

See Truong Chinh, President Ho-Chi-Minh, Beloved Leader of the Vietnamese People, Hanoi 1966, p. 47.

Le Duan, ‘Reassessment’, p. 75. On the divergences between Truong Chinh and Le Duan, see Rousset, pp. 283-8.

‘The national popular democratic revolution and the socialist revolution are two revolutionary strategies corresponding to two different processes of development, which however succeed one another without interruption and are even intimately linked to one another. Therefore certain tasks of the second stage have their origin in the first stage, and some tasks of the first stage cannot be completed except in the second stage.’ (Truong Chinh, Sur la vote, pp. 55-6.)

"In contrast to the Chinese Trotskyists, the Vietnamese explicitly recognized the predomi

nance of the rural areas in the revolutionary process. In an article published in 1945, an ■■

Indochinese Trotskyist wrote: 'The particular conditions existing in Indochina make the -■ revolutionary waves come from the countryside towards the urban centres, contrary to what generally happens in the West.’ (Quatribne Internationale, 22-23 {September/October 1945] in ,v

Le Duan, 'Reassessment', pp. 68-9- Also: 'The peasants, fervent revolutionaries, could not however take the leadership of the revolution because they did not represent a specific _;mode of production, and they had no independent political position or ideology of their own.' \ (Le Duan, La revolution vietnamienne, p. 31.)

Robin Blackburn, ‘Prologue to the Cuban Revolution', New Left Review 21 (October 1963), p. 59- See also Jose A. Tabares, ‘Apuntes para la historia del movimiento revolucionar-io 26 de Julio', Pensamiento Critico (Havana) 31, August 1969, p. 134.

See Michel Winocur, 'Cuba: sucre, cafe et revolution’, These de doctors: du 3e cycle, ephe, Paris 1973, pp. 29-30.

Emesto Che Guevara, ‘A New Old Interview¹, in Selected Works of Guevara, Boston 1970, p. 372.

Quoted by Silvio Frondizi, La revolution cubana, su signification historica, Montevideo 1960,':

Blas Roca, Balance de la labor delpartido, Havana 1960, pp. 87-8. It is interesting to note that the representative of the Chinese Communist Party who was present at this psp conference

also designated the Cuban revolution as a ‘national and democratic’ transformation. (See

^t25Che Guevara, La guerra de guerrillas, (I960), in Obras 1957-67, vol. 1, Havana 1970, p 136. ;

Fidel Castro, Trois discours, pp. 75, 80. This same idea was later developed by Che in to famous Letter to the Tricontinmtal (1967): ‘There are no ocher alternatives: eicher a socialis revolution or a caricature of revolution.’ "j

Hugo Gonzales Moscoso, ‘The Cuban Revolution and its Lessons’, in 50 Years of World Revolution, Ernest Mandel, ed.j New York 1971, p. 190.

Vania Bambirra, A Revotu[ao Cubatta, una mnterprttagio, Sao Paulo 1975, pp. 157, 219-

‘The revolution, in order to be consistent with its basic postulates, which at the beginning took a democratic form, was obliged to break with bourgeois democracy and to carry out this break to its last consequences, i.e. to transform itself into a socialist revolution.’ (Ibid., p. 261.)

^t33See Carlos Franqui, Journal de la revolution cubaine, Paris 1976, p. 581. Later Raul Casoo organized Revolutionary Peasant Committees, combining various political and milicary taslef which helped consolidate his ’Second Front’. (See ‘Diario de campana de Raul Castro’ (1958)] in La sierra y el llano, Havana 1969, pp- 211-7.)

Letter of August 11 1957 in collection of Frank Pais Museum in Santiago, Cuba. ^;

Cf., Jaime Sarusky, ‘Camilo: et guerrillero y el politico’, Bohemia, 43, (October 1972) and Bambirra, pp. 181-7. I was able to consult some documents from this Congress at an exhibition at the former headquarters of the Second Front in Sierra Cristal.

Fidel Castro, ‘En el campamento de Columbia’ (8 January 1959), in La Revoluain Cubatu-Buenos Aires I960, p. 182. "The workers’ national strike lasted almost a week; it was j decisive factor in the victory, by destroying the attempts at a military coup or American intervention, as well as in consolidating the revolution in power. ... In order to understand the decisive importance of the strike, one has to remember that when General Cantillo attempted his coup, he had che support of the still powerful American Embassy, of da Supreme Court, of the rich and well-to-do classes in the country, of the old politicians, of tit Church, of the traditional press, and of the conservative sectors of che councry; moreover, be had the Columbia barracks, the army, the police and other repressive apparatus of the tyranny; he had tens of thousands of armed men—while che rebel army and the rebel militias had 3 more than 5,000 armed men, many of them without rifles. The strike weighed decisively ii the balance by psychologically disarming the military.’ (Franqui, pp. 548-9.) f

See Theodore Draper, La revolution de Castro, mythes el realites, Paris 163, pp. 58-9. Draper, however, draws the hasty conclusion that the Cuban revolution was therefore a 'middle-class’ movement.

'‘"Blackburn, p. 77. Blackburn is one of the few authors to insist on the specific intellectual composition of the m-26-7 leadership. On the more general dimensions of the problem, see my Georg Lukacs—From Romanticism to Bolshevism, London 1979.

^14JIn Franqui, p. 91- This sympathy for jacobinism did not imply an equal sympathy for the guillotine; there were very few executions in revolutionary Cuba after the first months of 1959 when some of the leading torturers and most infamous officials of the police and army were shot. Beyond the scope of this present essay is a consideration of how far the authoritarian element in jacobinism may or may not have facilitated the incorporation in the Cuban revolutionary state of some of the authoritarian features of the political system of the USSR.

Various authors have stressed the intimate relationship between the so-called "economic miracle" in Brazil and the authoritarian military regime’s ability to achieve a drastic reduction of wages to bare subsistence and a corresponding increase in absolute surplus extraction. In other words, che ‘Brazilian model" of Third World industrialization seems virtually synonymous with the suppression of democracy. See J. Serra, "The Brazilian “Economic Miracle'”, in James Petras (ed.), Latin America: From Dependence to Revolution, New York 1973-

See Adolfo Gilly, La revolution interrumptda, Mexico 1972, esp. chapters VI and VIII.

Lorenzo Meyer, ‘Historical Roots of the Authoritarian State in Mexico’ in Jose Luise Reyna ? and Richard S. Weinert, eds., Authoritarianism in Mexico, Philadelphia 1977. :■

"Michel Gutelmann, Reformes el mystification agraires en Amerique Latine. Le cas du Mexique, ; Paris 1971, pp. 145-6, 254.

Quoted in 'Des entreprises rentables: les implantations industrielies de part et d’autre de la frontiere du Mexique’, Problemes Economiques, La Documentation Franqaise, February 12 1975, pp. 27-8.

See Alfonso Rios, 'El petroleo acerta la dependencia de Mexico con EUA’, La International (Mexico, DF), March-June 1978.

Marc Raffinot and Pierre Jacquemot, Le capitalisme d'Etat algerien, Paris 1977, p. 59- )

RaIph Miliband, Marxism and Politics, Oxford 1977, p. 109- On Algeria, cf. K. Ammour,

C. Leucate and J. Moulin, La voie algerimm: les contradictions d'un deviloppemcnt national, Paris /

1974, pp. 161-74; and anon., La crise du capitalisms d’Etat et du bonapartisme en Algerie, Paris

1978, pp. 20-1. Some authors speak of a 'bureaucratic state bourgeoisie'—see Raffinot and Jacquemoc, pp. 119-23.

See Raffinoc and Jacquemoc, pp. 101-05; and La crise du capitalisms d'Etat, p. 22.

A. Kumar Bagchi, ‘Foreign Capital and Economic Development in India: A Schematic View^-, in Gough and Sharma, p. 62.

Cf. Eric Rouleau, ‘L’Egypte nasserienne encre deux revolutions—IV', Le Monde, 20 September 1963; and Joseph Hansen, ‘Nasser’s Egypt. On the Way to a Workers State?’, in The Workers and Farmers Government, Education for Socialists (Socialist Workers Party), New York 1974.

Hassan Riad, L'Egypte nasserienne, Paris 1964, p. 13. Also Rouleau, 'L'Egypce nasserien-ne—II’, Le Monde, 18 September 1963-

“^Mahmud Hussein, L'Egypte. Lutte de classes et liberation nationale, vol. 1, Paris 1975, p. 77.

See Marie-Christine Aulas, ‘Sadat's Egypt’, New Left Review 98, July-August 1976, g pp. 85-9. 7

Teodoro Petkoff, Socialismo para Venezuela, Caracas 1972, p. 118. Petkoff adds the following remark: ‘If the leadership of the party had conceived the course of the revolution as a flowing river, in which each stage attained is only the beginning of the next. . . the history of Venezuela and of Latin American could have been changed in 1958, and it would not be strange if ours had been the first socialist country in Latin America' (p. 120).

⁵ⁱSee the statements of R. H. Herman, Vice-President for Marketing of Exxon, in Fortune, August 1977, p. 118; and of Martin K. King, President of Exxon Service Co. in Caracas, in Business Week, 9 July 1976.

Siete ensayos de interpretation de la realidad peruana (1928), Santiago de Chile 1955, p. 29.

''‘Mariategui, ‘Cana colecciva del grupo de Lima' (1929), in El proletariat!*) y tu organization, Mexico 1970, pp. 119-20. The similarity between Mariategui’s and Trotsky's views is strik

ing. Mariategui did not openly support Trotsky against Stalin, but in an article written in

1928, when Trotsky had already been expelled from the party and exiled in Central Asia, he referred to his defeat as ‘temporary’ and spoke of him as 'one of the most open-minded and clear-sighted critics of our time’. (See Mariategui, 'Trotsky y la opposition comunista' (1928), in El Proletariatio, p. 33).

Julio Antonio Mella, ‘Que es el arpa?' (1928), in Ensayos revolutionaries, Havana I960, p. 23-4. Exiled in Mexico, Mella joined the Communist Party in that country, but had troubles with ics leadership, who accused him of Trotskyist tendencies. See Bernardo Claraval, Cuando fui communista, Mexico 1944, p. 49.

electoral front in 1952, their common candidate, Salvador Allende, received merely 6 per cent

D. N. Aidit, The Indonesian Revolution and the Immediate Tasks of the Indonesian Communist Party, Peking 1965, p. 15.

Aidit, The Indonesian Revolution, Its Historical Background and Its Future, Djakarta 1964, p. 77.

M. H. Lukman, About the Constitution, Djakarta 1959, p. 26. See also T. Soedarso, ‘Lessons from a Defeat’, in The Catastrophe in Indonesia, New York 1966.

^2,,Some of the most developed of the underdeveloped countries are experiencing a not insignificant degree of industrialization. . . . But the system as a whole continues to be dominated by imperialism, and there is no sign that this is changing in any important way. There are therefore absolute limits to the industrialization programmes of these countries, and . none of them—or at least no country with a significant-sized population—will succeed in making the transition from ‘■semi-industrialized" to fully industrialized, with all the socio- ; economic consequences this entails. . . . In some ways, stepped-up industrialization has made -these countries—the most developed of the underdeveloped countries—more and not less : dependent on imperialism than before. They are more dependent on imperialist technology, more closely integrated into and therefore subjected to the imperialist world market. Exten- ‘ sive sectors of the national bourgeoisie are more strongly tied to multinational firms. In fact, their relative economic successes have enhanced their dependence on the international credit system.’ (Ibid., pp. 78, 83, 84).

For an illuminating comparison of Iran and Nicaragua, see Manuel Aguilar Mora, 'Popu-lisme et revolution permanente', Quatrieme Internationale (Juiy-September 1980).

Carlos Fonseca Amador, ‘Nicaragua heure h‘, Tricontinentale, 14 (September-Ocrober

d’etat with the support of its members in the armed forces and overthrew the hated Daud dictatorship in April 1978. Daud had been preparing a massive wave of repression directed against the pdpa. The coup had the support of the masses, but the pdpa’s Stalinist training institutionalized a process of manipulation and substitutionism, which rapidly divorced the new regime from the masses, encouraged reaction and ultimately resulted in the Soviet military intervention. Trotsky had stressed in the theses on permanent revolution that democracy was crucial in order to ensure the widest participation of the masses. In his writings on China he further amplified his earlier views in the following way: 'The stage of democracy has a great importance in the evolution of the masses. Under definite conditions, the revolution can allow the proletariat to pass beyond this stage. But it is precisely to facilitate this future development, which is not at all easy and not at all guaranteed to be successful in advance, that it is necessary to utilize to the fullest the inter-revolutionary period to exhaust the democratic resources of the bourgeoisie. This can be done by developing democratic before the broad masses and by compelling the bourgeoisie to place icself in contradiction to them at each step.’ (Oh China, New York 1976, p. 400-1). If the pdpa had permitted a flowering of democratic institutions, prepared an electoral register and announced the date for elections to a Constituent Assembly events might have turned out differently. The election campaign would have permitted the PDPA to go to the masses and argue for their programme of reforms. The elections would have also provided the most accurate estimate of the relationship of social forces in the country. This failure to mobilize the masses and encourage mass participation at every level could only lead to an unstable, petty-bourgeois dictatorship. The pdpa’s social base was excremely narrow. It was at the time of the coup an organization of 2,000—3,000 members__most_o£jvhom were teachers and students. Instead of relying on the masses it sought to use the Army as an instrument of reform. It is indisputable that Hafizullah Amin had more political prisoners executed than all preceding regimes. The consequences of Stalinism have, in this case, meant that the Afghan masses are more alienated from socialism today than they were in the period preceding April 1978.

^30,La question catalane’ (17 May 1931), in La revolution espagnole 1930-1940, Paris 1973, pp. 104-5.

Alvin Gouldner, 'Prologue co a Theory of Revolutionary Intellectuals', Telos, 26 (Winter 1975-6), p. 5. ~ '

On the role of Marx’s conflict with the liberal Rhenish bourgeoisie as part of his evolution toward communism, see our book, La theorie de la revolution chez le jeune Marx, Paris 1970.

James Petras, 'Socialist Revolutions and Their Class Components', New Left Review 111 (September-October 1978), pp. 44-5.

^This does not mean, however, that Marxists should consider the peasantry merely as an instrument; as Alavi justifiably insists, 'for socialists, the question is not merely that of mobilizing peasant support as a means for achieving success in their struggle. The question is not just that of utilizing the forces of rhe peasantry. The free and active participation of the peasantry in transforming their mode of existence and giving shape to the new society, in itself, must be an essential part of the socialist goal.' (ibid., p. 242).

⁴³Wolf, p. 294. Considering the Chinese case, the French scholar Lucien Bianco has shown how the communists ‘revolutionized’ the peasants, filling them with a global vision that went beyond their inarticulate discontent and anger. (Bianco, ‘Les paysans dans la revolution', in Regards froids sur la chine, Paris 1976, pp. 291-4. See also Roland Yew, ‘Revolution en Asie et marxisme', Critique Conrntmiste 24, September 1978.)

Rakovsky, ‘Les dangers professionels du pouvoir’, in Les bolcheviks contre Staling 1923-28, Paris 1958, pp. 157-61. A year after the publication of this essay, Rakovsky, in collaboration with other exiled Trotskyists, wrote a document that has only recently been discovered in the sealed section of the Trotsky Archives at Harvard. The document contains a characterization of the USSR which, in our opinion, is extremely perceptive: *From a proletarian state with bureaucratic deformations—as Lenin defined the political form of our state—we are becoming a bureaucratic state with proletarian-communist remnants. (K. Rakovsky, V. V. Kossior, N. I. Mouralov, V. S. Kasparova, ‘Declaration en vue du XVI Congres du PCUS* (12 April 1930), Cahiers Leon Trotsky, 6, 1980, p. 97.)

Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschafl, I, Tubingen 1921, p. 180. Marx and Engels also distinguished estates from classes; see Marx, The German Ideology.

Terrorismus und Kommunismus (1919) quoted by M. Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938, London 1979, p. 301.

‘Marxism teaches us that socialism will arrive inevitably, according to natural necessity, at a certain level of capitalist development. But with this is indissolubly linked the other -knowledge, that socialism is impossible at an earlier sCage of development.' (Kautsky, Dieproletarische 4 Revolution und ibr Programm, Berlin 1922, p. 89-)

	1955	1959
Industry	41.7	91.7
Foreign Commerce	77.0	100
Interior Commerce (wholesale)	28.1	89.0
Interior Commerce ( retail)	20.3	80.4
Commodities Transport	23.6	70.3

Contents

Conceptions of Revolution in Marx and Engels

2

Permanent Revolution in Russia

The Emergence of the General Theory

4

The Socialist Revolutions in Backward Capitalism

The Unfinished Bourgeois Revolutions

6

Index