‘THERE can be no analogy of historical development,’ wrote Trotsky in his book 1905, ‘between, on the one hand, England, the pioneer of capitalism which has been creating new social forms for centuries and has also created a powerful bourgeoisie as the expression of these new forms and, on the other hand, the colonies of today, to which European capital delivers ready-made rails, sleepers, nuts and bolts in ready-made battleships for the use of the colonial administration, and then, with rifle and bayonet, drives the natives from their primitive environment straight into capitalist civilisation: there can be no analogy of historical development, certainly, but there does exist a profound inner connection between the two.
‘The new Russia acquired its absolutely specific character because it received its capitalist baptism in the latter half of the nineteenth century from European capital which by then had reached its most concentrated and abstract form, that of finance capital.’
In this passage – from the chapter in the book on ‘The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution’ – Trotsky adds to the ideas of Results and Prospects and concludes with the famous quotation from the 18th Brumaire in which Marx proposed a characterisation and definition of proletarian revolution. The detailing of the role of European finance capital in Russia’s development is Trotsky’s most significant addition. What does it mean?
Exactly this – for we can once again make use, this time for a different purpose, of the advantage of hindsight. It means that the tendency of capitalist world economy towards becoming an imperialist economy now predominated, and had begun to drive forward revolutionary developments in every part of the world. This later became the context in which, as the 1914-1918 imperialist war broke out and the social-democratic parties of Europe abandoned socialism and revolution to support their own bourgeois governments fighting one another, similar social chauvinism was also exposed in the positions of many leading members of Russia’s Bolshevik Party – not least in the position of Stalin.
Trotsky continued: ‘When English or French capital, the historical coagulate of many centuries, appears in the steppes of the Donets basin, it cannot release the same social forces, relations and passions which once went into its own formation. It does not repeat on the new territory the development which it has already completed, but starts from the point at which it has arrived on its own ground.’ Then he added: ‘Around the machines which it has transported across the seas and the customs barriers, it immediately, without any intermediate stages whatsoever, concentrates the masses of a new proletariat, and into this class it instills the revolutionary energy of all the past generations of the bourgeoisie – an energy which in Europe has by now become stagnant.’
The magnitude of the social contradictions that give rise to such ‘revolutionary energy’ explains the lack of an analogy: for the main characteristic of finance capital is that it requires its new proletariat to produce at a greater rate of profit than in a corresponding European context. It’s a fact too that the Russo-Japanese war helped to precipitate 1905. And already in the same chapter of 1905 Trotsky had outlined the massive change in Russia’s social character during the nineteenth century: between 1812 and 1850 the proportion of Russians living and working in towns increased by 3.4 per cent, whereas between 1885 and 1897 it increased by 33.8 per cent. In almost all cases this process was organised centrally and guaranteed financially by the Tsarist absolutism. ‘Thus,’ wrote Trotsky, ‘large-scale capital achieved economic domination without a struggle.
‘But,’ he went on, ‘the tremendous part played in this process by foreign capital has had a fatal impact on the Russian bourgeoisie’s power of political influence. As a result of state indebtedness, a considerable share of the national product went abroad year by year, enriching and strengthening the European bourgeoisie. But the aristocracy of the stock exchange, which holds the hegemony in European countries and which, without effort, turned the Tsarist government into its financial vassal, neither wished nor was able to become part of the bourgeois opposition within Russia, if only because no other form of national government would have guaranteed it the usurers’ rate of interest it exacted under Tsarism . . . Neither could our indigenous capital take up a position at the head of the national struggle with Tsarism, since, from the first, it was antagonistic to the popular masses – the proletariat, which it exploits directly, and the peasantry, which it robs indirectly through the state.’
After Trotsky had escaped from Tsarist custody in early 1907, he succeeded both in returning to St Petersburg to meet with his wife Natalya, and in leaving again for Finland together with her, without being noticed by the police. In Finland he met, and was helped by Lenin himself, who was in exile again; the help came, of course, in spite of the split in Russia’s Social Democratic Labour Party at the London congress of 1903, from which Trotsky had walked out with the Menshevik minority. Later in 1907 both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were in attendance at that year’s congress, also held in London; and the speech Trotsky made there – Lenin was present and responded reservedly but favourably to Trotsky’s position – was included in the first edition of 1905, published later that year. It had attacked the Mensheviks for continuing to believe that a Russian bourgeoisie existed that was capable of leading the nation in a revolution to overthrow Tsarism, and defended as follows his conception of permanent revolution.
‘Just as the petty-bourgeois urban democracy of the French Revolution placed itself at the head of the revolutionary nation,’ he said, ‘so the proletariat, that sole revolutionary democracy of our towns, must seek support among the peasant masses and must take power if the revolution is to be victorious . . . Perhaps the proletariat is destined to fall, as the Jacobin democracy fell, to clear a space for the rule of the bourgeoisie. I want to establish only one thing: if, as Plekhanov predicted, the revolutionary movement in Russia triumphs as a workers’ movement, then the victory of the proletariat in Russia is possible only as a revolutionary victory of the proletariat – or else it is not possible at all.
‘On this conclusion I insist most adamantly. If we are forced to admit that the social contradictions between the proletariat and the peasant masses will not allow the proletariat to become the leader of the peasantry, and the proletariat itself is not strong enough for victory, then we must reach the conclusion that our revolution is not destined to win at all.’
There was another key point too that Trotsky had made for the first time in 1905, and developed throughout his life, when he wrote about the October 1905 general strike. ‘In struggle it is extremely important to weaken the enemy,’ he wrote. ‘That is what a strike does. At the same time a strike brings the army of the revolution to its feet. But neither the one nor the other, in itself, creates a state revolution. The power still has to be snatched from the hands of the old rulers and handed over to the revolution. That is the fundamental task. A general strike only creates the necessary preconditions; it is quite inadequate for achieving the task itself.’
These passages and speeches came a full ten years before the Russian Revolution of 1917 – but ten years which Lenin and Trotsky both spent in their separate exiles, and in their separate ways preparing the ground for the new revolution they were confident would come; while a number of the other well-known Bolshevik leaders only marked time. And it was in 1908 that Lenin spent the best part of a year writing his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, with its thoroughgoing philosophical rejection of the ‘new’ forms of subjective idealism which were disorientating some party leaders during the years of counter-revolutionary reaction from 1907 to 1912. ‘Without any immediate intercourse with the masses, and deprived of contacts with any organisations,’ said Trotsky of Lenin in the History of the Russian Revolution, ‘he concentrated his thought the more resolutely upon the fundamental problems of revolution, reducing them – as was both his rule and the necessity of his nature – to the key problems of Marxism.’
By the time the 1914-18 war began, it was clear to Lenin and to a number of Marxists that what determined its character as a world war was the fact that, as he later put it, ‘the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet. For the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible.’ By the end of 1916 Lenin had completed his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which was published after his return to Russia from exile in April 1917. For the task of writing it he had studied methodically, choosing to read or re-read many crucial texts and sources of Marxism. Not the least of those he studied was Hegel’s Science of Logic, offering invaluable insights into its dialectics by tracing over and over again the materialist core of the dialectic itself.
In 1902 Lenin’s book What is to be Done? had expressed a relentless determination to build a party capable of organising and leading the Russian revolution, and he went on at the 1903 London congress to split that same party rather than accept anything less. Then in his 1905 book Two Tactics . . , as we saw in article 2, he had looked back to Marx’s 1848 experiences in fighting for a German revolution, and had commented on, after ‘half a century’, the ‘enormous difference . . . between the German workers’ party of those days and the present Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.’
By the time of writing his Imperialism . . . he had been insisting for two years that ‘the epoch of the so-called Second International’ had ended in 1914; and that: ‘Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination instead of the striving for liberty, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by an extremely small group of the richest or most powerful nations – all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism . . . From all that has been said in this book on the economic nature of imperialism, it follows that we must define it as capitalism in transition, or moribund capitalism.’ And after that, in the famous Letters from Afar in which, before he could even get back to Russia following the February 1917 overthrow of the Tsar and the coming to power of a Provisional Government, he was once again looking back to Marx’s writings on 1848, and their analysis of the February revolution, in drawing his conclusion on what this transition had to be: ‘Workers, you have performed miracles of proletarian heroism, the heroism of the people, in the civil war against Tsarism. You must perform miracles of organisation, miracles of organisation of the proletariat and of the whole people, to prepare the way for your victory in the second stage of the revolution.’
In the History of the Russian Revolution Trotsky describes what Lenin found in the Bolshevik leadership on his return: ‘Kamenev, a member of the emigrant editorial staff of the central organ, Stalin, a member of the Central Committee, and Muranov, a deputy in the Duma who had also returned from [exile in] Siberia, removed the old editors of Pravda, who had occupied a too “left” position, and on March 15 . . . took the paper into their own hands. In the programme announcement of the new editorship, it was declared that the Bolsheviks would decisively support the Provisional Government “insofar as it struggles against reaction or counter-revolution”.
‘The new editors expressed themselves no less categorically on the question of war: “While the German army obeys its emperor, the Russian soldier must “stand firmly at his post answering bullet with bullet, and shell with shell.” “Our slogan is not the meaningless ‘down with war.’ Our slogan is pressure upon the Provisional Government with the aim of compelling it . . . to make an attempt to induce all the warring countries to open immediate negotiations . . . and until then every man remains at his fighting post!”
‘. . . This programme of pressure on an imperialist government with the aim of “inducing” it to adopt a peace-loving form of activity, was the programme of Kautsky in Germany, Jean Longuet in France, MacDonald in England. It was anything but the programme of Lenin, who was calling for the overthrow of imperialist rule . . .’
Quoting Bolshevik Central Committee member Shliapnikov – a former metal worker – Trotsky continues: ‘When that number of Pravda was received in the factories it produced a complete bewilderment among the members of the party and its sympathisers, and a sarcastic satisfaction amongst its enemies . . . The indignation in the party ranks was enormous, and when the proletarians found out that Pravda had been seized by three former editors arriving from Siberia they demanded their expulsion from the party. Pravda was soon compelled to print a sharp protest from the Vyborg district: “If the paper does not want to lose the confidence of the workers, it must and will bring the light of revolutionary consciousness, no matter how painful it may be, to the bourgeois owls”.’
That was the true situation in March 1917 when Lenin and then Trotsky returned from exile; after which Lenin quickly re-established his leadership of the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks – more slowly – succeeded in winning the leadership of the workers’ Soviets.
It’s in the light of this history that the following basic postulates of permanent revolution, set out in these words by Trotsky in 1929, can be best understood:
‘1) The theory of the permanent revolution now demands the greatest attention from every Marxist, for the course of the class and ideological struggle has fully and finally raised this question from the realm of reminiscences over old differences of opinion among Russian Marxists, and converted it into a question of the character, the inner connections and methods of the international revolution in general.
2) With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solutions of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.
3) 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 the democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even seriously posed. But the alliance of these two classes can be realised in no other way than through an irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national-liberal bourgeoisie.
4) No matter what the first episodic stages of the revolution may be in the individual countries, the realisation of the revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard, organised in the Communist Party. This in turn means that 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 all the tasks of the democratic revolution.
8) The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfilment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.
9) The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it. Socialist construction is conceivable only on the foundation of the class struggle, on a national and international scale. This struggle, under the conditions of an overwhelming predominance of capitalist relationships on the world arena, must inevitably lead to explosions, that is, internally to civil wars, and externally to revolutionary wars. Therein lies the permanent character of the socialist revolution as such, regardless of whether it is a backward country that is involved, which only yesterday accomplished its democratic revolution, or an old capitalist country which already has behind it a long epoch of democracy and parliamentarism.
10) The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis in bourgeois society is the fact that the productive forces created by it can no longer be reconciled with the framework of the national state. From this follow, on the one hand, imperialist wars, on the other, the utopia of a United States of Europe. The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.’
• Concluded