10.11.2022

Memory wars - Part II

In the second of three articles marking the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Jack Conrad explores the rival parties, class blocs and the differences that separated Trotsky from Lenin

Let us briefly revisit the situation in early 1917.

As readers will know, tsarism ignominiously collapsed with the February revolution (once again we shall stick with the Julian calendar). Political strikes by engineering workers, mass demonstrations on International Women’s Day, army mutinies, the seizing of police arsenals, the arming of the people … and high-command panic forced the abdication of Nicholas II.¹

Elite, but reform-minded, members of the tsar’s fig-leaf fourth duma - powers were nominal and voting was rigged in favour of landlords, capitalists and clerics - came to a rotten agreement with rightwing Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary leaders. Hence the agreementist sobriquet.² Socialists would back, shore up, a bourgeois Provisional government; in return they were given vague assurances about democracy. Before their rank and file the agreementists promised that class-collaboration would appease counterrevolution, secure workers’ rights and add to the “forward momentum to socialism”.³

The first coalition government was headed by prince Georgy Lvov - a member of the House of Rurik, who joined the Progressists in 1911. Other top ministers included Alexander Konovalov, another Progressist, Pavel Milyukov, a Cadet, and Alexander Guchkov of the Octobrists. Suffice to say, the Octobrists were loyal monarchists and the traditional party of the big capitalists, landlords and sections of the state bureaucracy. As for the Cadets and Progressists, they represented liberal capitalist interests and advocated a constitutional monarchy along the lines of Britain, Sweden and Denmark. Naturally, given their innate conservatism, the Cadets, Progressists and Octobrists hated revolution with a passion. But, with the disintegration of tsarism, they had no choice but to place themselves at the head of an armed revolution, in order, when the time was right, to inflict a counterrevolution, which would guarantee the sacred rights of property.

Behind these parties, behind the Provisional government, there stood, of course, Anglo-French imperialism’s “wartime need to maintain the eastern front”.⁴ Due to popular sentiments the Provisional government was obliged to declare for universal suffrage, press freedom, land reform, a just peace, etc, but - not least after frantic negotiations with British and French plenipotentiaries - it remained firmly committed to the Triple Entente and Russia annexing Constantinople and the Dardanelles Strait.⁵ Bolshevik slogans demanding peace and the publication of the secret treaties with Britain and France were to prove of huge agitational value.

However, thanks to the agreementists, the Provisional government could present a socialist face. Alexander Kerensky, a Trudovik, was appointed minister of justice, then minister of war. An aspiring Bonaparte, he put aside the dark suit of the duma deputy and donned the khaki of the common soldier. Other socialists joined him round the cabinet table: eg, Victor Chernov of the SRs, Alexey Peshekhonov of the Popular Socialists and the Mensheviks’ Irakli Tsereteli. They were not mere decoration. Kerensky became minister-president of the second coalition in July 1917, while other SRs, PSs and Mensheviks were handed ministerial portfolios. The end result was a seven-to-seven balance between bourgeois and socialist parties. This shift to the left happened both in response to mass pressure from the left and in order to deceive the masses, who were moving to the left.

Dual power

The Provisional government was not the sole centre of power. In fact, almost from the start, there was dual power. Education in leftwing study circles, a widely read socialist press and illegal and semi-legal trade union, cooperative and party organisations ensured that the lessons of the 1905 revolution were well remembered. Workers and members of the armed forces needed little prompting, when it came to establishing soviets (councils) in city districts, factories, naval bases and barracks. After a short while peasants followed their example and formed their own soviets.

The soviets, in particular the Petrograd soviet, were where real authority lay. Eg, the unofficial, unwritten, de facto post-February constitution, meant that soldiers could refuse to obey orders unless countersigned by the Petrograd executive committee. Adding to the complexity of the situation, however, the SR and Menshevik agreementist majority in the Petrograd soviet were determined to strengthen the hand of the Provisional government. So it was a dual power that drained authority in the direction of the Provisional government.

What of the Bolsheviks? Historically they were the majority faction/party of the working class - as proven by 1905, mass support for Pravda, trade union elections and the last, 1912, fourth duma, where its candidates won the entire workers’ curia. However, brutal tsarist oppression - unleashed with the onset of World War I - hit the Bolsheviks first and foremost. Their duma deputies were arrested in November 1914, while the Mensheviks were left untouched. Members of the Bolshevik central committee based in Russia were likewise rounded up and put on trial. Siberian exile followed. Rank-and-file members were arrested by the score, were drafted into the army, kept their distance out of fear, or had to operate in the hazardous, suffocating conditions of illegality - all punishment for Bolshevik opposition to the war and Lenin’s ringing demand to turn imperialist war into civil war. By contrast social pacifists and social chauvinists were in comparative terms tolerated. Indeed the activities of Georgy Plekhanov and his right Menshevik group were “secretly subsidised” by the tsarist authorities.⁶

So, in February 1917, the Bolsheviks were very weak. Membership was considerably reduced, down to some 40,000 or 45,000,⁷ committees were cash-strapped and many barely functioned. And, whereas even the small centrist faction, the RSDLP (Internationalist) - or Mezhraiontsy, as they were commonly known - had already, in January, acquired a printing press⁸, possibly due to German finance channelled through the ‘merchant of revolution’, Alexander Parvus, the Bolsheviks only began publishing Pravda, in Petrograd, and Sotsial Democrat, in Moscow, after the February revolution. Unsurprisingly, Bolshevik delegates to the Petrograd soviet therefore constituted a small minority, at least to begin with.

In terms of leadership the Bolsheviks were somewhat handicapped too. They had to make do with the politically limited abilities of Alexander Shlyapnikov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Pyotr Zalutsky, who together formed the Russian bureau of the central committee. That said, they had the good sense to order the Vyborg district committee to stop circulating its leaflet calling for the soviets to “immediately eliminate the Provisional government of the liberal bourgeoisie and declare itself to be the provisional revolutionary government”.⁹ Instead of falling into the trap of a premature uprising, the bureau set the task of winning a Bolshevik majority in the soviets.

Meanwhile, the actual Menshevik and SR majority in the Petrograd soviet supported the Provisional government in the name of ‘defending the revolution’. In truth, defending the rule of landlords and capitalists, defending the war, defending tsarism’s predatory aims.

Yet, bizarrely, according to Tony Cliff, Socialist Workers Party founder-leader, the “existence of dual power” and the eminently predictable behaviour of rightwing Menshevik and SR leaders exposed the “bankruptcy” of the standing Bolshevik programme.¹⁰ Hence Lenin, we are seriously told, was forced to carry out “a complete break” with what he had written up to 1917.¹¹ And, of course, what Cliff says here, as argued in the first part of this article, is lifted straight from the pages of Trotsky’s Lessons of October (1924), which still, unfortunately, passes as verisimilitude for much of the left.¹²

Two stages

Let us take the argument forward by going back to the actual theoretical foundations of the Bolshevik programme. From the outset - yes, since the Emancipation of Labour Group was established in 1883 - Russian Marxists (eg, Georgy Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich and Pavel Axelrod) were agreed: the country was not yet ripe for socialism - if by that one means working class rule, leaving behind commodity production and the transition to the communist principle of ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need’. The autocratic state, lack of capitalist development, domination of the economy by a woefully backward peasant agriculture - explain why the coming Russian Revolution was conceived by all Marxists as having two stages: the first, anti-tsarist, anti-feudal and democratic, the second, working class and socialist - Trotsky being no exception.

It was the anarchists and narodniks, and following them the SRs, who raised the slogan of socialist revolution - what they meant by ‘socialism’ being, of course, a moot point. Either way, the call for a socialist revolution earned Lenin’s withering scorn. In 1905 he writes: “Only the most ignorant people can ignore the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place.”¹³ Note, the SRs, formed in 1902, advocated a programme that included the “expropriation of capitalist property and the reorganisation of production and the entire social system on socialist foundations”¹⁴ - in truth a utopian peasant socialism. Yet, though attracting a very considerable popular base, above all in rural areas, the SRs placed their hopes - well, at least initially - not, as might be expected, on waging a protracted guerrilla struggle, but on individual terrorism and the assassination of tsarist officials.

What of the Menshevik (minority) wing of the RSDLP? As I have said before, they were committed to a theory of stages, which inevitably resulted in tailism. According to the Mensheviks, the overthrow of tsarism had to be crowned by the class rule of the bourgeoisie and, in the best-case scenario, a western-style parliamentary constitution. It should be added that the ‘Menshevik’ label united an amorphous collection of factions, groups and trends - there were, for example, sceptics on the left, such as Jules Martov, who had faith neither in the bourgeoisie playing its ascribed “revolutionary role” nor in its democratic credentials.¹⁵ Nevertheless, in step with the growth of capitalism, there is working class growth too. Eventually the peasantry is eclipsed in population terms. The working class becomes the majority. Only then does socialism come onto the agenda - a Menshevik proposition which owes more to sociology than Marxism.

If the forthcoming revolution against tsarism was bourgeois, then, agreed the Mensheviks, eg, in a conference resolution of April-May 1905, the working class and its party “must not aim at seizing or sharing power in the provisional government, but must remain the party of the extreme revolutionary opposition”.¹⁶ So, for mainstream Menshevik thinking, the immediate task of the working class was to align itself with the educated, progressive, urban middle classes and edge, push or lift the bourgeois parties into their predetermined position as leaders of the anti-tsarist revolution.

Participation in a revolutionary government was explicitly ruled out (obviously subject to a violent reversal after the collapse of tsarism). Why non-participation? Firstly, if the working class succumbed to the temptation of power, it would cause the bourgeoisie to “recoil from the revolution and diminish its sweep”.¹⁷ Secondly, without an already established European socialism, the working class party in Russia would be unable to meet the economic demands of its social base. Failure to deliver far-going changes would produce demoralisation, confusion and defeat.

If the anti-tsarist revolution proved successful, the workers’ party should, argued the Mensheviks, exit the centre stage, so as to allow the bourgeoisie to assume power. Obeying the ‘laws of history’, the workers’ party then patiently waits in the wings until capitalism has carried out its preordained historic mission of developing the forces of production. Hence, for the Mensheviks, there had to be two, necessarily distinct, revolutions - the one separated from the other by a definite historical period.

While not including socialist measures in their minimum programme - shared, of course, in its first, 1903, form with the Mensheviks - Lenin and the Bolsheviks were resolutely opposed to handing power to the bourgeoisie, as the Mensheviks insisted. The bourgeoisie in Russia was both cowardly and treacherous. Despite occasional leftish posturings, their parties sought a compromise with tsarism, not a people’s revolution against tsarism. Their ideal was a constitutional monarchy. Russia therefore had no Cromwell, no Washington, no Robespierre. The only force capable of scoring a decisive victory over tsarism and pushing through the most radical changes objective circumstances permitted was the proletariat … in alliance with the peasant masses.

So, whereas for the Mensheviks the ‘vital forces’ of the coming revolution were the working class, the urban middle classes and the capitalist bourgeoisie (a minority bloc of three classes), for the Bolsheviks it was the working class and the peasantry (a majority bloc of two classes).

Naturally, because Russia was overwhelmingly a peasant country, the Bolsheviks paid particular attention to their agrarian programme and securing proletarian hegemony over the rural masses. To neatly illustrate the point, there are far more references to the condition of peasants than the condition of workers in Lenin’s Collected works. In fact, for the Bolsheviks, peasant interests set the limit on how far the revolution could go. Landlord power could certainly be destroyed and the land nationalised and given, according to their wishes, to the peasants. This ‘black redistribution’ was, of course, not a socialist measure. It would uproot Russia’s semi-feudal social relationships and allow capitalism in the countryside to develop along an “American path”.

What of Trotsky’s immediate programme? It was not limited by the interests of the peasants. While a hegemonic working class could take the peasantry along with it in the overthrow of tsarism, an irreversible split between these two popular classes was bound to occur. The peasants were, for Trotsky, “absolutely incapable of taking an independent political role”.¹⁸ They would gravitate either towards the rule of the proletariat or the rule of the bourgeoisie. And, because working class political domination is incompatible with “its economic enslavement”, Trotsky reasoned, the workers’ party would be “obliged to take the path of socialist policy” … even if that risked a bloody “civil war” with the peasantry.¹⁹ Thankfully, by the summer of 1917, Trotsky had undergone something of a Leninist conversion. Certainly, if one reads him when he was the leader of the Left Opposition, it is obvious, despite accusations to the contrary, that he was painfully aware of the vital importance of keeping the peasantry onside. Eg, in the late 1920s he roundly condemned Stalin’s drive to forcibly collectivise agriculture.

Hybrid regime

The fact of the matter is that the Bolsheviks were determined that the anti-tsarist revolution would see the fulfilment of the party’s entire minimum programme - a democratic republic, the election of judges, free universal education, abolition of the police and standing army, a popular militia, separation of church and state, extensive democratic rights, decisive economic reforms, such as workers’ commissions to inspect factories, an eight-hour day, etc.

Such a hugely advanced package could only be delivered by establishing a provisional revolutionary government which embodied the interests of the great mass of the population. Lenin used a famous algebraic formulation to capture the essence of the majoritarian regime envisaged by the Bolsheviks: the democratic (majority) dictatorship (rule) of the proletariat and peasantry. Such a hybrid regime could not abolish classes and bring full liberation for the working class. That was impossible. Economically Russia would have to progress capitalistically - albeit under the armed rule of the working class and peasants. That meant the continuation of wage-labour, albeit with workers taking over abandoned factories, the nationalisation of the central bank, etc.²⁰

How long was the hybrid regime going to last? There are those who reckon that prior to 1917 Lenin anticipated nothing more than a brief historical moment. Once the provisional revolutionary government put into law its radical measures, there would be elections to a Constituent Assembly that would see the bourgeoisie come to power with the support of peasant votes. Frankly, a thoroughgoing misreading of the Bolshevik programme. Yes, Lenin admitted the possibility that elections might see the return of the Bolsheviks to being a party of extreme opposition. It is also true, however, that Lenin sought an extended post-revolution alliance with the peasantry - or at least the great majority of the peasantry. He also, of course, wrote about the revolution being uninterrupted.

Given that the worker-peasant regime was going to be committed to implementing the full minimum programme of the RSDLP, we surely must conclude that it was expected to be relatively long-lasting. Why? Far from it being imagined as a mere prelude to the bourgeoisie assuming power, the party of the working class had every interest in its bloc of two classes winning elections to a Constituent Assembly and from that salient acting in the most decisive manner to spread the flame of revolution to Europe.

Lenin seems to have seriously contemplated war for the “purpose” of “taking” the revolution into Europe. One of his key slogans was for a “revolutionary army”.²¹Depending on their success in furthering the world socialist revolution, the Bolsheviks looked towards a purely working class government in Russia and embarking on specifically socialist tasks. Before that, though, because the tasks of the worker-peasant government included eliminating every last vestige of tsarism, enacting sweeping land reform, putting in place full democratic rights, defeating bourgeois counterrevolution … and maybe even fighting a revolutionary war in Europe, that explains why such a regime would have been expected to last not a few brief months, but years.

My main argument, is, though, that the Bolsheviks were not committed to handing political power to the bourgeoisie, as the Mensheviks were. Of course, for the Bolsheviks, the international dimension was crucial. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in Russia could not survive for any extended period in isolation. It would, it had to, “rouse Europe” to carry through the “socialist revolution”.²² The United Socialist States of Europe would then, in turn, help Russia move in the direction of socialism (which requires definite material conditions in terms of the development of the productive forces). And a revolution uniting Europe and half of Asia had a realistic chance of successfully spreading to every corner of the globe.

Inevitably, there would, within Russia, be a differentiation between the proletarianised rural masses and the emerging class of capitalist farmers. But not necessarily a specifically socialist revolution: ie, the violent overthrow of the state. Put another way, for the Bolsheviks there would not necessarily be a democratic stage and then a socialist stage at the level of regime. Democratic and socialist tasks are categorically distinct, premised as they are on different material, social and political conditions. But particular aspects can evolve and assume dominance. The revolution could, given favourable internal and external conditions, proceed uninterruptedly from democratic to socialist tasks through the proletariat fighting not only from below, but from above: ie, using state power. The revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat thereby peacefully grows over into the dictatorship (rule) of the working class. As the size, organisation and consciousness of the urban and rural working class grew, so would the strength of the workers’ party. The necessity of a coalition government would at some point disappear. The tasks of the maximum programme then decidedly come onto the agenda.

Lenin defended and elaborated his programme for the democratic revolution as being the shortest - in fact, the only viable - route to socialism in Two tactics of social democracy (1905).²³ This was a seminal pamphlet that armed the Bolsheviks with the political weapons needed - first to lead the “whole people” for a democratic republic, and then lead “all the toilers and exploited” for socialism.²⁴ By any objective assessment, Lenin and the Bolsheviks therefore had their own version of permanent revolution.

Permanent

Too often comrades who should know better identify permanent revolution exclusively with the name, Leon Trotsky. Of course, the phrase long predates him, going back to the “literature of the French Revolution.”²⁵ From there it spread far and wide, becoming a common “programmatic slogan” of European radicals, socialists and communists, including Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.²⁶ And, as Hal Draper helpfully explains, for Marx, the word ‘permanent’ in permanent revolution, describes a situation where there is “more than one stage or phase” in the revolutionary process. He usefully adds that the expression “retains its specifically French and Latin meaning”. It does not mean perpetual or never-ending. It is employed by Marx to convey the idea of “continuity, uninterrupted”.²⁷

Bearing this in mind, consider Lenin’s “uninterrupted revolution”. A typical example is from 1905. Lenin declares: “We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop halfway.”²⁸ He wants to take the anti-tsarist revolution to the socialist stage through a process that does not halt at some artificial boundary. No, the Bolsheviks will take the revolution forward both from below and above.

Not without interest in this respect, when it came to Russia, Karl Kautsky too can be cited as an advocate of permanent revolution. He was, remember, a close ally of the Bolsheviks till August 1914, almost an honorary member. Here is a little snatch from Trotsky’s own - albeit rather jaundiced and self-serving - description of Kautsky’s approach, “when he was a Marxist”:

Together with the Russian and Polish revolutionary Marxists, he rightly acknowledged that, should the Russian proletariat conquer power before the European proletariat, it would have to use its situation as the ruling class not for the rapid surrender of its positions to the bourgeoisie, but for rendering powerful assistance to the proletarian revolution in Europe and throughout the world.²⁹

I am not suggesting that Bolshevik ideas, perspectives and expectations went unchanged from 1905 to 1917. Far from it. It seems clear to me that, with the outbreak of World War I, Lenin and other Bolsheviks - maybe inspired in part by none other than Kautsky³⁰ - began to anticipate steps towards socialism in the immediate aftermath of the anti-tsarist revolution (Lenin’s writings on this subject were later culled by the Stalin and Bukharin duumvirate in order to pharisaically justify their theory of socialism in one country). No, all I insist on is programmatic continuity. A river will be added to by tributaries, will broaden, but it continues to flow towards the sea. There is no abandonment, no break.

Lenin vs Trotsky

All in all, to any objective observer, Trotsky’s differences with Lenin are clear. Lenin wanted a majoritarian regime that would last by reaching out to Europe. Trotsky wanted a minority regime that would temporarily lead the majority, would last by reaching out to Europe, but would risk a bloody “civil war” with the majority.

Different, but not that different. True, in Results and prospects (1906) and in Lenin’s so-called replies there was a fierce polemic between the two of them. However, factional interests often produced more heat than light. Eg, Trotsky obstinately, crassly, dismissed any suggestion of a “special form of the proletarian dictatorship in the bourgeois revolution”. He was, at the time, intent on rubbishing and equating both the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. On the other hand, Lenin attacked Trotsky for “underestimating” the importance of the peasantry by raising the slogan, ‘Not a tsar’s government, but a workers’ government’.

Not least, on the basis of this slogan, Trotsky is no doubt right when he says that Lenin had “never read my basic work”. That slogan was proclaimed - not by Trotsky, but his friend and collaborator, Alexander Parvus (yes, the very same man who went on to become an agent of German imperialism in World War I and who arranged the ‘sealed train’ which took Lenin and co from their Swiss exile to Petrograd’s Finlyandsky station in April 1917). “Never did Lenin anywhere analyse or quote,” says Trotsky, “even in passing, Results and prospects”.³¹ Moreover, he goes on to cite the “solidarity” that existed between himself and the Bolsheviks during and immediately after the 1905 revolution.

And for those idiots who demonise the term ‘stage’ and belittle Lenin because of it, Trotsky’s boasts that he “formulated the tasks of the successive stages of the revolution in exactly the same manner as Lenin”.³² This should provide food for thought (for those who permit themselves the luxury of thought). The same can be said for Trotsky’s proud affirmation about how “Lenin’s formula” closely “approximated” to his own “formula of permanent revolution”.³³ Despite that, we are told time and again that Trotsky’s theory was far superior to Lenin’s. Yet another example of the past, this time Lessons of October, weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

The idea of Lenin carrying through a “complete break” with the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry was a loser’s gamble played by Trotsky after Lenin’s death in January 1924. By boldly, outrageously, claiming in effect that Lenin had become a Trotskyist in April 1917, Trotsky could, without fear of being contradicted by Lenin, enhance his own standing and at the same time vilify the role played by his three rivals. We have already mentioned Kamenev and Stalin in March 1917 and Zinoviev and Kamenev in October 1917. But in the conditions of 1924 this was never going to be a winner. Leave aside the little matter of the truth (which we shall examine in part three): politically the odds were hopelessly stacked against him.

No doubt Trotsky was desperate to counter the campaign against ‘Trotskyism’ launched by the Kamenev-Zinoviev-Stalin triumvirate. That went hand-in-hand, of course, with the burgeoning ‘Leninism’ cult. A canonised version of what Lenin did, said, wrote and thought became holy writ, infallible, consecrated, unquestionable. To have doubted the vozhd, to have disagreed, to have presented an alternative course of action went from being natural, inevitable, healthy, within any serious working class party: instead it became scandalous, treacherous, even sacrilegious. And there could be no hiding, no getting away from Trotsky’s long, often bitter, factional struggles against Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

True, the Lenin cult was helped in part by Lenin himself. He was, after all, more than inclined to present his arguments in the sharpest, most angular terms. But, once an issue, a dispute, had been resolved, settled, or simply no longer mattered, the harsh language, the threats, the name-calling instantly vanished and it was let bygones be bygones. That was true with Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin in 1917. It was also true of Trotsky in 1917.

However, with the 1924 ‘literary discussion’, Lenin’s almost forgotten harsh language, threats and name-calling took on a life of their own - torn out of context, they were used as the main weapons of war on both sides. In short, Trotsky’s Lessons of October survives, remains influential, because of history - not because it is good history.

1. For the role of the army high command see R Service The last of the tsars chapter 4, London 2017.↩︎

2. LT Lih, ‘For or against “agreementism”?’ Weekly Worker January 28 2021: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1332/for-or-against-agreementism.↩︎

3. RA Wade (ed) Revolutionary Russia: new approaches New York 2004, p154.↩︎

4. J Siegel For peace and money: French and British finance in the service of tsars and commissars Oxford 2014, p10.↩︎

5. See www.gwpda.org/comment/secrettreaties.html.↩︎

6. SH Baron Plekhanov in Russian history and Soviet historiography London 1995, p148.↩︎

7. Membership figures from History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Moscow 1939, p183.↩︎

8. See Weekly Worker series translated and introduced by John Riddell and Barbara Allen, beginning with the Petrograd Mezhrayonka leaflet of January 1917: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1139/day-of-peoples-wrath-is-near.↩︎

9. Quoted in E Blanc, ‘A revolutionary line of march: “Old Bolshevism” in early 1917 re-examined’ Historical Materialism March 31 2017.↩︎

10. T Cliff Lenin Vol 2, London 1975, p127.↩︎

11. Ibid p124.↩︎

12. ‘Memory wars’ Weekly Worker November 3 2022: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1417/memory-wars.↩︎

13. VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, pp28-29.↩︎

14. web.archive.org/web/20160711122553/community.dur.ac.uk/a.k.harrington/srprog.html.↩︎

15. Z Galili The Menshevik leaders in the Russian Revolution: social realties and political strategy Princeton NJ 1989, p36.↩︎

16. Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 9 Moscow 1977, p245.↩︎

17. Ibid p128.↩︎

18. L Trotsky The permanent revolution and Results and prospects New York 1978, p72.↩︎

19. Quoted in LT Lih, ‘Democratic revolution in permanenz’ Science and Society October 2012.↩︎

20. See VI Lenin CW Vol 8, Moscow 1977, p208.↩︎

21. VI Lenin CW Vol 9 Moscow 1977, p128.↩︎

22. Ibid p82.↩︎

23. Ibid pp15-130.↩︎

24. Ibid pp114.↩︎

25. “Kautsky describes the policy of the sans-culottes in 1793-94 as one of ‘Revolution in Permanenz’” - quoted in RB Day and D Gaido (eds) Witnesses to permanent revolution Leiden 2009, p537.↩︎

26. H Draper Karl Marx’s theory of revolution Vol 2, New York 1978, p204.↩︎

27. Ibid p201. Marx’s most famous use of ‘permanent revolution’ can be found in his 1850 ‘Address of the Central Authority of the Communist League’, K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 10, New York 1978, pp277-87.↩︎

28. VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, p237.↩︎

29. L Trotsky The permanent revolution and Results and prospects New York 1978, pp33-34.↩︎

30. See ‘Kautsky, Lenin and the “April theses”’ Weekly Worker January 14 2010: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/800/supplement-kautsky-lenin-and-the-april-theses.↩︎

31. L Trotsky The permanent revolution and Results and prospects New York 1978, p166.↩︎

32. Ibid p168.↩︎

33. Ibid p198.↩︎