07.12.2006

Permanent revolution and state power

As Jack Conrad shows, the Marx-Engels theory of permanent revolution does not preclude the workers' party participating in government

There exists a common-sensical, dumb hand-me-down, almost religious certainty on the Trotskyite left that if the sort of minimum-maximum programmes written, sanctioned or inspired by the Marx-Engels team - eg, those of the Communist Party in Germany, the German Social Democratic Party, the French Workers Party and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party - ever had any relevance, if they were ever anything more than self-set death traps, such programmes definitely have no relevance for the 21st century. An elementary error. One might just as well reject Capital as a 19th century antique.

The awful fate of German social democracy in August 1914 is waved about like a talisman, a solemn warning for those who might be tempted to think otherwise. As if there was a categorical imperative which joined the 1891 Erfurt programme to the vote for war credits by the Social Democratic Party's Reichstag fraction. The alternative offered by the Trotskyite comrades is the 'transitional method' - derived, of course, from Trotsky's The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International (written in the "dark night" of 1938). In reality their much-vaunted 'transitional method' turns out to be nothing more than a pretentious rehash of economism, the tailing of spontaneity, downplaying democratic issues, etc.¹ 

As I have already explained, and shall elaborate here and in future, subsequent articles, workers, the overwhelming majority in a country like Britain, if they are going to become the leading class - ie, if they are going to organise themselves a revolutionary party - need a minimum-maximum programme that learns from the programmatic heritage of the past: and that certainly means including in its minimum section the demand for the democratic republic - what Marx and Engels called the "form" of working class rule.

The slur - for that is surely the intention - that what our perspective amounts to is "Neither Trotsky nor Stalin, but myself" (ie, Jack Conrad) could not be further off the mark.²  What I am defending is the authentic Marxist programme, the only programme through which the working class can form itself into a party and navigate its way to power (which in Marxist terms more or less amounts to the same thing). In that sense, if we want to reduce it to names, our slogan would be 'Neither Stalin nor Trotsky, but Marx and Engels'.

Incidentally, especially for purposes of this account, I include amongst the Trotskyite left heterodox or divergent examples, such as the Socialist Workers Party and the Alliance for Workers' Liberty - they share and reproduce the same version of history, at least when it comes to rejecting the 1891 Erfurt programme and the pre-1917 programme of the Bolsheviks. Only self-proclaimed guardians of the flame could possibly object to my describing these groups as Trotskyite in this context.

The long and the short of it is that despite the hugely fragmented nature of Trotskyism, the famed 57 varieties, there is a common, disparaging, version of 1903-17 Bolshevik history. According to the comrades, before 1917 Lenin and the Bolsheviks rejected the idea of working class leadership of the Russian Revolution, were committed to putting into power the bourgeoisie and establishing a stable, capitalist regime which would eventually, after a whole, prolonged period, create the conditions where a specifically socialist revolution was possible (as we have seen, that was actually the theory of the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP, not the Bolshevik wing).

Despite its transparent falsity, this version of history is lazily accepted, and passed on by every 'party' and 'international' constituting the Trotskyite left. Whatever their arcane ideological disputes and entrenched battle lines of demarcation, on the minimum-maximum programme, on the history of Bolshevism, they are to all intents and purposes indistinguishable.

Take the SWP's founder-leader, Tony Cliff. As we know, along with the usual run of orthodox Trotskyites, he wants us to believe that up to April 1917 Lenin was essentially a Menshevik programmatically. Trotsky supposedly had an altogether superior theory. Eg, Trotsky is approvingly quoted, by implication against Lenin, as stating that "power must pass into the hands of the workers" through a revolution "before the politicians of bourgeois liberalism get the chance to display to the full their talent for governing".³  Yet the reader will recall that the real Lenin argued for the replacement of tsarism ... by the revolutionary rule of the workers and peasants. This was the pivotal demand of the Bolsheviks' minimum programme.⁴ 

In this article I shall continue my defence of the Marxist programme against the false version of history presented by Trotskyite economism.

Permanent

Marx and Engels had originally expected the bourgeoisie to take the lead in Germany against the old order of autocrats, electors and petty kingdoms. Their model was 1789 and the great French Revolution. In the event of the German bourgeoisie coming to power through the bourgeois revolution, Marx and Engels strongly advised the nascent workers' party to steer well clear of all offers of governmental posts. The workers' party should constitute itself as the party of "extreme opposition". Entering a coalition government with the parties of the bourgeoisie would drain the masses of their revolutionary energy and turn the workers' party into its opposite: ie, a bourgeois workers' party. Certainly no such coalition government would carry out the demands of the minimum programme.

Reality soon disabused Marx and Engels and led them to break from this 1789 paradigm. The bourgeoisie proved cowardly and in the end these gentlemen sought a compromise with reaction, not a revolution. However, in 1848 the working class was painfully small and politically undeveloped. Workers were in no position to form a government majority and take power (especially democratically - and that is what Marx and Engels assumed and tirelessly fought for). Hence the socialist state remained a distant prospect. Ever the revolutionary realist, Marx spoke of "15, 20, 50 years of civil war" for the working class to even ready itself.⁵ 

There were instant socialists who disagreed. Who thought of themselves as far to the left of Marx and Engels, with their sober talk of necessary phases, patient education and winning the battle for democracy. August Willich and Karl Schapper - leading members of the Communist League - were convinced that workers in Germany must conquer power directly, if only by way of the guillotine. Once in command, they would immediately get on with the communist reconstruction of society - even if that were against the wishes of the great majority. True, gaining a great majority was a problem they easily solved, at least in their own minds, by the simple device of including within the ranks of the proletariat all manner of non-proletarians. In effect they equated the proletariat with the people.

Marx savaged this backsliding from the Communist manifesto. The Willich-Schapper faction reeked of national parochialism; it was a reflux of non-class utopian socialism. The Communist League split in 1850 and soon winked out of existence altogether.

Not that Marx and Engels advocated a passive waiting game. Far from it. In alliance with the urban petty bourgeoisie and rural peasantry, the workers could shunt the revolution forward again and again. Naturally, to achieve that they would have to strive and fight and constantly produce new initiatives. The immediate aim would be to remake Germany constitutionally: instead of fragmentation and autocracy, indivisible unity and democracy. If the petty bourgeois democracy came to power (shopkeepers, lowly ranking government officials, school teachers, artisans, small farmers, etc, constituted a clear majority in Germany at the time), workers should guard their organisational and political independence, keep their stocks of weapons and make the most extreme social and economic demands objective circumstances permitted. That is what Marx called "making the revolution permanent".⁶  However, as their numbers, organisation and confidence gradually increased, the workers could envisage taking power - perhaps to begin with in alliance with the petty bourgeoisie.

Instructively, that phase of "making the revolution permanent" broadly corresponds with the glorious but all too brief reality of the 1871 Paris Commune. Though Engels can be found writing about the Paris Commune as the "dictatorship of the proletariat", the locus is in the final sentence of his introduction to the 1891 edition of The civil war in France.⁷  Surely, however, he included the 'terrifying' term as a final polemical thrust. His closing remarks were pointedly directed against the social democratic "philistines" in the Reichstag. The right wing of the SDP wanted to disown the Commune and forget all about the minimum demand for the democratic republic in Germany.

Marx himself never described the Paris Commune as an example of the dictatorship (rule) of the proletariat. Instead he characterised it as a government of the producing classes. As an aside, it should be noted that Marx urged a compromise between the Commune and the counterrevolutionary "dogs" in Versailles. Why? Not because he was a coward or a defeatist. He foresaw a horrendous massacre followed by a drawn out period of reaction. That scenario he sought to avoid. Yet, of course, when Paris rose in revolt and the civil war began in earnest, Marx and his comrades gave unstinting support.

The Paris Commune began as nothing more than the appointed city council. It was the equivalent of an unelected Greater London Authority. Those who insist on the unreformability of the House of Commons and other such representative institutions and the inherent superiority of Russia's soviets in 1905 and 1917 might care to ponder this salient fact.

Anyway, after the fall of the Bonapartist regime free elections were held and they resulted in a clear leftwing majority. Needless to say, not a working class left. The majority were Jacobins and Blanquists, the biggest minority Proudhonists. In other words, the Paris Commune was dominated by petty bourgeois socialism - an accurate reflection of the class structure of the capital city and France as a whole.

Not that members of the Marx-Engels party refused to participate in the revolutionary government. Out of the 90 elected members of the Commune, 15 were partisans of the International Workingmen's Association. To have stood aside at such a testing moment would have been treachery - political absentionism of the worst kind.

Under conditions of a Prussian military victory the city council and the national guard were the two key institutions that the popular forces of Paris took hold of and used for their own purposes. Not that structurally things were left unchanged. Propelled more by their instincts than their utopian socialist programmes, members of the Commune agreed a complete overhaul. A whole range of far-reaching, democratic measures were introduced "¦ to all intents and purposes the bureaucratic state apparatus was dismantled in the city. That is why Marx called the Paris Commune a semi-state. There was universal suffrage, the people were armed, officers elected, an industrial union formed, the church separated from the state, rent and price controls introduced, women granted formal equality with men, judges had to be elected, all officials were subject to recall and received a salary no more than the average skilled worker, etc.

Marx recognised that the Commune had to win the peasantry. Far from impossible. The Commune held out the prospect of cheap government, ending police repression and parasitic exploitation by priests, banks, etc. To "prevent a general uprising of the peasants" the reactionary government of Thiers headquartered in Versailles imposed a suffocating blockade around Paris. The democratic infection had to be contained.⁸ 

Given the political composition of the Commune, mistakes were inevitable. There was no concerted march on Versailles - with training, determination and discipline, entirely feasible. Paris had 200,000 men under arms. No takeover of the Bank of France - that would have had the bourgeoisie clamouring for peace. Instead the Blanquists took hostages, closed churches and tried to curb the democracy of the Commune. Meanwhile the Proudhonists busied themselves with schemas for national workshops and in general limiting the growth of capitalism.

The Commune did not attempt to introduce socialism. Nor could it. Capitalists were not expropriated. But the Commune did point towards socialism, in that it aimed to set free the slave classes. Marx never rated the prospects of the Commune highly. He knew what the outcome would likely be (the counterrevolution killed at least 30,000 and exiled a similar number). But despite his premonitions Marx celebrated the revolutionary élan of Paris, its achievements and promises, and - equally to the point - the simple fact that it had happened. For him the true significance of the Commune lay in its "own working existence".⁹ 

Marx and Engels were fully aware that the Paris Commune was an historical accident brought about by exceptional circumstances - the Franco-Prussian war, the collapse of Napoleon III's regime and the siege of Paris. For the Commune to have succeeded would have required not only reaching out to the countryside and to other urban centres in France. There would have had to have been revolutions in Britain, Germany, Austria and Belgium. But conditions for that were not yet ripe.

Lenin

Essentially Vladimir Lenin wanted a peasant revolution in Russia led by the working class, which, given favourable conditions (ie, the spread of the revolution to Europe), would then proceed "uninterruptedly" from the tasks of the minimum programme towards the tasks of the maximum, or full communist, programme. Conditions were now ripe objectively for the socialist revolution in key countries such as Germany, Austria, France, Britain and the United States. Certainly in Europe there were mass Marxist parties. Taking his cue from Marx and his 1848-51 writings, Lenin spoke of the democratic revolution "growing over into the socialist revolution". Reportedly, he memorised Marx almost word for word. He was, in other words, committed to "making the revolution permanent".

A short aside for the benefit of pedants. Trotsky too worked from a minimum-maximum programme and, of course, used the term "uninterrupted revolution" as well as "permanent revolution". 'Uninterrupted' was interchangeable with 'permanent'. Eg, in 1906 Trotsky wrote that the victory of the proletariat "in turn means the further uninterrupted character of the revolution".¹⁰ 

So the disputes between Lenin and Trotsky, while hardly being unimportant, took place within the same 'permanentist' camp (whose advocates, besides Lenin and Trotsky, include the likes of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky and, though less consistently, a post-1917 Jules Martov). All recognised that a working class-led revolution in Russia could act as the spark for the socialist revolution in the west and therefore allow Russia to carry on uninterruptedly to the tasks of socialism.

However, Lenin, at least on balance, displayed greater flexibility and daring than Trotsky on the potential of the downtrodden peasants in Russia. His famous 'democratic [majority] dictatorship [rule] of the proletariat and peasantry' formulation was deliberately open-ended. It had the advantage of highlighting the necessity of democracy, or the rule of the people by the people. At the same time it held out the possibility of working class leadership. Not that Lenin is unambiguous. On occasion he used the term 'dictatorship' not as meaning 'rule', but as the opposite of democracy.

Lenin's was a scientific formula, not an agitational slogan. The latter was the demand for the overthrow of tsarism, and the establishment of the democratic republic through a provisional revolutionary government. But the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' formula did have the virtue of locating what might be called the chemical composition of the Russian Revolution.

The urban proletariat had geographic and workplace concentration, political training and the habit of collective solidarity. However, the peasants were the overwhelming majority of the population. But they were weak organisationally and inherently parochial. Hence, according to Lenin, the centre of gravity and the party composition of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would be determined not by numbers alone but by the actual course of history - ie, making, consolidating and carrying on the anti-tsarist revolution to a new, higher, phase.

Lenin refused to indulge in idle speculation or give a priori answers to questions such as whether or not the peasants could establish their own party, whether such a party would form the majority or the minority in a revolutionary government, and what exact relationship the peasants would have to the proletariat and its party. Circumstances and the balance of forces, crucially internationally, would concretely decide such matters.

Yet, while maintaining its independence, the goal of the workers' party was absolutely clear - to play a leading role in the post-tsarist regime. Lenin's overriding concern lay in releasing the peasant masses and giving the anti-tsarist revolution the greatest national and international momentum. Here, of course, the workers' party, as the main subjective factor, was vital. Energy, discipline and accumulated experience could, with the right programme, put it at the forefront of the struggle, including from within the revolutionary government.

The Mensheviks dismissed the revolutionary potential of the peasants. They were a reactionary class doomed to extinction by the growth and spread of capitalism. What Russia faced was an anti-tsarist revolution along the lines of 1789, which would put the bourgeoisie into power and thereby speed up socio-economic progress. The working class party had a duty to push the bourgeoisie forward. However, after the revolution the workers' party should take a back seat, and form themselves into a "party of extreme opposition" and stay clear of all government posts till the long off socialist revolution.

The refusal to countenance participation in the revolutionary government was one that the Mensheviks consistently maintained - that is, till the irresistible temptations of 1917 drew their right wing into accepting portfolios in a government that, initially at least, included 10 capitalist ministers (which dramatically increased their endemic splits and factional divisions).

Lenin easily countered the arguments of the Mensheviks by pointing out the obvious. There is a huge difference between participation in a bourgeois-dominated government and joining a revolutionary government of the kind seen in 1871 and therefore the one he envisaged for Russia.

In France the rightwing socialist, Alexandre Millerand (1859-1943), had entered a bourgeois-dominated cabinet in 1899. He loyally served first as minister of commerce, then minister of works and finally as minister of war. Hardly what Lenin had in mind. He told the Bolsheviks to mobilise the peasantry alongside the proletariat in a revolution that would sweep away tsarism and then, from the position of government, proceed to rigorously, ruthlessly, combat all attempts at counterrevolution.

The Mensheviks excused themselves by saying that Lenin's democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would be unable to put into effect the maximum programme of the RSDLP. Lenin readily agreed. But the Mensheviks' bourgeois government would hardly put into effect the party's minimum programme. However, the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry - if the independent organisation of the proletariat was properly guarded - could do that and proceed further.

By declaring in advance that they would not participate in a revolutionary government, the Mensheviks were the ones who played into the hands of the bourgeoisie and, in effect, timidly shrank from giving communist leadership to the anti-tsarist revolution. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, were determined to use their Russian Paris to ignite the world revolution.

What about Trotsky? Though he began on the side of the Mensheviks, being committed to a strategy of permanent or uninterrupted revolution, he had very a different position to them.

Trotsky's governmental-class formulation recognises the social weight of the peasantry and the need to win it: the 'dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry'. On the other hand, this appears to be an exclusively proletarian government, one which discounts even the possibility of a coalition. Certainly one in which the working class party begins as a minority, as was arguably the case with the 1871 Paris Commune. A peasant majority, he warned, would hold the proletariat hostage. From this it is pretty obvious that Trotsky was proposing minority rule. By implication, if nothing more, Trotsky's perspective sees the proletarian party in Russia ruling, at least in a transitionary period, without the 'luxury' of democracy. An attitude that displays more than a tincture of Blanquism.

However, we should not exaggerate the difference between Lenin and Trotsky - something Trotskyite economism is wont to do. Eg, Lenin in 1906, under the urging of Luxemburg and her Poles, used the formulation "the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry".

When Martov and other Menshevik leaders got themselves into a froth over this supposed 'deviation' from Bolshevik orthodoxy, an unruffled Lenin coolly informed them that there was no change: "Is it not obvious that the same idea runs through all these formulations, that this idea is precisely the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, that the 'formula' of the proletariat relying upon [supported by - JC] the peasantry, remains part and parcel of the same dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry?"¹¹ 

The peasantry, the sphinx of the Russian Revolution for Trotsky, is an elemental force prone at any moment to the most violent outbursts. But as an estate it is "absolutely incapable of taking an independent political role". Trudoviks, Popular Socialists, the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party can be deployed by either side of the Lenin-Trotsky argument, the main bone of contention, however,  being: was it permissible for the working class party to enter a government alongside such forces after the anti-tsarist revolution?

Personally I think the huge support gained by the SRs in 1917 - they were the undisputed party of the countryside - and, after October, the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition, where the Bolsheviks constituted the majority and the Left SRs the minority, tends to support Lenin. Certainly only a hardened dogmatist could possibly object to describing the post-October 1917 regime as the realisation of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

Trotsky's thesis rested on the expectation that the proletariat, from the vantage point of state power, would be able to draw the peasant mountain to its prophetic leadership. The victorious proletariat would stand before the rural masses as their liberator and with their essentially passive consent as benign rulers. In my opinion, given the spread of the revolution to Europe, which is certainly what Lenin banked on, and consequently the favourable balance of class forces internationally, there was nothing inevitable about the growing alienation of the peasant masses from the Communist Party regime in Moscow that was seen from 1918 onwards. Unfortunately, Lenin, but especially Trotsky, theoretically normalised this dire situation in writings and speeches - in the process gutting the Marxist use of the term, 'dictatorship of the proletariat', of its democratic content.