18.06.2008
Imperialism is the main enemy
The theory of permanent revolution provides the revolutionary programme we need, writes Gerry Downing of the Campaign for a Marxist Party's Trotskyist Tendency
Comrade Torab Saleth has attacked permanent revolution as being irrelevant today. He says all states are now bourgeois and the first part of Trotsky’s theory is mainly concerned with the transition from the bourgeois democratic to the socialist revolution. He contends that the second part - which deals with the period of transition (no stages separated by long historical periods) - and the third, with the necessity for the world revolution to complete the national revolution, were “not particularly specific to Trotsky nor in contention here” and so we can largely ignore them.1
To begin with, it is important to emphasise that the theory is an integrated whole. It cannot be broken down and dissolved into its constituent parts and then invalidated by repudiating one of them. The application of the theory today depends on the understanding of the integrated nature of the entire world economy and the worldwide division of labour. If we remove that from our considerations - ‘that’ being world imperialism - then the question of why the democratic revolution is incapable of triumphing is lost.
The stratagem is a means of dismissing world imperialism as the main enemy of humanity and focusing solely on, for example, the internal problems of Iran with a dismissive nod in the direction of world imperialism - which is not dealt with at all in Saleth’s article and mentioned only twice. As we can easily prove that bourgeois democratic revolutions are a thing of the past, according to him the whole theory of permanent revolution falls on this account. We need a socialist revolution here, so forget all that anti-imperialist nonsense - that is the implication of comrade Saleth’s ideological capitulation to socialism in one country. As the left communists do, he dismisses ‘Our main enemy is world imperialism’ and with it the whole concept of oppressor imperialist nations and oppressed semi-colonial nations like Iran, Iraq and Argentina, to mention just a few recent victims of imperialist aggression.
As Trotsky observed, “The struggle of the epigones is directed, even if not always with the same clarity, against all three aspects of the permanent revolution. And how could it be otherwise when it is a question of three inseparable parts of a whole? They separate the national socialist revolution from the international. They consider that in essence the conquest of power within national limits is not the initial act, but the final act of the revolution; after that follows the period of reforms that lead to the national socialist society.”2
Comrade Saleth misrepresents Trotsky when he says, “Can this central aspect of Trotsky’s theory - ie, the problem of transition from the democratic revolution to the socialist - be applied today or does it require modification or abandonment?”3
This is the actual quote from Trotsky: “The theory of the permanent revolution … pointed out that the democratic tasks of the backward bourgeois nations lead directly, in our epoch, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and that the dictatorship of the proletariat puts socialist tasks on the order of the day. Therein lay the central idea of the theory.”4
Transition is not the central idea of the theory. The phrase, “the problem of transition from the democratic revolution to the socialist”, comes a whole page earlier - on p7 of my New Park edition. Trotsky does not refer to it as the central idea of the theory and no serious Trotskyist since has ever claimed it was. I knew immediately it was not and it was this that prompted me to go back to the original text. It is wrong to present matters like this but it does point to a discrepancy in Trotsky’s formulations. We can understand this if we accept that the p7 formulation was looking back at 1905 and 1917, but the p8 formulation was looking forward and dealing with “the democratic tasks of [all] the backward bourgeois nations”.
An old article by Stuart King, entitled ‘In defence of the revolutionary Comintern’, explains why this analysis is correct: “Its [the Comintern’s] perspectives for the revolutionary struggles in that arena remained flawed by its failure to generalise the lessons of the Russian Revolution with regard to the theory of permanent revolution. This should come as no surprise, since even the author of this theory, Leon Trotsky, did not think this perspective was applicable to the colonial countries, and did not raise it as an operative guide for revolutionary strategy between 1917 and 1927 …
“Trotsky’s … report on the Fourth World Congress to the Russian Party [states]: “It is self-understood that the colonies … if taken independently and isolatedly, are absolutely not ready for the proletarian revolution. The growth and influence of communist ideas … can be assured … not so much by the role of the native communist nuclei as by the revolutionary proletariat of the metropolitan centres for the emancipation of the colonies.”5
Schematic
Moreover, it is hopelessly schematic to base an entire article on a differentiation between the ‘democratic’ and ‘socialist’ revolution. As we highlighted above, the initial phrase of all revolutions will be spontaneously ‘democratic’. To the masses it will simply be ‘the revolution’. The Russian ‘democratic’ February revolution had and will have this in common with all revolutions. And despite the numerous quotes we can pull from Lenin and Trotsky pre-1917 to the effect that this approaching revolution will be “the bourgeois revolution”, they knew, and even Kautsky knew, that it was impermissible in serious theoretical debate to make this absolute separation.
Take the following from 1906: “To Plekhanov’s question, ‘Is our revolution bourgeois or socialist?’, Kautsky had answered that it is no longer bourgeois, but not yet socialist: that is, it represents the transitional form from one to the other. In this connection Lenin wrote in his foreword: ‘Is our revolution bourgeois or socialist in its general character?’ That is the old schema, says Kautsky; that is not how the question should be put. That is not the Marxist way. The revolution in Russia is not bourgeois, for the bourgeoisie is not one of the driving forces of the present revolutionary movement in Russia. But neither is the revolution in Russia socialist.”6
And Trotsky goes on: “On the other hand, I never denied the bourgeois character of the revolution in the sense of its immediate historical tasks, but only in the sense of its driving forces and its perspectives … The general sociological term ‘bourgeois revolution’ by no means solves the politico-tactical problems, contradictions and difficulties which the mechanics of a given bourgeois revolution throw up.”7
Contrast this sophisticated and dialectical approach to the coming revolution with the method applied by comrade Saleth to dismiss permanent revolution, Trotsky, both in 1904-06, when he developed the theory, and in 1928-29, when he was defending it against the Stalinist attacks, was obviously referring to pre-capitalist countries ruled by non-bourgeois classes. Why else should he say that in 1906 “Russia was approaching the bourgeois revolution” if indeed the bourgeoisie had already achieved state power?
Comrade Saleth writes: “Thus in the eyes of Trotsky himself the whole concept of transition depends on the starting point of a non-bourgeois state. But, in how many countries of the periphery today do we have similar conditions to Russia or China of the early 20th century? Who has seriously claimed that countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Iran, India, Philippine, Egypt, etc are still dominated by pre-capitalist economies with pre-capitalist ruling classes?”8
That is not the Marxist way. Having ignored world imperialism and misinterpreted Trotsky, he then ignores that fact that the Chinese bourgeois revolution had already triumphed in 1911 in the form of the Kuomintang, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek and it was to this new world of semi-colonial nations that Trotsky was now applying his theory. It was here that the force and applicability of his theory educated a whole new generation of revolutionaries and enabled the theoretical struggle against Stalinism and ‘socialism in one country’ to be fought out for future generations.
Comrade Saleth says: “To cut a long story short, this fact alone is enough to claim therefore, there is hardly anywhere left in the world today where the first aspect of the theory of permanent revolution can be usefully applied. If you have a bourgeois state what you have ahead of you is called a socialist revolution and not a growing over or the transition of the democratic to socialist revolution.”9
On the contrary the theory applies to all semi-colonial nations fighting against imperialism, with Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Venezuela in the forefront. Why else would Hands Off the People of Iran say: “The main enemy is imperialism. The Iranian regime does not represent a progressive or consistent anti-imperialist force?” but we can only fight it consistently on a world - ie, permanent revolution - perspective, and recognise the impossibility of defeating the regime in Iran and going on to construct socialism by a national socialist revolution? Permanent revolution recognised the Hopi launch conference, even if many did not recognise it: some fought for its premises consciously, some unconsciously; and others, consciously or unconsciously, opposed it.
Comrade Saleth counterposes his theory of ‘combined revolution’ to permanent revolution on the basis that the only reason Trotsky called the Russian Revolution a bourgeois revolution was that “the immediate objective tasks of the revolution” consisted in the creation of “normal conditions for the development of bourgeois society as a whole”. And that “at least Trotsky had a need for the term ‘permanent’ to explain a ‘transition’ from this bourgeois revolution to a socialist one. What need does it serve today when you face combined anti-capitalist and democratic tasks against a bourgeois state?”10 Comrade Saleth, in his apparent ultra-leftism, forgets entirely the consciousness of the masses, the working class leading the peasantry, who must make the revolution.
“When the ‘students following the imam’s line’ took the US embassy personnel hostage,” writes comrade Saleth, “even bourgeois liberal politicians in Iran could see that the clerics were simply trying to consolidate their own position within this ‘post-revolutionary’ regime at the expense of the more liberal wing - but our Trotskyist generals were in fact calling on the masses to abandon their own real anti-imperialist struggles and come in front of the US embassy to passively watch this charade.”11
Shora struggles
Indeed they should not “abandon their own real anti-imperialist struggles”, but we would respectfully suggest that the imam hijacked and focused this anti-imperialism on the personage of Khomeini because they recognised that the masses did have an internationalist understanding that the main enemy was US and world imperialism. How should revolutionaries tackle this contradiction? It was made immensely more difficult in 1979-80 by the capitulation of the Stalinist Tudeh Party, the Fedayeen guerrillas, the islamic leftist Mujahedin and the pseudo-Trotskyist HKE (allied to the Jack Barnes US Socialist Workers Party) to islamic reaction, which had immensely weakened the class-consciousness of the vanguard, particularly in the shora struggles.
These workers’ councils/soviets, before they were transformed into tools of the reactionary clerics, were “based on general assemblies of all employees, assumed control over the Iranian economy. They ensured continued production amidst the revolutionary chaos, initiated radical reforms in work organisation and [in the course of 1979] developed into the focal point of a democratic restructuring of Iranian society from the bottom up. The shora movement, arguably the most comprehensive experiment of workers’ control in a developing-world country to date, was also a major threat to the power of ayatollah Khomeini and the sort of society he and his fellow islamists were striving to establish.”12
In correctly pouring scorn on the pseudo-Trotskyists, Gerry Healy, Jack Barnes and Ernest Mandel, who objectified permanent revolution and the world revolution as an unstoppable process which moved through the semi-feudal ayatollah Khomeini’s reactionary utopian islamic republic, he dismisses the anti-imperialism of the Iranian masses themselves and the Iranian Trotskyists who did get it right - or almost right - back then. That includes the Workers’ Unity Party (HVK) and the 1983 Torab Saleth himself, whose document to the USFI World Congress of 1985, ‘The 1979 revolution and the failures of the left’, is an excellent attempt to fight for revolutionary leadership and to defend Trotskyism against its detractors and betrayers.13
Sadly he has abandoned that revolutionary orientation now: “The author would like to stress that he would have written an entirely different text now. At the time the main purpose of the document was to organise a fight at the congress of the Fourth International,” he says in the introduction to its reproduction on the Hopi website.14
This battle in the shoras was where the revolution was ideologically defeated by the capitulation of Stalinism, pseudo-Trotskyism and those to their right to Khomeini. But to take the line of the pro-imperialist liberal bourgeoisie and refuse even critical support to the hostage-takers was to side with imperialism. The correct transitional demand was critical support to set the base against the leaders by pointing out that their bogus ‘anti-imperialism’ was tied to the reactionary clergy who sought to destroy all the working class organisations, the only force that can defeat imperialism internationally.
Chairperson of the Organisation for Women’s Liberation Azar Majedi, when speaking at the June 14-15 Hopi weekend school in a session entitled ‘Can imperialism liberate women in the Middle East?’, explained that young women were wearing the veil to show their opposition to imperialism. These contradictory acts of defiance mean that extreme sensitivity is needed to empathise with the genuine anti-imperialism of the oppressed and to find the ways to expose the bogus, half-hearted, self-serving anti-imperialism of the theocracy.
And in that sense permanent revolution is predicated on the transitional method - linking the consciousness of the masses to the objective necessity to forge an internationalist class struggle and revolution in Iran. What Khomeini wanted then and what Ahmadinejad wants now is a new compromise with imperialism that guarantees their own positions on terms far worse for the working class than before.
But an imperialist-neutral or even a pro-democratic-imperialist working class leading a ‘socialist’ revolution in Iran is a reactionary utopia, whose superficial attraction is that at least it appears more modern. If “Trotsky’s theory about the ‘transition’ from the democratic to the socialist revolution … in fact is nothing but a proletarian revolution with combined tasks”, then we have no need at all to fight imperialism.
This is not the Marxist way, because it is not the path to winning the masses to revolutionary socialism with the programme of permanent revolution.
Notes
1. Weekly Worker June 5.
2. L Trotsky The permanent revolution and results and prospects New York 1976, p9.
3. This sentence was originally framed: “The first aspect - according to Trotsky himself, ‘the central idea of the theory’ - deals with the problem of transition from the democratic revolution to the socialist.” That was in an earlier version of this article before I took issue with it. However, the point remains the same in the new formulation.
4. L Trotsky The permanent revolution and results and prospects New York 1976, p8.
5. Permanent Revolution spring 1986: www.fifthinternational.org/index.php?id=61,967,0,0,1,0
6. L Trotsky The permanent revolution and results and prospects New York 1976, p55.
7. Ibid p56.
8. Weekly Worker June 5.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Weekly Worker June 12.
12. S Esmailian, A Malm ‘Iran: the hidden power’: www.opendemocracy.net/trackback/4513. See also M Hoskisson, ‘The shoras and the shah’ for details of this:www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=2049
13. There were three small Trotskyist groups of only about 150 who got it right then, and we must include the oppositionists like himself in the larger Trotskyist groups, according to comrade Torab, speaking at the June 14-15 Hopi weekend school.
14. www.hopoi.org/iran-revolution.html
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