Permanent Revolution: A Rupture with Second International Marxism
“But it’s a violation of all the laws of history”.[1]
- Plekhanov upon hearing news of the October 1917 Russian revolution
This article is provoked by Sami El-Sayed’s stimulating article in Issue 6 of Rupture, ‘Permanent Revolution: Myth, reality & relevance’. In short, my argument is that Sami overstates the continuity from Marx and Engels to Kautsky to Trotsky in terms of the theory of permanent revolution. In contrast, I want to make an argument for discontinuity and rupture.
Article originally published in Issue 7 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
My argument is that Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, put into practice by the Bolsheviks from October 1917, was a qualitatively new development in Marxist strategic thinking. It built upon significant insights that existed in Marx and Engels’ work, and to a lesser extent in the work of the pre-renegade Karl Kautsky. However, it could only be achieved by making a qualitative break from the strategic conceptions which were dominant within the Second International. Sami acknowledges Plekhanov put forward a “de facto stagist approach”, but in my opinion he was simply the worst of a bad trend of what can be described as Second International Marxism, whose leader was Karl Kautsky.
I make this argument not to defend Trotsky’s ‘honour’, but because I think it speaks to a wider methodological and philosophical break that was made by the Bolsheviks and the Third International from the mechanical materialism which dominated the Second International.
To make the case against Sami, I want to make both a textual and historical argument. Firstly, I will look at a broader range of Kautsky’s writings to argue that those pieces quoted by Sami amount to a sort of cherry-picking of the best of Kautsky and don’t accurately reflect his views in the round. Secondly, I want to make the case that the reaction to Lenin’s adoption of the strategy of permanent revolution with his April Theses strongly makes the case for discontinuity rather than continuity. To put it bluntly, if “most Social Democrats” were Permanent Revolutionarists, as Sami argues, they had a funny way of showing it!
The contending theories
Before commencing the argument, for those who did not read Sami’s article or aren’t familiar with the background, it is worth restating briefly the essentials of the theory of permanent revolution against the contending theories of the time. The Menshevik (and later the Stalinist view of strategies for revolutions in similarly ‘backward countries’ to Russia in 1917) was that the coming Russian revolution would be a bourgeois one, and that it would be led by the capitalist class. The question of a socialist revolution would only arrive at a much later stage after capitalist development had created the material conditions for it in terms of economic development and a large working class.
The pre April 1917 Bolshevik conception, as put forward by Lenin in Two Tactics of Social Democracy[3], was that the character of the revolution would be capitalist, but the capitalist class would not lead the revolution - instead it would be led by the working class and peasantry. To his credit, he did have an internationalist conception, seeing that this could inspire European workers to rise in socialist revolution and then “together with them, we shall bring about the socialist revolution”.[4]
Trotsky’s conception in Results and Prospects agreed with Lenin on the incapacity of the capitalist class to play a revolutionary role, but pointed out that having achieved power the working class in Russia would not limit itself to just the capitalist tasks (e.g. land distribution and democratic reform), but would proceed to socialist measures. Sami and I, are, I think, agreed that Lenin’s ‘April Theses’[5] and the Bolsheviks’ strategic orientation towards “all power to the soviets” represented the implementation of this strategy in practice.
What was Kautsky’s position?
The most intriguing part of the Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record[6] which Sami draws on extensively, are the writings of Kautsky which reveal him to have some significant insights pointing in the direction of permanent revolution.
To recap them briefly, they include: The understanding in 1902 of the dynamics of imperialism whereby European capital supported tsarism within Russia and thus blocked any move towards bourgeois democracy[7] His reference in 1905 to “the revolution in permanence” and the unconditional support of western European capitalists to the tsarist regime in Russia[8]; The interesting reference to the ‘distinguishing mark of Japan and the root of its power, is that the country was able to leap over an important stage of development: the decadence of feudalism.”[9]
So far so good in terms of an understanding of the web of relations connecting imperialist ruling classes with those in less developed countries and how that impacts on developments. But it is far from the whole story. As well as these more insightful, nuanced open-ended analyses, are lots of mechanical, objectivist and stageist views of how history develops.
Kautsky was an advocate for a fatalistic view of history. You have to look no further than one of Kautsky’s most popular works, The Road to Power, written before any obvious renegacy, to see it. It advocates a fatalistic view of history with minimal human agency, stating:
“It is no part of our work to instigate a revolution or to prepare the way for it. And since the revolution cannot be arbitrarily created by us, we cannot say anything whatever about when, under what conditions, or what forms it will come.”
Nor was this expression of Katusky a once off popularisation. In 1903, he wrote:
“It is only where the capitalist system of production has attained a high degree of development that economic conditions permit the transformation, by the power of the people, of capitalist property in the means of production into social ownership”
In quite a good piece on Russia written in 1904, he is absolutely explicit:
“A revolution in Russia cannot establish a socialist régime at once. The economic conditions of the country are not sufficiently developed for that. The best it can do is to bring about a democratic government behind which would be a strong, impetuous and progressive proletariat that would be able to demand important concessions.”[10]
At its best this brings Kautsky close to Lenin’s pre-April Theses conception of the tasks of Marxists in the Russian revolution. But it means we are a big distance from Sami’s claim that “most Social Democrats” were Permanent Revolutionists.
Proof of the pudding
If Sami was right, then Lenin’s ‘Letters from afar’,[11] his first speech when he arrived at Finland station on 3 April 1917 ending in ‘long live the socialist revolution”[12] and the accompanying April Theses should have been largely agreed by most Social Democrats without much arguing about their main thrust. But an entire book could be filled with evidence of how the opposite was the case.[13]
They caused consternation and provoked widespread disagreement. Not just amongst the Mensheviks, but amongst the Bolshevik leadership. When he repeated similar points at a meeting of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and independent Social Democrats at the Tauride Palace the next day, Sukhanov writes that one Bolshevik told him the “speech had removed the differences within the Social-Democracy, for with respect to Lenin's position there could be no differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.”[14]
The Bolshevik paper, Pravda, had an editorial, written by Kamenev against it on 8 April, describing Lenin’s “general scheme” as “unacceptable”.[15] A motion to agree the Theses “as a whole” was voted down by the Bolshevik Petrograd Committee on the same day by 13 votes to 2, with one member abstaining.[16] Many, many more examples could be given. Only Lenin’s authority, the Bolsheviks’ democratic traditions, and the role of the so-called ‘worker-Bolsheviks’ connected with the advanced section of the Russian working class who agreed that they should not confine their tasks to ‘bourgeois democratic’ ones, meant that the Bolsheviks passed through a vigorous deep debate throughout April and emerged with a transformed position at a national conference commencing on 24 April.[17]
Surely this is powerful evidence of rupture, rather than continuity between the ideas of Kautsky and that of Trotsky, put into practice by the Bolsheviks after April 1917.
Trotsky as dialectician
Michael Löwy in ‘From the “Logic” of Hegel to the Finland Station in Petrograd’[18] makes a powerful case that a “critical reading of Hegel helped Lenin to free himself from an abstract, cut-and-dried theory that was an obstacle to this concrete analysis [of the strategic orientation of the April Theses]: the predialectical pseudo-orthodoxy of the Second International.”[19]
Trotsky got there earlier, under the impact of the experience of the dynamics of the 1905 revolution. But Results and Prospects[20] also stands out in retrospect as a striking philosophical as well as strategic break with second international Marxism. Dialectical categories are central to the analysis he uses to go beyond the pre-existing schema of what the revolution might look like.
““Trotsky is unique in looking at the capitalist system in its totality, and on that basis insisting that the objective conditions are ripe for working class power.””
Firstly, instead of analysing the objective possibility of socialism on the basis of Russian conditions alone, Trotsky is unique in looking at the capitalist system in its totality, and on that basis insisting that the objective conditions are ripe for working class power. Secondly, he rejects what he describes as Lenin’s “logical, purely formal operation” of his “distinction of principle between the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat and the democratic (that is, bourgeois-democratic) dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” In simple terms, he says once the working class is in power your formal conception of what its role is meant to be might not have that much relationship to how it actually uses its power.
Thirdly, and most significantly, in a parallel to Luxemburg’s ‘socialism or barbarism’ in the Junius Pamphlet[21] Trotsky dramatically reasserts political agency. People - not abstract productive forces - make history, even if not in conditions of their own choosing. He is withering about the dominant trend he is arguing with:
“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.”
A postscript on Connolly
While I understand that Sami may have been using a shorthand formulation, I think the idea that “James Connolly reproduced an essentially identical analysis [to that of permanent revolution] of the dynamics of Irish revolutionary struggles in his magnum opus, Labour in Irish History” is mistaken.
Connolly was an inspiring workers’ leader and a creative internationalist Marxist on the revolutionary left of the Second International. Labour in Irish History[22] is valuable precisely because it, and the lessons Connolly drew from it, represent a partial break from Second International Marxism. In particular within that is the importance of the dynamic of the struggle for national liberation in, and the rejection of a mechanistic schema of, waiting for the capitalist class to lead a bourgeois revolution.
However, there are profound weaknesses in Labour in Irish History, which I only have space to point towards here.[23] In short, Connolly’s determination to present capitalism as a foreign force and socialism as in line with “Gaelic tradition” leads him into all sorts of ahistorical confusion.
Connolly’s book is a tale of the rich betraying the struggle of the nation. However, while he has contempt for constitutional nationalists like Daniel O’Connell and Henry Grattan, he fails to take an objective view of the revolutionary Republicans he correctly admires like Wolfe Tone, Henry Joy McCracken and Robert Emmett. Crucially, he does not identify them as clearly bourgeois revolutionary figures. Instead they appear as leaders of the masses against foreign property forms. In a historical sense, Labour in Irish History seems to actually under-estimate the possibility that existed for a bourgeois revolution in Ireland in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
The internationalist perspective which is central to Results and Prospects and which gives a materialist underpinning to Trotsky’s perspective of the objective possibility of the working class taking power in Russia is strikingly absent in Connolly’s work. In its place is an idealistic reference back to “the Gaelic principle of common ownership,” an idea which does not appear to have much basis in fact.
To see Labour in Irish History as essentially identical to the theory of permanent revolution is to downplay the strengths of that theory. That isn’t to suggest that Trotsky’s theory is a fully finished product or that there are not many other Marxists who have much to add. Aside from more contemporary Marxists, one Marxist being partly rediscovered in the Anglosphere in recent years is the Peruvian Communist Party leader, José Carlos Mariátegui.
Unlike Connolly, he had the benefit of living through the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary period of the 1920s. He seems to have come to quite similar conclusions to Trotsky about the character of revolutions in colonial countries. However, his work is relatively unknown in Ireland. Perhaps the editors might consider including an article on his ideas in a future issue.
Notes
1. Quoted in Michael Löwy, ‘From the “Logic” of Hegel to the Finland Station in Petrograd’, in ‘On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin’ (Haymarket Books, 1993)
2. p. 72 Issue 6 Rupture
3. Lenin, ‘Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution’ (1905)
4. Lenin, ‘The Stages, the Trend, and the Prospects of the Revolution’ (1906)
5. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’ (1917)
6. Edited and translated by Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (Haymarket Books, 2011)
7. Karl Kautsky, ‘The Slavs and Revolution’ (1902), republished at p. 59 of Witnesses
8. Karl Kautsky, ‘The Consequence of the Japanese Victory and Social Democracy’ (1905), reprinted at p.373 of Witnesses
9. Ibid
10. Karl Kautsky, ‘Revolutionary Questions’ (1904), republished in Witnesses at p. 188
11. A series of letters written to the Bolshevik leadership in March 1917 setting out this new orientation, which in the final letter is referred to as an immediately posed “transition to socialism”.
12. There are multiple sources for this, however the full transcript of the speech does not appear to be published in English. Zinoviev’s reminiscence was recently translated by Ben Lewis and printed as ‘Lenin’s arrival in Russia’ (https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1149/lenins-arrival-in-russia/)
13. It should be noted that Lars T. Lih has written material disputing this case, most significantly “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context,” in Russian History 38 (2011), 199–242. I encourage readers to read Lih and the very many engagements with him, for example Paul le Blanc ‘Re-Arming the Party: Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolution in 1917’ (https://johnriddell.com/2017/10/21/paul-le-blanc-re-arming-the-party-bolsheviks-and-socialist-revolution-in-1917/) . A useful starting point for this debate is to read the contributions on John Riddell’s website at https://johnriddell.com/2017/10/12/the-bolsheviks-in-1917-index-to-a-debate/. While Lih has added colour to our understanding of the events, I think the evidence for the April Theses marking a major shift in strategic orientation is overwhelming.
14. P. 287 N. N. Sukhanov, ‘The Russian Revolution, 1917: a personal record’ (Oxford University Press, 1955)
15. This is cited in Lenin, ‘Letters on Tactics’ (1917)
16. Leon Trotsky, ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ (Haymarket Books, 2008) Vol. 1., Ch. 14 and Lars T. Lih, ‘‘A basic question’: Lenin glosses the April Theses’ (https://johnriddell.com/2017/08/15/a-basic-question-lenin-glosses-the-april-theses/)
17. P 132 Marcel Liebman, ‘Leninsm under Lenin’ (Merlin, 1980)
18. P 77 Löwy
19. P. 88 Löwy
20. Leon Trotsky, ‘Results and Prospects’ (1906)
21. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Crisis of German Social Democracy’ (1915)
22. James Connolly, ‘Labour in Irish History’ (1910)
23. For further reading, I recommend Kieran Allen, ‘The Politics of James Connolly’ (Pluto Press, 1990) and Andy Johnston, James Larragy, Edward McWilliams, ‘Connolly: A Marxist Analysis’ (Irish Workers Group, 1976)