When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973-Carl Davidson"s "Left in Form, Right in Essence:United front against fascism"

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*******
Carl Davidson"s "Left in Form, Right in Essence:United front against fascism"

The Trotskyists believe they are the only authentic practitioners of the policy of the united front.

Yet in practice. they have opposed full implementation, either from rightist or “leftist” positions.

The most apparent example of this role was the Trotskyist attitude toward World War 2, in which they took a “defeatist” position towards the capitalist governments fighting the fascists, called for the “revolutionary” overthrow of the Soviet government and opposed the united front with the national bourgeoisie in the colonial countries invaded by the fascists.

The fact that the Trotskyist line led them inevitably to these positions substantiated the charge that they objectively served the interests of the fascists.

Trotsky and his followers tried to justify their line with a “left” cover, stating that they called for a revolution in Germany, the “unconditional defense” of the Soviet Union (but not its leadership) and the defeat of the capitalists everywhere through socialist revolution. They then tried to back it all up by drawing a doctrinaire analogy with World War 1, where the Leninists called for the proletariat in all capitalist countries to work for the defeat of their own bourgeoisie by “turning the imperialist war into a civil war.”

“It is really ridiculous,” wrote Georgi Dimitrov in 1936, “when ‘left’ phrasemongers of various kinds oppose these tactics (of the united front), adopting the pose of irreconcilable revolutionaries. If we are to believe them, all governments are aggressors. They even quote Lenin, who, during the imperialist war of 1914- 1918. correctly rejected the argument of the social-chauvinists that’ we were attacked and we are defending.’ But the world at that time was divided into two military-imperialist coalitions which were equally striving to establish their world hegemony and which had equally prepared and provoked the imperialist war. At that time there were neither countries where the proletariat was in power nor countries with a fascist dictatorship.”

But now the situation is different. Now we have: (1) a proletarian state which is the greatest bulwark of peace; (2) definite fascist aggressors; (3) a number of countries which are in direct danger of attack by fascist aggressors and in danger of losing their state and national independence; (4) other capitalist governments which are interested at the present moment in the preservation of peace. It is, therefore. completely wrong now to depict all countries as aggressors. Only people who are trying to conceal the real aggressors can distort the facts in such a manner.

A number of main contradictions came to the fore during World War 2: between bourgeois democracy and bourgeois fascism between and within the imperialist powers; between the imperialists and the colonies; among the imperialist powers; between the working class and the bourgeoisie in all capitalist countries; between the first socialist state and all the capitalist countries, and between the first socialist state and the fascist powers.

Of all these, which was the principal contradiction whose development determined or influenced the development of the rest? In the period of World War 2, it was the contradiction between the Soviet Union and the fascist powers. The principal, immediate enemy – as opposed to the enemy in general – of all the world’s peoples was the fascist powers of Germany, Italy and .Japan and their lackeys.

Strategic meaning

What did this mean for proletarian strategy? First, that Marxists-Leninists everywhere called for a united front of all working class organizations against fascism, on the basis of which would be built an even broader popular front which was in contradiction to the fascists, including even the temporary and wavering allies to be found in the camp of the bourgeois-democratic capitalist governments.

The Trotskyists opposed this line under the guise of upholding the proletarian united front while rejecting its broader extension in the popular front. They believed that the capitalist camp could not be split and that efforts to do so on the part of proletarian revolutionaries in each country and the Soviet Union internationally amounted to so much “class collaboration.”

It was true that the capitalist countries initially wavered or opposed the Soviet Union’s call for a united defense against the fascists. Many elements of the bourgeoisie wanted the fascists to attack the Soviet Union first, while they stood on the sidelines watching the two powers exhaust each other so they could pick up the pieces later.

Trotsky, himself, believed that this was the inevitable course. In 1932 he wrote, “It would be sheer political stupidity to believe that once they came to power, the German National Socialists would begin with a war against France or even against Poland.”

Hitler-Stalin Pact

The Soviet leadership completely understood that sooner or later, they would have to fight the German fascists. But precisely this question – sooner or later? – made all the difference in the world. Since the bourgeois democracies continued to stall on the question of the united front and the German fascists were in the process of making up their minds of who to attack first, the Soviet leadership waited until the last possible moment and then decided to force the issue.

The method chosen was the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, more popularly known as the Hitler-Stalin pact. Its signing sent the Trotskyists into a frenzied howl but in actuality it constituted one of the most brilliant diplomatic moves of the period.

It meant that the capitalist governments were attacked first, that the Germans would have to fight eventually on two fronts at once, that the Soviet Union would not have to fight alone and that the international popular front isolating the principal fascist enemies would become a reality. In short, it meant the defeat of fascism.

The Trotskyists, of course, saw it as only one more “betrayal” of the working class. In their view, it was the Communists who were primarily responsible for fascism’s coming to power in Germany in the first place.

In this way the Trotskyists cover up for the political force that actually paved the way to power for the fascists – the German Social-Democrats.

Refused united front

The German Social-Democrats refused at every point in the struggle to form a united front with the German Communists against the rising power of the fascists. Instead, they shared governmental power with the bourgeoisie, collaborated with them in suppressing the struggles of the working class and pursued the line of the peaceful, constitutional path to “socialism.” In both theory and practice, however, they were tools of the capitalists for maintaining the stability of bourgeois rule.

In Austria, for example, even after Hitler had come to power in Germany, the Social-Democrats begged for an agreement with the fascists. even going so far as to volunteer cooperation with a two-year suspension of the constitution and the parliament so long as it was done “constitutionally.”

For these reasons, the Communists correctly attacked the leadership of the Social-Democratic parties as “social-fascists,” that is, “socialists in words, fascist in deeds.” (Lenin had attacked the same parties during World War I as “social-imperialists” for defending their own capitalists.) In this way, the Communists sought to expose to the masses the actual implications of following the line of the Social-Democrats.

For Trotsky, this amounted only to so much name-calling. He pointed out the obvious fact that the Social-Democrats stood to be smashed with the victory of fascism and that this constituted an objective basis for a united front.

Decisive factor

The problem. however, was that it was not obvious to the Social-Democrats who feared proletarian revolution more than the victory of Hitler. This factor proved decisive.

This is not to say that the German Communist party made no mistakes or that their errors were insignificant. One of their main weaknesses was a social-democratic or right error. This was seen in the building of their party primarily on the basis of electoral districts, rather than on factory cells. They also made a number of ultra-“left” errors, including a one-sided emphasis on the “united front from below,” rather than a more persistent effort at unity with the Social-Democratic leaders as well, even if this was turned down. They also at one point perpetrated the illusion that the Hitler government would be short-lived and that the proletarian power would quickly replace it.

The Trotskyists believe that the Communists’ errors were the decisive factor in preventing the united front from being embraced by the Social- Democratic leaders. But this is utopian. The Communists would have been able to strengthen their influence among the masses of the Social-Democrats but the leadership had objective ties to the bourgeoisie. To think otherwise is to deny the character of the labor aristocracy as the agent of the capitalists within the workers movement.

This is reflected in this country in the Socialist Workers party’s one-sided emphasis on the union leadership in the united front against the Vietnam war. While Trotskyists went all-out to get endorsements from trade union leaders for antiwar demonstrations, they did no organizational work among the rank-and-file for the struggle against imperialism. Despite their running debate with the revisionists on the single-issue, multi-issue question, this is where they share with the Communist party a thoroughly rightist approach to the question of the united front.

The Trotskyist movement in the 1930s went on to merge with the Social-Democrats and the Trotskyists in this country joined the Socialist party of Norman Thomas. This and other aspects of the Trotskyists’ history in the U.S. show what left phrases mean in practice.

When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:Trotskyism and China today"

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*************
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:Trotskyism and China today"

“The ‘Russian question’ has been the main axis in world politics for nearly four decades,” states the Socialist Workers party’s 1955 resolution on the Chinese revolution.

“It now has found its extension and deepening,” the SWP continues, “in the ‘Chinese question.’ ”

The Trotskyists pose the question fairly enough. Their conclusions, however, just as in the past, lead them to the other side of the barricades.

What made the “Russian question” a touchstone for revolutionaries, demarcating Marxist-Leninists from right and “left” revisionists, was the existence of the proletarian dictatorship and its undertaking of the task of socialist construction “in one country.” The Trotskyists opposed the former in practice by denying the latter in theory.

Today China represents the main example in the world of the proletarian dictatorship and is likewise a touchstone for revolutionaries. But the Chinese revolution has also “deepened and extended” the question on two fronts: in the international arena through its call for a united front of all the world’s peoples against the “two superpowers” of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism and in the domestic arena through its example of continuing the class struggle by the means of the “great proletarian cultural revolution” in socialist society.

Liu and Lin

In these two arenas the SWP has opposed the gains of the Chinese revolution. In general, it has attacked the policies of the Chinese Communist party under the leadership of Mao Tsetung as “ultraleftist” domestically and “rightist” internationally. In reality, however, it is the Trotskyists who vacillate between right and “left” opportunism and to the extent that their views have been reflected in China, it has been in the lines pursued by Liu Shao-chi and Lin Piao.

How is this manifested? In China’s socialist construction the theoretical link between Trotsky and Liu Shao-chi can be seen in the “theory of productive forces” put forth by both figures.

The Sept. 19, 1969 issue of Peking Review sums up the “theory” as claiming that “the socialist road cannot be taken in any country where capitalism is not highly developed and the productive forces have not reached a high level ... After the seizure of power (Liu Shao-chi) raised it to oppose socialist transformation in a futile effort to lead China on the road to capitalism.”

Liu Shao-chi’s line came into sharp conflict with Mao’s over the collectivization of agriculture through the development of the cooperative system. “Some people have expressed the opinion,” Liu is quoted as saying in The Struggle Between the Two Roads in China’s Countryside, “that steps should be taken gradually to shake the foundations of private ownership, weaken it until it is nullified and raise the mutual aid organizations for agricultural production to the level of agricultural producers cooperatives as a new factor for ‘overcoming the peasants’ spontaneous tendency.’ This is an erroneous, dangerous and utopian conception of agricultural socialism.”

Liu held the view that farming had to develop for some time on an individual basis and that “mechanization” had to occur before “cooperation.” His struggle with Mao on the issue, together with severe natural calamities, hindered the development of China’s people’s communes and was not decisively defeated until the cultural revolution.

What are the Trotskyist views on this struggle? “China’s productive forces,” states the SWP in 1955, “are far from adequate to give the statized property a socialist character.” This is rooted in Trotsky’s own position where, in 1936, he summed up the essence of the “productive forces” line.

Vulgar evolutionism

“Marxism,” writes Trotsky, “sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress.” Marxism, of course, does no such thing. It posits the class struggle as the motive force of historical development, including the development of the productive forces. Trotsky simply replaces revolutionary dialectics with vulgar evolutionism.

The SWP also sympathized with Liu’s line on the communes. “Abolition of private property on the land,” states Daniel Roberts in the May 1959 SWP Discussion Bulletin, is an “irrational and utopian” objective, “as long as China’s technological development and industrial equipment remain low. Communist social relations can evolve only on the basis of a technology that stands higher in its development and universal application than the heights reached under capitalism in the advanced industrial countries.”

“Does setting up the communes violate the peasants’ petty bourgeois aspirations to be individual farmers?” Roberts asks. He believes that it does and that, at most, the peasants might defer this individualism, for a brief time. After this period some peasants will have become bureaucrats or workers “and then we can also expect that tens of millions of peasants will want at last to engage in individual farming plus some form of voluntary cooperation.”

“The peasantry,” as Lenin put it, “has two souls,” one aspiring toward petty capitalism and the other casting its lot with the proletariat. What the Chinese experience has demonstrated is that “technique in command” leads them along the former path while “politics in command” leads to the latter. Given correct leadership the peasant masses, states Mao, “have a potentially inexhaustible enthusiasm for socialism.”

“The ‘theory of productive forces’ hawked by Liu Shao-chi,” states Peking Review, “onesidedly describes the progress of society as the natural outcome of the development of the productive forces, chiefly the instruments of production. It completely denies that, Under certain conditions, the superstructure and the relations of production play the principle and decisive role in relation to the economic base and the productive forces; it also denies the proletariat’s consciously making revolution under the guidance of revolutionary theory, seizing political power and changing the relations of production that play the decisive role in greatly developing the productive forces and pushing social development ahead.”

China’s cultural revolution represented the massive class struggle between these two lines in every sphere of life. Its results have represented a tremendous advance for proletarian revolutionary forces, not only in China but throughout the world.

Side with revisionists

The Trotskyists, however, have tended to side with the modern Soviet revisionists in their evaluation of its results. They view it as an anti-intellectual, anti-cultural purge of one group of bureaucrats by another and if any “progressive tendencies” were involved at all, they would be found in the camp opposed to Mao Tsetung’s line.

For instance, SWP activist Les Evans, writing in the January 1973 International Socialist Review, interprets the cultural revolution in China’s educational system in the same fashion as the revisionists:

“The new standards,” he writes, commenting on university admissions policies, “are supposed to favor the children of workers and peasants, but clearly when the total enrollment is so sharply restricted this can have little application for the Chinese masses.”

Loyalty “downgrades”

The new standards downgrade educational performance and replace it with the criterion of unwavering loyalty to the regime ...
While the universities have been restricted to party members (a false claim – CD), the regime has stepped up its campaign to deport masses of city youth to remote areas of the countryside.

What the CPC has done, of course, is to apply Mao’s line of “serving the people” to its academic standards, rather than relying solely on the grading system in evaluating students. It also requires that students be selected directly from production in factories and communes, rather than entering the universities directly from the lower schools.

Its “deportation of youth” consists of the policy of tempering the masses of urban youth in continuing the revolution, going among the masses of rural workers and peasants – the basic social reality of China – to learn from them, assist the revolution in the countryside and remold their class outlook in the process.

Evans also attacks the principle of criticism and self-criticism, the leading role in the revolutionary committees of the CPC and the May 7 cadre schools, where cadres manifesting bureaucratic attitudes toward the masses are re-educated in the spirit of serving the people.

Al] this, according to the Trotskyists, amounts to so many violations of what they term “worker’s democracy” but in reality represents the practice of the CPC slogan, “Fight self, repudiate revisionism.”

To the SWP this is unbearable and only confirms their 1955 assertion that “the Mao bureaucracy succeeded in the very course of the third Chinese revolution in imposing a totalitarian state power” which the SWP claims must be overthrown “by iron necessity.”

In evaluating China’s role in international affairs, the Trotskyists switch over and put on their ultra-“leftist” hat. Here the 1955 SWP statement attacks Mao for working to “confine the revolution to China’s borders.”

What does this mean? One indication is the Trotskyist attack on China for “betraying” the Vietnamese revolution. The “evidence” is that China has not given the Vietnamese “adequate” aid. Since the Vietnamese state that China has given them whatever they needed and the Chinese have given whatever the Vietnamese have asked, what do the Trotskyists consider “adequate?”

In his pamphlet, China and the U.S., SWPer Dick Roberts gives a hint. The imperialists were stopped in Korea when China sent in its troops, he points out. “But the Chinese did not send troops to aid the Vietminh,” he adds.

Thus “adequate” aid boils down to China’s giving the People’s Liberation Army their marching orders. This is the theory of the “export” of revolution, which is opposed by both the Chinese and Vietnamese leaderships, as contrary to the basic principle that the revolution in each country must be based mainly on self-reliance, on the masses of people in each country themselves. Only then can international aid have its greatest effect.

“We have always believed,” a Chinese official stated in a 1972 interview with the Guardian, “that revolution cannot be exported ... Look at the countries of Eastern Europe which depended primarily on the Soviet Union to make revolution. They have very limited independence. Albania achieved victory by relying on its own efforts – and it is staunch and independent today. A revolution cannot succeed if the revolutionary forces do not rely on their own efforts and do not mobilize the great masses of people but place hope on aid from abroad.” (From Unite the Many, Defeat the Few, a Guardian pamphlet on China’s foreign policy.)

In addition to their opposition to the principle of self-reliance as “autarchic,” Trotskyism also attacks the Chinese call for an international united front of the world’s peoples against the “two superpowers” of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism as a class collaborationist betrayal of the national movements in the small and medium-sized countries in the colonial world.

Support for struggles

“In our objective,” the Chinese official told the Guardian, “national struggles must not be subordinated. China has friendly and diplomatic relations with a number of countries. This should not have any effect on the revolutionary forces in those countries ... China is not against peoples’ struggles in reactionary countries or in countries where a progressive government is in power. Countries want independence, nations want liberation, people want revolution. We support this.”

Regarding countries with which we have diplomatic relations, we support the government insofar as it is engaging in struggle against the two superpowers, not in its suppression of local struggles. We believe that in giving firm backing to governments against the domination of one or two superpowers we are helping the forces of national liberation and revolution.

United front

Just as in their views on the national united front in the colonial countries, the Trotskyist line on the world scale makes no distinctions in the enemy camp, between enemies in general and particular or principal enemies at various times and stages. As a result, the revolutionary forces are left more isolated from both strategic and tactical allies, however temporary and wavering they may be.

Finally, the Trotskyists blur the distinction between the revisionist countries and the socialist countries and on most questions side with the former. For instance, in 1963 the SWP denounced Albania as one of the most despicable Stalinized regimes in Europe and added that “the internal regime of communist Yugoslavia is much freer.”

When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:The national liberation struggle"

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:The national liberation struggle"

“The strength of Marxism,” writes Leon Trotsky in The Third International After Lenin, “lies in its ability to foretell.”

Trotsky made the remark in a 1928 commentary on the Chinese revolution. In the same work he also made a number of predictions which, if he is measured by his own standard, place him considerably outside and opposed to the camp of those who deserve to be called Marxists.

Everyone knows, for instance, of the magnificent and heroic role of the Chinese peasant masses as the main force of the revolution, as the backbone of the Red Army and, under the proletarian leadership of the Chinese Communist party, as a vital component part of socialist construction in China today.

What did Trotsky “foretell?”

“Numerically the Chinese peasantry constitutes an even more overwhelming mass than the Russian peasantry,” he writes in the same work. “But ... the Chinese peasantry is even less capable of playing a leading role than the Russian At present this is no longer a matter of theoretical forecast, but a fact verified completely in all its aspects.”

It is also a matter of fact that the Chinese revolution was characterized by a protracted period of dual power for nearly two decades. “Red political power,” sustained by the Red Army and organized by the CPC, was established in a number of liberated zones stretching over vast areas and incorporating scores of millions of people. The governments of the base areas rallied the masses and step-by-step carried out the democratic tasks of the revolution, including land reform and the struggle against the Japanese imperialists.

New Democracy

Mao Tsetung termed the character of the state power and economy in these areas as “new democracy,” or a proletarian-led “dictatorship of all revolutionary classes over the counterrevolutionaries and traitors.” Their existence was seen as the first stage of the Chinese revolution, which would be completed in the main when they were extended over the entire country. At that time the revolution would immediately and uninterruptedly pass over to its second stage of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Such a development was possible, Mao said, because of the moribund character of imperialism and the fact that the October revolution in 1917 had placed the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in the colonial countries on the side of the proletarian socialist world revolution. “It is no longer a revolution of the old type,” Mao stated in 1940, “led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat ...” What Mao had done, in effect, was to creatively apply and further develop Lenin’s theory of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” to the concrete conditions in China.

Again, what did Trotsky “foretell?”

The formula of the democratic dictatorship has hopelessly outlived its usefulness ... the third Chinese revolution, despite the great backwardness of China, or more correctly, because of this great backwardness as compared with Russia, will not have a “democratic” period, not even such a six-month period as the October Revolution had (November 1917 to July 1918) but it will be compelled from the very outset to effect the most decisive shake-up and abolition of bourgeois property in city and village.

Lashing out at “some metaphysics-mongers plus a few Trotskyites who, brandishing their pens like lances, are tilting in all directions and creating bedlam,” Mao said in a 1940 summary:

It is a utopian view rejected by true revolutionaries to say that the democratic revolution does not have a specific task and period of its own but can be merged and accomplished simultaneously with another task, i.e., the socialist task (which can only be carried out in another period), and this is what they call “accomplishing both at one stroke.”

History has proved Mao correct. But rather than face the bankruptcy of their mentor, the present-day Trotskyists are reduced to slandering the Chinese revolution and rewriting history in a manner worthy of the Kuomintang. The U.S. Socialist Workers party’s 1955 resolution on the Chinese revolution, for instance, sums up the new democratic period that mobilized the Chinese masses to resist Japan and to future victories against Chiang Kai-shek in the following manner:

After the defeat of the second Chinese revolution, they withdrew from the cities and established an armed peasant base. For a span of over 20 years, they used this armed power to rule over the backward and scattered peasant masses. In this manner the uncontrolled, cynical, self-willed bureaucracy consolidated. They applied to the revolution the methods of deceit and ultimatism, in order, at every stage, to safeguard their interests, their power, their privileges. Each success rendered them more contemptuous and fearful of the masses, more convinced they could cheat the class struggle with impunity.

Contrary to the SWP, however, this was the most daring and dramatic period in Chinese history. Hundreds of millions of Chinese, inspired by the leadership of Mao Tsetung and the CPC, “stood up” and turned over centuries of feudal domination. Tens of thousands flocked from the Kuomintang areas to the liberated zones, where the CPC had established, for the first time, an uncorrupted and democratic system of rule that, by all accounts, won the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. By all accounts, that is, except three: those of the Chiang Kai-shek reactionaries, the Japanese fascists and the Trotskyists.

Given its evaluation of the CPC, how does the SWP think the proletarian dictatorship ever managed to come to be in China? Apart from being counter-revolutionary, the reasoning is nothing short of bizarre. By their logic, it could only have been done spontaneously by the peasants. without the leading role of the proletariat, in opposition to the CPC every step of the way and, most decisively, because of Soviet prestige and the U.S. invasion of Korea!

SWP hits “Mao & Co.”

“Throughout the revolution,” states the SWP resolution, “Mao & Co. continued to impose arbitrary restrictions and limits upon its course. The agrarian reform was carried out ‘in stages’ and was completed only when the assault of American imperialism stimulated the opposition of the landlords during and after Korea. The Chinese Stalinists were able to ride into power because the Chinese working class had been demoralized by the continuous defeats it suffered during and after the second Chinese revolution, and. by the deliberate policy of the CPC, which subordinated the cities, above all, the proletariat, to the military struggle in the countryside and thereby blocked the emergence of the workers as an independent political force. The CPC thus appeared in the eyes of the masses as the only organization with political cadres and knowledge, backed, moreover, by military force.”

The SWP has another interesting facet. It characterizes the periods of 1925-27 and 1936-47 as years of “Maoist crimes.” What happened between 1928 and 1935? Why does this period get off the hook? One reason could be that this was the time when Mao still did not have hegemony within the CPC, when its central committee was dominated by the “three ‘left’ lines,” most disastrously by the ultra-leftism of the Li Li-san line.

Li Li-san’s attack

Li Li-san attacked Mao for “right opportunism” because he made distinctions between his enemies, because he didn’t oppose the entire bourgeoisie all at once, because he built rural base areas rather than launching frontal attacks on the cities all at once, and because Mao refused to expropriate the millions of “rich” peasants and petit bourgeoisie and “force” them into the revolution. Trotsky would have agreed. “The drive on the rich peasants,” he stated in 1923, “will be the first and not the second step of the Chinese October.” The SWP would have sympathized with Li Li-san, too. “The armies and regime of Chiang,” states their resolution, “could have been knocked down like rotten pieces of wood had the CPC at any time summoned the masses in the cities to rise.”

What was the cumulative result of the “three ‘left’ lines” in China? Disaster. All except one of more than a dozen base areas were lost. The Red Army, which Mao’s influence had carefully built up. was reduced to a fragment of its former size and power. The situation was only reversed by Mao’s assumption of leadership and his political direction of the unprecedented epic of the Long March.

How could Trotsky be so mistaken that his views led both him and his followers into the camp of counter-reVolution? The essence of the matter is found in Trotsky’s liquidation of the national question.

“What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our theses?” Lenin asked at the Comintern’s Second Congress. “The distinction between oppressed nations and oppressing nations. We emphasize this distinction – in contrast to the Second International and bourgeois democracy.

The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonies and backward countries,” he also noted, “but must not merge with it, and must unfailingly preserve the independence of the proletarian movement ...”

Trotsky’s view

Trotsky made the same distinction, all right, hut arrived at the opposite conclusion: “The Russian bourgeoisie was the bourgeoisie of an imperialist oppressor state; the Chinese bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie of an oppressed colonial country. The overthrow of feudal Tsarism was a progressive task in old Russia. The overthrow of the imperialist yoke is a progressive historical task in China. However. The conduct of the Chinese bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism, the proletariat and the peasantry, was not more revolutionary than the attitude of the Russian bourgeoisie towards Tsarism and the revolutionary classes in Russia, but, if anything, viler and more reactionary. That is the only way to pose the question.”

Didn’t the Chinese national bourgeoisie at times conduct armed struggle against the imperialists? Yes, Trotsky notes, but then countered this by stating that the Russian capitalists, too, fought foreign imperialists. Trotsky forgets one “minor” point. The Russian capitalists fought in an inter-imperialist war to subjugate backward nations; the Chinese fought a war of national liberation.

Rejects alliance

Despite the experience of the Chinese revolution, the present-day Trotskyists continue to uphold their reactionary views. “Any perspective of collaborating with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie or certain of its so-called progressive sectors must be rejected,” states the resolutions of the 1968 World Congress of the so-called Fourth International. “Parallel to this, all equivocal conceptions or formulas on the nature of the revolution such as ‘national democracy,’ ‘people’s democracy,’ ‘anti-imperialist revolution,’ or ‘bloc of four classes,’ which have been irretrievably refuted ... must be rejected.”

This is the real reason why the SWP refused to support the political program of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam and stood with Washington in their refusal to support the demand, “Sign the Treaty Now!”

As succinctly stated in Forward Along the Path Charted By Karl Marx, written by the Vietnamese revolutionary Truong Chinh, the Vietnamese revolution is precisely a two-stage revolution, passing through a “new-type bourgeois-democratic revolution,” comprising at that stage an alliance of “four revolutionary forces,” including the “national bourgeoisie.” It has conducted the “national democratic” revolution in the liberated zones, conducted a people’s war based on the principle of self- reliance and on its completion, will uninterruptedly pass over to the socialist revolution.

Hiding behind “leftism”

The SWP opposes all this as so much “counterrevolution,” but has tried to hide its real views on Vietnam from the masses of anti-imperialist activists behind “left” phrases. For the SWP to come out in the open with its views on the line summed up by Truong Thinh would only lead to a greater self-exposure of~the renegade character of the Trotskyist line.

“The Trotskyite theory of permanent revolution,” states the Albanian commentator Agim Popa, “is also the theory of the negation of the national movement in the development of the revolutionary, movement, the theory of the overestimation of the external factor and the negation of the internal factor as decisive in the revolution and, in the last analysis, a theory of the ‘export’ of revolution.” These concepts also apply to the Trotskyist line on China’s view of the united front and the cultural revolution.

When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973-Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:The two-stage revolution"

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:The two-stage revolution"

Trotsky’s last stand in his battle against the Comintern, while he was still within its ranks, was on the question of the Chinese revolution.

Today his contemporary followers stand in opposition to China’s path of socialist developmnent and its contribution to the strategy of world revolution.

What is the connection between the two?

The heart of the Trotskyist position on the Chinese revolution lies in its failure to grasp the essence of the revolution’s first stage as a bourgeois-democratic revolution combining the agrarian struggle against feudalism with the national liberation struggle against foreign imperialism.

China in the 1920s was a vast semi-colonial and semi-feudal country. Its population was overwhelmingly comprised of rural peasants under the yoke of a large feudal landholding class. The nation was disunited, torn apart by warlord rivalries throughout the country, and through competing imperialist powers dominating and looting its various coastal cities.

The Chinese industrial proletariat was small hut militant, concentrated in a few urban centers. The bourgeoisie was weak and divided. Its most powerful sector was a class of compradors or “bureaucrat capitalists” integrated with colonial interests and linked to feudal forces. In between there was a more numerous national or “middle” bourgeoisie, itself hemmed in by the feudal warlords and foreign capital, but exploiters of the workers and peasants nonetheless. At the other end was also a large urban petty bourgeoisie, comprised of many diverse strata.

Friends and enemies

This is a brief summary of a more detailed picture of China drawn by Mao Tsetung in his 1926 essay, Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society. Mao wrote the work in order to answer the question he posed as of “the first importance for the revolution: Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” He answered in the following way:

Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism-the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat (the peasant masses) and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right wing may become our enemy and their left wing may become our friend – but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.

Trotsky completely opposed this position, which was essentially the same as that of the Comintern’s call during the 1920s for a revolutionary “bloc of four classes” in China. The “bloc” was seen as a national united front of the workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie. The spearhead of the struggle was to be aimed at foreign imperialism. Its leading force was to be the proletariat and its motive force was to be the agrarian revolution of the peasant masses against the feudal landlords.

Politically, the bloc took the form of an alliance between the Communist party and the Kuomintang (KMT), which was at that time waging a massive armed struggle against feudal and imperialist forces. The CP joined its ranks, following the guidance of the 1923 Third Congress of the Comintern, led by Lenin, to “push the Kuomintang leftward.” While members of the KMT and its armies, however, the CP was to maintain its political and organizational independence in order to bring into effect the leading role of the working class within the united front. While the KMT was comprised of all classes, it represented the interests of the national bourgeoisie. initially under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen and later of Chiang Kai-shek.

Trotsky considered the “bloc of four classes” counter-revolutionary and a manifestation of “Menshevism” imposed in China by Stalin. In his view the struggle had to be spearheaded against the bourgeoisie as a whole. At the same time, he played down or dismissed entirely the feudal and imperialist targets of the revolution.

“No landlords”

“There is almost no estate of landlords in China,” Trotsky wrote in a ludicrous passage in his 1929 work, The Permanent Revolution. “The landowners are much more intimately bound up with the capitalists than in Tsarist Russia, and the specific weight of the agrarian question is therefore much lighter than in Tsarist Russia.”

Stalin, in a reply to Trotsky at a 1927 meeting of the Comintern, noted the vast and elemental upsurge of the peasants against the feudal landlords and asked:

Where does the agrarian revolution in China, with its demand for the confiscation of the landlords’ land, come from? ... Surely, the agrarian revolution cannot have dropped from the skies?

Trotsky practically liquidated the agrarian content of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and limited its scope mainly to the interests of the national bourgeoisie. “The Chinese revolution,” he states in The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin, “has a national bourgeois character principally because the development of the productive forces of Chinese capitalism collideE with its governmental customs dependence upon the countries of imperialism.”

“The revolution in China,” Stalin answered Trotsky ironically, “is primarily, so to speak, an anti-customs revolution ...”

“Permit me to observe,” he continued, “that this is the viewpoint of a state counselor of His Highness’ Chang Tso-lin (China’s self- proclaimed emperor.)”

If Trotsky’s viewpoint is correct, then it must be admitted that Chang Tso-lin and Chiang Kaishek are right in not desiring either an agrarian or a workers’ revolution and in striving only for the abolition of the unequal treaties and the establishment of customs autonomy for China.

Rightist in essence

Thus through its “left” form of opposition to the national united front during the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist stage of the revolution, Trotsky’s viewpoint is revealed to be rightist in its essence.

How were these questions reflected in the actual practice of the Chinese revolution? The Trotskyists have claimed that Chiang Kai-shek’s betrayal of the united front and massacre of Communists in 1927 conclusively demonstrated the “counter-revolutionary” character of the Comintern line at the time as well as Mao’s line as it is still being developed and applied today.

The Chinese Communist party believes that its line was correct during “the early and middle stages of the 1924-27 period and was summed up by Mao in his Analysis of Classes ... Toward the end, however, as Chiang Kai-shek shifted increasingly to the right and the national bourgeoisie, in the main, deserted the revolution, the party’s line came to be dominated by the right opportunist policies of Chen Tu-hsiu, the CPC’s general secretary.

In the face of the KMT’s efforts to subordinate the CPC, spurred on by the growing fear of the worker and peasant upsurge within the KMT leadership, Chen Tu-hsiu pursued a policy of “all alliance and no struggle” within the united front, thus liquidating the proletariat’s leading role. (he also feared the peasant risings, believing they had “gone too far” and that they were a “conservative” force “unlikely to join the revolution.” In practice this meant capitulation to the betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek.

“Left” opposition to peasants

At the same time a second deviation arose in the CPC, the “left” opportunist line of Chang Kuo-tao, aimed at “all struggle and no alliance.” While Chen Tu-hsiu only curried favor with the KMT and discounted the peasants. Chang Kuotao urged reliance “only on the labor movement” and likewise discounted the peasants.

Opposed to what was identical in both the right and “left” opportunist lines was Mao Tsetung, who organized and supported the agrarian revolts, stating that “without the poor peasants there would be no revolution.” Mao’s policy on the united front throughout the Chinese revolution was one of both “unite with and struggle against,” always maintaining the independence of the CPC, its leading role among the masses and its armed power.

Mao’s position did not win hegemony at the time. “In 1927 Chen Tu-hsiu’s capitulationism,” Mao wrote later in 1937, “led to the failure of the revolution. No member of our party should ever forget this historical lesson written in blood.”

Which tendency was most represented by the general line of the Comintern? “I know that there are Kuomintangists and even Chinese Communists,” Stalin stated in 1926, “who do not consider it possible to unleash revolution in the countryside, since they fear that if the peasantry were drawn into the revolution it would disrupt the united anti-imperialist front. That is a profound error, comrades. The more quickly and thoroughly the Chinese peasantry is drawn into the revolution, the stronger and more powerful the anti-imperialist front in China will be.”

For as much as a year prior to Chiang Kaishek’s 1927 coup, the Comintern had urged and warned the Chinese CP to work for the “resignation or expulsion of Rights from the Kuomintang.” Six weeks prior to the coup, it stated, “It is necessary to adopt the course of arming the workers and peasants and converting the peasant committees in the localities into actual organs of governmental authority equipped with armed self-defense ... The Communist party must not come forward as a brake on the mass movement; the Communist i arty should not cover up the treacherous and reactionary policy of the Kuomintang Rights, and should mobilize the masses around the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party on the basis of exposing the Rights.”

In the main, the Comintern advocated a policy put into practice independently by Mao and ignored or opposed by both Chen Tu-hsiu and Chang Kuo-tao. There were also a number of mistakes, some of which were corrected and others which had more serious consequences. Most significant was the role of Borodin, a key Comintern advisor in China at the time who vacillated on carrying out the Comintern line and took a number of positions close to Chen Tu-hsiu.

If Trotsky’s line can be said to have had anything in common with Chinese reality, however, it was closest to the “left” opportunism of Chang Kuo-tao. Trotsky later saw in Chiang Kai-shek’s coup the “completion” of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the onset of new period of “stabilization” in China. What actually transpired was a prolonged period of renewed crisis, civil war and “dual power” in the form of liberated bases in the countryside. Trotsky’s line here, which called for a “constituent assembly” and legal struggle for democratic rights, was thoroughly rightist and devoid of any connection with the actual course of class struggle.

When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -Carl Davidson's Left in Form, Right in Essence-Socialism in one country

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*********
Carl Davidson's Left in Form, Right in Essence-Socialism in one country

It is an historical fact that Trotsky stood together with Lenin and the, Bolshevik party during the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia.

But it is also true that in February 1917 Lenin termed Trotsky a “swine” and “scoundrel” and in March of 1918 declared his views on the most crucial issue to the survival of the revolution – the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty – to be “absolutely wrong.”

Why were Trotsky and the Leninists able to find a temporary unity during the October period? Why did that unity succumb to a series of “tactical differences” which eventually developed into two opposing lines on the question of building “socialism in one country?”

The answer lies in the internal contradiction in Trotsky’s views and his failure to take into account the changing national and international objective conditions determining the course of the revolutionary struggle.

On one hand, Trotsky stood in opposition to the bourgeoisie and called for the immediate transition to the proletarian dictatorship. In spite of the fact that this was an ultra-leftist position prior to the first stage of the revolution in February, Trotsky’s opposition to the Provisional Government and his call for the assumption of all power to the Soviets during the transition to the second stage placed him objectively in the same position as the Bolsheviks.

On the other hand, Trotsky stood in opposition to the Bolsheviks in claiming that the proletariat was bound to come into “hostile collision” with the broad masses of peasants during socialist construction and that “without direct state support from the European proletariat, the working class of Russia cannot maintain itself in power and transform its temporary rule into a durable socialist dictatorship. This we cannot doubt for an instant.”

These differences between Trotsky and the Leninists did not immediately become paramount for two reasons, both related to objective conditions. First, internally, Trotsky’s views on the peasantry did not immediately come to the foreground because the Soviet power’s first tasks in the countryside were not socialist construction but the completion of the democratic revolution against the big landlords.

With this much Trotsky agreed. But he did not believe it could go much further without socialism in power in Western Europe. After victory in the Civil War and the successful conclusion of the temporary retreat during the period of the New Economic Program (NEP), the objective conditions changed. Trotsky’s underlying views on the peasant masses did not change, however, which led him to vacillate on agrarian policy and finally to term the actual rural collectivization an “economic adventure.”

Second, on external questions concerning the “direct state support” of the European workers, Trotsky’s disagreements were seen as “tactical” because the immediate postwar period was viewed as one of acute crisis for the capitalists and direct revolutionary offensive by the revolutionary proletariat. Despite the emergence of Soviets in Hungary and Germany, however, the offensive failed to bring about another proletarian state power. After its peak in 1921, the offensive slacked off and by 1923 had turned into a proletarian defensive and a new period of temporary stabilization and offensive by capital.

Why were the proletarian forces unable to go further and take power in Europe? “It could have taken place,” said Lenin, “but for the fact that the split within the proletariat of Western Europe was deeper, and the treachery of the former socialist leaders greater, than had been imagined.” Trotsky, on the other hand, laid the main blame not on the social-democratic opportunists, but on “the weaknesses, unpreparedness and irresolution of the communist parties and the vicious errors of their leadership ...”

But what did this turn of events mean for the new Soviet power?

Although Lenin had proclaimed in March 1918 “that without a revolution in Germany, we shall perish,” he also made the point even earlier, in 1915, that “uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country taken separately.”

“It has turned out,” said Lenin later, after the Civil War, “that while our forecasts did not materialize simply, rapidly and directly, they were fulfilled insofar as we achieved the main thing. The possibility has been maintained of the existence of proletarian rule and the Soviet Republic even in the event of the world socialist revolution being delayed.”

“But is the existence of a socialist republic in a capitalist environment at all conceivable?” Lenin asked again. “From the political and military aspects it seemed inconceivable. That it is possible, both politically and militarily, has now been proved. It is a fact.”

By ignoring the changed objective conditions, Trotsky arrived at the opposite conclusion: “The organic interdependence of the several countries, developing toward an international division of labor, excludes the possibility of building socialism in one country. This means that the Marxist doctrine, which posits that the socialist revolution can begin only on a national basis, while the building of socialism in one country is impossible, has been rendered doubly and trebly true, all the more so now, in the modern epoch ...”

Final victory is worldwide

Marxist-Leninists, of course, have never held that the final victory of socialism – the classless society – is possible in one country. “According to the Leninist viewpoint,” states Mao Tsetung, “the final victory of a socialist country not only requires the efforts of the proletariat and the broad masses of the people at home, but also involves the victory of the world revolution and the abolition of the system of exploitation of man by man over the whole globe, upon which all mankind will be emancipated.”

The Trotskyists consider this distinction between the final aims and the present tasks of socialist construction to be so much sand thrown in the face of the masses. “The lowest stage of communism,” said Trotsky, referring to Marx’s term describing the initial period of socialist construction, “begins at that level to which the most advanced capitalism has drawn near.”

Most socialist construction that has taken place in the world has been in relatively backward countries. But to call it “socialism,” in Trotsky s view, would only “hopelessly discredit the idea of socialist society in the eyes of the toiling masses.” (If this position were not patently ridiculous, one would be led to the conclusion that the deepest and broadest hatred of socialism in the world today would be permeated among the masses of the Chinese people.)

Idealism versus materialism

How can Trotsky arrive at such a conclusion? By adopting an idealist rather than a materialist world outlook: “The Soviet proletariat has achieved grandiose successes,” writes Trotsky in 1928, “if we take into consideration the conditions under which they have been attained and the low cultural level inherited from the past. But these achievements constitute an extremely small magnitude on the scales of the socialist ideal.”

What is Trotsky’s “socialist ideal?” Writing in 1936, after the successful conclusion of the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture, Trotsky still says “there is not yet, in this fundamental sense, a hint of socialism in the Soviet Union.” Why? Because “socialism, if it is worthy of the name, means human relations without greed, friendship without envy and intrigue, love without base calculation.”

Proletarian revolutionaries, of course, must never forget the final aims of their movement and always fight to implement them in the fullest way possible in the present day struggle. But Trotsky’s use of these standards to measure the advances of socialism under conditions of class domination and class struggle reduces the role of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard to that of a Sunday-school parson prattling moralistic aphorisms.

This utopianism, however, is only the veneer on the Trotskyist attack on socialist construction “in one country.” Its essence is what has led many revolutionaries to attack Trotskyists for “supporting socialism everywhere in the world except where it exists,” that is, anti-communism.

“The Soviet government,” writes Trotsky in 1936, “had become totalitarian in character several years before this word arrived from Germany”. What are the roots of fascism? “Japanese militarism” and the “triumph of Hitler,” says Trotsky, “are alike the fruits of the policy of the Communist International.” To make sure the point gets across, he adds, “Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity.”

That Trotsky’s position would lead him into this camp of the social-democratic renegades became clear to the leadership of the Bolshevik party by 1924. At that time Trotsky’s initial unity with the Leninists had been transformed into its opposite. There were now two lines-the proletarian and the urban petty bourgeois-on almost every question. The ensuing struggle between them and their practical ramifications manifested itself in a debate conducted within the party over three years and led finally to the expulsion of Trotsky and his “left” opposition in 1927.

What were the strategic questions involved? In a 1925 speech Stalin focused the question again on the role of the peasantry and asked why it assumed exceptional importance in the Soviet Union at that time:

The ... reason why the peasant question has assumed exceptional importance for us at the present moment is that, of the allies of the Soviet power, of all the proletariat’s principal allies – of whom there are four, in my opinion – the peasantry is the only ally that can be of direct assistance to our revolution at this very moment.

The four allies were: the proletariat in the developed countries, the oppressed people in the underdeveloped countries, the conflicts and contradictions between the capitalist countries and, lastly, the peasantry.

The proletariat in the West, Stalin believed, was the principal ally. But due to its defensive position in the temporary stabilization it was “unable to render us direct and decisive assistance at the present moment.” The oppressed peoples, he said, were “coming directly to our help, but it is evident that they will not arrive quickly.” The contradictions among the capitalists had several aspects and could not be relied upon.

“There remains the fourth ally-the peasantry,” he said. “It is by our side, we are living together, together we are building the new life ... The peasantry is not as reliable an ally as the proletariat in the developed countries. But, for all that, it is an ally, and of all our existing allies it is the only one that can render us, and is rendering us, direct assistance at this very moment, receiving our assistance in exchange.”

Two lines on allies

Stalin then pointed to the two lines within the party: “Has this question – the question of the peasantry – any connection with the question of Trotskyism, which you have discussed here? Undoubtedly it has.”

... Can the bond, the alliance between the workers and peasants, be established if the theory which involves disbelief in that alliance. i.e., the theory of Trotskyism, is not smashed? No, it cannot. The conclusion is obvious: whoever wants to emerge from NEP as the victor must bury Trotskyism as an ideological trend.

Thus Trotsky’s position on the impossibility of “socialism in one country” led him and his followers into a blind alley. The path there was paved by a dogmatic and subjective world view that denied the law of uneven development in the imperialist epoch. Its fruit had two aspects: an infantile “leftism” that led to a line of “skipping stages” and the “export” of revolution and a right opportunist “theory of productive forces” similar to those held in the 1960s by Khrushchev and Liu Shao-chi. This became most apparent in the Trotskyist view of the Chinese revolution and the national liberation movements in general.

From The Archives Of The International Communist League- When Polemic Ruled The Day-The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited- A Reply To The "Guardian", Part One-THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today  what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited

These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]

Reply to the Guardian

THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED

THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION

In their tireless efforts to betray the struggles of the workers and peasants, the Stalinists must continue to maintain a pretense of revolutionism. Yet their doctrines stand counterposed to the line of Marxism. This presents them with a dilemma, which they can only resolve by resorting to systematic lies about the Trotskyists. This goes from distortions of the political positions of Trotsky (as well as Marx and Lenin), to denying Trotsky's leading role as the military organizer of the October Revolution and accusing him of carrying out espionage for the Mikado! While many of the specific charges leveled against Zinoviev, Bukharin and other leading Bolsheviks accused of Trotskyism during the Moscow Trials were admitted by Khrushchev in 1956 to be total fabrications, the method remains. Today we are witnessing a widespread revival of the "Stalin School of Falsification" especially on the part of the various Maoist groups. Just as Stalin in his day needed a cover to justify his crimes against the working class, so today must the Maoists resort to vicious slander in order to cover for their counterrevolutionary policies in Bangladesh, Indonesia and elsewhere. This series is intended as a reply to these lies and an introduction to some of the basic concepts of Trotskyism, as they have developed in the struggle against Stalinist reformism during the past fifty years.

The struggle between the reformist line of Stalinism and the revolutionary policies of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky is no academic matter of interest only to historians. The counterrevolutionary policies of the "Great Organizer of Defeats" (Stalin) led not only to the assassination of Trotsky by an agent of Stalin's GPU and the murder of tens of thousands of Russian Left Oppositionists in the Siberian concentration camps, but also to the strangulation of the Chinese (1927), German (1933), French (1936), Spanish (1937), Indonesian (1965) and French (1968) revolutions as well as the sellout "peace agreements" of the Vietnamese Stalinists in 1946 and 1954. The struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism is literally a matter of life and death for the revolutionary movement and must be given the closest attention by militants who are seeking the road to Marxism.

What is the Permanent Revolution?

At the heart of this conflict is the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. This theory, first advanced at the time of the 1905 Russian revolution, was summarized by Trotsky in his article "Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution," written in 1939:

"...the complete victory of the democratic revolution in Russia is conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only the democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West could protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism."

It is this theory which Davidson and the Stalinists reject when they say that "Trotsky's views on the course of the Russian revolution, like those of the Mensheviks, were refuted by history" (Guardian, 4 April 1973). In fact, only because the uprising never reached the seizure of power was Trotsky's theory not confirmed in practice in 1905. The course of the Russian Revolution of 1917 fully verified this theory. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat, embodied in soviet power, could solve the questions of land and peace, as well as liberating oppressed nations from czarist rule. Moreover, a careful analysis of Lenin's views in 1905 and 1917 shows that he came over to agreement with all the essential aspects of Trotsky's formulation, and abandoned his own earlier slogan of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry."

The Stalinist claim that Lenin still stood for a "democratic" revolution in 1917 and called for "socialism in one country" is pure fabrication. Likewise, their accusation that Trotsky's slogan was "Down with the Czar, For a Workers Government," supposedly ignoring the peasantry, was repeatedly denied by Trotsky. The slogan of permanent revolution was, rather, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasantry.

In Trotsky's view, because of the uneven and combined development of the world economy, the bourgeoisie of the backward countries is tightly bound to the feudal and imperialist interests, thereby preventing it from carrying out the fundamental tasks of the bourgeois revolution--democracy, agrarian revolution and national emancipation. In the presence of an aroused peasantry and a combative working class, each of these goals would directly threaten the political and economic dominance of the capitalist class. The tasks of the bourgeois revolution can be solved only by the alliance of the peasantry and the proletariat.

Marxism holds that there can only be one dominant class in the state. Since, as the Communist Manifesto states, the proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary class, this alliance must take the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasantry. In carrying out the democratic tasks of the revolution, the proletarian state must inevitably make "despotic inroads into the rights of bourgeois property" (e.g., expropriation of landlords), and thus the revolution directly passes over to socialist tasks, without pausing at any arbitrary "stages" or, as Lenin put it, without a "Chinese wall" being erected between the bourgeois and proletarian phases. Thus the revolution becomes permanent, eventually leading to the complete abolition of classes (socialism).

But socialism is the product of the liberation of the productive forces at the highest level of capitalist development: classes can be abolished only by eliminating want, that is, scarcity. Thus, while the dictatorship of the proletariat may be established in an isolated and backward country, socialism must be the joint achievement of at least several advanced countries. For these complementary reasons the revolution must extend and deepen itself--or else perish. Thus the opposition between Trotsky's "permanent revolution" and Stalin's "socialism in one country" is in reality the opposition between socialism on a world scale and the most brutal regime of bourgeois-feudal reaction (barbarism); there is no middle road.

While the theory of permanent revolution was the achievement of Leon Trotsky, the concept was first introduced by Karl Marx in 1850. Davidson, in his effort to cloak Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country" with the mantle of Marxism, maintains that Marx's use of the phrase "permanent revolution" was simply a general observation about class struggle continuing until socialism:

"Thus the revolution is 'permanent' in two ways. First in looking toward the future, its course is one of uninterrupted class struggle until classes themselves are abolished. Second, looking back historically once classes are abolished, the revolution is permanent in the sense that there is no longer class struggle and the seizure of power and domination of one class by another."
--Guardian, 4 April 1973

At this level of abstraction, it is no wonder that Davidson concludes that differences arise only "in the particularity of the question." But let us take a look first at what Marx actually said:

"While the democratic petty-bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and with the achievement, at most, of the above demands, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, until the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of existing society but the foundation of a new one."

--Karl Marx, "Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League," 1850

This is in fact a powerful polemic, 75 years in advance, against Stalin's sophistry about "socialism in one country." Trotsky's theory is a further development of these fundamental propositions in the epoch of imperialism, when capitalism has penetrated throughout the backward regions and the objective prerequisites for socialism on a world scale already exist (thereby endangering even the young bourgeoisies of the ex-colonial countries).

Revolution by Stages: Germany 1848

According to the Stalinists the chief error of Trotskyism is the failure to recognize the necessity of "stages" of the revolution, in particular the democratic stage as opposed to the socialist stage. One of Davidson's more illustrious predecessors wrote (a few years before Stalin murdered him as a "Trotskyite"!):

"Comrade Trotsky put the dictatorship of the working class at the beginning of the process, but did not see the steps and transitions that led to this dictatorship; he ignored the concrete relation of forces...he did not see the stages of the revolution...."
--N. Bukharin, "On the Theory of Permanent Revolution," 1925

Let us consider this "theory" of two-stage revolution, the "particularity" of the permanent revolution. Did Marx, perhaps, have such a theory? Marx, of course, rigorously distinguished the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions as to their social content, since they represent different epochs of historical development. But even in the mid-19th century it was becoming clear that the bourgeoisie was too weak and the proletariat too powerful for there to exist a "Chinese wall" between the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. Distinct in social content, they would be closely linked historically. The German revolution of 1848 made this link particularly clear. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote:

"Communists pay special attention to Germany. There are two reasons for this. First of all, Germany is upon the eve of a bourgeois revolution. Secondly, this revolution will take place under comparatively advanced conditions as far as the general civilization of Europe is concerned, and when the German proletariat is much more highly developed than was the English proletariat in the seventeenth century or the French proletariat in the eighteenth. Consequently, in nineteenth-century Germany, the bourgeois revolution can only be the immediate precursor of a proletarian revolution."

Marx did not believe that the working class could directly achieve victory in 1848, but that it would be forced to support the liberal bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie insofar as they fought against feudal-absolutist reaction. But even in this pre-imperialist period, when the proletariat was quite weak and politically dominated by the artisan and democratic petty-bourgeois interests, he counseled the workers to "simultaneously erect their own revolutionary workers' government hard by the new official government" in order to oppose their previous ally, as well as bring about "the arming of the whole proletariat."

Marx's prediction that proletarian revolution would closely follow the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 was not borne out. But neither were there successful bourgeois revolutions, precisely because the fear that proletarian revolution would break out if the least step were taken to rouse the masses drove the liberals into the arms of Prussian and Austrian reaction. Tied to the feudalists by a common dread of social revolution, the liberals strove not to overthrow the monarchy (as did the French bourgeoisie in 1789), but to share power with the feudalists. The German bourgeoisie could not rise above the level of a "shopocracy," as Engels put it.

Revolution by Stages: Russia 1905

The Russian revolution of 1905 again raised the question of permanent revolution, but in much sharper form. The Russian bourgeoisie was far weaker even than the German. For centuries the main characteristic of Russian development was its primitiveness and slowness, resulting from Russia's unfavorable geographic location and sparse population. Capitalist development in the northern empire was primarily imported from the West by the autocratic state, simply grafted on to the existing feudal economy. Thus while a modern industrial proletariat was forming in the main cities, concentrated in large factories which utilized the most advanced techniques, the town handicrafts and early forms of manufacture which had formed the economic base for the bourgeoisie in the West, never had time to develop. With large industry primarily in the hands of European capital and state banks, the Russian capitalist class remained small in number, isolated, half-foreign and without historical traditions. Moreover, it remained tied by a thousand strands to the feudalist-absolutist state and the landed aristocracy. A bourgeois-led revolution which could solve the tasks of democracy, agrarian revolution and national emancipation, was utterly out of the question. And yet the tasks of the bourgeois revolution remained.

Faced with this reality the two wings of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party took sharply opposed positions. The Mensheviks with scholastic formalism and utter spinelessness deduced from the democratic character of the initial tasks of the revolution the "strategy" of an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie. In a speech at the "Unification Congress" of the RSDLP (1906), Axelrod, a leading Menshevik, remarked:

"The social relations of Russia have ripened only for a bourgeois revolution....While this general political lawlessness persists, we must not even so much as mention the direct fight of the proletariat against other classes for political power....It is fighting for the conditions of bourgeois development. Objective historical conditions doom our proletariat to an inevitable collaboration with the bourgeoisie against our common enemy."

This conclusion was derived by simply mechanically pasting the classical scheme of European (and more particularly French) development onto Russian conditions, with the implications that proletarian revolution could only come after many decades of capitalist development. The kernel of the Menshevik position was captured by Plekhanov's remark that "we must prize the support of the non-proletarian parties and not drive them away from us by tactless behavior." To this Lenin responded: "...the liberals among the landed gentry will forgive you millions of 'tactless' acts, but they will never forgive incitements to take away their land."

As against Plekhanov's coalition with the bourgeoisie, Lenin called for a bloc with the peasantry to carry out the agrarian revolution. This was codified in his formula of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry":

"We must be perfectly certain in our minds as to what real social forces are opposed to 'tsarism....The big bourgeoisie, the landlords, the factory owners, and 'society,' which follows the Osvobozhdeniye [the liberals'] lead, cannot be such a force....We know that owing to their class position they are incapable of waging a decisive struggle against tsarism; they are too heavily fettered by private property, by capital and land to enter into a decisive struggle. They stand in too great need of tsarism, with its bureaucratic, police, and military forces for use against the proletariat and the peasantry, to want it to be destroyed. No, the only force capable of gaining 'a decisive victory over tsarism' means the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." [emphasis in original]

--V.I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution," 1905

This policy was irreconcilably opposed to the insipid liberalism of the Mensheviks, instead fanning the flames of peasant revolt and leading the proletariat in a "tactless" assault on the czarist autocracy. But at the same time he insisted on the characterization of the revolution as bourgeois, with power to be placed in the hands of the peasantry and the future opened to a flowering of capitalist development:

"Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does that mean? It means that the democratic reforms in the political system, and the social and economic reforms that have become a necessity for Russia, do not in themselves imply the undermining of bourgeois rule, on the contrary, they will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European and not Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class."
--Ibid.

Trotsky's view, quoted at the beginning of this article, was distinct from those of the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, though immeasurably closer to the latter. As he later wrote:

"The theory of the permanent revolution, which originated in 1905...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."
--"Permanent Revolution," 1929

According to Davidson, Lenin "insisted that the revolution would develop in stages" while Trotsky supposedly completely ignored the bourgeois-democratic stage. This is simply a smokescreen. Trotsky never denied the bourgeois character of the initial phases of the revolution in the sense of its immediate historical tasks, but only in the sense of its driving forces and perspectives:

"Already in 1905, the Petersburg workers called their soviet a proletarian government. This designation passed into the everyday language of that time and was completely embodied in the program of the struggle of the working class for power. At the same time, we set up against Tsarism an elaborated program of political democracy (universal suffrage, republic, militia, etc.). We could act in no other way. Political democracy is a necessary stage in the development of the working masses--with the highly important reservation that in one case this stage lasts for decades, while in another, the revolutionary situation permits the masses to emancipate themselves from the prejudices of political democracy even before its institutions have been converted into reality." [emphasis in original]
--L. D. Trotsky, "Introduction" to The Year 1905, 1922

Davidson again tries to cloud the issues by claiming that Trotsky was "hostile to the peasantry" while "Lenin's view is directly_ opposite." This is pure fabrication. It is true that Trotsky dismissed out of hand the idea that the peasantry as a whole could be a "socialist ally" of the working class:

"From the very first moment after its taking power, the proletariat will have to find support in the antagonisms between the village poor and the village rich, between the agricultural proletariat and the agricultural bourgeoisie."
--L. D. Trotsky, "Results and Prospects," 1905

But in this respect, Lenin's view was identical:

"The struggle against the bureaucrat and the landlord can and must be waged together with all the peasants, even the well-to-do and the middle peasants. On the other hand, it is only together with the rural proletariat that the struggle against the bourgeoisie, and therefore against the well-to-do peasants too, can be properly waged."
--V.I. Lenin, "Petty-Bourgeois and Proletarian Socialism," 1905

The dispute between Lenin and Trotsky was not over whether or not the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution could be skipped or whether an alliance between the workers and peasants was necessary, but concerned the political mechanics of the collaboration of the proletariat and peasantry, the degree of independence of the latter. Trotsky pointed out (as had been shown by all past revolutionary experience, as well as the writings of Marx and Engels) that because of its intermediate position and heterogeneity of its social composition, the peasantry as a class was incapable of taking an independent role or forming its own independent party. It was compelled to follow the lead of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.

Revolution in Stages: 1917

It is no accident that Davidson's articles hardly mention the 1917 October Revolution, going instead from the disputes in 1905 over the role of the peasantry straight to the question of "socialism in one country." Indeed, had Davidson reproduced Lenin's writings from this period he would have had to print statements radically different from Lenin's view of the 1905-1907 period. Before Lenin's arrival from Europe on 4 April the majority of the Bolshevik party called for "critical support" to the bourgeois Provisional Government of Prince Lvov, which had taken power after the February revolution overthrew the czar. Stalin was the chief spokesman for this viewpoint at the March 1917 Bolshevik Party Conference. In his report on the attitude to the Provisional Government, he said:

"...the Provisional Government has in fact taken the role of fortifier of the conquests of the revolutionary people....It is not to our advantage at present to force events, hastening the process of repelling the bourgeois layers, who will in the future inevitably withdraw from us. It is necessary for us to gain time by putting a brake on the splitting away of the middle-bourgeois layers....Insofar as the Provisional Government fortifies the steps of the revolution, to that extent we must support it; but insofar as it is counterrevolutionary, support to the Provisional Government is not permissible."
--"Draft Protocol of the March 1917 All-Russian Conference of Party Workers"

While the bulk of the party leadership called for "completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution," Lenin insisted that the only revolutionary policy was calling for the dictatorship of the proletariat. In taking this position he came over to Trotsky's program of permanent revolution, and was accused of Trotskyism by the right wing. This required an ideological rearming of the party and at one point Lenin threatened to resign from the Central Committee in order to take the struggle to the ranks when his "April Theses" were initially voted down by the leadership. The key passage in these theses stated:

"The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution--which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants."
--V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution," 1917

In direct opposition to Stalin's position of less than a week earlier, Lenin demanded "No Support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear..." (Ibid.). The opposition to Lenin was led by Y. Kamenev who claimed that "the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed....As for Comrade Lenin's general scheme, it appears to us unacceptable, inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution." In his "Letters on Tactics" Lenin replied to this charge:

"After the revolution [of February-March 1917], the power is in the hands of a different class, a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie....

"To this extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed.

"But at this point we hear a clamor of protest from people who readily call themselves 'old Bolsheviks.' Didn't we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry'?...My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently....

"'The Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies'--there you have the 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' already accomplished in reality.

"This formula is already antiquated....

"A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defensist, internationalist, 'Communist' elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements....

"The person who now only speaks of a 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of 'Bolshevik' pre-revolutionary antiques....

"Comrade Kamenev...has repeated the bourgeois prejudice about the Paris Commune having wanted to introduce socialism 'immediately.' This is not so. The Commune, unfortunately, was too slow in introducing socialism. The real essence of the Commune is...in the creation of a state of a special type. Such a state has already arisen in Russia, it is the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies!"
--V.I. Lenin, "Letters on Tactics," April 1917

And the Paris Commune, Brother Davidson, was the dictatorship of the proletariat. In an article for Pravda at about this time, Lenin formulated the question in a manner identical to that of Trotsky:

"We are for a strong revolutionary government....The question is--what class is making this revolution? A revolution against whom?

"Against tsarism? In that sense most of Russia's landowners and capitalists today are revolutionaries....

"Against the landowners? In this sense most of the peasants, even most of the well-to-do peasants, that is, probably nine-tenths of the population in Russia, are revolutionaries. Very likely, some of the capitalists, too are prepared to become revolutionaries on the grounds that the landowners cannot be saved anyway....

"Against the capitalists? Now that is the real issue. That is the crux of the matter, because without a revolution against the capitalists, all that prattle about 'peace without annexations' and the speedy termination of the war by such a peace is either naivete and ignorance, or stupidity and deception....

"The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie--the intellectuals, the Prosperous peasants, the present parties of the Narodniks...and the Mensheviks--are not at present in favor of a revolution against the capitalists....

"The conclusion is obvious: only assumption of power by the proletariat, backed by the semi-proletarians, can give the country a really strong and really revolutionary government."
--V. I. Lenin, "A Strong Revolutionary Government," May 1917

It is true that Lenin both at this time and later occasionally referred to the soviets in the period February-October 1917 as an expression of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry," but those soviets did not hold state power. The struggle for "All Power to the Soviets" was, as Lenin put it, the struggle against the petty bourgeoisie, which did not wish to struggle against capitalism. And the state which resulted from the October Revolution was the dictatorship of the working class, supported by the peasantry. From 1917 on Lenin never implied that there could be such a creature as a state of two classes, such as envisioned by Stalin and Mao. As he put it in his polemic against Kautsky, "The Soviets are the Russian form of the proletarian dictatorship" ("The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," 1918).

Slogans and programs of revolutionary parties have a real meaning in the class struggle: they call for certain courses of action and oppose others. Kamenev who in April led the fight to retain the slogan of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" in October opposed the revolutionary insurrection, and after the successful uprising actually resigned from the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars in protest. In this behavior there was at least a semblance of consistency.

But Davidson and Stalinists everywhere would have us believe that the "Old Bolshevik" program was confirmed by the October Revolution! Behind this deception lies a purpose, namely to justify the anti-revolutionary policies of Stalinism. It is always "too soon" for socialist demands, we must always go through a "democratic stage" before the peasants can seize the land and the proletariat can expropriate the expropriators. As a true proletarian revolutionary, Lenin learned from the experience of the 1917 revolution, advancing a new program when the inadequacy of the old one had been clearly revealed. But what can one say of people who not only refuse to assimilate these lessons but insist on proclaiming that black is white? In the mouth of Stalin in 1927 the slogan of a "democratic dictatorship" was a justification for ordering the Chinese Communist Party to give up its arms just as Chiang Kai-shek prepared to massacre thousands of Communists and militant workers. Today, when the same slogan is used to justify support for "anti-imperialists" such as Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, it will have the same result--annihilation of the revolutionaries and strangulation of the revolution. The choice is posed world-wide: Either socialism or barbarism, there is no middle ground!