From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 64th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949- Tunisia, Egypt and Permanent Revolution
Markin comment (repost from 2012):
On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.
This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.
What struck him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.
That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
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Workers Vanguard No. 973
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4 February 2011
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LENIN
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Tunisia, Egypt and Permanent Revolution
TROTSKY
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(Quote of the Week)
Mass protests in Tunisia have sparked upheavals in Egypt and
beyond against the brutal imperialist-backed capitalist regimes and for basic
democratic rights, jobs and other necessities of life. As Leon Trotsky stressed
in “What Is the Permanent Revolution? Basic Postulates,” in countries of belated
capitalist development, these aspirations can be realized only through the
establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, necessarily linked to the
fight for socialist revolution in the imperialist centers. This was the
perspective of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, which led the proletariat to
victory in the Russian October Revolution of 1917.
With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development,
especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent
revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of
achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only
through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated
nation, above all of its peasant masses....
Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry the tasks
of the democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even seriously posed. But the
alliance of these two classes can be realized in no other way than through an
irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national-liberal
bourgeoisie.
No matter what the first episodic stages of the revolution may be
in the individual countries, the realization of the revolutionary alliance
between the proletariat and the peasantry is conceivable only under the
political leadership of the proletarian vanguard, organized in the Communist
Party. This in turn means that the victory of the democratic revolution is
conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat which bases itself
upon the alliance with the peasantry and solves first of all the tasks of the
democratic revolution....
The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the
leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted
with tasks, the fulfilment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the
rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into
the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent
revolution.
The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the
revolution, but only opens it. Socialist construction is conceivable only on the
foundation of the class struggle, on a national and international scale. This
struggle, under the conditions of an overwhelming predominance of capitalist
relationships on the world arena, must inevitably lead to explosions, that is,
internally to civil wars and externally to revolutionary wars. Therein lies the
permanent character of the socialist revolution as such, regardless of whether
it is a backward country that is involved, which only yesterday accomplished its
democratic revolution, or an old capitalist country which already has behind it
a long epoch of democracy and parliamentarism.
The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits
is unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis in bourgeois society is
the fact that the productive forces created by it can no longer be reconciled
with the framework of the national state. From this follow, on the one hand,
imperialist wars, on the other, the utopia of a bourgeois United States of
Europe. The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the
international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist
revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the
word; it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our
entire planet.
—Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (1930)
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