You speak about the new politics of imperialism, the national and ethnic problems, the question of democratic rights, the problems of the struggle for socialism in different countries, including semi-colonial countries. The last development of the theory of the permanent revolution was at the end of the 1920s in the polemics with the Comintern. But the Comintern was a mass force in the international arena, the working class was strong and at the beginning of the decade there had been the Baku conference, where the Third International not only put forward an analysis of the situation but also a strategy for colonial and semi-colonial political alternatives. Today, the situation is that the socialists and revolutionary Marxists are weak in the working class. How can the politics of the permanent revolution work? How can the political questions be answered and socialism as an alternative to terrorism be applied? In general it is a question of politics. How is the struggle against terrorism transformed? At the beginning of the 20th century there was a strong International with big sections. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a degenerated International. Today, there is a very different situation. How does the permanent revolution work today?
The theory of the permanent revolution is over 100 years old. There has been a discussion in a recently published book between different academic Marxists about this theory, in support of Trotsky’s ideas but, in my opinion, applying it in a very general abstract way to circumstances which do not pertain to what he was driving at. The theory of the permanent revolution is really about the revolution in an underdeveloped country with pre-capitalist tasks not yet completed. The bourgeois-democratic revolution in the neo-colonial world is not able to be completely carried through without the proletariat leading the poor and peasant masses. Once having come to power, the proletariat then goes over to the socialist tasks of the revolution, both nationally and internationally. That theory, in our opinion, applies today to the underdeveloped world. It could be said that, even in some of the semi-developed countries, there is an element of the bourgeois-democratic revolution not yet carried through; on the national question, for instance, which we discussed before. This task – the solution of the national question – can only be understood and carried through by an application of the theory of the permanent revolution.
Because of the absence of a strong, powerful, revolutionary working-class pole of attraction, in the post-1945 period, the theory of the permanent revolution was vindicated, for example, in the cases of China and Cuba but in a caricatured form, not in the classical schema laid down by Trotsky. It is also very applicable in the neocolonial world today, The theory of stages, originally put forward by the Mensheviks, then by the Stalinists, and now by a variety of organisations in the neo-colonial world, comes into conflict with the idea and the programme of the permanent revolution.
It still retains its validity in countries like Sri Lanka, where the bourgeois-democratic revolution has not been fully carried out, on the national question, for instance. Nigeria is a bit different because, on the land question, there exists not just pre-capitalist but tribal elements, which are pre-feudal, as well as feudal elements in agriculture. There is the vital and explosive national question in Nigeria. It is only the working class that is capable of solving this, and that is a programmatic question. It is a huge issue in Nigeria and the religious and ethnic questions are also very complicated. All of those issues can only be solved not by basing oneself upon this or that ethnic group but by the working class in general playing a role in mobilising the peasant and rural masses. That is the classical idea of the permanent revolution in the underdeveloped world.
In Sri Lanka, there is the very powerful historical tradition of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). Alongside Bolivia and Vietnam before 1945, this is a successful example of a Trotskyist party able to have an implantation in the working class and, in turn, affecting the rural population. The LSSP was the first party founded in Sri Lanka, not just the first workers’ party! The United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party came later. The LSSP found a powerful echo within the working class. It did not start in the rural areas but amongst the working class and found a response in the rural areas; it always had a base amongst the farmers or peasants. In 1953, it organised a movement in the cities, a general strike supplemented by a movement in the rural areas through the hartal, an all-island form of struggle taken from India. This was a classic example of the permanent revolution in action. Marx wrote of a working-class, proletarian movement in the cities supplemented by the ‘second edition’ of the Peasants’ War (from Germany in the 16th century). The hartal was an all-island strike of workers and peasants, although for a limited duration of one day. This magnificent movement prepared the way for the electoral defeat of the UNP in 1956.
The revolutions in China, Cuba and Vietnam were vindications of the theory of permanent revolution, not in its classical form but in a distorted fashion. The essence of Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution was not just that the bourgeoisie could not solve the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The working class could solve those tasks, but only a conscious revolutionary party like the Bolsheviks would be able to lead the nation, the majority of the workers and peasants that is, in the bourgeois-democratic tasks and go over to the international tasks, posing the question of socialism on a world scale. Lenin’s original slogan was the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’. He was unsure who would dominate in the alliance, the peasantry or the working class. However, he came out decisively in his April Theses of April 1917 in agreement with Trotsky’s position. But even his previous theory explained, in effect, that the ‘democratic dictatorship’ would provoke the international revolution which would then, in turn, come to the assistance of the Russian Revolution.
In China, the classical working-class revolution of 1925-27 failed because of the role of Stalin and his Chinese supporters. Mao Zedong’s guerrillas in the countryside were an echo of that defeat. The ‘Communist Party’ under Mao, it is generally accepted now, was not a conscious Bolshevik or clear Marxist force. It was really a peasant army in the tradition of China, where peasant armies had struggled, overcame the landlords, entered the cities and created a new dynasty. Then the cycle would begin again without the underlying problems being resolved. In China between 1927 and 1944, and then to 1949, Chinese landlordism and capitalism had shown its complete bankruptcy under Chiang Kai-shek. It capitulated to Japanese imperialism, China was divided into the fiefdoms of the different warlords and there was no way forward. Then this peasant army of ex-communists took power – they used the terminology of Marxism but were not in the tradition of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, a conscious working-class force.
There is a big debate amongst Sinologists, even those from a Trotskyist background, some of whom say the Trotskyists in China made a mistake. They should have gone into the countryside and gone with Mao. I do not accept or support that. Historically, the road to the peasantry for Marxists in the first instance is through support amongst the working class. Because the working class is linked to the peasantry, in that way it finds a road to the rural masses. That was the position of Lenin and Trotsky in the Russian Revolution. Trotsky makes the point on Mao’s ‘Red Army’ that it was a peasant army. We saw the mentality of a peasant army in the Russian Revolution and the civil war. Makhno and the anarchists’ armies, who stood between the Reds and the Whites, were hostile to the Whites because they represented the landlords. But they also clashed with the Reds because they represented the ‘city’ and the working class, and were perceived as a threat to the peasants, particularly the rich peasants.
Trotsky posed the question in relation to China: would it not be most likely that if Mao won and entered the cities then his Red Army could come into collision with the working class, who might begin to rise and form its own Organisations, soviets and so on, as they did between 1925 and 1927? Trotsky was very perceptive because, when Mao was about to enter the cities, the Red Army produced leaflets saying nobody must strike — anybody who took an independent position would be met with repression. This was a typical Bonapartist leadership based on a peasant army with an expressed fear of the independent movement of the working class. ‘There was no real communist, Trotskyist, Marxist appeal to the working class to support the peasants.
Trotsky envisaged that the Red Army could enter the cities, come into collision with the working class and, in that situation, there would be a new dynasty formed and the cycle would begin all over again. But it did not happen in that way. Because of the bankruptcy of landlordism and capitalism there was a huge vacuum. Mao came into the cities and balanced between the different classes. He did not come out for a ‘socialist’ state or a workers’ state or anything like that initially. In fact, he talked about a ‘national democracy’ involving sections of the national bourgeoisie. Chiang Kai-shek, his army, the capitalists and the landlords fled. There was no other armed force and Mao balanced between the classes. Mao started where Stalin had finished by creating from the outset a Stalinist state, He carried through, over a period, the liquidation of landlordism, began to take over industry and created a workers’ state, which was ‘deformed’ from the beginning. There were no soviets and other elements of workers’ democracy. Nevertheless, this was a vindication of the permanent revolution but in a caricaturised form. In a similar fashion, Stalinism did the same thing, in a way, in Eastern Europe although with some important differences. A Stalinist state was created from the beginning. This was a planned economy but with a one-party regime. Trotskyists in China were imprisoned, some of them remaining in prison for 20 or 30 years, but the Chinese Revolution was a vindication of the theory of the permanent revolution in the sense that landlordism and capitalism in the neo-colonial world cannot solve the problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, even in the era of imperialism.
In some countries, like Japan, the bourgeois-democratic revolution was completed from the top under imperialist occupation. In Japan, US General MacArthur carried through land reform which liquidated the remaining elements of feudalism. This was in order to develop Japan as a bastion against Chinese Stalinism. The same in Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek could not carry through land reform in China, dependent as he was on the landlords, but in Taiwan he expropriated the domestic Taiwanese landlords and capitalists, and in the process laid the basis for a developed capitalist structure.
The theory of the permanent revolution was again vindicated in the case of Vietnam. This was a clear national liberation struggle based on the peasantry in the main but, again, why did it result in a social revolution? Because there was no way forward on the basis of capitalism in Vietnam. When the NLF – the Vietcong — came to power, North and South were reunified. They carried through land reform, established a workers’ state. However, afterwards, the new regime began to introduce elements of capitalism into Vietnam. Nevertheless, in the first instance, the theory of permanent revolution was vindicated but in a distorted way.
Cuba was a similar case but slightly different because of the origins of the Cuban Revolution. I will not go into all the details here as we have done so in our book. When Fidel Castro and Guevara came to power, contrary to what he says today, Castro was not a Marxist. His model was the United States. He said subsequently that it was a manoeuvre! This was to fool US imperialism. Che Guevara was from a Communist Party tradition and so was Raúl Castro but not Fidel Castro. The revolution was based on the guerrilla struggle of a small group initially. The guerrillas were not a working-class movement, they were based upon the rural masses. Only after the Cuban Revolution had succeeded in the sense that Batista was already fleeing did the masses of Havana organise a general strike. It was a most peculiar ‘deformed workers’ state’ in the sense that it was, at the beginning, outside the Stalinist tradition, which Mao was not. Cuba was an entirely new development. There were elements of workers’ control, and there was the huge popularity of Castro and Guevara themselves. They moved towards the expropriation of Cuban capitalism and American imperialism, step by step.
South Africa
In the 1970s and 1980s, the revolutionary left in general said that there was only one road for South Africa. They were the best conditions for the vindication of the permanent revolution. After, the process did not confirm the permanent revolution. How do you explain this very typical situation for the vindication of the permanent revolution?
It was correct to say in the 1970s and the 1980s that in South Africa the democratic tasks — One person, one vote, etc. — were revolutionary demands in the context of apartheid. It could only be achieved by the application of the theory of the permanent revolution, a socialist revolution. The black working class, if mobilised on a revolutionary programme through an uprising, would smash the apartheid regime, grant democratic rights and go over to the tasks of the socialist revolution, not just in South Africa but in the African continent as a whole. That was a correct appraisal of this theory but it is again a question of the change of circumstances in world political factors. In the past, the South African regime had refused to b under the pressure of imperialism. Harold Macmillan, the former British prime minister made his famous ‘winds of change’ speech in Cape Town in 1959 a a a warning to the white minority regimes that they would have to give way and retreat in the face of mass African resistance to them.
But they refused to heed Macmillan’s advice and battened down the hatches. They introduced more discriminatory and dictatorial measures against the black African masses, the ‘coloureds’ and their supporters in the white population. This assumed that the ANC would be compelled, under pressure, to lead the revolution or it would split in the process and a revolutionary wing would emerge. That was the general perspective that we put forward. In fact, we had a general discussion in our ranks at the time when some in our South African organisation argued there could be democratic reform from the top by somebody like Buthelezi, who would be handed power by the white capitalist elite and that would open the gates to a form of truncated, strangulated capitalism with a black face leading it. In reality, power would still be vested In the hands of the whites. We discounted that possibility in the 1970s and 1980s
But there were big underlying changes in the 1980s and those changes led to the collapse of Stalinism and the abandonment of revolutionary or even quasi-revolutionary phraseology by Stalinism. For example, Russian Stalinism in the 1960s supported Cuba, without which the Cuban regime could not have existed for more than a few months. It depended on oil from Russia. In the later case of Nicaragua, however, they consciously put pressure on the Sandinistas not to break with capitalism and so did Castro. The same in Ghana with Rawlings. The acceptance of the results of a revolution, as with Cuba, by the Stalinist states was an expensive luxury they were no longer prepared to support.
There was also evidence in the 1980s, on the part of a section of the bureaucracy, of a move back towards capitalism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, those trends and tendencies were magnified. Mandela and the bourgeois wing of the ANC pushed towards the right. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) had arisen as a revolutionary trade union – amandla! (power) – and we helped in its formation. It was a revolutionary threat. We could give many examples of the African workers talking about the revolution, of needing to ‘kill’ trade union leaders who were not prepared to support the revolution. That was the natural reaction of the African workers in the underground, especially the mineworkers. It was a struggle to the end. It was socialism and the revolution; it was particularly the case as far as young people were concerned.
But the situation changed with the collapse of Stalinism and the recognition by the white regime of de Klerk that they could open up from the top and maybe have a power-sharing arrangement with the ANC. The fundamental economic interests of capitalism would not be threatened because of the shift towards the right of the ANC leadership under the pressure of the collapse of Stalinism and also the release of Mandela. Mandela had long discussions before he was released in which the ground was obviously prepared for him to play this role; in effect, to betray the revolution.
Africa
Bob Labi: “I think there is another side to this. The permanent revolution involves an analysis of why these countries, especially in Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America, are not developed. Why in parts of Africa is society actually going backwards? Why have the movements which existed and developed, whether it is the workers’ movement in some countries or even some of the bourgeois nationalist movements, failed to carry out the tasks? This can be explained in terms of the objective conditions which make the permanent revolution necessary and also the failure of the different organisations to have the sort of programme to carry through the revolution. Instead, they propose the ‘stages theory’ in different forms.
“So it is not just a question of the programme that is necessary, it is also the analysis which explains why countries do not develop. We can give the example of Nigeria. Why is Nigeria, a country of 120-130 million people, with a huge amount of natural resources and wealth, not developing and instead is going backwards? It can be explained by the grip of imperialism and also weakness of local capitalism. How do you break that? In a country like Nigeria there is a potentially powerful working class but it has not been able to achieve its aims.
“As we have been saying all along, conditions are always changing. In the 1990s with the development of the Asian Tigers, there was a discussion in different countries of the neo-colonial world: could they also become Tigers? To a certain extent the crisis at the end of the 1990s put a stop to that discussion. But now, with the development of China and, to some extent, India, the question is posed in some countries: could we follow the Chinese road? It is a new form of the discussion on the Asian Tigers. Is it possible in Africa for a country to develop like China? That is a discussion which is now taking place in India. Can India develop in the same way as China has developed? These are things we have to consider and we are not closing our eyes to the developments taking place but looking at how dependent they are on the developments in the world economy and also the question of the relative strengths of the different imperialist powers.
“In Africa, which is a special case, the question of China is also something which is not always an attraction but can be the opposite amongst sections of the masses. In Nigeria, there is a mounting explosion of anger towards China, which is seen as coming in and taking the resources. Also, local African companies are closed down as a result of competition from China. There is also a racial element which I discovered when in Nigeria last year. Workers think that Chinese employers are worse than Western bosses because they are more brutal. I was surprised by the hostility, not just of CWI members but of many other workers, to Chinese employers. They considered that they are far worse than the Europeans because at least Europeans would recognise token trade unions. The Chinese do not care; they just get the police sent in immediately if workers struggle.”
The permanent revolution can be vindicated in a positive way by the victory of the working class in Russia, but so also in a negative sense by the failure of revolutions: in China 1925-27, and in other circumstances in the neo-colonial world. But even in South Africa, what we had as a result of the permanent revolution not being applied consciously by the working class through its organisations was an abortion of a regime We have a society in which some features of apartheid still exist in the discrimination, the housing, the divisions even between sections of the African masses and the ‘coloured’ masses. South Africa experienced a derailed revolution.
We knew South African comrades in the 1980s who discussed with us in our headquarters in London – revolutionaries participating in the struggles of the mineworkers’ union. One of these, Irene Charnley, is now one of the richest black women in South Africa because of the opportunities which opened up for a black African elite. People like Cyril Ramaphosa, a former leader of the mineworkers’ union and now a rich businessman, have copies of Trotsky’s books which were given to them by members – our party when they had been radicalised by the revolution. But in the new situation that opened up with the release of Mandela they shifted towards the right. Mandela was always more on the right of the ANC than on the left. These people, as a result of ‘black empowerment’ for an elite not the masses, then gave a cover to the same predominantly capitalist set-up in South Africa. However the revolutionary drive and potential is there amongst the working class, which will break out again.
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