The Trotskyist Program of Permanent Revolution

quote of the issue

The program of permanent revolution, first developed by the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, outlines the road to national and social liberation for the masses in semicolonial countries such as India. We reprint below excerpts from section 10, “Colonial Revolution, Permanent Revolution and the ‘Guerrilla Road’,” of the International Communist League’s “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program,” adopted at our Third International Conference in 1998.

Experience since the Second World War has completely validated the Trotskyist theory of the permanent revolution which declares that in the imperialist epoch the bourgeois-democratic revolution can be completed only by a proletarian dictatorship supported by the peasantry. Only under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat can the colonial and semicolonial countries obtain genuine national emancipation. To open the road to socialism requires the extension of the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries.

The October Revolution itself refuted the Menshevik idea of the revolution as stagist; the Mensheviks proposed a political bloc with the liberal Cadet party to place the bourgeoisie in power....

Lenin’s Bolsheviks were closer to Trotsky’s view in that they insisted that the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of leading a democratic revolution. The Bolsheviks argued for an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, culminating in the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” a flawed slogan projecting a state defending the interests of two different classes. In 1917 following the February revolution, it took a sharp fight within the Bolshevik Party for Lenin’s “April Theses” line for the dictatorship of the proletariat to prevail....

Trotsky wrote in his 29 March 1930 introduction to the German edition of The Permanent Revolution:

“Under the guise of providing an economic justification for internationalism, Stalin in reality presents a justification for national socialism. It is false that world economy is simply a sum of national parts of one and the same type. It is false that the specific features are ‘merely supplementary to the general features,’ like warts on a face. In reality, the national peculiarities represent an original combination of the basic features of the world process.”

In The Permanent Revolution (30 November 1929) Trotsky explained:

“Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses.

“A backward colonial or semi-colonial country, the proletariat of which is insufficiently prepared to unite the peasantry and take power, is thereby incapable of bringing the democratic revolution to its conclusion.”

The partial character of the anti-capitalist revolutions in the colonial world leads us to reaffirm the Marxist-Leninist concept of the proletariat as the only social force capable of making the socialist revolution. The ICL fundamentally opposes the Maoist doctrine, rooted in Menshevism and Stalinist reformism, which rejects the vanguard role of the working class and substitutes peasant-based guerrilla warfare as the road to socialism.

A further extension of Marxism contributed by the International Communist League in analyzing Stalinism was our understanding of the Cuban Revolution (see Marxist Bulletin No. 8, “Cuba and Marxist Theory”), which retrospectively illuminated the course of the Yugoslav and Chinese Revolutions. In Cuba, a petty-bourgeois movement under exceptional circumstances—the absence of the working class as a contender for social power in its own right, the flight of the national bourgeoisie and hostile imperialist encirclement, and a lifeline thrown by the Soviet Union—did overthrow the old Batista dictatorship and eventually smash capitalist property relations. But Castroism (or other peasant-based guerrilla movements) cannot bring the working class to political power.

Under the most favorable historic circumstances conceivable, the petty-bourgeois peasantry was only capable of creating a bureaucratically deformed workers state, that is, a state of the same order as that issuing out of the political counterrevolution of Stalin in the Soviet Union, an anti-working-class regime which blocked the possibilities to extend social revolution into Latin America and North America, and suppressed Cuba’s further development in the direction of socialism. To place the working class in political power and open the road to socialist development requires a supplemental political revolution led by a Trotskyist party. With the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state and consequently no readily available lifeline against imperialist encirclement, the narrow historical opening in which petty-bourgeois forces were able to overturn local capitalist rule has been closed, underscoring the Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution.

—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 54, Spring 1998