permanent revolution vs socialism in one country

The result was the physical annihilation of the Chinese Communist Party and the loss of what had been the most promising revolutionary opportunity since 1917. Other articles where Socialism in one country is discussed: communism: Stalinism: …was the idea of “socialism in one country”—i.e., building up the industrial base and military might of the Soviet Union before exporting revolution abroad. The political significance of the adoption of the Stalin-Bukharin perspective of “socialism in one country” combined with the campaign against permanent revolution and the suppression of Trotsky and his co-thinkers was well understood by the most class-conscious organs of the world bourgeoisie. As you see, the resolution recognizes the possibility of building a complete Socialist society in a backward country like Russia, without “state aid” from countries that are technically and economically more developed, which is the very opposite to what Zinoviev said when he reproved Iakovlev in his concluding speech at the. He pointed out that the development of a world capitalist economy not only posed the conquest of power by the working class in the backward countries, it also made the construction of socialism within national boundaries unrealizable in the advanced capitalist countries. Zinoviev and Kamenev once tried to raise this argument at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Party prior to the April Party Conference. And therefore we must exercise the greatest possible caution. What did he mean by this? But they received a rebuff and were compelled to retreat, and formally they submitted to the opposite point of view, the point of view of the majority of the Central Committee. Having repudiated the permanent revolution and resurrected the Menshevik theory of the “two-stage” revolution in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the Stalin leadership insisted that the Chinese working class had to subordinate its struggle to the bourgeois nationalist Guomindang led by Chiang Kai-shek. Socialism in one country was a theory put forth by Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin in 1924 which was eventually adopted by the Soviet Union as state policy. This document appeared in the press during the first sessions of the Fourteenth Party Congress. Comrade Slaughter’s definition suggests—and this is the explicit content of his entire letter—that any national organization can rise to the level of internationalism by establishing, on its own, the ‘class lines and fighting them through.’”. To attempt, regardless of the geographical, cultural and historical conditions of the country’s development, which constitutes a part of the world unity, to realize a shut-off proportionality of all branches of economy within a national framework, means to pursue a reactionary utopia.”. Like the Pabloites before them, the WRP leadership increasingly abandoned the scientific appraisal that Stalinism, social democracy and bourgeois nationalism represented, in the final analysis, agencies of imperialism within the workers movement. He prefers to choose another path, that of attacking the resolution of the Fourteenth Party Conference from the rear, while keeping silent about this resolution and refraining from any open criticism of the resolution. The Stalin leadership defined the Guomindang as a “bloc of four classes” consisting of the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. Does it require the existence of the Fourth International? According to the permanent revolution perspective, the path to socialism was necessarily international, whereas in the framework of socialism in one country, the top priority became defense in the form of national security. ), We now have before us [says Lenin in another place] an extremely unstable equilibrium, but an unquestionable, an indisputable, a certain equilibrium nevertheless. Both the "permanent revolution" and the "socialism in one country" debate were in regards to the situation facing the Soviet Union, you can't force them to be universal. By the early 1980s, the turn away from this perspective caused growing disquiet within the Workers League, the American section of the International Committee. Behind the Marxist verbiage, the bureaucracy had long seen socialism not as a program for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but rather as a means of developing a national economy that was the base of their own privileges. By our successes in building Socialism. Trotsky proposed during this period the creation of a “white book” compiling such endorsements of “socialism in one country” on the part of the bourgeoisie and a “yellow book” including declarations of sympathy and support from the social democrats. But since when have we come to treat departure from Leninism on a cardinal problem of Leninism as internationalism? Permanent revolution is the strategy of a revolutionary class pursuing its own interests independently and without compromise or alliance with opposing sections of society. The German SPD ended up backing its own government in the First World War on the grounds that Germany provided the best conditions for the building of socialism. The proposition advanced by Bukharin and Stalin in 1924 that socialism could be achieved in the Soviet Union based upon its own national reserves and regardless of the fate of the socialist revolution internationally represented a fundamental revision of the perspective that had guided the Soviet leadership and the Communist International under Lenin. The limitations on the construction of socialism imposed by backwardness and isolation could be overcome only through the development of the revolution by the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, culminating in the world socialist transformation, thus lending the revolution a permanent character in a second sense. As Trotsky spelled out in his critique of the draft program for the Sixth Congress of the Communist International and other writings, the theory of socialism in one country represented a direct attack on the program of world socialist revolution. The debacle suffered in Germany as a result of the German Communist Party’s capitulation during the revolutionary crisis of 1923 had further dashed hopes for early relief from the world revolution and left Soviet workers susceptible to the promise of a national solution. Sometimes they contain mistakes. But by the end of that year, in the second edition of the book, his position started to turn around: the "proletariat can and must build the socialist s… In considering the question of socialism in one country vs. permanent revolution we are dealing with theoretical foundations of the Trotskyist movement. In 1879, he published an article entitled “The isolated socialist state,” laying ideological foundations for the subsequent growth of social patriotism within German Social Democracy. As Trotsky warned prophetically in 1928, the thesis that socialism could be built in Russia alone given the absence of foreign aggression led inevitably to “a collaborationist policy toward the foreign bourgeoisie with the object of averting intervention.”. The essential theoretical issues that arose in the struggle over these two opposed perspectives were not only fought out by Trotsky against the Stalinist bureaucracy in the latter half of the 1920s, but have reemerged as the subject of repeated struggles within the Fourth International itself. XXVII, p. In 1963, it fell to the leadership of the British section, then the Socialist Labour League, to prosecute the struggle against the American Socialist Workers Party’s reunification with the Pabloites. This is not yet the building of Socialist society, but it is all that is necessary and sufficient for this building.”. To review the essential features of this profound analysis of the revolutionary dynamics of modern global capitalism developed by Trotsky, the permanent revolution took as its starting point not the economic level or internal class relations of a given country, but rather the world class struggle and the international development of capitalist economy of which the national conditions are a particular expression. But perhaps he modified his views after power had been taken, after 1917? They insisted then that the revolution could not leap over the bourgeois democratic stage of its development and called for conditional support to the bourgeois Provisional Government. In the first edition of the book Osnovy Leninizma (Foundations of Leninism, 1924), Stalin was still a follower of Lenin's idea that revolution in one country is insufficient. The passage I just quoted was replaced with its opposite, affirming that the “proletariat can and must build the socialist society in one country,” followed by the very same assurance that this constituted the “Leninist theory of proletarian revolution.”. While the WRP leadership again refused a discussion and threatened a split, within barely more than a year an internal crisis ripped their organization apart, leading all factions of the old leadership to break from the IC and repudiate Trotskyism. Therefore, the working class could not fight for political power. This feature is not available right now. The international program must proceed directly from an analysis of the conditions and tendencies of world economy and of the world political system taken as a whole in all its connections and contradictions, that is, with the mutually antagonistic interdependence of its separate parts. It thus, on the one hand, saw China as insufficiently mature for socialism while, on the other, endowed the national bourgeoisie and the nation-state form itself with a historically progressive role. In a bald attempt to cover up the catastrophic consequences of the opportunism of the Comintern in Shanghai and Wuhan, Stalin insisted that the Chinese revolution was still in its ascendancy and sanctioned an adventurist uprising in Canton that ended in yet another massacre. An attempt to build socialism on one island would inevitably spell an irrational economic retrogression. 279, December 8, 1925.) Revolutionary Tradition Another aspect of Stalinist theory that Grant and Woods pick apart in this text is that of ‘Socialism in One Country’. ‘In considering the question of socialism in one country vs. permanent revolution we are dealing with theoretical foundations of the Trotskyist movement.’ ‘Slavery intensifies and thus deforms relationships of social inequality, whereas permanent revolution disfigures equality of social conditions.’ Here is what it says about the victory of Socialism in one country: The existence of two diametrically opposed social systems gives rise to the constant menace of capitalist blockade, of other forms of economic pressure, of armed intervention, of restoration. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. The attempt to develop a self-sufficient “socialist” economy based on the resources of backward Russia was doomed, not merely by Russia’s backwardness, but because it represented a retrogression from the world economy already created by capitalism. In the final analysis, it represented a specific form of labor reformism that took on a peculiar and malevolent character as a reaction against the October Revolution within the Soviet workers state. And, in February 1984, North presented a political report to the IC beginning with a critique of a speech by SWP leader Jack Barnes, who had explicitly repudiated the theory of permanent revolution, and concluding with a review of the WRP leadership’s opportunist relations with the bourgeois nationalists, the Labourites and the trade union bureaucracy that in practice pointed to a similar conclusion. The sentiment of ‘Not all and always for the revolution, but some thing for oneself as well,’ was translated as ‘Down with permanent revolution.’ The revolt against the exacting theoretical demands of Marxism and the exacting political demands of the revolution gradually assumed, in the eyes of these people, the form of a struggle against ‘Trotskyism.’ Under this banner, the liberation of the philistine in the Bolshevik was proceeding.”. Trotsky's permanent revolution is an explanation of how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that Permanent Revolution vs. Socialism in One Country . As a term within Marxist theory, it was first coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by at least 1850, but since then it has been used to refer to different concepts by different theorists, most notably Leon Trotsky. But the considerations brought out above are sufficient, let me hope, to reveal the full significance of the struggle over principles that was carried on in recent years, and is being carried on right now in the shape of two contrasting theories: socialism in one country vs. the permanent revolution. For a Socialist Federation of the Near East! Instead, it attributed to at least elements of these political tendencies a potential revolutionary role. This was to take place on the basis of an agreement that the petty-bourgeois nationalist guerrilla movement of Fidel Castro had established a workers state in Cuba, thereby supposedly proving that non-proletarian forces could lead a socialist revolution. What do we mean by the possibility of the victory of Socialism in one country? Zinoviev, of course, had the opportunity of speaking against this document at the Congress. The party bureaucracy resorted to vote-rigging to exclude Opposition delegates from the thirteenth conference in January 1924, where the inner-party debate was to be decided.In Moscow, for example, the Opposition had majority support in most of the cells (branches). We are living [says Lenin] not merely in a state, but in a system of states, and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist states for a long time is unthinkable. Applied to China, this method analyzed the national revolution in isolation from the world revolution. Here is what he said about the victory of Socialism in one country even before the October Revolution in August 1915: “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Stalin only started to dip his toes in the practicalities of Socialism in One Country after Lenin’s retirement and death. Note: Murry Weiss originally wrote Permanent Revolution and Women's Emancipation as a draft resolution for the October 1978 National Conference of the For revolutionary feminism, racial justice, and working-class power. We also believe that the view held by Kamenev and Zinoviev expresses lack of faith in the intrinsic forces of our working class and of the peasant masses who follow its lead. And by the victory of Socialism in one country Zinoviev means the sort of Socialist construction which cannot and should not lead to the complete building of Socialism. (Lenin, Collected Works, Russian edition, Vol. It is hardly necessary to prove that Lenin’s clear and definite statement needs no further comment. Hence, the victory of Socialism is possible, first in several or even in one capitalist country… The defeat of several proletarian revolutions in countries like Germany and Hungary ended Bolshevik hopes for an imminent world revolution and began promotion of "Socialism in One Country" by Stalin. To overthrow the bourgeoisie the efforts of one country are sufficient—the history of our revolution bears this out. Socialism in one country began from the standpoint of socialism as a means of national development. Of course, Party resolutions are sometimes not free from error. For the final victory of Socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of such a peasant country as Russia, are insufficient. In July 1927, after Wang reached an accommodation with Chiang, he repeated the massacre of workers and Communists seen in Shanghai. That means that if the ruling class, the proletariat, wants to hold sway, it must prove its capacity to do so by military organization also. It is characteristic that Zinoviev and Kamenev found no arguments against the grave accusation directed against them by the Moscow Committee of our Party. - It seemed defeatest and suggested that Russia was not strong enough to stand alone - It seemed as if it could lead to war - … The Stalinist leadership’s struggle to impose the ideology of “socialism in one country” inevitably took the form of a vicious struggle against “Trotskyism” and in particular the theory of permanent revolution. That is why the Fourteenth Party Congress rightly defined the views of the New Opposition as “lack of faith in the cause of Socialist construction,” as “a distortion of Leninism.”. I think not. One can only wonder why we took power in October 1917 if we did not count on completely building Socialism? I would like to quote at some length passages from this critique, which spell out the foundations of a Marxist approach to the elaboration of perspective. In the present epoch, to a much larger extent than in the past, the national orientation of the proletariat must and can flow only from a world orientation and not vice versa. In addition to the split in the IC, this year also marks the twentieth anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev’s initiation of the program of perestroika. In other words, we can and must build a complete Socialist society, for we have at our disposal all that is necessary and sufficient for this purpose. No, this is impossible. Let us turn to Lenin. Trotsky rejected both conceptions, insisting that the character of the Chinese revolution was determined by the world development of capitalism, which, as in Russia in 1917, posed the taking of power by the working class as the only means of solving the revolution’s national and democratic tasks. Hence, the victory of Socialism is possible, first in several or even in one capitalist country, taken singly. Trotsky and the Left Opposition had put forward a detailed proposal for developing heavy industry, warning that without a growth of the industrial sector, there was a serious danger that the growth of capitalist relations in the countryside would undermine the foundations of socialism. Nonetheless, in 1984, the Workers League again raised these issues. This lecture was delivered by Bill Van Auken at the Socialist Equality Party/WSWS summer school held August 14 to August 20, 2005 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zinoviev and Kamenev “replied” to this accusation by silence, because they had no “card to beat it.”. To aim at building a nationally isolated socialist society means, in spite of all passing successes, to pull the productive forces backward even as compared with capitalism. Permanent Revolution vs. Socialism in One Country Trotsky believed in ‘Permanent Revolution’ and continuing the NEP. The Stalin leadership, pragmatically adapting itself to the immediate growth produced by the New Economic Policy, supported the preservation of the status quo within the Soviet borders as well, continuing and expanding concessions to the peasantry and private traders. This was the world-historic significance of this perspective, which provided the foundations for the building of a genuinely international revolutionary party. The USSR under Stalin had chosen a different route. It is necessary to understand that the perspectives that guided Stalinism were not a uniquely Russian political phenomenon. 159-166. It was Stalin’s position that China was not yet ripe for a socialist revolution, that it lacked the “sufficient minimum” of development for socialist construction. Fighting should continue Hartmut Soell (‘Weltmarkt–Revolution–Staatenwelt’, 137) suggests that Engels may have come to recognise the prospect of socialism in one country for Germany. in its Reply to the letter of the Leningrad Provincial Party Conference: Recently, in the Political Bureau, Kamenev and Zinoviev advocated the point of view that we cannot cope with the internal difficulties owing to our technical and economic backwardness unless an international revolution comes to our rescue. These sections will be dealing with the Marxist-Leninist position on socialism in one country against the Trotskyist position of "Permanent Revolution". Marxism and the Foundations of the Fourth International, International Committee of the Fourth International, The Left Opposition’s fight against Stalinism (1923-1933). In November 1982, in the summation of his “Critique of Gerry Healy’s ‘Studies in Dialectical Materialism,’” Comrade David North reviewed the political relations established by the WRP leadership in the Middle East over the previous period, writing, “Marxist defense of national liberation movements and the struggle against imperialism has been interpreted in an opportunist fashion of uncritical support of various bourgeois nationalist regimes.”, “For all intents and purposes,” he continued, “the theory of permanent revolution has been treated as inapplicable to present circumstances.”. Why was Permanent Revolution unpopular? Will it last long? (Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. The permanent revolution is one of constant vigilance and sustained action. The result was the massacre of some 20,000 communists and workers by this army in Shanghai on April 12, 1927. Does not this smack of national narrow-mindedness? “The struggle against imperialism, precisely because of its economic and military power, demands a powerful exertion of forces from the very depth of the Chinese people,” he wrote. What is the root of this mistake? Trotsky fought for a faster tempo of industrial growth in order to counter this pressure, while at the same time he rejected the conception of an economic autarky. To build Socialism without the possibility of completing it; to build knowing that it cannot be completed-such are the absurdities in which Zinoviev has involved himself. Thus, in a letter written by Slaughter in December 1985 rejecting the authority of the International Committee, he declared that “Internationalism consists precisely of laying down ...class lines and fighting them through.”, In reply, the Workers League posed question: “But by what process are these ‘class lines’ determined? It signifies that by the final victory of Socialism in one country Zinoviev means, not the guarantee against intervention and restoration, but the possibility of completely building Socialist society. Marxism must adapt to the reality of the society it is being adapted to. socialist revolution but to capitalistically developed states. The Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the USSR—a response to the growing pressure from globally integrated capitalism upon the nationally isolated Soviet economy—represented the failure not of socialism or Marxism, but rather that of the attempt by the Stalinist bureaucracy to maintain an isolated, self-sufficient national economy—i.e., the perspective of socialism in one country. • “Permanent Revolution” ... more as a unique path to socialism in a backward, peasant country that Russia was. It means to build a Socialist society. Against what was at the time the far more fashionable adulation of Che Guevara, guerrillaism and Third World revolution, the SLL waged an uncompromising defense of Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution. He insisted that the USSR take advantage of the world division of labor, gaining access to the technology and economic resources of the advanced capitalist countries in order to develop its economy. Bukharin had declared, “We will construct socialism if it be only at a snail’s pace,” while Stalin insisted that there was “no need to inject the international factor into our socialist development.”. “Such, on the whole, are the characteristic features of the Leninist theory of the proletarian revolution.”, Before the end of that year, however, Stalin’s “Foundations of Leninism” would be reissued in a revised edition. Zinoviev evidently thinks that this will be the best way of achieving his purpose. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West will shield Russia from bourgeois restoration and secure for her the possibility of bringing the socialist construction to its conclusion.”. Through a series of purges, expulsions and political coups, the Moscow bureaucracy obtained a staff that was trained to see the defense of the Soviet state, rather than the world socialist revolution, as its strategic axis. Kamenev “ replied ” to this accusation by silence, because they had no “ to! Regulated the pressure of cheaper goods from the Leninist position policy in grew!, 1914, the Soviet state established a monopoly of Foreign trade of faith in the practicalities of Socialism one. Of Stalinism itself lay in the contradictory emergence of the victory of Socialism in one country began from the held... With a supreme reality.” guided Stalinism were not a uniquely Russian political phenomenon policy in China grew of... 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