Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism
Christopher Z. Hobson and Ronald D. Tabor, Trotskyism and the Dilemma of Socialism
Originally applied in the Russian context, after 1917 this became generalized into a theory of revolution in underdeveloped countries. It rejects the general thesis that the bourgeoisie in the underdeveloped countries was able to play a revolutionary role. It also rejects a “two-stage” approach to revolution: where the first, “national-democratic” revolution expels foreign exploiters, followed by a second, proletarian-socialist revolution that brings to power the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is anti-Popular Front and anti-Menshevik/Stalinist strategy of bloc-ing with the nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie.
Trotsky’s emphasis was that while a particular country may be underdeveloped, it must be considered in the context of global capitalism. So the higher development of capitalism elsewhere mitigates the relative underdevelopment of another place. Russia, for instance, while undergoing intense, rapid industrialization, was able to import straightaway some of the highest technology and organization available at the turn of the 20th century, to the extent that it had some of the most impressive factories in the world by 1905. This combined and uneven development, the “drawing together of the different stages of the journey [toward socialism], a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic and more contemporary forms” (Callinicos) of production, meant that the Russian proletariat, while a minority of the population, yielded a power and significance above and beyond its small size. Thus, according to Trotsky, it, and not the bourgeoisie, played the central role in the struggle against tsarism.
Trotsky believed the peasantry could only act as a national force under the leadership of an urban class. The peasant parties represented the hegemony of the urban bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie over the rural masses. Trotsky was isolated in this position until February 1917 when Lenin and the Bolsheviks adapted his theory of permanent revolution. In October 1917, he was won over to some of Lenin’s prescriptions for the necessity and type of revolutionary organization.
To clarify the differences with Stalin’s (and the Mensheviks’) two stage approach: this was founded on the belief that capitalism was a necessary historical stage that developed the means of production that would eventually provide the material basis for socialism. In countries that were underdeveloped, comparatively speaking, the two-stage approach assumed that the country must first develop along capitalist lines before the relations and means of production would be sufficiently mature. To do this meant to remove the fetters upon capitalism (old feudal relations, landed oligarchies, church, etc.) and establish a strong bourgeoisie in power.
Hence, in the underdeveloped countries, this approach argued, first there would have to be a bourgeois national revolution in which the national bourgeoisie would fight for power, throw out the imperialists, achieve national independence, and overthrow the feudal landowners. This would rely on the “bloc of four classes” where workers, peasants, intellectuals, and the national bourgeoisie would be allies. The task of the revolutionary (vanguard) party was to help the bourgeois nationalist parties take power.
Though Stalin would claim this approach was taken from Lenin, in fact Lenin argued that the national bourgeoisie was weak and cowardly and would ally with the tsar/ancien regime rather than face the power of the workers’ movement. Thus, Lenin said, the workers and peasants would have to carry out the bourgeois revolution against the bourgeoisie (Hobson and Tabor, 39). The tasks of the revolutionary party, in this setting, were to combat the bourgeoisie’s political influence over the workers and peasants.
Trotsky was not entirely in disagreement with other Russian Marxists on the question of revolution, in that he did believe that Russia was too underdeveloped to establish a socialist society. The revolution was to be permanent in two senses, then: it had to proceed without interruption beyond the bourgeois democratic stage; and it could not be limited to Russia alone, but had to occur in other countries (a counter-argument to Stalin’s “socialism in one country”) (Hobson and Tabor, 37).
Monday, February 2, 2009
Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution
History, Civilization, Progress
Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, pp. 147-183
Bookchin is “negating the negation”. In dismissing deterministic, patriarchal, and white supremacist notions of history, civilization, and progress, critics have gone too far in the opposite direction and opted for a modern relativism that leaves little possibility for understanding History, let alone constituting a revolutionary praxis.
What is History? The “rational content and continuity of events (with due regard for qualitative ‘leaps’) that are grounded in humanity’s potentialities for freedom, self-consciousness, and cooperation, in the self-formative development of increasingly libertarian forms of consociation.” (157) History is what is rational in human development. Humans have of course committed irrational acts, murderous atrocities, and inflicted all sorts of evil upon one another. Yet Bookchin distinguishes between human capacities and human potentialities. And is there a human “potentiality for evil”? Capacities for evil acts do not mean that human potentiality is constituted to produce evil and destructiveness. “Episodic capacities” are not the same as “unfolding potentialities.”
“If our views of social development are to be structured around the differences that distinguish one culture or period from another, we will ignore underlying tendencies that, with extraordinary universality, have greatly expanded the material and cultural conditions for freedom on various levels of individual and social self-understanding. By grossly emphasizing disjunctions, social isolates, unique configurations, and chance events, we will reduce shared, clearly common social developments to an archipelago of cultures, each essentially unrelated to those that preceded and followed it.” (162-163)
Bookchin argues there is a “legacy of freedom” or a tradition of increasing approximation toward freedom and self-consciousness. Civilization verifies this – it is the potentialities of History embodied and partially actualized. It consists of the material, cultural, and psychological advances that humanity has made. The “dialectic of freedom” has emerged and reemerged in recurring struggles for freedom that have expanded freedom and cooperation. There is also a “legacy of domination” yet this, Bookchin argues, is the realm of the irrational. That which defies rational interpretation remains an event, not History in the dialectical sense of the unfolding of humanity’s potentialities for freedom, etc. Progress is the advance of freedom over domination.
“The denial of a rational universal History, of Civilization, of Progress, and of social continuity renders any historical perspective impossible and hence any revolutionary praxis meaningless except as a matter of personal, indeed, often very personal, taste.” (167)
History is an ever-developing “whole”, but not in a predestined or predetermined sense. Nor are humans the tools of the “God of History” that mythically operates unseen and carries out the final self-realization of History. Humans are active agents who may or may not make real their potentialities. There may or may not be an “end of history”, a finality to the historical process, because “History forms its own ideal of [the notions of the rational, the democratic, the free, and the cooperative] at various times, which in turn have been expanded and enriched.” (168)
