Marx saw societies progressing through distinct historical stages feudal, bourgeois and communist. Trotsky advanced this model by considering how countries at different stages of development influence each other. Developed countries colonise less developed countries and exploit their people and resources. Elsewhere, even as many were kept in poverty, the influence of foreign capital and state-led industrialisation produced novel economic forms and prospects for political alliances and change. The contributors show how, 100 years on from its original publication, Trotsky's theories are hugely useful for understanding today's globalised economy, dominated by US imperialism. The book makes an ideal introduction to Trosky's thinking, and is ideal for students of political theory and development economics.
Marx saw societies progressing through distinct historical stages feudal, bourgeois and communist. Trotsky advanced this model by considering how countries at different stages of development influence each other. Developed countries colonise less developed countries and exploit their people and resources. Elsewhere, even as many were kept in poverty, the influence of foreign capital and state-led industrialisation produced novel economic forms and prospects for political alliances and change. The contributors show how, 100 years on from its original publication, Trotsky's theories are hugely useful for understanding today's globalised economy, dominated by US imperialism. The book makes an ideal introduction to Trosky's thinking, and is ideal for students of political theory and development economics.
100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results and Prospects
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Overview
Marx saw societies progressing through distinct historical stages feudal, bourgeois and communist. Trotsky advanced this model by considering how countries at different stages of development influence each other. Developed countries colonise less developed countries and exploit their people and resources. Elsewhere, even as many were kept in poverty, the influence of foreign capital and state-led industrialisation produced novel economic forms and prospects for political alliances and change. The contributors show how, 100 years on from its original publication, Trotsky's theories are hugely useful for understanding today's globalised economy, dominated by US imperialism. The book makes an ideal introduction to Trosky's thinking, and is ideal for students of political theory and development economics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745325217 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 06/13/2006 |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Bill Dunn is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is author of Global Political Economy (Pluto, 2008), Global Restructuring and the Power of Labour (Palgrave, 2004), and co-editor, with Hugo Radice, of 100 Years of Permanent Revolution (Pluto, 2006).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Permanent Revolution: Results and Prospects 100 Years On1
Hugo Radice and Bill Dunn
The year 2006 marks the centenary of the publication of Trotsky's Results and Prospects. This short essay gave the first considered articulation of his theory of permanent revolution. In a sense, it therefore represents the founding document or original sin of 'Trotskyism'. The elaboration and defence of its perspective would remain a primary feature of Trotsky's political life (Deutscher 1954).
The basic ideas are straightforward. We will elaborate briefly below, while several of the subsequent chapters illuminate particular aspects in more detail. In short, Trotsky rejected a 'stages' theory of revolution – that Russia would have to wait until capitalism was fully developed before socialism could be put on the agenda. Any Russian revolution had to be understood not in isolation, but as a world event both in its causes and its consequences. Despite its absolute 'backwardness', competition with the West, and penetration of capital from the West, produced vast concentrations of workers capable of challenging Tsarist power. Russia alone lacked the material basis for establishing socialism, but the seizure of power by a workers' government could lead an international revolutionary process. On a world scale, the development of capitalism already provided ample economic foundations for socialism.
The last 100 years have not produced the envisaged international revolution. Meanwhile several attempts to build socialisms on a national basis have produced monstrous dictatorships. These also provided easy targets for the defenders of capitalism and the status quo. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, for many the Marxist project is redundant and its continued articulation at best quaint. Yet reading Trotsky today one is struck by his potential relevance. The contemporary talk of 'globalisation' again insists, with Trotsky, that we have to understand the world in its interconnections. National economies are not separate and independent either from each other or from a global capitalist system. Still we experience poverty and 'backwardness' alongside extremes of wealth and the latest technology. Again, we still grapple with the problems of the causes and consequences of that world system's unevenness and with the relations between economic and political action. These are longstanding questions of social science, but they are being played out with renewed urgency in the anti-globalisation or anticapitalist movement.
The reputation of Trotsky's theory has varied with that of its author. Perhaps most commonly it has suffered the worst of fates: neglect. Initially printed in small numbers and quickly suppressed, even many leading Russian Marxists, including Lenin, had not read Results and Prospects before the successful revolution of 1917. Afterwards, for a while, the coincidence of Trotsky's thinking with that of the Bolsheviks, whom he joined in 1917, and his own leading role in the revolution and early Soviet republic, made his works essential reading. Results and Prospects was republished in Moscow, and translated and used by the sympathising communist parties around the world. It was accepted as a prophetic account of the development of the Russian Revolution. Moreover, its analysis also informed strategy beyond Russia, particularly in other poorer countries. However, the revolutionary wave which swept Europe, and on which workers' power in Russia depended according to Trotsky's theory, soon waned. Stalin's triumph again marginalised Trotsky and his supporters. The theory's denial of the possibility of successfully establishing socialism in one country rendered it incompatible with the new aims of the Soviet leadership.
Thereafter, Results and Prospects and the theory of Permanent Revolution have lived something of a twilight existence. Trotsky's explicit self-defence, published as Permanent Revolution, was printed in runs not much larger than Results and Prospects. It was repudiated by the political mainstreams both East and West – it was anathema equally to apologists of capitalism and to those of 'actually existing socialism'. Meanwhile, the sheer weight of vilification understandably put some of Trotsky's supporters on the defensive, and may thereby have contributed to some formulaic interpretations rather than critical reflection and strategic application.
As a result, if this volume hopes to rescue the theory from wholly inappropriate neglect or opprobrium, it does so in a spirit of sympathetic but critical appraisal. Trotsky was not infallible, and his work is open to various interpretations, but he produced original and important contributions to Marxist theory, which are still well worth revisiting.
Subsequent chapters will situate Trotsky's theory within a wider tradition of Marxist and other socialist writing, discuss some of the problems and reconsider its contemporary relevance. The book is overtly partial in two senses. It does not claim to offer a comprehensive or definitive survey, and cannot hope to consider all the historical experiences or places where it might be used today. We particularly regret that it was not possible to include more Southern perspectives. Furthermore, all the authors are broadly sympathetic to Trotsky's project – some are members of avowedly Trotskyist organisations – but all try to examine his contribution in a constructive way, avoiding either demonology or hagiography. Many of the pieces look beyond Results and Prospects and examine the world according to its spirit rather than its letter. We hope that together they will help to rehabilitate an important contribution to Marxist theory which, whatever flaws it may have, can continue to stimulate and inform a wide range of contemporary debates.
In the rest of this introduction, rather than outline the subsequent chapters, which are short enough to speak for themselves, we briefly sketch Trotsky's argument and outline its significance. The reader should be warned, of course, that questions of interpretation and application remain hotly disputed.
'Permanent Revolution', as Trotsky acknowledges, was a rather 'high-flown expression [which] defines the thought that the Russian revolution, although directly concerned with bourgeois aims, could not stop short at those aims' (1971:8). The term appears to have been coined by Marx, writing about the 1848 revolutions. Although his usage differs somewhat from that of Trotsky, for both authors it conveys more the idea of continuing or uninterrupted rather than perpetual or never-ending revolution (Draper 1978:201).
Marx did at one point consider the possibility that Russia might skip capitalism and move towards socialism based on communal peasant traditions (Marx 1970). However, for the most part, particularly after Marx's death, orthodoxy saw development as a gradual evolution, with more backward countries mimicking the progress of the more advanced. Unlike various earlier utopian proposals, historical materialism maintained that capitalist industrial development was a necessary precursor of socialism. It created the material basis for an advanced classless society and a working class, united by their common propertylessness, and in practice brought together in ever-larger firms and workplaces, which could achieve this. The success of the most economically advanced countries would force others to follow a similar economic course and their political development would accordingly have to go through a similar phase of 'bourgeois' democracy before socialism became a realistic prospect. Countries that had not yet had bourgeois revolutions along the lines of the great French Revolution needed to do so to begin the process of capitalist accumulation, itself a necessary precondition for socialism.
In Russia this position was exemplified in the Menshevik programme of support for an anticipated bourgeois or capitalist revolution. Russian Marxism had split in 1903, initially over organisational questions. Soon, however, political differences developed, with the Mensheviks becoming the more moderate wing, the Bolsheviks the more radical. Initially, however, particularly in the heady revolutionary months of 1905, the separation and this distinction were far from clear-cut. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, for the Mensheviks, workers could not be expected to play an independent role, but should rather support the bourgeoisie against Tsarism. Any prospects for workers' power in Russia lay in the distant future. The best Marxists could do was to encourage capitalist development and liberal democracy. To expect more was 'utopian', the antithesis of 'scientific socialism'.
The Bolsheviks had a slightly more complex position. They agreed with the fundamental proposition that Russian development along bourgeois democratic lines was necessary. However, they believed the Russian capitalist class to be too politically weak, too dependent on Tsarism, to effect such a transformation. Instead, an alliance of workers and peasants could achieve the democratic revolution and crush reaction. This would involve confiscating large landed estates and introducing pro-labour reforms such as the eighthour day. But it could not go much further than this; Russia was still a backward agrarian country requiring a prolonged period of capitalist development before it became ripe for a genuinely socialist transformation.
Trotsky argues something more subtle. In particular, Russian 'results and prospects' in the light of the 1905 revolution were not simply a Russian phenomenon but were conditioned by Russia's relations with the rest of the world.
Although the particular argument is original, Trotsky articulates a version of Marxism which can be traced to Marx's own writings, and elements of which can be found amongst his more sophisticated followers. Trotsky himself had begun to develop his ideas in collaboration with fellow emigre Alexander Parvus in Germany in the years before 1905. He also cites approvingly and develops ideas from Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). But Trotsky's perspective is also crucially shaped by the experiences of the 1905 revolution in Russia. Here, suddenly, in this backward country, were not only mass strikes but also a new form of alternative government, the workers' council or soviet. These were bodies of deputies, directly elected and immediately accountable to the workers who elected them. Trotsky himself had become the chairman of the key St Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies during the final days of the revolution.
Written during the revolution and while Trotsky was awaiting trial in its immediate aftermath, Results and Prospects was an attempt to combine the lessons of the experiences of that revolution with a Marxist analysis of Russian and world capitalist development. It was this combination of the peculiar and the general, an analysis of the specifics of the Russian Revolution but within the wider global context, that provided the basic prerequisite for an adequate evaluation of strategy and tactics for Russian Marxists.
In 1906 Trotsky argued that Russia was indeed in most respects a backward, mainly agrarian society, less than 50 years from the emancipation from serfdom. The vast majority of the population were peasants rather than proletarians. The state was an absolutist monarchy, whose concessions to constitutional rule were few and ephemeral. There was relatively little capitalist economic development and no 'bourgeois' democracy. But it was not simply backward.
However, history does not march forward with each country following a common blueprint and progressing through discrete stages. Rather it is profoundly uneven – it occurs differently in different places, with the more 'backward' influenced by what has gone before elsewhere. This also means that different developmental 'levels' or 'stages' may be combined, found together at the same time in the same country.
Therefore, the conditions of the classically 'bourgeois' French Revolution were not recreated in 1848 and were still less likely to recur in twentieth-century Russia. In France in 1789 'the bourgeoisie, consistently in all its factions, regarded itself as the leader of the nation, rallied the masses to the struggle, gave them slogans and dictated their fighting tactics' (Trotsky 1962: 185). No class capable of playing this role existed in Russia, where capitalism was too cowardly, being either 'an offspring of the State' (1962:173) or 'to a considerable extent of foreign origin' (1962:181). The urban petty-bourgeois sansculottes, so crucial in France, simply did not exist. Trotsky therefore condemned as the method of Mensheviks and 'educated philistines' the reduction of social analysis to 'crude historical analogies' (1962:161). We should not expect the actors to play out the parts assigned to them by previous revolutions (although in identifying Stalin's rise to power as the Russian 'Thermidor' it could be argued that Trotsky himself did not always heed his own advice).
However, this does not simply lead to pessimism about the prospects for revolutionary transformation. Russian development could not simply be understood as peculiar and uneven. It was also combined in two senses. Firstly, in its integration into the world economy, which had a number of important aspects. In particular, the Tsarist state devoted a huge proportion of its resources to competing militarily with more advanced capitalist powers. On the one hand, this exacerbated the general backwardness, taking surpluses that might otherwise have been invested more productively. On the other hand, it brought into Russia first the products and then the machines of Western capitalism. Industrial output, and particularly productivity levels, were still low by Western standards, but these rocketed in the last years of the mid nineteenth century, particularly in military-related areas like railway building, iron production and oil. Thus initially through the intermediary of the state and later in the form of direct investments, Western capital shaped Russian political economy.
Rather than a gradual development through petty-commodity production, with workers in small-scale manufacturing, in Russia 'the proletariat immediately found itself concentrated in tremendous masses, while between the masses and the autocracy there stood a capitalist bourgeoisie, very small in numbers, isolated from the "people", half-foreign, without historical traditions, and inspired only by the greed for gain' (Trotsky 1962:183). So while the bourgeoisie was reckoned unwilling and unfit to make a revolution, the working class was much more concentrated than Russia's overall level of 'backwardness' would suggest. Already by the turn of the century, the proportion of Russian workers in 'large enterprises', those of more than 500 or 1,000 employees, was much higher than it was, for example, in Germany or Belgium (Trotsky 1971). The potential this gave workers was recognised by the Bolsheviks. But for them, because workers remained a small minority within a backward country lacking the material basis for the construction of socialism, they would have to rein in their demands, to pursue only a certain minimum programme of reform.
For Trotsky, in contrast, Russian development was also combined in a second sense. Rather than being discrete, stages of Russian development were combined. A society in many ways still feudal also experienced some of the most advanced forms of capitalism and with them the potential to move beyond them. Accordingly, the proletariat 'must adopt the tactics of permanent revolution, i.e., must destroy the barriers between the minimum and maximum programme of Social Democracy' (Trotsky 1962:163). Russian workers could not be expected to stop short at bourgeois democratic demands. The 1905 revolution had already raised the possibility of Soviet power, of workers combining the bourgeois and socialist revolutions. This did not abandon historical materialism, and in particular the insistence on an adequate material basis for socialism. The bourgeoisie ruled in all capitalist countries and while it would be 'false, dead, scholastic' to describe all countries taken separately as ripe for socialism the 'world economy in its entirety [wa]s indubitably ripe' (Trotsky 1962:130).
Trotsky's understanding of the revolution was substantially borne out in 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to offer a similar prognosis and lead the October Revolution. This did indeed also provide a massive impulse to other revolutionary movements, particularly in Europe, and for the next few years the prospect of international workers' revolution seemed very real. Ultimately, of course, the revolutions elsewhere failed and Russia remained isolated. A very different form of society emerged in the USSR from that which its founders had envisaged.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2006 Bill Dunn and Hugo Radice.
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Table of Contents
1. Permanent Revolution: Results and Prospects 100 Years On, Hugo Radice and Bill Dunn
2. From Uneven to Combined Development, Neil Davidson
3. The Marxism of Results and Prospects, Michael Löwy
4. Trotsky, 1905, and the anticipation of the Concept of Decline, Hillel Ticktin
5. Results and Prospects: Trotsky and his Critics, Paul Blackledge
6. The Baggage of Exodus, Daniel Bensaïd
7. Beyond Trotsky: Extending Combined and Uneven Development, Colin Barker
8. From World Market to World Economy, Sam Ashman
9. Trotsky, Social Science, and Irish Revolution, Michael Hanagan
10. Uneven and Combined Development and ‘Revolution of Backwardness’: The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: 1906 - 1911, Kamran Matin
11. A Veteran of the Epoch of Revolution Looks Forward: Trotsky, Serge and the Soviets, Suzi Weissman
12. Trotsky’s Omission: Labour’s Role in Combined and Uneven Development, Andrew Herod
13. Combined and Uneven Development as a Strategic Concept, Bill Dunn
14. The Geography of Uneven Development, Neil Smith
15. The Reinvention of Populism: Islamist Responses to Capitalist Development in the Contemporary Maghreb, Alejandro Colás
16. China: Unevenness, Combination, Revolution? Neil Davidson
17. Explaining uneven and combined development in South Africa, Patrick Bond and Ashwin Desai
Index