Introduction
Most of today’s major states originated in a revolution, the USA doubly so; first the Revolutionary War of Independence, 1775-83, and then the second American Revolution of 1861-65, which crushed the economic and political power of the slave oligarchy and secured the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Revolutions have been, and will continue to be facts of life because the structural contradictions that prevail both politically and economically due to the class nature of societies, do not simply fade away. The ruling classes resist the elimination of their privileges to the very end, with all the oppressive means at their disposal. Revolutions are the birth pains whereby the overthrow of the old relations is realised and a new, more democratic, less despotic, society emerges.
The world has entered a new global crisis of imperialism, similar in many ways to the impasse seen at the beginning of the twentieth century. The prospect is one of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions; especially so with the relative weakening of the power base of US imperialism as shown by its inability to impose its chosen solution on the Middle East where it had long been the dominant force. The US is increasingly fragile both socially and economically, and while the raising of tariff barriers might bring a temporary lull, such actions can only make things worse in the longer run. Simultaneously, the numerical strength of the working class on a world scale has never been greater, and combined with the growing, and increasingly obvious abyss between a tiny and obscenely wealthy minority, and the impoverished, exploited masses, points to heightened class struggles.
Oppressed people feel weak before their oppressors despite their numerical superiority, because they are on their knees. Revolutions occur when that feeling of weakness and helplessness is overcome, when the mass of the people suddenly thinks “we won’t take it any more”, and acts accordingly. A revolution is the combination of the sudden massive active intervention of huge numbers of ordinary people into political life and the overthrow of the ruling class. When the majority of the people refuse to be intimidated any longer; when they refuse to stay on their knees; when they recognise the fundamental weakness of their oppressors, they can become transformed overnight from seemingly subdued and helpless into performing exceptional acts of heroism, self-sacrifice, and endurance.
It is in just such situations that reformists of all hues attempt to restrain the revolutionary energies of the masses by taking political control and directing the insurrection into channels safe for the exploiters. In countries dominated by imperialism they do this by maintaining that the best way to achieve democracy and improve living conditions is to support the development of a national, bourgeois democracy. This capitalist path of development is particularly favoured by academics as the means of eliminating the repressive states that exist in Latin America. And this argument is often supported by the liberal wing of imperialism which appreciates that while such a perspective can lead to some reforms (usually temporary), it poses no serious, long-term threat to imperialist interests.
This line of argument is also championed by national Communist Parties which assert the opportunist argument that the priority in underdeveloped countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela is the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and this has priority over the struggle for socialism. This argument has its roots in the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution, when the ‘theory of stages’, together with ‘socialism in one country’, and ‘peaceful co-existence’, was developed not in response to the situations in the countries concerned, but to preserve the power and privileges of the Russian bureaucracy. Stalinist discipline was imposed on the international communist movement, and the national Communist Parties became little more than transmission belts for the international policies of the Russian bureaucracy. When applied to colonial and under-developed countries, this class-collaborationist perspective became the ‘theory of stages’, according to which the task of the Communist Parties is to enable the national bourgeoisie to take power in a revolution against imperialism. Since then, Communist Parties have consistently sought to identify an anti-imperialist wing within the national bourgeoisie with which to unite against the imperialists.
During World War II, this meant the national Communist Parties openly supported bourgeois dictators such as Batista in Cuba, and Somoza in Nicaragua, because they were formally fighting fascism. This was not the case, however, with the most able Communists who began their analyses of Latin American societies before the Stalinist degeneration. We show that the founders of the Communist movement in Latin America, revolutionary leaders such as Julio Mella in Cuba, and José Mariátegui in Peru, developed their own theories, and now that their writings are available it is clear they argued for a strategy that was strikingly close to that of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
Theoretical distortions of Marxism were integral to the Stalinist degeneration, in particular, Marxism was perverted into economic determinism whereby human history became a rigid series: slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism, in that order, were the stages through which all societies passed. The feudal nature of Spanish colonialism, left important cultural legacies and Stalinist historians sought to justify a political liaison with the national bourgeoisie, by falsely claiming that the feudal nature of the latifundia persisted into the late twentieth century.
The history of Latin America gives a certain form to the class struggle. The great liberators, such as Simón Bolívar, correctly understood that Central and South America could tear themselves out of enslavement and backwardness only by uniting all their states into one powerful federation. This is an important reason why as American replaced Spanish imperialism, it imposed on Central America a patchwork of small states, each with a belated and already decaying capitalism, kept in power either by direct US military intervention or comprador strong men who imposed military dictatorships. The American bourgeoisie, during its historic rise, united the northern half of the American continent into a single country, but now uses its power to weaken and enslave the southern half. We show that the belated South American bourgeoisie, are thoroughly corrupt agents of a foreign power, and are quite unable to lead a struggle to achieve national independence. We show that the popular masses, led by a young proletariat, are capable and willing to carry through the national democratic revolution, against the bloody violence of the native compradors and world imperialism. We also show that the gains made in such a revolution can be safeguarded only by taking the first steps towards a socialist state. The natural slogan will be: the Soviet United States of Central and South America.
In practice, the theory of stages means handing economic authority to the capitalists. In Nicaragua and Venezuela this was most clearly seen in the refusal to implement a thorough land reform programme to end the latifundia. We argue that the theory of stages has proved a fatal trap for bourgeois democratic, anti-imperialist revolutions in the ‘third world’ and this book describes and analyses three cases in which this theory has been tested in practice: Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. These were chosen because, despite significant common features, the revolutions in the three countries have unfolded in quite different ways. We show how, in all three countries, the national bourgeois, when faced with a make-or-break choice, sided with imperialism against the democratic revolution.
In Cuba, the revolution has been to the benefit of the great majority of the population because it went all the way to abolish capitalism. In Nicaragua and Venezuela, the revolutionary masses initially made substantial gains but, gradually, those gains were subverted and now the great majority of the population are no better, and possibly worse off than before the revolutions. We explain the qualitative difference between the Cuban, and the Nicaraguan and Venezuelan revolutions in terms of the theory of permanent revolution, and the categorical failure of the reformist theory of stages. We show that, in the epoch of imperialism, to achieve the demands of the bourgeois democratic revolution: national independence, return of land seized by the latifundios to the peasants, a democratic state, greater social equality, and an end to the oppression of women, black people and national minorities, the revolution must take the first steps towards socialism. We demonstrate that the alternative theory, that claims these progressive, but still, bourgeois democratic measures will be achieved by developing a national capitalism, is a sure-fire way of ensuring the continued dominance of imperialism.
The theory of stages is prettified by being presented in terms of the coming together of the widest possible popular alliance against imperialism and its agents. The nation’s bourgeoisie, urban petty-bourgeoisie, proletariat and peasantry will unite in a common struggle against a common foe. ‘People’s power’ will seize only the enterprises and businesses of the imperialists, the compradors and the supposedly feudal landed estates. However, as Augusto Sandino found by his own experience as a fighter for national liberation, the national bourgeoisie of Latin America is too servile, too weak, too tied to imperialism to carry through such a struggle; “only the workers and peasants will take the struggle through to its ultimate conclusion”. For Sandino (and later the Stalinists) this meant the popular masses would fight, guns in hands for the national bourgeois revolution, and then having won political power, would allow the bourgeoisie to retain economic power.
The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government formed as a result of the revolutionary upsurge would change social relationships in favour of working people. It would carry out important reforms for the benefit of the masses; education and health provision, improved working and living conditions, the growth of democracy, taking measures for a more equal distribution of wealth, etc. The stagist theory argues that, in a relatively economically backward country such as, say, Nicaragua, it will be the bourgeoisie jointly with the new government that will develop the productive forces, building an effective infrastructure for communications, electrical supply, transportation, water supply and sewage systems, etc. The socialist transition to a state-planned economy will take many years, possibly decades. The reformists invariably obfuscate that, during this period, the state is capitalist, using formulas such as ‘broad popular alliance’ or ‘people’s power’ to disguise the fact that, in practice, economic power remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
The stagist perspective means that the government resulting from the revolutionary uprising voluntarily accepts to be constrained within the laws of capitalism, usually under the misnomer ‘mixed economy’. The revolutionary democratic government would guarantee the property rights of the capitalists, subject to certain conditions, for instance, their refraining from economic sabotage. The new government would need the knowledge, expertise and skills of the middle and professional classes who would retain their managerial positions and be suitably rewarded.
We will show that there are fundamental problems that fatally undermine this schema. At a methodological level, the theory of stages fails to recognise that the roles of the relevant social classes are very different during the rise of capitalism and in the epoch of its decline. In the former, the bourgeoisie overthrew a decadent feudal system and was immensely progressive but, it must be remembered, only in Western Europe and the US. The American Civil War was the last great radical act of international capitalism; with it, the progressive role of the bourgeoisie came to an end. As capitalism extended across the world, it made use of all kinds of pre-capitalist relations in the underdeveloped countries, adapting them to its needs and, in doing so, stunting the growth of the national bourgeoisie.
Marxist analysis, confirmed by the examples described in this book, has shown the roles of the national bourgeoisie during the decline and decay of imperialism is very different from that in its progressive stages. The growth of imperialism and consequent dependence of both big and small native bourgeoisie in underdeveloped countries on it, meant they had neither the capacity nor the will to provide a lead for the masses to carry through a thorough-going democratic transformation of the existing regime. Capitalism in its imperialist phase was a world-wide system that largely eliminated pre-capitalist relations of production, and in doing so bound the emerging national bourgeoisie to it. Now, in the period of capitalism’s decline the bourgeoisie desperately clings to power and is thoroughly reactionary, conservative, anti-democratic, and counter-revolutionary.
In order to justify the theory of stages the Stalinists searched for pre-capitalist formations against which they could unite with the national bourgeois. i.e., the great latifundia, which began as feudal estates, continued to be classified as such by the Stalinists even in the late 1970s when, in their majority, they had developed into capitalist agribusinesses and were fully integrated with the national bourgeoisie and imperialism. The national bourgeoisie may be variegated but it has common interests that far outweigh any sectional differences. Real life has shown that, in its great majority, the national bourgeoisie will, after the revolution, choose to side with imperialism against the popular masses. We show that the ties between the national bourgeoisie and the imperialists are far stronger than any ties between any significant section of the national bourgeoisie and the revolutionary masses.
The examples from Latin America presented here show that, in the twenty-first century, the national bourgeoisie is hostile to a bourgeois-democratic revolution; it is outraged at losing political power, it sees a more equal distribution of wealth as bare-faced robbery, price controls are an intolerable burden to be circumvented, campaigns to end injustice against women and black people are seen as unnatural, and education and healthcare are wastes of money. Egged on, and supported by US imperialism, it does not reconcile to the new regime but plots and plans to take back political power by any means necessary.
Because the stagist theory has as its goal the development of a strong national capitalism, the national bourgeoisie is able to hold the revolutionary-democratic government hostage and, as we show, unless its power is broken, it is only a matter of time before it re-asserts its political dominance, regains state power and re-establishes the control of the imperialist interests that the revolution was meant to break. While revolutionaries remain bound to the stagist theory, the bourgeoisie can and will run rings round them. For example, in both Nicaragua and Venezuela, the bourgeoisie was allowed to retain control of food processing and distribution, and was able to undermine the revolution by economic sabotage, creating artificial shortages of food, medicines and other necessities, deliberately stoking inflation, in a well-orchestrated campaign to wear down the masses and subvert the revolution. In all this they were actively supported by US imperialism.
Popular masses seeking to take control of their lives are a great attractor and a dangerous example. The US will confront and seek to overthrow any popular government that attempts to qualitatively better the living conditions of its people, because such moves are seen as a direct threat to US interests. In all three examples given here the US used military intervention, then trade and financial embargoes to economically paralyse the new regime. In Cuba the national bourgeoisie fled to America, and then with US support attempted a military invasion. In Nicaragua, the national bourgeoisie and US imperialism carried on a war of attrition against the government and the masses. In Venezuela, the national bourgeoisie launched a military coup. After the failure of the military adventures, the US Administration organised and supported prolonged wars of economic sabotage to depress the living standards of the masses and destabilise the regime.
Despite determined attempts by reformists to obfuscate the issue, what revolutions are all about is the class nature of state power. Either the overthrow of the bourgeois-oligarchic state, its army and its repressive apparatus, and the establishment of a workers’ state with one foot in socialism, or the historical tasks of the national democratic revolution will not be completed.
This does not mean that no democratic goals can be achieved under bourgeois or petty-bourgeois governments. In Mexico, for example, a process of semi-industrialisation was accompanied by a degree of land reform greater than that carried out in Nicaragua or Venezuela, and was indispensable for mobilising mass support for the government. However, the dominance of US imperialism remains, and is seen in particularly stark terms with the descent of Mexico’s northern states into war zones in obedience to US demands for a ‘War on Drugs’. Under the unique conditions existing after World War II (1939-1945); world imperialism both as a whole and in its constituent parts was greatly weakened, the victory of the Chinese Revolution and the creation of workers’ states in Eastern Europe, the upsurge in revolutionary struggles across the colonial world, and the refusal of the conscript armies to continue fighting, meant it was temporarily incapable of imposing its will. Under these conditions, many previously colonial countries did achieve political and national independence without overthrowing the capitalist order. In some cases at least, India being the most striking, this was not purely formal but also included a degree of economic autonomy from imperialism, which made an initial industrialisation under national bourgeois ownership possible. However, the ongoing oppression of, in particular, women, the peasantry, and minority religions demonstrates that the revolution is far from completed. The unique conditions are now long gone, and we have returned to the situation where imperialism will intervene directly to stop any national democratic revolution.
The theory of the permanent revolution does require the overthrow of the old state order and a radical agrarian revolution to achieve genuine independence from imperialism. But it does not call for the immediate and complete destruction of all capitalist private property relations. The crucial issue is whether the workers hold governmental and state power. Each country will make its own decisions. Genuine differences will arise when determining the border between expropriation and tolerance of medium-sized capitalists, with all consequential implications for economic growth, social equality and motivation of producers. The issue is whether the capitalist enterprises are allowed to retain so much economic power that they can subvert the policies and programme of the new regime.
Theory predicted, and experience has confirmed, that it is impossible to achieve genuine independence from imperialism and motivate the working class for the tasks of socialist reconstruction of the nation without expropriating big capital (international and national) in agriculture, banking, industrial production, wholesale trade, and transportation.
Events in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, have confirmed these perspectives. Where there was a full break with the old ruling classes and with international capitalism, the historical tasks of the national-democratic revolution were realised. Where the revolution became locked into the stagist perspective, imperialism has re-asserted its dominance.
Of the three revolutions considered in this book, only the Cuban can be considered to have been part of a plan of action; guerrilla warfare preparing the ground for an urban insurrection and a successful general strike. In Nicaragua, a spontaneous general strike and urban insurrection played the decisive role. In Venezuela, it was the spontaneous response of the urban masses from the barrios, taking over the streets to defeat an attempted coup by the army. It is this entry of the broadest masses into political action that is the outstanding characteristic of revolutions.
But it cannot be supposed that the masses are conscious of the unfolding historical process of which they are so important a part. Long-term victory depends above all on the presence of a leadership that incorporates a practical knowledge and theoretical understanding of capitalist society. That leadership must consciously understand the tasks in hand, the need to weld together the oppressed classes and social movements into a force to overthrow the opposing classes which stand in the way of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government transition to a socialist state (Nicaragua and Venezuela) or, in the case of Cuba, the need to introduce the necessary soviet democracy to protect the gains of the socialist revolution.
The absence of such leaderships in the cases of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela is characteristic of the epoch in which we live; correctly categorised as one of a “crisis of leadership”. Obviously, this matter has a personal dimension, and comparison of Fidel Castro, Celia Sánchez and Che Guevara in Cuba with Humberto and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua is living proof of this. But we will argue that, possibly more important, in all three cases what was missing and is desperately needed, is a collective leadership, a party able to correctly apply the theory of the permanent revolution in order to guide the revolutionary masses. The programme and constitution of the party are not determined by the immediate consciousness of the working class but on the basis of Marxist theory and international experience.
So long as the working class is not mobilised by such a party, its actions can rise to revolutionary peaks but its consciousness will remain determined by bourgeois culture. Without Marxist theory and a Marxist party the struggles of the masses will only temporarily and partially challenge bourgeois domination, and will tend to fall back and suffer defeats. Deep crises can arouse tremendous forces, and the task of the party is to maximise these forces and direct them, ensuring they are not dissipated.
Certainly, no workers’ party will be successful if it is not responsive to changes in the moods of the working class. That response is a matter of tactics, of timing, of the form of propaganda, etc., and corresponds to the immediate consciousness of the masses. Of course, the party must have the correct action slogans, and Trotsky’s Transitional Programme (subtitled: the mobilisation of the masses around transitional demands to prepare the conquest of power) provides a method by which these can be determined.
In each of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela the governmental parties originated in guerrilla and military organisations with top-down command, and subsequent links with the national Communist Parties strengthened the bureaucratic nature of the structures. In each case we show that these parties have little in common with a revolutionary party characterised by democracy and centralism; a combination which is not in the least contradictory. The revolutionary party is strictly defined in terms of who is a member, and party members have the right to define party policy. Once agreed, all members are then expected to carry out the decisions made. To obtain an objective assessment of the outcomes, to ensure party policy is best matched to objective conditions, internal democracy is essential.
It would be expected that the more experienced a revolutionary leadership, the more flexible it would be in assisting the ranks to understand the need for a democratic centralist party, to encourage an atmosphere in which differences of opinion can usefully develop the programme and policy of the Marxist movement to match the needs of the moment. Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle is an irrevocable element in party democracy, and the right to form factions is essential for a healthy revolutionary party. It is a Stalinist distortion to say that factions have no place in the revolutionary party, and it reflects the fact that the Stalinists stand in opposition to the revolutionary process.
There are many Socialists who are repelled by the bureaucratic distortions of the Stalinist Parties, as well as by the shameful record of Social-Democracy on a world scale since 1917, and yet fail to free themselves from the theory of stages. It will be seen in the test cases presented here that a major contributing factor is that they perceive the state as neutral in the class struggle, able to assist in building a strong national bourgeoisie and at the same time better the conditions of the masses, and alleviate the exploitation and poverty caused by the operation of the capitalist market. They do not understand, or close their eyes to, the class nature of the state.
We also show that participatory democracy is essential for the masses to overcome such a collaborationist perspective which, certainly in the cases of Nicaragua and Venezuela, is endemic in the state and trade union bureaucracies, which act in collaboration with the bourgeoisie. We argue that direct, soviet-style democracy is a life-and-death requirement for any popular revolution. The bringing of direct democracy into society has been attempted by the masses since the Paris Commune of 1871, but the top-down structures of both Stalinist and guerrilla organisations are inherently non-democratic and bureaucratic. Social-Democratic parties appear less bureaucratic, but only until the leadership faces a serious challenge. The natural democratic form of the working masses is the Soviet which appeared in February 1917, on the basis of the experience of the 1905 Revolution, and was essential for the success of the October Revolution. Soviets are, in their essence, organs of class rule, and cannot be anything else. Bourgeois-democratic institutions of administration can be local councils, municipalities, counties, national parliaments, almost anything you like, but never Soviets.
In this book, the term Workers’ and Peasants’ Government is used to describe the transitional regime after the revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua. In Cuba, the transition was to a workers’ state, but not so in Nicaragua. In Nicaragua the regime leaders had a stagist perspective, of building a national capitalism via a mixed economy. As in all previous cases, this allowed US imperialism to re-assert its dominance. The lack of a direct, participatory democracy in Nicaragua was a major factor in the destruction of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. In Venezuela, the specific conditions; the lack of either a Marxist leadership or any real form of direct democracy, meant the revolutionary upsurge of the masses that could easily have overthrown the bourgeois state and established a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, was reined in and, eventually, dissipated.
The effective participation in the running of society by the masses themselves is unthinkable without Soviet democracy. We see leadership as a two-way street in which the soviets exert control over the leaders through the election (and immediate recall when necessary) of their representatives. Soviet democracy gives the party the power to carry through both the democratic and socialist revolutions, while allowing the masses to exert control on the party. Democracy demands freedom of criticism and local initiatives, conditions incompatible with a bureaucratic regime which fears the masses with a perfectly bourgeois fear.
We explain that counter-revolutions are not simply natural reactions to revolutions, the product of some inevitable social yo-yo. They may originate from the same forces that gave rise to the revolution, but with a qualitative shift in the socio-political relations. A genuine popular revolution generally implies a qualitatively increased level of political activity by the masses, but this cannot be sustained indefinitely, for obvious material and psychological reasons. The great masses of people cannot live permanently at a high level of excitement and expenditure of nervous energy. In this book we describe and discuss the different factors at play in the three countries that led to the decline of mass political activity and, in Nicaragua and Venezuela, generated a deep economic crisis, high levels of unemployment, scarcity of food, and the impoverishment of the working masses.
The recent histories of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are the latest episodes demonstrating the penalty the working masses pay for the absence of revolutionary Marxist parties. Contrary to the expectation of the leaders in the three countries, the national bourgeoisie did not welcome a democratic revolution, did not help develop the economy, did not support education and health provision, fought hard against increasing democratic rights, anti-racist legislation and any redistribution of wealth. In all three countries the national bourgeoisie joined forces with imperialism to reverse the progressive measures made and to re-introduce their own and US imperialism’s stranglehold. In this they were quite prepared to use violent methods, and when these failed, to starve the masses into submission.
We have entered a decisive epoch in the world revolution but, as in Nicaragua and Venezuela, reformists are holding that revolution back. In the face of experience, their solution to social crises is that revolutionary activities must be curtailed; the goal of the revolution must be limited to a progressive, independent bourgeois state. This book is a contribution, intended to convince the exploited and oppressed to reject these false friends and avoid the mistakes made in Nicaragua and Venezuela, to learn from the lessons of the past, and by basing themselves on revolutionary Marxism achieve victory over exploitation and oppression.