Introduction by Alan Woods¶
Core Argument¶
In the introduction to this volume, Alan Woods presents a vigorous defence of Leon Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution, first elaborated in 1904, and argues for its continued relevance as a guide to revolutionary strategy in the epoch of imperialism. The theory emerged from a fundamental disagreement within Russian Social Democracy over the character of the coming revolution. While all tendencies anticipated a bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Mensheviks concluded that the working class must therefore support the liberal bourgeoisie as the presumed leader of progressive change. Trotsky rejected this outright. In a backward country subordinated to imperialism, he argued, the national bourgeoisie is fatally compromised, tied by a thousand threads to feudalism and foreign capital, and thus incapable of fulfilling its own historical tasks. In Russia, the bourgeoisie played a counter-revolutionary role from the outset. Lenin came to agree with Trotsky on this point, though until 1917 he maintained that the Russian revolution could not exceed the limits of capitalism until the workers of Western Europe had first overthrown their own ruling classes.
The theory of permanent revolution contains two essential elements. First, a revolution in a backward, semi-feudal country begins by tackling bourgeois-democratic tasks—land reform, national unification, democratic rights—but is compelled by the logic of class struggle to pass immediately to socialist tasks: the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the nationalisation of the means of production. Second, while the socialist revolution can begin and triumph in a single country, even a backward one, it can only succeed in building socialism if it spreads to more developed nations. This second proposition was accepted by all Bolshevik leaders until 1924, when Stalin and Bukharin advanced the rival theory of socialism in one country.
Woods draws on devastating historical examples to illustrate the consequences of abandoning this perspective. In Sudan and Iraq during the 1950s and 1960s, mass communist parties capable of mobilising millions sought alliances with ‘progressive’ bourgeois and army factions rather than pursuing independent working-class power. In each case, the army, having ridden to power on communist support, turned on its former allies, murdering and jailing them. In Sudan this occurred twice. The most catastrophic example is Indonesia in the 1960s. The Indonesian Communist Party, with three million members and ten million affiliated supporters, plus significant backing within the army, could have taken power and sparked revolution across Asia. Instead, under Maoist influence, it allied with the bourgeois nationalist Sukarno. This left it defenceless when the bourgeoisie, directed by the CIA, massacred at least one and a half million members and sympathisers.
These defeats, Woods insists, were not inevitable. They resulted from a weakness of the subjective factor: the lack of a revolutionary party and leadership. The working class cannot transform society without organisation and consciousness. A revolutionary party must organise the most advanced layers, educate cadres in an international revolutionary perspective, and prepare for a general offensive. Without this, proletarian power remains merely potential. The only way forward for the underdeveloped world is the working-class seizure of power and the construction of a planned, democratically controlled economy. Global capitalism’s deepening crisis creates favourable conditions; victory in any major country will trigger world revolution.