Basic Postulates¶
Core Argument¶
In this concluding chapter, Trotsky distils the core theses of the theory of permanent revolution, arguing that the question has been forced beyond the confines of old Russian factional disputes and now defines the character and methods of the international revolution as a whole. The central claim is that in backward, colonial, and semi-colonial countries, the tasks of democratic and national emancipation—above all the agrarian and national questions—cannot be solved under bourgeois leadership. The peasantry, though numerically dominant, cannot play an independent political role; it must follow either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. Consequently, the only viable form of revolutionary alliance between workers and peasants is one in which the proletarian vanguard, organised in the Communist Party, holds political leadership. This means that the democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which bases itself on an alliance with the peasantry and proceeds immediately to solve democratic tasks.
Trotsky engages in a sustained polemic against the Comintern’s retention of the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,” which he treats as a formula long exhausted by history. He argues that this slogan, when counterposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat, dissolves the proletariat into the petty-bourgeois masses and creates favourable conditions for the hegemony of the national bourgeoisie. He draws on the Russian experience of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution to argue that no intermediate regime—between Kerenskyism and Bolshevik power, between the Kuomintang and proletarian dictatorship—is possible. The Comintern’s insistence on this slogan is denounced as a betrayal of Marxism and the October tradition.
The chapter also develops the international dimension of permanent revolution. Socialist construction cannot be completed within national limits; it begins on the national arena but unfolds on the international and is completed only on the world arena. Backward countries may reach the dictatorship of the proletariat sooner than advanced ones, but they will arrive at socialism later. Trotsky attacks the theory of socialism in one country as a break with internationalism that leads to national messianism. He argues that the world division of labour—the dependence of Soviet industry on foreign technology, the reliance of European productive forces on Asiatic raw materials—makes independent socialist construction in any single country impossible. The theory of socialism in one country is linked, in his analysis, to the theory of the kulak growing into socialism and the neutralisation of the world bourgeoisie; all stand or fall together. The Comintern, under this theory, is reduced to an auxiliary weapon against military intervention, its programme an eclectic attempt to reconcile irreconcilables. The struggle of the Communist Left Opposition for a correct programme is inseparable from the struggle between the theory of permanent revolution and the theory of socialism in one country—a struggle, Trotsky insists, between the basic ideas of Marx and Lenin and the eclecticism of the centrists.