The International Communist Movement part1

KOREA COLUMN 24

The International Communist Movement: Part 1

The last two of these columns have dealt with Stalinism in the Soviet Union. This one deals with the history and fate of the international communist movement.

Internationalism has always been a fundamental principle of Marxism and genuine socialism, and Marxists have always sought to organise their forces internationally. Faced with the betrayal of internationalism by the majority of the parties of the Socialist or Second International in 1914, when they supported their own ruling classes in the First World War, Lenin speedily grasped the need for a new (third) international. However, circumstances – primarily the combination of the War and lack of forces – prevented the realisation of this project until fifteen months after the Russian Revolution.

In March 1919 the First Congress of the (Third) Communist International was convened in Moscow in conditions of civil war in Russia and a rising tide of revolution sweeping Europe. Its aim was to create more than just a federation of national parties. The Comintern, as it became known, was to be a single international revolutionary organisation – the Russian Bolshevik Party on a world scale – capable of leading the international proletariat to victory worldwide.

At the time of its First Congress the Comintern was still relatively weak. Apart from the Russian Communist Party the bulk of the foreign Communist Parties participating were from Eastern Europe – the Hungarian, Polish, Latvian, Estonian CPs and so on. From Western Europe and elsewhere came mainly the representatives of small groups or trends, not yet fully formed parties and in many cases not yet fully formed Communists. But by the Second Congress in July 1920 not only had the number of parties represented increased dramatically, so had the size of their support in the working class, especially in Germany.

By now the Communist International had emerged as the highest point yet reached in the history of the organisation of the international working class and the most powerful threat to the rule of the bourgeoisie that has existed up to and including the present day. For the first and only time in history, three things seemed to coincide: a deep and general crisis of the world system, a massive upsurge in militancy and consciousness in the working class internationally, and the existence of strong interlinked revolutionary organisations in a number of countries. Tragically the Comintern did not succeed in its aim and the opportunity was missed.

Why was this? Essentially it was due to a failure of revolutionary leadership. The two crucial defeats were in Italy and Germany and in both cases the passivity of the workers leaders was the decisive.factor. In 1919-20 Italy experienced its biennio rossi, its ‘two red years’, in which there were mass strikes and large scale factory occupations, especially in Turin and Milan. But the leadership of the main working class party, the Italian Socialist Party, which had flirted with the Comintern, sat on its hands and did nothing. The result was not only the missing of a revolutionary opportunity but a terrible reactionary backlash. The two red years were followed by two black years, which culminated in the conquest of power by Mussolini’s fascists.

In terms of building a real revolutionary party it could be said that Italian Marxists were strategically late and tactically premature. On the one hand the revolutionary left remained for too long attached to the wavering and reformist leadership of the Socialist Party. On the other the actual break to form a Communist Party, when it came in 1921, was rushed through in such a way as to minimise the forces won from reformism.

In Germany the process was more drawn out but no less catastrophic in the end. The German Revolution began in October 1918 with a mutiny of sailors in Kiel which spread like wildfire through the German armed forces. Within weeks the Kaiser abdicated and power was assumed by the leaders of German Social Democracy. In January 1919 the revolutionary Spartacus League (shortly to become the German Communist Party) attempted to transform this democratic revolution into a workers’ revolution through an uprising in Berlin. The rising was premature and was put down by an alliance of the Social Democratic Government and right wing militia, called the Freikorps. Its leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxumberg, - Luxemberg was Germany’s foremost Marxist and revolutionary at this time – were murdered.

The so-called Weimar Republic with its Social Democratic government continued but so did the revolutionary crisis. In March 1920 came the Kapp Putsch, a rightwing military attempt to crush the republic, but it was defeated by a nationwide general strike. Then in 1921 the Communist Party, which had grown massively, launched another revolutionary offensive called the March Action. Again it was premature, and again it was defeated.

Still the chronic instability of German society persisted and it all came to a head once again in the summer and autumn of 1923.when Germany was gripped by extreme hyperinflation. In January 1923 1 US $ = 18,000 marks, in June 1$ = 100,000 marks, in December 1$ = 4000 billion marks! With workers carrying their wages in wheelbarrows, support for the Communist Party mushroomed. But having twice acted prematurely the German Communist leaders, acting on advice from Moscow, now did nothing - the moment was lost and German capitalism restabilised itself, at least for five years.

The consequences of this can hardly be overstated. If the German Revolution had succeeded the likelihood is that capitalism would quickly have fallen in all the countries between Russia and Germany, and the possibility is that this would have created such revolutionary momentum that we would be living in a socialist world today. As it was the German defeat brought the post war revolutionary crisis to an end and ensured the isolation of the Russian Revolution, thus massively reinforcing the tendencies to bureaucratic degeneration and Stalinism that were already beginning to manifest themselves.

Behind the failures in Italy and Germany and elsewhere in Europe (e.g. Hungary and Bulgaria) lay the fact that in the short period of time available, less than four years, it proved impossible to transfer to the fledgling European CPs the experience and lessons of revolutionary strategy and tactics acquired by Lenin and the Bolsheviks over decades. Unfortunately the years that followed showed that it was much easier to transfer to the international movement the methods and policies of Stalinism. The consequences of this for the Comintern and for the international working class will be discussed in part 2 of this article.

John Molyneux

8 June 2007

Anti-War Art at the ICA

ICA: MEMORIAL TO THE IRAQ WAR

Visual art has, in general, been slow to respond to the challenge of the Iraq War and the ‘War on Terror’, but now things seem to be changing. This year we have seen Mark Wallinger’s brilliant State Britain (based on Brian Haw’s protest in Parliament Square) at the Tate Britain, which is currently favourite for the Turner Prize. Then there have been a couple of small shows in East London, plus there will be work on show at Marxism and now the Institute for Contemporary Arts has weighed in with Memorial to the Iraq War.

Deliberately timed to coincide with the departure of Blair, the ICA has invited twenty five artists from many different countries, including Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, USA and Britain, to exhibit works which could serve as memorials to the war or which are proposals for such memorials. The idea of a ‘memorial’ to a war that is still going on is obviously open to challenge, and, indeed, is challenged in a written piece by one of the invited artists.

However the aim, explicitly stated in the Newspaper/ Catalogue accompanying the exhibition, is ‘ to show to a wider public that contemporary art is more capable of social and political engagement than perhaps they thought’, and the idea of a memorial is, perhaps, a vehicle for facilitating this. The main question is does it succeed and the answer has to be only partially.

As a literal public monument only one work here makes a real visual impact – Iraqi Stars by Marc Bijl, featuring three large five pointed stars, one green (for Iraq), one white (for the US coalition), one red/ black (for blood and anarchy). But many of the works, although not really viable memorial proposals, nevertheless ask the viewer to engage thoughtfully with various aspects of the war.

The first piece we encounter is Nate Sloman’s installation, Never Ending Story, consisting of old broken petrol pumps. This establishes from the start the central role of oil, but it also, more subtly, evokes America’s past – the America of Ed Hopper perhaps – and the whole history of the oil/car economy. Jalal Toufic’s Dual-Use Memorial highlight’s the extreme intellectual isolation of Iraq through sanctions; a rarely mentioned aspect of the conflict, worth remembering in the context of debates about boycotting Israel.

Jeremy Deller’s Twin Cities is small and simple, almost minimalist; just outline maps of Britain and Iraq with Iraqi cities marked on the map of Britain and the equivalent British cities marked on Iraq e.g. Aberdeen/ Kirkut, Mosul/Derry, but it makes its point effectively. Also moving are Collier Schorr’s three sketches focussing on soldiers who have been maimed and crippled – a perennial feature of war always neglected by the media, but dealt with by artists from Rembrandt to Otto Dix and George Grosz and many poets, singers, film makers etc.

The proposal I liked most, though it is completely unrealisable, is from Sam Durant. It suggests collecting war debris in Iraq and shipping it to London and Washington where it would be piled up round public buildings, beginning with 10 Downing St and the White House. This is accompanied by an illustrative photomontage and the famous quote from Walter Benjamin about the Angel of History.

On the down side, there are some pieces which approach the subject so obliquely that they barely register and there is nothing here to match the power of Wallinger, let alone the great anti war art of the past – Goya, Picasso, Nash, Dix etc. But this relative failure is not cause for condemnation. Masterpieces will not come to order and the effort to engage should be applauded and encouraged.

John Molyneux

3 June, 2007

Memorial to the Iraq War, Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London

23 May – 27 June. Admission: Mon-Fri £2/£1.50 concs. Sat- Sun £3/£2 concs.

Edited version of this article appears in Socialist Worker, 9 June 2007.

HI Libertad

Libertad, I am happy to communicate with you . Please email me
on john@molyneux8652.freeserve.co.uk

John Molyneux

The Nature of Stalinism

KOREA COLUMN 23

The Nature of Stalinism

Stalinism is an appropriate name for the political regime operating in the Soviet Union in the nineteen thirties and forties because a) Joseph Stalin was its absolute ruler in those years, and b) the name rightly differentiates this regime from socialism or communism in general, and from the Leninist period of Soviet power that preceded it. However, the term does not tell us anything about the economic, social or class character of the society over which Stalin and Stalinism presided.

What was the economic dynamic of Stalinist Russia – was it fundamentally the same or different from that of western capitalism? Was it fundamentally a class divided society or a classless society, or was it a transitional society on the way to becoming classless? If there were classes in Russia, what classes were they and which was the ruling class? These questions which were all bound up with one another and in reality all boiled down to one – the class nature of Soviet Union – were the subject of intense debate among socialists and Marxists for more than sixty years.

The issue was hugely significant not only in Russia itself and in other similar ‘communist’ countries, but everywhere in the world because the Soviet Union claimed, and to a considerable extent exercised, leadership of the whole international communist movement. The issue remains important today, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and of East European communism, partly because some Stalinist and semi-Stalinist regimes survive – most notably North Korea – partly for historical reasons, and partly because, theoretically, it goes to the heart of what we mean by capitalism and socialism.

In the course of the debate four main positions emerged:1) that the Soviet Union was socialist; 2) that it was a degenerated workers’ state; 3) that it was neither capitalist nor socialist but bureaucratic collectivist; 4) that it was state capitalist.

The first position was by far the most common – it was shared by mainstream ‘communists’, many social democrats, and by the right, and therefore became the ‘common sense’ view - but it was also the most damaging. On the left it often involved the denial of well established historical fact, but at bottom it rested on the idea that the essence of socialism is simply state ownership of property, not working class self emancipation or workers’ power. The right agreed with this because they regarded workers’ power as impossible anyway and knew that identifying Stalinism with socialism discredited socialism in the eyes of the masses.

The degenerated workers’ state position was associated with Trotsky and Trotskyism. It argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy had betrayed the aims of the Russian Revolution and was a counter revolutionary force hostile to the development of socialism in the Soviet Union and to workers’ revolution internationally. It called for a political revolution to overthrow Stalinism. However, it also insisted that, by virtue of its nationalised property relations, the Soviet economy remained post capitalist and this made Russia a workers’ state which was more progressive than world capitalism and had to be defended by socialists. The strength of Trotsky’s position was that it combined revolutionary socialist opposition to both Stalinism and western capitalism. Its weakness was that it opened the door to separating socialism from the self emancipation of the working class.

The bureaucratic collectivist position was first developed within the Trotskyist movement (particularly by the American, Max Schachtman) in opposition to the workers’ state view, but has subsequently been adopted by various academics. It rejects the idea that state ownership equals socialism or a workers’ state, but accepts the idea that state ownership means the abolition of capitalism. It maintains that Russia represented a new form of class society, with a new ruling class. Unfortunately the advocates of this theory have not been able to identify clearly the economic dynamic of this new mode of production or its position in historical development. This has produced confusion as to whether ‘bureaucratic collectivist’ societies were more or less progressive than capitalism and has led many its supporters to move to the right, including support for US imperialism, on the grounds that Stalinism was worse than capitalism.

The designation of Stalinist Russia as state capitalist seems to have been there from the beginning among some Trotskyists and other oppositionists, but the most coherent theory of state capitalism was developed in the late 1940s by Tony Cliff, founder of the International Socialist Tendency. Cliff’s point of departure was that if Stalinism had brought socialism or workers’ states to Eastern Europe (and North Korea) – by means of the Red Army and without workers’ revolutions – then Marx’s fundamental ideas on the revolutionary role of the working class would have to be abandoned. Faced with the choice between the state property criterion and the self emancipation of the working class, between socialism from above and socialism from below, Cliff opted decisively for the latter.

This led him to look beyond property relations as such to the actual relations of production underlying forms of property. Where state property was concerned Cliff argued that it had existed in many different societies and that the real question for Marxists was which class owned or controlled the state. He then showed, through detailed analysis, that the real relations of production in the Soviet economy, were capitalist relations: the control of the means of production by a small minority, with the large majority forced to live by the sale of their labour power and be exploited in the process.

Cliff also showed that once Stalinist Russia was seen in the context of the world economy rather than in isolation the idea that it was basically a planned economy was false. When the Stalinist bureaucracy opted for ‘socialism in one country’ it committed itself, in fact, to competition with western capitalism on capitalism’s terms, i.e. the accumulation of capital, and thus to the ruthless subordination of living labour (the workers) to dead labour (capital) – precisely the fundamental characteristic of capitalism as analysed by Marx in the Communist Manifesto and Capital.

The theory of state capitalism was not only the theory that accorded best with the Marxism of Marx, but it was also the position that best stood the test of time and events. The fall of communism in 1989-91 proved that far from constituting a superior, more progressive mode of production the so-called socialist countries had lost their economic competition with the west. It showed that the working class not only did not control these states, but also felt no allegiance to them. Finally the way the old Stalinist bureaucrats simply ‘moved sideways’ from state to private ownership, without, in most cases, losing power proved there was no fundamental, i.e. class, difference between the two systems.

The theory of state capitalism is thus a hugely important development of Marxism, essential for understanding the world in the 20^th and 21^st centuries and for continuing the struggle to change it.

John Molyneux

25 May 2007

Russia: What Went Wrong?

KOREA COLUMN 22

Russia: What Went Wrong?

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the world’s first successful socialist revolution. It proved that the working class was capable taking power even when it was a still a minority in society. It also showed the world the form of political organisation, the workers’ council or soviet, through which the working class could actually run society.

But if we look at Russia twenty years later, in 1937, we see a society which, with the exception of being dominated by state rather than private property, is completely at odds both with the conception of socialism held by Marx and with the aims of the 1917 Revolution.

It is a society ruled by an absolute dictator, Stalin, with the aid of a vast apparatus of secret police. It is a society in which freedom, debate, and democracy are non- existent and where the slightest dissent is punishable by imprisonment or death. The working class live in grim poverty forced to work long hours for low wages, without even real trades unions to defend them. Many of the peasants have recently endured famine and starvation. Inequality, having been massively reduced by the Revolution, is now increasing rapidly as the new rulers, managers, bureaucrats etc. enrich themselves and the preaching of equality is an offence against the state.

So what went wrong? Obviously a great deal hangs on the answer to this question, not least the possibility of making a convincing case for socialist revolution now, in the twenty first century. Before setting out our own views on this issue let us begin by considering some of the other answers that have been put forward.

There are two major groups who, basically, deny that anything went wrong - the western ruling classes (and their ideologists) and the Stalinists themselves. The western bourgeois view is that since working people are inherently incapable of running society, all talk of workers’ power, freedom and equality is a pipedream, and dictatorship and tyranny is either the conscious aim, or at least the inevitable outcome, of any attempt to create a socialist society. The Stalinist view is (or mainly was) that the Soviet Union in the thirties was a true embodiment of socialism and of the ideas of Marx and Lenin and that all talk of tyranny and a police state is bourgeois propaganda.

The bourgeois view is based on a) prejudice against the working class, and b) ignorance of socialist and Marxist ideas. I shall not answer it further here, as every word of this series of columns, from first to last, is an answer. The Stalinist view is based on either ignorance or denial of the facts. It has been refuted by a mountain of evidence and eyewitness testimony, including from genuine revolutionaries (see for example the memoirs of Victor Serge) and, above all, by history. If Russia, or the other so-called socialist countries of Eastern Europe, had really been the promised land for working people, it is inconceivable that these regimes could have been overthrown as they were in 1989-91, without the working class lifting a finger in their defence.

From those who recognise that a problem exists the main focus has been on the character and ideology of Russia’s political leaders – Stalin, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. In 1956, Khrushchev, in his ‘Secret Speech’ to the 20^th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, denounced the crimes of the Stalin era. He blamed the ‘cult of personality’ that developed around Stalin and the latter’s sadistic character. Both the cult and the sadism were facts but the weakness of this as an explanation is obvious: why was the cult developed and why did the Communist Party install and sustain a sadistic monster as its leader?

The main explanation favoured by western academics has stressed the role of Leninism and Bolshevism. It was, the argument goes, the totalitarian character of Lenin as an individual and of Leninism as an ideology, both embodied in the totalitarian Bolshevik Party, that led, more or less inevitably, to the excesses of Stalinism. This view has to ignore or discount important historical facts such as the extremely democratic character of the Bolshevik Party, before, during and immediately after the Revolution, and Stalin’s need, in order to establish his regime, to physically eliminate virtually the entire Bolshevik old guard. *

However, all these explanations suffer from a deeper flaw. They are all versions of what might be called the bourgeois ‘great man’ theory of history, which sees the course of history as shaped, first and foremost, by the ideas and deeds of the tiny minority at the top (usually kings, generals etc. but in this case Marxist theorists and activists). In reality history is shaped primarily by the struggle between classes, which in turn is conditioned by the development of the forces and relations of production, and this historical materialist approach should be applied to the fate of the Russian Revolution just as much as to the rest of world history.

The real question, therefore, is how did the working class who took power in October 1917 then come to lose it again? Once this is established as the core question the main answers are not hard to find.

First the backwardness of Russian economic development, compared to Europe and North America, and consequently the relatively small size of its urban proletariat. This was not in itself decisive (or October 1917 would have been impossible) but it weakened the position of the working class from the start.

Second the utter devastation of the Russian economy in the Civil War of 1918-21 which followed the Revolution and which was imposed on Russia by Western imperialist intervention. The scale of this devastation is hard to grasp: large scale industrial production fell to 21% of its 1913 level, factories closed, transport ceased to function, epidemics of cholera and TB raged and there was widespread famine. Above all this destroyed the economic foundations of the working class. Added to this was the slaughter of a large proportion of the most advanced workers in the Civil War. By 1921 the class, which took power in 1917, had virtually ceased to exist and was no longer able to assert its collective will over society. In the absence of the working class another social force had to take control. Normally it would have been the aristocracy or bourgeoisie, but they had been expropriated and driven out, consequently it was the bureaucracy, of the state and the party which came to the fore, more and more freeing itself from popular control.

Finally, the isolation of Russian Revolution, its failure to spread internationally. This was a very close run thing, especially in Germany, but the effect was to deprive the Revolution of the aid needed to restore the economy and renew and refresh the working class, and to put Russia under immense economic and military pressure from western capitalism.

It was the interaction of these real material factors, not human nature or the alleged defects of Marxist or Leninist ideology, that sealed the fate of the Russian Revolution and produced the phenomenon of Stalinism. The precise nature of that phenomenon will be discussed in the next in this series.

* The claimed ‘textual basis’ of this argument in Lenin’s What is To Be Done? has recently been meticulously refuted by the US scholar Lars T. Lih in his book Lenin Rediscovered – sadly it is very large and very expensive.

John Molyneux

11 May 2007

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KOREA COLUMN 20

Capitalism and Imperialism

As Marx explained in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism is a system which is subject to constant change and development. ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society… Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions… distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all others.’

In the run up to the First World War, i.e. twenty five to thirty years after Marx’s death, it became clear to most of the leading Marxist theorists that capitalism had entered a new stage of development, distinct and different in various ways from the capitalism analysed by Marx in Capital. Since one of the most obvious characteristics of the period was the struggle between the so-called ‘Great Powers’ (Britain, France, Germany, Russia etc.) to take over and colonise virtually the whole world, the term ‘imperialism’ was widely adopted as the name for this new phase of capitalism. Analysis of imperialism became an important task for Marxism, and that task became even more pressing when rivalry between the imperialist powers erupted into the mass slaughter of world war – the most destructive conflict in human history up to that point.

Many leading Marxists of the time – Hilferding, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, and Lenin – applied themselves to this project. Hilferding’s Finance Capital (1910), Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1915), and Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy(1916), were particularly important contributions to an ongoing debate, but what was to prove by far the most influential analysis was provided by Lenin in his brochure Imperialism – the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Lenin’s work had significant limitations. By his own account it was only a ‘popular outline’ of the subject and, because it was designed to get past the Tsarist censorship, it dealt only with the economic features of imperialism and refrained from drawing political conclusions. Nevertheless it provided an extraordinarily clear and concise summary of imperialism’s essential characteristics and structure and of the theoretical underpinning of Lenin’s political opposition to the war and to imperialism, which became known by other means.

For Lenin ‘ Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general’ but it was also distinguished by five main features:

1. The replacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly and the domination of economic life by giant monopolies, cartels, trusts etc.

2. The merger of bank capital and industrial capital to produce ‘finance capital’ and the emergence of a financial oligarchy

3. A shift from the export of goods (typical of the previous phase of capitalism) to the export of capital, particularly to economically backward countries where profits are high, due to a scarcity of capital, and cheap labour, land and raw materials

4. The formation of international capitalist monopolies, which operate across the globe and divide the world among themselves.

5. Alongside this economic division, the complete territorial division of the world among the Great Powers, so that further expansion, further acquisition of colonies, was possible only through the forcible repartitioning of the world.

Clearly Lenin’s analysis both offered a Marxist explanation of the First World War, and supported his revolutionary opposition to it. Since war was the necessary consequence of imperialism and imperialism was capitalism in its latest stage, any ‘peace’ on a capitalist basis would only be a ‘truce’ before the next war. Real peace could be won only by the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Throughout this analysis Lenin was keen to stress his differences with Kautsky, widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on Marxism, but whom Lenin viewed as a traitor since his failure to oppose the War in August 1914. Kautsky argued that imperialism was not a ‘stage’ of capitalism as such, or even an economic necessity for capitalism as a whole, but merely a ‘policy’ adopted under the influence of particular pro-imperialist capitalists. He also suggested that it was possible, even likely, that capitalism would soon enter a new ‘ultra-imperialist’ phase in which competition and conflict between rival monopolies and states would give way to agreement and peaceful co-operation. Lenin insisted that such views were both theoretically false, completely separating the politics of imperialism from its economics, and politically disastrous, blunting the struggle against war, imperialism and capitalism and leading directly to opportunism, reformism and class collaboration by sowing illusions in the possibility of a peaceful non- imperialist capitalism, freed of its contradictions.

Lenin’s economic analysis of imperialism must also be seen in the context of his political position on the right of oppressed nations to self-determination. He had first developed this position in relation to the many oppressed nationalities within the Tsarist Empire – Latvians, Georgians, Ukrainians etc. Lenin insisted that revolutionaries in the oppressor country, i.e. Russia, had an absolute duty to defend the right of oppressed nations to secede if they chose to do so, and that this was the only basis on which the international unity of the working class could be achieved. Lenin extended this position to apply to colonial countries in general, arguing that imperialism would inevitably generate anti- imperialist struggles from Ireland to China, and that these would play a vital role in weakening the imperialist powers and assisting their overthrow by the working class. It was therefore necessary to establish an international alliance between the working class and the oppressed nations and people’s of the world against imperialism (without, of course, abandoning independent revolutionary socialist organisation).

The ninety one years since the publication of Lenin’s Imperialism have obviously witnessed enormous further changes in world capitalism, economically and politically – the depression of the thirties, the rise (and then fall) of fascism and Stalinism, the Second World War, the Cold war, the permanent arms economy and the post war boom, the retreat from colonialism, the return of crises in the seventies, globalisation and others too numerous to mention here. At times elements in Lenin’s analysis, e.g. the export of capital to underdeveloped countries, have become less relevant, and elements emphasised by other Marxists, such as the drawing together of the state and capital pointed to by Bukharin, have become more relevant. Nevertheless it is astonishing how well the core of Lenin’s analysis has stood the test of time and how much of it still applies to the world today.

We still live in a world dominated by giant capitalist corporations (far larger, of course, than in Lenin’s day) and imperialist states. Despite the illusions, peddled by the system’s ideologists, in a peaceful ‘new world order’ or a conflict free ‘end of history’ following the fall of the Soviet Union, or in the abolition of poverty and war by capitalist globalisation, imperialism remains warlike and anti-imperialist revolt grows. Despite the existence, in the shape of the US, of a single imperialist superpower, that power is already obliged to strategise against potential future threats such as China, or a resurgent Russia, and has already over reached itself in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, of course, from our side, uncompromising opposition to imperialism and imperialist war remains absolutely central to socialist politics.

John Molyneux

13 April 2007

KOREA COLUMN 19

The theory of the Revolutionary Party

The most important of the many contributions to Marxist theory after Marx is, in my opinion, the theory of the revolutionary party developed by Lenin. What makes this theory so important is, first, that history has shown that without such a party the socialist revolution cannot be victorious and, second, that this theory affects and transforms every aspect of socialist activity in the here and now.

Before setting out the positive features of the Leninist theory of the party, it is perhaps necessary to say what the theory is not. It is not simply the idea that to struggle effectively the working class needs to be organized into a political party. This was well understood by Marx and by most Marxists and socialists long before Lenin and has continued to be an article of faith of most reformists and non – Leninist socialists subsequent to Lenin.

Nor is it some special organizational formula, such as ‘democratic centralism’. The principle that a socialist party should be internally democratic in discussing and forming policy but united in action in implementing that policy was indeed adopted by the Bolshevik Party and other Leninist organizations but it was not invented by Lenin, not a fixed organizational structure or regime, and certainly not the key distinguishing or defining characteristic of the Leninist party.

What was distinctively Leninist was a new conception of the relationship between the party and the class. This conception was not arrived at by Lenin in a single moment of theoretical inspiration, nor is it systematically set out in any single Lenin text. Rather it was developed in practice, by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, before it was expounded theoretically. With hindsight we can say that this conception rested on the combination of two key principles:

1. The independent organization of a party consisting wholly of revolutionary

socialists

2. The establishment and maintenance of the closest possible links between the independent revolutionary and the mass of the working class.

Prior to Karl Marx there existed two models of socialist activity. The first, drawn from the French Revolution and based on the Jacobins, was of a secret club or conspiracy which would seize power in a coup d’etat on behalf of the masses. The second, as with the ‘Utopian Socialists’, was of passive propaganda which would preach the virtues of socialism to the general public and, especially, to the ruling class. Marx transcended both these models with the understanding that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself, and the idea of a workers’ party combining active engagement in workers’ day to day struggles with socialist political propaganda.

Following Marx the predominant form of socialist organization was the large national workers party, including in its ranks all or most of the strands of socialism in a given country. A typical example was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) which had an openly reformist right wing led by Eduard Bernstein, a revolutionary left led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and a majority ‘centre’ led by Bebel and Kautsky, which talked revolution while practicing reformism. Similar parties, with similar trends existed in most European countries before the First World War, and together they made up the Second, or Socialist International.

What Leninism brought to this was the idea that the revolutionary left should separate from the reformist right and the vacillating center, and organize independently. What was really at stake here was the role of the reformist leaders. Marx and Engels and the young Luxemburg and young Trotsky were all revolutionaries, not reformists, but they tended to assume that once revolution broke out the reformist and centrist leaders would either be swept along with the movement or swept aside by it.

Blast from the past - old Warhol review

Issue 261 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published March 2002 Copyright © Socialist Review

Art

TOP OF THE POPS?

John Molyneux reviews the new Andy Warhol exhibition at the Tate Modern

From Marilyn to the Big Electric Chair--the many works of Andy Warhol on display at the Tate Modern

In 1963 the Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein painted 'Whaam!' It was a huge blow-up of a comic book image depicting a US fighter jet destroying an enemy plane at the press of a button. Nearly 30 years later, in the run-up to the Gulf War, Socialist Review put this picture on the front cover with the caption 'Stop Bush's Mad War'. Similarly, in 1962 Andy Warhol produced his 'Marilyn Diptych', with its rows of yellow-haired Marilyns, and 36 years later the International Socialism journal referenced Warhol on its cover with rows of yellow-haired Karl Marxes. This significant art, so often greeted as outlandish or absurd in its day, seeps gradually into the culture until it becomes part of the taken for granted collective visual consciousness, like Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' or a Constable landscape. It is therefore worth beginning a consideration of Warhol, whose exhibition has been the subject of such massive media attention, by noting just what a radical move (in historical, not political, terms) Pop Art represented at its inception. The art world in the 1950s, especially the New York art world, was dominated by the painting of the Abstract Expressionists and the criticism of their champion, Clement Greenberg. Greenberg's key theoretical statement, 'Avant Garde and Kitsch', defined 'high art' previously in opposition to the products of popular mass culture, of kitsch and 'tin pan alley' as he called it. To try to make art out of the despised imagery of Hollywood and the supermarket was a daring and risky provocation, in the same way that a century earlier it was risky for Monet to present a nude working class prostitute rather than a classical Venus or an Eastern odalisque. It is true that it was Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton and others who were the first to take this road, but it was Warhol who took it furthest and mostly uncompromisingly with his stark, almost unembellished images of serial soup cans, Brillo boxes, Elvises and Marilyns. The word 'almost' is important here, and so is this impressive retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern. The casual viewer of Warhol reproductions in books, magazines and newspapers could easily get the impression that these are 'simple' mechanical reproductions of already iconic images. But standing in front of the very large originals immediately makes it clear that these pictures are carefully and artfully constructed. For example, '210 Coca-Cola Bottles' (seven rows, 30 bottles each) actually presents us with 210 different bottles, each distinguished by variations in the quantity of the liquid, the highlights on the glass, the lettering on the bottle, etc, so that the pictures constitute not only an invocation of Coke and mass production but also a complex 'abstract' composition in its own right. The same applies to 'S&H Green Stamps' and to '192 One Dollar Bills', in which the bills all vary in tone and some are upside-down. It's even more important where the Marilyn pictures are concerned. All the Marilyns derive from a single source, a clipped black and white still from the 1953 film Niagara, but each are different, and not only in colour. 'Blue Shot Marilyn', for example, has a white circle right between Monroe's eyes, clearly suggestive of a bullet hole. The 'Marilyn Diptych' divides into 25 coloured Monroes on the left and 25 black and whites on the right, with the image passing through near total blackening and disfiguration in the seventh column to extreme faintness on the far right. The more you look at the coloured panels, the more the hair, eyeshadow and lips look like paper cutouts that have been stuck on the faces, emphasising the artificially constructed nature of the Monroe 'image'. Also the misregistration of the colour (the failure of the colour to fit exactly with the underlying black and white photograph) changes the expression on some of the faces from a smile almost to a snarl, especially where the red lipstick overlaps onto the teeth like blood.

Dark side of US life

Thus while it is obvious that these works from the 1960s are 'about' mass production and celebrity, the actual paintings clearly undermine the oft-repeated view that Warhol's art is a simple celebration of either of these phenomena--'fascinated critique' would be a more accurate designation. The images of Elvis also make this point. In the black and white 'Double Elvis' the left hand figure is so darkened as to be virtually a black Elvis, while the red-shirted Elvis against blue background has red lipstick--a camp gay Elvis!

In fact, none of the early 'celebrity' works gives us a romanticised, glamorous publicity-type picture. They are certainly 'beautiful' in the sense that Warhol has created highly charged, highly memorable images, but they all share the same flat, impersonal, distanced quality reflecting the fragile, alienated nature of the fame they represent.

This exhibition also gives prominence to the social-political works--the suicides, car crashes, race riots, electric chairs, etc--in which Warhol documented the dark side of US life in the 1960s. Some of these Warhol has called 'Disasters' in reference to Goya's 'Disasters of War', and indeed his subjects and themes are to some extent similar to Goya's. All of these large silkscreen prints make a strong visual and emotional impact--Warhol has a brilliant eye for the telling image.

Three of them I found especially powerful: the huge black and red 'Atomic Bomb', in which the awesome blackening mushroom cloud is given the horns of the devil; the chilling 'Big Electric Chair', made more so by its use of dilapidated ordinariness; and the whited out 'White Disaster I', depicting a lynching with a black man hanging from a telegraph pole and a burning car. It is, I think, neither possible nor desirable to try to infer a coherent or developed political position from these pictures, but their basic sympathies seem unambiguous. If one wants to pin down Warhol's politics his vicious portrait of Nixon above the slogan 'Vote McGovern' is a fairly straightforward clue (McGovern was an anti Vietnam War left Democrat presidential candidate).

The exhibition also brings out other aspects of Warhol's art--his humour in his 'Mona Lisa' series cheekily entitled 'Thirty are Better Than One', produced to coincide with the original's much-trumpeted trip to New York. His chaotic avant-gardist capacity to annoy the authorities is seen in his 'Thirteen Most Wanted Men' series offered as a mural to represent the US on the facade of the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World Fair. Particularly surprising to me was the extract from 'Empire', his eight-hour film of the Empire State building. Previously I had assumed this to be of only symbolic or conceptual significance, but the actual film showed that in the absence of any other motion one became sensitised to every slight atmospheric variation in the air. Warhol's 'Empire State' became Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral in a different light.

However, this exhibition unintentionally tells another story as well. It is a deep seated tendency in both bourgeois art appreciation and the mass media's coverage of art to focus more on the artist's personality than the artist's work--to treat the work as simply an effect of the artist's innate 'genius'. This produces a situation where once an artist is established as a 'master' everything from his/her hand is automatically valued highly, both aesthetically and financially. In reality there are both great and poor Picassos, wonderful and mediocre Rembrants. And this exhibition shows that there are good and bad Warhols.

At the beginning there are early paintings influenced, I guess, by Johns and Rauschenberg which do not work visually. More importantly there is a marked decline in the second half of the show featuring work from the 1970s and 1980s. Here the silkscreen portraits of Liza Minelli, Mick Jagger, Peter Ludwig and others have lost their edge, becoming 'Pop' versions of the familiar saccharine society portrait, and some of the attempts at new directions, such as 'Oxidation Painting' and 'Camouflage', are not very interesting failures. Of course Warhol has not lost all his talent, so there are exceptions such as the beautiful 'Portrait Joseph Beuys', but the general trend is downwards. Significantly in his collaborations with his protege, Basquiat, it is the younger artist's style and work that predominate. It may be that Warhol's shooting by Valerie Solanas, author of the Scum [Society for Cutting Up Men] Manifesto, in 1968, was the turning point. Or it may be that he was the victim of his own success, his own celebrity.

Never mind. The show as a whole remains very impressive, and the first half offers the opportunity, probably unique for a generation, of a face to face engagement with some of the most surprising and telling art of the last 50 years.
Andy Warhol is at the Tate Modern until 1 April.

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Permanent Revolution : then and now

All theories – like ideas generally - have material roots. They develop as reflections of, and responses to, specific historical and social situations, and to understand them fully they have to be seen in their context. However, it is a big mistake to conclude from this, as people often do, that the moment time passes or society changes, a formerly valid theory now becomes irrelevant. Least of all can socialists afford this error, as we have so much still to learn from the classic texts of our tradition, such as, for example, the writings of Marx and Engels.

There are two main reasons why such texts retain their importance. First, because there is always continuity as well change in history. Capitalism has been around for about five hundred years, and in the course of that time has changed enormously, but its central dynamic – the accumulation of capital - and its basic classes – the bourgeoisie and proletariat – and the relationship of exploitation between them, remain the same. Consequently works which have a firm grasp of these fundamentals, like The Communist Manifesto, retain more validity than any number of ‘up to date’ history or sociology textbooks which fail to grasp them. Second, because a theoretical analysis that contains real insight into the underlying tendencies in society may become more not less true with the passing of time as those tendencies work themselves out. Thus Marx’s statement that, ‘ The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’ (1), is clearly a far more accurate description of the world today than it was when it was written in 1848.

At the same time, however, we must remember that none of the writings in the Marxist tradition are sacred texts and none of them stand above or outside history. They deal not in eternal truths but in concrete analyses and none of their propositions are valid simply by virtue of the author’s authority. Nothing is true just because Marx, or anyone else, said so. Socialists must value and study the outstanding works from the past, but also critically assess them in relation to history and contemporary reality. That very perceptive Marxist, Tony Cliff, summed this up by quoting Isaac Newton, ‘ Those who stand on the shoulders of giants can see far,’ but then improved on Newton by adding ‘… provided they open their eyes’. An excellent example of this is Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, which was developed over a hundred years ago but which, on condition it is not approached dogmatically, remains an extremely useful guide to action in the world today , and particularly in Egypt and the Middle East.

The theory of Permanent Revolution arose in Tsarist Russia at the turn of the century. This was then the most economically, socially and politically backward society in Europe. The vast majority of the population were peasants living and working in conditions at the level of Western Europe in the 17^th century. Serfdom had been abolished only in !861, more than 400 years after its disappearance in Britain, and the aristocratic landowners remained the country’s ruling class. Modern industry, with its associated classes of bourgeois and proletarians, was starting to develop in the towns, especially St. Petersburg and Moscow, but agriculture remained predominant. There was no democracy or freedom of speech. Political power was concentrated in the hands of the Tsar or Emperor whose rule was absolute. In other words the situation in Russia was comparable to that in France before the French Revolution of 1789.

The problem facing the young Marxist movement in Russia was what they should do in such circumstances. On one thing they all agreed – that Russia was heading for a revolution that would overthrow the Tsarist autocracy and that they should help bring this about. Where there were differences was on the precise nature and dynamics of this coming revolution, and hence on the strategic role of Marxists within it. These differences came to a head as a result of the 1905 Revolution and three definite positions emerged.

The first, that of Plekhanov and the Mensheviks, was that the Russian Revolution would be a bourgeois revolution led by the bourgeoisie, resulting in a capitalist democracy in which the bourgeoisie was the ruling class . The job of Marxists was to support this process while defending the interests of the working class within it. The struggle for socialism would come later.

The second, taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, accepted that the fundamental character of the revolution would be bourgeois – its outcome would be capitalist democracy not socialism – but argued that the Russian bourgeoisie was too conservative and timid to lead its own revolution. The working class , in alliance with the peasantry, would have to lead the democratic revolution. The revolution, Lenin envisaged, would culminate in ‘the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’(2).This would mean, for a short period, a Worker-Peasant government which would establish a democratic republic and carry through radical land reform. Then the peasant majority, having secured their main aim, the land, would cease to be revolutionary and the revolutionary democratic dictatorship would revert to a normal bourgeois democracy in which socialists would be a revolutionary opposition.(3)

The third, developed by Leon Trotsky, became known as Permanent Revolution.(4) It agreed with Lenin that the working class, not the bourgeoisie, would lead the revolution but argued that in the process the working class would be obliged to take power and begin the transition to socialism. In other words the Russian Revolution would not stop at its bourgeois democratic stage but would grow over into workers’ power and a socialist revolution.(The name came from the use of the slogan ‘ The Permanent Revolution’ in an 1850 article by Marx which put a similar position for Germany).(5)

To the important objection that Russia’s peasant majority and economic underdevelopment made it too backward to sustain socialist relations of production, Trotsky replied that this was true if Russia was considered in isolation, but that the Russian Revolution should be seen as the first step in an international revolution and that internationally the conditions for socialism were in place. However, without the spread of the revolution to other countries it would not be possible for workers’ power to survive in Russia.(6)

Trotsky’s theory, it must be stressed, was rooted in a concrete analysis of Russian history and society. This analysis brought out the peculiarities of Russia’s development, but always by understanding its relationship to the rest of the world , not by viewing Russia in isolation. The national was seen in the context of the international.

The main characteristic of Russian history, Trotsky argued, was its backwardness in relation to the rest of Europe. Pressure on Russia from its more advanced European neighbours resulted in disproportionate growth in the role and size of the Russian state apparatus . This in turn meant that when capitalism, very belatedly, did start to develop in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, it did so very much under the tutelage of the state and on the basis of foreign investment (especially from France and Britain). These factors produced a bourgeoisie which was exceedingly weak in terms of its organic roots in Russian society, peculiarly subordinate to the Tsarist autocracy, and peculiarly tied to foreign capital , which had long since ceased to be revolutionary and had become a thoroughly counter-revolutionary force internationally.

These same factors, however, had produced in Russia a proletariat whose economic a social and political weight far exceeded its numerical size. Precisely because of its late development and dependence on foreign capital Russian industry arose on the basis of the most modern technique and the largest possible scale.

At the same time that peasant land- cultivation as a whole remained…at the level of the seventeenth century, Russian industry in its technique and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries and in certain respects even outstripped them. Small enterprises, involving less than 100 workers, employed in the United States, in 1914, 35% of the total of industrial workers, but in Russia only 17.8%… But the giant enterprises, above 1000 workers each, employed in the US 17.8% of the workers and in Russia 41.4%. (7)

Thus despite being only about 5% of the population the working class held in its hands the decisive productive forces in Russian society and through its massive concentration in a few key cities, exercised potentially decisive political power. The whole phenomenon was epitomised by the Putilov Works, in the Vyborg District of St. Petersburg, which with 40.000 workers in 1914, was probably the largest factory in the world and renowned for its political militancy.

This tendency of capitalism to bring side by side in one social formation the most backward and the most advanced social structures and phenomena, was called by Trotsky ‘the law of combined and uneven development’. In Russia combined and uneven development produced the combination of a weak, conservative bourgeoisie and a strong revolutionary proletariat – this was the core material foundation of the strategy of permanent revolution.

To this must be added Trotsky’s analysis of the role of the peasantry. Whereas the Mensheviks had a generally suspicious attitude to the peasant movement, Lenin supported it enthusiastically, but where they agreed was that the peasant majority excluded the possibility of workers’ power. In opposition to this Trotsky maintained that the peasant revolt, although it was a vital factor in the revolution, would not be able to push the proletariat aside or lead the revolutionary government. Basing himself on Marx’s analysis of the French peasantry in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and the record of peasant revolts in Russia and elsewhere, Trotsky concluded, ‘Historical experience shows that the peasantry are absolutely incapable of taking up an independent political role’ (8) The countryside would follow the town. The peasants would follow whichever of the urban classes provided the stronger lead, and since the cowardly bourgeoisie would betray the peasant struggle for land, it would follow the working class who would be obliged, by the logic of events, to take power into its own hands.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 vindicated the theory of Permanent Revolution. Reality was, of course, richer and more complicated than any theory, but there is no doubt that actual events corresponded more closely to Trotsky’s perspective than to any other.. The Revolution began with the February uprising which overthrew the Tsar and was the spontaneous action of the workers themselves. The bourgeois Provisional Government proved completely incapable of carrying through any of demands or tasks of the revolution, neither ending the war, nor giving land to the peasants, nor even convening a constituent assembly to establish a democratic republic. The Menshevik insistence on the bourgeois character of the revolution turned them, first, into a conservative force trying to hold back the working class, and then into outright counter revolutionaries opposed to the October Revolution. The intermediate position of the Bolsheviks was overtaken by events, especially the emergence of Soviets (workers’ councils) as embryos of workers’ power, and Lenin, returning to Russia from exile, rapidly won the Bolshevik Party to a perspective of workers’ revolution based on the call for ‘All Power to the Soviets’, i.e. effectively adopted Trotsky’s position. Trotsky, in turn, joined the Bolsheviks and together they led the working class seizure of power in October.

The theory of permanent revolution was also confirmed, negatively, by the fact that although the Russian Revolution did inspire a wave of revolution internationally, the defeat of the international revolution made it impossible to construct socialism in Russia and led to the Stalinist reaction.

But if Permanent Revolution was valid for Russia, what was its applicability to other countries where the tasks of the bourgeois revolution had not yet been achieved? This question was posed sharply by developments in China. China in the years1925-27 saw the rapid rise of a mass revolutionary movement, directed against foreign imperialism and Chinese warlords and feudal landowners. The leading role in this movement was played by the militant mass strikes of the young Chinese proletariat in the coastal towns of Shanghai, Canton etc.(9)

The Communist International, by now under complete Stalinist control, responded to this situation by reverting to the pre-1917 Menshevik position of arguing that the Chinese Revolution would be a bourgeois democratic revolution led by the bourgeoisie, and that the task of Chinese communists was to do no more than support this process from the left. In pursuance of this policy the Chinese CP was instructed to join, subordinate itself, and even hand over its membership lists, to the main Chinese nationalist party, the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai- Shek. This policy was persisted with, despite Trotsky’s protests and warnings, right up to the point in 1927 when Chiang Kai-Shek put the Chinese revolutionary workers and Communists to the sword in a series of massacres in Shanghai and Canton. Trotsky responded by insisting that, ‘The Chinese Revolution… will win as a dictatorship of the proletariat or not at all.’ (10) Then in 1928 in his polemical work, The Permanent Revolution, Trotsky formulated his theory as applicable to all underdeveloped and colonial countries.

With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation. (11)

This generalization of permanent revolution was both an immense breakthrough and a source of various problems. It was an immense breakthrough because by disposing of mechanical stages theory, typical of both reformism and Stalinism, and getting rid of the idea of individual countries not yet ready for socialism, it made workers’ power and socialism a fully international programme for the first time. It was a source of problems because, by insisting that almost no progress was possible without the dictatorship of the proletariat, it tended to substitute one mechanical dogma for another. These difficulties came to the fore after World War II when a number of the imperialist powers, especially Britain, retreated from policies of direct colonial rule, and many colonial countries achieved national independence without workers’ revolutions. This left some Trotskyists who adhered fanatically to the letter of Trotsky’s formulations either denying the possibility of changes that were manifestly in the process of happening – for example, Gandhi and Nehru leading India to independence in 1947, or Mandela and the ANC defeating Apartheid and establishing democracy in South Africa. – or inventing revolutions that had manifestly not occurred, such as workers’ socialist revolutions in China, Vietnam and Cuba. (For a Marxist analysis of what really happened in class terms in China and Cuba, and similar revolutions, and how it relates to the theory of permanent revolution see Tony Cliff’s article ‘Permanent Revolution’) (12).

So where does Permanent Revolution stand in relation to the struggle today ? Here a distinction must be made between permanent revolution as an absolute and general prediction, and permanent revolution as a strategic goal. As an absolute prediction ( as in its 1928 formulation) it is clearly not sustainable, but as the theory of a general strategic orientation it is, in many situations, extremely useful – indeed essential.

Wherever there is a fight to be waged against imperialism, national or racial oppression, or dictatorship, revolutionary socialists are put under intense pressure ( by liberals, nationalists, reformists, Stalinists and so on) to sacrifice or shelve ( for the time being !) socialist ideas and demands, and even basic working class interests, in the name of unity in the struggle for the immediate aim. The strategy of permanent revolution rejects those pressures, not from the sectarian position of dismissing the anti- imperialist or democratic struggle as irrelevant , but from the standpoint of arguing for working class and socialist leadership in the fight for national independence and democracy.

In all such struggles the strategy of permanent revolution will treat the so-called ‘national bourgeoisie’, even its most ‘patriotic’ sections, as at very best an unreliable ally and potential enemy and therefore resist all calls for socialists and the working class to give up their political and organisational independence. Permanent revolution means that socialists while participating vigorously in the movements for national liberation and democracy, will seek to develop those movements into struggles for workers’ power and international socialism, not because no kind of national independence or democracy is possible without socialist revolution , but because the very nature of world capitalism and imperialism will weaken, corrupt and undermine any independence or democracy won on a capitalist basis.

Understood in this way the strategy of permanent revolution, far from being out of date, fits the current situation in the Middle East like a glove. In the first place there is the struggle against imperialist occupation in Iraq. It is the duty of socialists to support that struggle unconditionally, no matter whether it is led by Islamists, nationalists , Communists or whoever, but it also the duty of socialists to press within that struggle for socialist and working class leadership, precisely because such politics and such leadership are the best bulwark against the sectarian divisions that are so fostered by the imperialists and so weaken the struggle against the occupation.

In the second place there is the Palestinian struggle against Zionism. Again it is the duty of socialists to support that struggle unconditionally. However, is it not also clear that no matter how heroically the Palestinians resist, the economic and military strength of Zionism, funded and armed by US imperialism, is overwhelming that it cannot be overthrown by the Palestinians on their own. The defeat of Zionist Israel and the real liberation of Palestine ( the two are inseparable) is possible only on the basis of a united mobilization of the masses throughout the Middle East. But the major obstacle to such a mobilization is, of course, the corrupt, pro- imperialist and thoroughly bourgeois regimes which exist throughout the region, and which, regardless of their nationalist rhetoric, have repeatedly failed and betrayed the Palestinians. Thus the liberation of Palestine urgently demands the worker-led process of permanent revolution across the Middle East.

In the third place, there is the struggle for democracy now in Egypt ( and, of course, elsewhere). Democratic rights – free elections, free speech, freedom of the press and of association, an end to torture and arbitrary detention – are valid and important in themselves, but the struggle for democracy is not separate from other struggles. The Mubarak regime is able to continue its undemocratic practices and survive in power, in large part because it is backed by the US. US imperialism supports Mubarak because he opens up Egypt to the world market, and to US firms in particular, and because of his role in preventing Arab mobilization against Israel and/or the US. Within Egypt it is the massive Egyptian working class, concentrated in Cairo much as the Russian proletariat was concentrated in St. Petersburg and Moscow, that has, a) the strongest interest in achieving full democracy; b) the greatest power to defeat the regime; c) the capacity and consciousness to lead the anti- imperialist struggle in the region as a whole. In other words, from a different starting point we are back again to the perspective of permanent revolution, developed by Trotsky more than a century ago.

Nor is it just a question of the Middle East . If space permitted it would be possible to make a similar demonstration of the relevance of permanent revolution to South America or South Africa or Indonesia.(13) What is more, the methodological principles of starting from an international standpoint in the analysis of national peculiarities and the law of combined and uneven development, which were key to the theory of permanent revolution are also central to the analysis of global capitalism today. Indeed the argument for the contemporary validity of permanent revolution is but one instance of the wider case for the continuing relevance of Marxism and the Marxist tradition as a whole.

NOTES

1. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
2. Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow, 1962, Vol. 9, p.56.
3. Lenin’s position at that time was outlined by him in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, to be found in the Collected Works, op. cit., Vol. 9.
4. Trotsky produced a number of statements of the theory of permanent revolution. The first was in Results and Prospects, written and published in 1906, and now available in English in Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, New York 1969. One of the clearest is in Chapter 1 of The History of the Russian Revolution, London,1977. Permanent Revolution, written in 1928, and published with Results and Prospects, op.cit. is a polemical defence of the theory against Stalinist attacks and distortions
5. See Marx and Engels, ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850)’, in Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, London 1981.
6. See Results and Prospects, op.cit., p.105.
7. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, op.cit., p31-2.
8. Trotsky, Results and Prospects, op.cit., p.72.
9. The best account of these events is probably still Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Stamford, 1961.
10. Leon Trotsky on China, New York, 1976, p.269.
11. Trotsky, Permanent Revolution, op.cit., p.276.
12. In Tony Cliff, Marxist Theory After Trotsky, London, 2003, pp.187-202.
13. See for example Tony Cliff, ‘Revolution and counter-revolution: lessons for Indonesia’, in International Socialism 80 and John Rees, ‘The socialist revolution and the democratic revolution’, in International Socialism 83.

This article was written for publication in Egypt, by Egyptian socialists.

John Molyneux

12 March 2007