Key lesson of 1848 for today

The strategy of permanent revolution

The experience of the struggles in Germany, France and elsewhere in Europe rapidly proved to them that this was not sufficient as a line for the embryonic working class of that time.

The bourgeoisie would always prove an inconsistent and inadequate ally and a treacherous leadership in any struggle against the old regime, because of their fear of the potential strength of the working class.

Marx and Engels had correctly underlined what was to be the driving fear of the bourgeoisie when they argued in the Community Manifesto that the successful bourgeois revolution in Germany would immediately open the door to the proletarian revolution.

In practice the bourgeoisie preferred not to take that chance, but instead to do a new deal with the old regime.

It was this which led Marx to put forward the "battle cry" of permanent revolution, a stern warning on the need for the working class to organise itself sepaately from the bourgeoisie and to prepare to fight on its own behalf to complete the struggle for democratic rights and for its own power.

Half a century later this same spirit of working class independence became part of the driving force of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Indeed it was precisely over the necessity for this type of firm and disciplined leadership, and the rejection of any perspective of class collaboration with the "democratic bourgeoisie" in Russia, that the Bolsheviks split in 1903 from the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

The Mensheviks – ignoring the lessons of 1848 – clung to the notion that the liberal bourgeoisie would play the leading role in the democratic revolution in Russia,

Lenin argued that the centrality of the agrarian question in a backward land of massed peasantry raised the central role of an alliance between the workers and the poor peasants as the driving force of revolution. If victorious, Lenin argued that these combined forces would establish a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry".

This formulation left open the possibility of a regime which fell short of a revolutionary workers’ state, but which rested on a more radical mass base than a "democratic" bourgeois regime. Lenin did not at first) rule out the possibility that the peasantry might even develop a mass party of its own which might play some independent role.

Trotsky criticised not Lenin’s focus on the agrarian revolution, nor the emphasis upon forming an alliance of the most oppressed against the Tsarist aristocracy and the liberal bourgeoisie, but the fact that Lenin’s formula placed two antagonistic forces simultaneously in the driving seat. It left open whether the actual dictatorial power would be exercised by the proletariat or by the peasantry when it came to the crunch.

Trotsky argued that the peasantry, for all its size and weight, did not have the political independence to form a genuine party of its own which would not either fall prey to the bourgeoisie or follow the lead of the proletariat.

The completion even of the tasks demanded the peasantry could only be carried through if the working class assumed the leading role, breaking boldly from the landowners, and making the democratic programme part of its own.

Pursuing the argument in his 1904 pamphlet Results and Prospects, Trotsky pointed out that a victorious alliance of workers and peasants in Russia would need to act swiftly — and by no means "democratically" or through Parliamentary procedures — to secure its survival, by dismissing key reactionaries from the army and the state machine, and disbanding those regiments most involved with crimes against the people. It would hardly be a "democracy" in the traditional sense.

And on the level of immediate demands, the same government, theoretically representing both peasant and working class interests, would need to take steps to defend the agricultural proletariat — measures which would be strongly opposed by sections of the peasantry.

Other contentious issues would be the fight for the legal 8-hour day; support for the unemployed; government support for strikers; and the need to expropriate those capitalists who attempted to lock out their workers or disrupt the new regime. To each of these question a proletarian answer would need to be given.

The expropriation of the large estates raised a further question: would a hypothetical "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" decide to carve up those estates into small plots for landless peasants and agricultural workers?

Or would it decide rather to retain them as larger units, and farm them collectively? The proletarian programme points to a collective, socialised economy: but the traditional peasant demand is for individual land ownership.

Such questions, Trotsky stressed, could prove decisive for the very survival of a revolutionary government: on each of them the only consistently revolutionary line came from the proletariat, not the peasantry.

The democratic programme, and even the minimum demands of the workers, could only be achieved by a government under the control of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat. For this reason, Trotsky argued, the "democratic dictatorship" formula should be discarded.

The Marxist goal was to wage an independent struggle within the unfolding democratic revolution, and to create the conditions for the working class to play the leading role, cementing an alliance with the poorest sectors of the peasantry, so that the democratic revolution against Tsarism could "grow over" in an uninterrupted way into the socialist revolution and the seizure of power by the workers.

Nor was it a question of Marxists artificially trying to fabricate a process of "growing over". In the emergence of the powerful Soviets (workers’ councils) based on the key workplaces, and reaching into the army, the Russian working class and sections of the peasantry showed in 1917 that the struggle had by no means been completed in the February "democratic" revolution.

At the same time the Russian bourgeoisie and their reformist hangers-on gave proof that the democratic programme could not be completed while they were in charge: it could only be carried through under the leadership of the working class.

Stridently denouncing Joseph Stalin and other "old Bolsheviks" within Russia who had since February 1917 given support to the bourgeois "Provisional Government" and even to its continued involvement in the war, Lenin in his April Theses reaffirmed the fight for an independent class line, and for internationalism, and on his return to Russia decisively shifted the line of the Bolshevik Party toward what would be the October Revolution.

Again the watch-words for this turn had been established by Marx and Engels sixty years previously, when they insisted:

"Alongside the new official governments [the workers] must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees...

"In a word, from the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself.

"To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party. whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory. the workers must be armed and organised.

"The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.

"Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organise themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff: they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers."

In the fight to take forward the uninterrupted, "permanent" revolution, and in the fight to mobilise armed bodies of workers as part of a dual power challenge to the Provisional Government, Lenin was therefore building on the actual situation in Russia and on the Marxist tradition and the lessons of the 1848 revolutions.

In the aftermath of the successful Russian Revolution, Trotsky began consciously to work through these lessons and to spell out the necessity for the Communist International and Communist Parties to learn them too, and fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only means to complete the democratic revolution.

But he ran into immediate opposition from Stalin and the growing bureaucratic caste which had begun to emerge within the strife-torn, isolated and backward workers’ state.

Showing that no political lessons had been learned by some "old Bolsheviks" from the upheavals of the Revolution itself, and giving voice to a mood of demoralisation, conservatism and nationalism among whole sections of the Russian peasantry, Stalin was by 1924 feeling his way towards a renunciation of international revolution, dressed up in his "theory" of socialism in one country.

This is one reason why the bureaucratic machinery of the Kremlin expended such energy in slandering Trotsky’s line – the line of Lenin and Marx – and instilling in the degenerated "Communist International" the discredited formulae of the Mensheviks.

Today it is a hallmark of Communist Parties and CP-influenced groupings which have descended from Stalins’s Comintern that they – like today’s nationalist leaderships and so-called "liberal" bourgeoisie – adamantly insist upon the separation of the democratic and socialist revolutions. That is the cornerstone of their search for "progressive"’ sections of the capitalist class and "broad popular alliances."

When we argue today that there is only a working class solution to the struggles in Indonesia, South Korea, South Africa, and the Philippines, we are not arguing for any less emphasis on the democratic tasks to be accomplished in the revolution.

We are certainly not arguing against an alliance where appropriate between the working class and the poorest layers of peasants and petty bourgeois.

We are stressing that even the minimal demands of the proletariat and the carrying through of the democratic revolution go beyond anything that can be accomplished by or under the leadership of the "democratic" capitalists. We are insisting that the workers, committing themselves to the struggle must build and maintain their own independent organisations, and develop their own demands and programme.

Fighting alongside the various "democrats" who are prepared to use revolutionary means against the existing regime, workers must also maintain their own, revolutionary organisations.

Incorporating the democratic demands, alongside the specifically socialist programme of a workers’ organisation, they must remain committed to the socialist struggle — and (as Marx and Engels insisted) not stop short "until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power."

From this standpoint, permanent revolution is not so much a ‘‘theory" as a strategic conception, an orientation within every struggle on an international level.

It is not a jargon term to be confusingly used by academics, or a label, but as Marx put it, a "battle cry" for the workers. In it the spirit of revolutionary defiance from 1848 lives on in the battles being fought 150 years later.