permanent revolution: a rejoinder

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Science & Society, Vol. 77, No. 3, july 2013, 397–404

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SyMPOSIUM

Permanent Revolution: the early 20th-century Debate

About sustained struggle, consciousness, class and transformation

Editor’s Note: When we asked noted Lenin scholar Lars Lih to review for us the new collection edited by Richard Day and Daniel Gaido — Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record (Hay-market, 2010) — we never expected to receive what emerged as a full-fledged article (“Democratic Revolution in Permanenz,” Octo-ber 2012). Lih, in our view, raised important (if controversial!) observations about the thinking of the participants in the Euro-pean debate within left Social Democratic, or Communist, circles in the first two decades of the 20th century, and especially about the apparently distinctive position of Trotsky in that debate. Day and Gaido gladly accepted our request for a response; here they are joined by Alan Shandro and john Marot, each of whom presents a unique perspective, followed by a rejoinder from Lih. Whatever the reader makes of the various positions in this discussion, we believe it demonstrates without doubt the remarkable richness, and enduring relevance for the present, of the source texts, and of the revolutionary experiences within which these texts emerged.

Permanent Revolution — But Without socialism?RICHARD B. DAy AND DANIEL GAIDO

In his commentary on our book Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documen-tary Record, Lars Lih basically argues that, though we collected and translated

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398 SCIENCE & SOCIETy

several hundred pages of historical documents, we either did not read them attentively or else simply did not understand them. The fundamental prob-lem, according to Lih, is that we undertook this project with an ideological mission; namely to prove “that Ryazanov, Parvus, Luxemburg, Mehring and particularly Kautsky ‘anticipated’ Trotsky’s scenario of ‘permanent revolu-tion’.” “Hypnotized” by the expression “permanent revolution,” we failed to notice that there were in fact important differences among these authors, and assumed that “anyone who uses this expression is . . . in essential agreement with Trotsky’s particular scenario.” Thus we came to the simplistic conclu-sion that all these luminaries of the first Russian revolution were incipient Trotskyists, deserving the warmest praise, whereas anyone who disagreed with Trotsky plays in our book the role of a villain. Lih then proceeds to read the documents correctly and to pronounce that Trotsky alone pointed to “a link between democratic revolution and socialist revolution,” whereas “none of the other writers” looked beyond “the framework of democratic revolution”; indeed, they all contemplated nothing more than “democratic revolution in Permanenz.”

This account of our work is, to put it mildly, bizarre. Of course there were differences among the authors whose works we translated; they were engaged in a debate, not a recitation. We compiled these documents with the explicit conviction that the debate over permanent revolution, which has now lasted for more than a century, has involved far too much ideology, far too many tenuous generalizations, and far too little scholarly research into primary sources. The whole point of our effort was to allow the participants finally to speak for themselves, and not to impose some post facto uniformity upon them or, in the alternative, to hypostasize their differences.

Lih acknowledges that we did do something worthwhile, namely “to explode many clichés and stereotypes,” thereby giving him the opportunity to explain the subtleties that eluded us. The problem is that Lih’s discovery was precisely our starting point: the realization that this debate has long been obscured by partisan commentators. Had we been pursuing the “Trotskyist” agenda that Lih ascribes to us, the documents would have been impossible to manipulate without substituting ellipses for every reservation — of which there were a great many — that did not serve our own preconceived purpose. The charge that we tried to impose our own meaning upon the documents thus falls of its own weight.

What, then, is this meaning that we allegedly tried to impose? Lih tells readers that his essay will “focus primarily on the validity of Day and Gaido’s main thesis: did or did not any of these writers ‘anticipate’ Trotsky’s scenario of permanent revolution?” He returns to the question of who anticipated what at least a dozen times, a fact that we find passing strange. We used this expres-sion in our main introduction when speaking of Ryazanov, whose account of

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PERMANENT REVOLUTION 399

the specificities of Russian history — as distinct from the so-called “pattern” of Western Europe — “anticipated” the historical outline that Trotsky later provided in Results and Prospects. We never suggested that Ryazanov or anyone else “anticipated” Trotsky’s conclusion that, despite its economic backwardness — indeed, precisely because of the political and class consequences of that backwardness — Russia might press on with the introduction of socialism even before revolution came in Western Europe. When we mentioned that Ryazanov “anticipated” Trotsky, we merely stated a fact that will be obvious to anyone who compares the two texts. It is in that sense that Ryazanov has the honor of introducing the concept of permanent revolution into debates within Russian Social Democracy, and it is for that reason that we translated sections of the 1903 dispute between him and Plekhanov.

Alas, poor Plekhanov! Lih complains that we ranked him “lowest of all” in “the hierarchy of honor.” Our response is that Plekhanov ranked himself. We merely translated what he wrote. Lih objects that we chose Plekhanov “to be the fall guy whose obtuseness sets off everybody else’s brilliance.” We are perfectly aware that Plekhanov was the “father of Russian Marxism” and needs no certification from us as a major historical and intellectual figure. His famous debate with Mikhailovsky remains an outstanding introduction to historical materialism. On the question of permanent revolution, however, Plekhanov turned out to be mistaken. If his “obtuseness” stands in contrast with the “brilliance” of many others in this particular discussion, that is simply a historical fact. It was not our task to choose who would be the “hero” and who the “fall guy.” We were not writing a screenplay. We did, however, point out that this was not Plekhanov’s finest hour. Indeed, we quoted Trotsky himself commenting that Plekhanov’s later work was much more nuanced and that “it does no harm to learn from him now and again” (140).

Apart from Plekhanov, Lenin appears as our next victim in the so-called “hierarchy of honor.” Lih is distressed by the fact that we attributed less than central importance to Lenin in this debate. He complains that:

Day and Gaido follow Trotskyist tradition in giving much attention to the alleged clash between Lenin’s formula “democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasantry” and the formula associated with Trotsky, that is, “the workers relying on the peasantry.” I agree with Lenin that the actual political differences between these formulae are insubstantial.

In this criticism, at least, Lih is not alone: Paul Le Blanc also wrote a review arguing that Witnesses is anti-Leninist (Le Blanc, 2012). But it was inevitable that Lenin should play a secondary role in our book, since he happened to be on the margins of this particular discussion. We do note in our book that occasionally Lenin’s statements resembled Trotsky’s, particularly in 1905 when he spoke of “uninterrupted revolution” (449). But as late as 1909 Lenin

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still maintained — in his essay “The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution” — that the Trudovik faction in the Russian Duma constituted “the embryo of a distinct peasant party”: “If political groups like this could spring up at the beginning of the revolution,” Lenin declared, there could not be “the slightest doubt” that a revolution carried to such “a high stage of development as a revolutionary dictatorship, will produce a more definitely constituted and stronger revolutionary peasant party.”

The historical record demonstrates that on this point Lenin misjudged, and Trotsky’s view that the peasants were incapable of constituting a coher-ent political force was more prescient. Lih believes the differences between Lenin and Trotsky on this issue were “insubstantial.” We disagree, although we certainly acknowledge that Lenin’s views did converge with Trotsky’s by the time of Lenin’s “April Theses” in 1917. In any case, we give Lenin his due by referring to him on at least 80 pages of our book by way of footnotes and lengthy quotations.

The truth is that Lih’s quarrel is with Trotsky and Trotskyism, not with our reading of the sources. This becomes quite apparent in the final pages of his essay when he discusses the “axiom of the class ally.” Trotsky, we are told, “diligently painted himself into a corner” by deliberately contemplating a civil war with the peasantry. Lih paraphrases Trotsky’s argument as follows:

The proletariat should cap its introduction of political freedoms and a thoroughgoing democratic republic by announcing its intention never to forego power voluntarily, then embarking on a policy that it knows cannot succeed, instigating in this way an armed revolt among a majority of the population, and thus deliberately creating a situ-ation so desperate that the proletarian government can only be rescued by a foreign revolution that may or may not happen. Any other policy would discredit socialism.

Of course, it was Trotsky alone who concluded that the revolution — even apart from a simultaneous upheaval in Europe — would have to proceed to the first steps of introducing socialism in Russia (despite the country’s eco-nomic backwardness, as portrayed in Results and Prospects). But the novelty of Trotsky’s position is also perfectly clear from the documents and from our own commentary. We nowhere imply, much less claim, that the other par-ticipants in this debate subscribed without reservations to what Lih calls “the Trotsky scenario.” We state explicitly in the introduction to Chapter 17 that Trotsky was going further than anyone else was prepared to contemplate. It is nonsense to attribute to us the assumption that anyone who used the term “permanent revolution” was “in essential agreement with Trotsky’s ‘particular scenario’.” No one who reads our book — unless this person starts with pre-formed ideological predilections — could possibly come to this conclusion.

In fairness to Trotsky, however, it should be added that he never for a moment entertained the thought that the European revolution “may or may

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not happen.” It is perfectly obvious in Results and Prospects that he expected the revolution to spread to Europe through resistance by European workers to armed intervention in Russia by foreign powers intent upon protecting their investments. Anyone who has read Results and Prospects will be familiar with the connection Trotsky drew between a victorious Russian revolution and the response he expected from Western European capital. Lih forgets that Trotsky was always an internationalist, who consistently denied that the Russian revolution could be abstracted from developments in Europe. “Capitalism,” he claimed in june 1905, “has converted the whole world into a single political and economic organism.” He may fairly be said to have mis-judged the economic obstacles to socialism in Russia (see chapter 7 of Results and Prospects). Perhaps he also saw too much inevitability in the prospect of foreign intervention (in 1905–6, as distinct from 1918–19). But to say that he gambled upon a European revolution that “may or may not happen” is simply to ignore chapter 9 of Results and Prospects, entitled “Europe and Revolution.”

Mention of Trotsky’s casual appraisal of the economic difficulties awaiting a socialist government in Russia leads to another peculiarity of the debate over permanent revolution that deserves to be emphasized. The documents gathered in Witnesses show that for all the participants the main question was not concerned with economics at all. The pivotal issue was: Which classes can be relied upon to act in a consistently revolutionary manner? The debate was one of revolutionary strategy and political tactics. This was the context in which Marx himself used the term; and it was likewise the principal concern expressed in all the documents that we translated. And just as Marx never advocated a “bourgeois–democratic revolution in Permanenz,” so it never oc-curred to the authors whose works we translated to decapitate the revolution-ary movement in Russia by limiting their ambitions to bourgeois rule — or even bourgeois revolution — in Permanenz. They certainly differed in their appraisals of what might be practical and possible, but even on that score there was a wide range of fluctuating opinion. On one occasion, even Lenin mentioned the need to pass “at once” from the democratic to the socialist revolution, vowing that “we shall not stop half-way” (449). The frontier of possibilities was neither clear nor constant, bringing us back to our initial contention that it would be absurd to impose upon these heterogeneous and continuously changing views some sort of artificial uniformity.

Turning from the details of our book to the more basic question of methodology, we treated the debate over permanent revolution as an ongo-ing dialog that generated its own momentum and charted its own path. Our task, as we said earlier, was to follow the documents. But in this respect, too, Lars Lih regards our work with suspicion, suggesting that we hailed some of the participants as dialecticians while dismissing others as fatalists, a flaw that Lih again associates with Trotsky and Trotskyism:

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In the traditional picture painted by writers in the Trotsky tradition, Trotsky stands alone in rejecting the “fatalism” of the Second International (Löwy, 2010). Day and Gaido do not really challenge this traditional framework — all they do is shuffle the players, moving some writers from the “fatalistic” slot over to the “dialectical” slot.

In this regard our critic would have done better to let sleeping dogs lie. We believe the fundamental problem with Lih’s own treatment of our work is his commitment to the rigid categories of either/or: in his view, a revolution can be either bourgeois–democratic or socialist; when speaking of a permanent revolution, the participants must have meant either the one or the other — either “democratic revolution in Permanenz” or permanent revolution leading ineluctably to socialism. It was precisely this kind of dichotomy that we set out to avoid. In the first paragraph of our preface we promised to have “the foremost participants give their own accounts of the historical forces at work and the prospects they saw for a revolutionary victory that might affect the history of Europe and even the entire world.” Lih, by contrast, prefers to think in terms of a much more rigid dichotomy in which Trotsky alone was contemplating socialist revolution, while the other participants in the debate shared a completely different “common outlook”:

. . . these writers viewed the Russian revolution of 1905 as the beginning of a vast, hard-fought and long drawn-out process of democratic revolution. When used by writers such as Kautsky, Luxemburg, Parvus, Ryazanov and Mehring, the expression “permanent revolution” did not point to a transition from a demo-cratic revolution to a socialist revolution. It pointed to a way of conducting the democratic revolution.

As the biblical injunction says, “But let your communication be, yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil” (Matthew 5:37). The whole problem with the analysis of the Russian revolution of 1905–6, however, is that it was neither a purely bourgeois nor a purely socialist revo-lution but rather a sui generis historical phenomenon combining bourgeois and proletarian features; and therefore the attempt to force upon it the principle of identity does violence to its character. In Witnesses (521–22) we reproduce the following paragraph from Rosa Luxemburg regarding the dual nature of the Russian revolution:

The present revolution in our country as well as in the rest of the tsarist kingdom has a dual character. In its immediate objectives, it is a bourgeois revolution. Its aim is the introduction of political freedom in the tsarist state, the republic and the parlia-mentary order that, with the dominion of capital over wage-labor, is nothing but an advanced form of the bourgeois state, a form of the class rule of the bourgeoisie over

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the proletariat. But, in Russia and Poland, this bourgeois revolution was not carried out by the bourgeoisie, as was previously the case in Germany and France, but by the working class — moreover, by a working class that is to a high degree conscious of its class interests; a working class that has not conquered political freedom for the bourgeoisie but, on the contrary, with the objective of facilitating its own struggle against the bourgeoisie with the aim of accelerating the triumph of socialism. For that reason, the present revolution is at the same time a workers’ revolution. There-fore, the struggle against absolutism in this revolution must go hand in hand with the struggle against capital, against exploitation.

The theme of Luxemburg’s article, “The Russian Revolution” (chapter 18 of Witnesses), was that a dual revolution in Russia would simultaneously complete the series of bourgeois revolutions inaugurated in 1789 and begin a new round of proletarian revolutions leading to socialism’s international triumph. The dual character of permanent revolution in terms of completing one historical project and launching another is a recurrent theme throughout our entire anthology. To quote from Witnesses (522):

The documents in this collection have shown that the concept of permanent revolu-tion was typically set forth from two perspectives; one emphasized the exceptional historical and social-class relations within Russia due to its delayed economic develop-ment; another assessed Russian revolutionary prospects in terms of the international context, with particular stress on the role of foreign capital and the connections between revolution in Russia and impending socialist revolution throughout Europe.

Our response to our critic may be summarized as follows: We believed when compiling our book, and we remain convinced, that events in Russia during 1905–6 were complex, contradictory, ever-shifting and extraordinarily difficult to interpret. In our editorial commentary we sought neither to im-pose uniformity where there was none, nor to transform subtle degrees of interpretive difference into sacred battles over truth and error.

In the story told by our book, there are neither “heroes” nor “villains,” only decent people attempting — sometimes more successfully and at other times less so — to understand events and what they portended for the future. Witnesses to Permanent Revolution is not a book about either/or, nor is it a work of advocacy on behalf of Trotsky. It is a compendium of documents written by revolutionaries who more or less understood their own times — sometimes more and sometimes less, even within the same documents. Our critic’s attempt to compress the debate over permanent revolution by means of a formula such as “Democratic Revolution in Permanenz,” applied indiscrimi-nately to all the participants but Trotsky, does unacceptable violence to the historical record. Curiously enough, it also ultimately endows Trotsky with

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super-human qualities by diminishing the contributions of other participants in their effort to elaborate Marxist perspectives on the basis of their own revolutionary experience.

Richard B. Day:229 Kaneff CentreUniversity of Toronto in Mississauga3359 Mississauga Road NorthMississauga, OntarioCanada, L5L [email protected]

Daniel Gaido:CIECS-CONICETAv. General Paz 154, 2º Piso5000-Có[email protected]

REFERENCES

Day, Richard B., and Daniel Gaido, eds. 2010. Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books.

Le Blanc, Paul. 2012. “Revisiting Permanent Revolution.” International Socialist Review. www.isreview.org/ issues/82/featrev-permanentrevolution.shtml

Lih, Lars. 2012. “Democratic Revolution in Permanenz.” Science & Society, 76:4 (Oc-tober), 433–462.

Revolutionary theory and Political Agency

ALAN SHANDRO

Under the rubric, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution, Richard Day and Daniel Gaido have brought together and helpfully introduced the reader of English to a range of interventions in which Russian and some European Marxists sought to come to grips with the novelty of the revolutionary movements of the Russian 1905 Revolution, and to discern perhaps unanticipated possibili-ties opened up by these movements. Lars Lih’s rereading (Lih, 2012) of the


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documentary record compiled by Day and Gaido calls into question what he takes to be their main thesis, viz., that in the course of the discussion over the revolution several Russian and German Marxists would come to anticipate the theory that Trotsky would later formulate under the rubric of “perma-nent revolu tion.” This claim rests, Lih contends, upon a simple conflation of terminological similarity with substantive theoretical agreement. Once the language of “permanence” is set appropriately in the context of each author’s political argument, it may be seen to bear quite different, indeed, opposing political and theoretical implications in the case of Trotsky and in those of all the other writers featured in the collection: does this language promise an immediate transition to socialist revolution or does it simply betoken com-mitment to an enduring, persistent and thoroughgoing democratic revolution? Lih is concerned to set the historical record straight, but his interpretation of that record frames the respective political arguments simply in terms of the telos of the revolutionary process, considered apart from the dynamic whereby the aims of action may be redefined through the logic of political agency in the revolutionary struggle. A brief look at the issue of revolution-ary agency as it presented itself to the Marxists of the time may suggest that, while Lih is right to treat Trotsky’s position as distinctive, his inattention to issues of agency leads to some misunderstanding of Trotsky’s own position and of its relation to the others represented in the Day–Gaido collection.

The Russian 1905 was marked by islands of advanced capitalist production amidst a sea of agrarian backwardness. The isolation of the capitalist class, an exiguous petty bourgeois stratum and concentrations of proletarian power gave acute expression to the unevenness of capitalist development. The spontaneous surge of working-class struggles prodded Russian Marxists, especially outside Bolshevik ranks, as well as SPD members like Parvus, Kautsky and Luxemburg who took an interest in Russian affairs, to rethink a number of the assumptions and distinctions that had been built into Social Democratic strategizing and that encrusted socialist practice. With a view to orienting the workers’ movement amidst the unexpected scope, uncertainties and promise of the revolutionary process, locutions multiplied, blurring distinctions between economic and po-litical struggle, and between the aims of democratic and socialist revolutions. Parvus exemplified both the probing and the equivocation:

Workers’ democracy includes all of the most extreme demands of bourgeois de-mocracy, but imparts to some of them a special character and also includes new demands that are strictly proletarian. . . . The revolution in Russia creates a special connection between the minimum programme of Social Democracy and its final goal. (Day and Gaido, 493.)

Thus Luxemburg: “Being formally bourgeois–democratic, but essentially proletarian–socialist, [the Russian revolution] is, in both content and method,

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a transitional form from the bourgeois revolutions of the past to the proletar-ian revolutions of the future” (Day and Gaido, 526). And Kautsky thought the revolution is best understood “as neither a bourgeois revolution in the traditional sense nor a socialist one but as a quite unique process which is taking place on the borderline between bourgeois and socialist society, which requires the dissolution of the one while preparing the creation of the other” (Day and Gaido, 607).

This current could draw strength from the confluence of several streams of thought and sensibility. As the wave of revolutionary activity crested, Economist infatuation with the elemental spontaneity of the working-class movement mutated into what Reidar Larsson has termed “revolutionary Economism”: the injunction to unmask the class context of platforms on behalf of “the entire people” and to destroy “all illusions of some commu-nity of political goals” among all classes, particularly workers and bourgeois, could be followed up with an imperative to destroy the state duma (Day and Gaido, 475). The Menshevik theme of proletarian self-activity expressing a consciousness of specifically “class,” specifically socialist aims was radicalized, as Menshevik workers and even leaders like Dan and Martynov flirted with the notion of a “workers’ regime” (Dan, 343). David Ryazanov infused the discourse of “the revolution in Permanenz” into typically Menshevik themes of working-class independence: “In concentrating all its efforts on complet-ing its own tasks, [Social Democracy] simultaneously approaches the mo-ment when the issue will not be participation in a provisional government, but rather the seizure of power by the working class and conversion of the ‘bourgeois’ revolution into a direct prologue for the social revolution” (Day and Gaido, 473). The notion that the workers first of all — most often, the workers alone — were driving the revolution, perhaps beyond its anticipated limits, was sometimes intertwined with hard-edged dismissal of the thought of subordinating the daring, determination and inventiveness of the newly awakened masses to the narrow perspectives or bureaucratic schemes of party politicians, as when Luxemburg invoked the dynamism of the Russian mass strikes, at once economic and political, to try to shake the German trade unions from their routine.

Although this current was broad and its resonance diffuse, it was most enduringly instantiated by Trotsky and conceived with the greatest clarity from his perspective of permanent revolution. Drawing upon Kautsky’s reflec-tions on the unevenness of working-class movements in America and Russia (see Trotsky, 1969, 65–66), Trotsky reasoned from the international con-text of capitalism in less-developed Russia that the victory of the bourgeois– democratic revolution would be conditional upon its being “telescoped” into a proletarian–socialist revolution, a circumstance that could be expected to trigger workers’ revolutions in Europe, initiating a process of socialist

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revolution on a world scale. Capitalism had progressed to a point where the proletariat displaced the bourgeoisie as the driving force of the democratic revolution. Once power is assumed by “a revolutionary government with a socialist majority, the division of our program into maximum [socialist] and minimum [democratic measures] loses all significance, both in principle and in immediate practice”; the working class is driven “by the very logic of its position . . . toward the introduction of state management of industry” and the construction of a socialist order (Trotsky, 1969, 78, 67), transcending the differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and rendering the factional division obsolete. Consistent with this logic, Trotsky sought persistently in the aftermath of 1905 to broker reconciliation between the opposing politi-cal tendencies, earning him Lenin’s epithet “centrist,” the same label Lenin would later affix to Kautsky’s quixotic quest to maintain an illusory unity of the working-class movement after the outbreak of the world war. In later years, Trotsky would attribute his misguided efforts to conciliate the factional opponents to “a sort of social-revolutionary fatalism . . . in questions of the inner development of the party” (Trotsky, 1975, 231).

Although the elemental struggles of the peasantry for land might wear away at the props of absolutist rule, this was a process profoundly lacking in consciousness and political will; the peasants were “absolutely incapable of taking up an independent political role.” Since the countryside had never engendered a class capable of undertaking the revolutionary abolition of the relations of feudal society, upon its ascension to power the working class would “stand before the peasants as the class which had emancipated them.” The peasants would be left with no political choice other than to rally to the rule of the workers and it would not matter greatly if this was done with a degree of consciousness not larger than that with which [they] usually rally to the bourgeois regime” (Trotsky, 1969, 71–73). In criticiz-ing the Bolshevik strategy of revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, Trotsky asserted, first, that the nature of the revolutionary government was a matter of “who will determine the content of the government’s policy, who will form within it a solid majority,” to which the only viable answer was the proletariat; second, that a worker–peasant coalition “presupposes either that one of the existing bourgeois parties com-mands influence over the peasantry or that the peasants will have created a powerful independent party of its own,” neither of which was a possibility (Trotsky, 1969, 69, 74). While he would maintain that a peasant party had already taken shape in the course of the revolution, if only in embryo, the really decisive point of Lenin’s response was that a “‘coalition’ of classes does not at all presuppose either the existence of any particular powerful party, or parties in general” (Lenin, 1909, 371). Coalitions between workers and peas-ants could and did assume the most diverse forms of joint action between

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say, primarily non-party organizations such as Soviets of Workers’ Deputies or strike committees and soldiers’ or peasants’ soviets. The governmental form appropriate to the revolutionary democratic dictatorship could not be understood in abstraction from the struggle to transform the social rela-tions in agriculture; a governmental majority in the cities could not enforce its decisions in the countryside without the agency of the peasants’ struggle (Lenin, 1909, 370–374). Accordingly, Lenin had specified the organization of the democratic dictatorship as “workers’ governments in towns, peasant committees in the villages (which at a certain moment will be transformed into bodies elected by universal, etc., suffrage)” (Lenin, 1907, 392n).

The struggle of the workers for political influence over the peasantry was acknowledged, of course, but it did not deflect the logic of Trotsky’s concep-tion. For the instinctive proprietorial urges of the petty-bourgeois peasant mass would not bend to the organic collectivism of the industrial proletariat and this contradiction could not be resolved within the limits of one country, especially such an economically backward one as Russia, and would sap the foundations of proletarian rule unless it was reinforced by the victory of the international working class. While the proletarian socialist revolution and the peasant revolts against landlordism might be temporally “telescoped,” they were not reconceived in terms of each other. The Leninist logic of the struggle for hegemony constrains political actors to adapt hegemonic political projects to shifting conjunctures of struggle and renders disagree-ment over the definition/redefinition of a political project potentially deeply trenchant. Understood in these terms, the project of proletarian hegemony in the democratic revolution was open to the influence of the people; the relation of the proletariat to the people, especially to the peasantry, may be partially constitutive of its revolutionary political project and hence of its political identity. Political relations between classes, in particular the relation between proletariat and peasantry, are cast in more rigid terms in Trotsky’s conception. His theory seems addressed to political actors who were able, because their adversaries and allies had no margin of maneuver, to calculate their own actions with no margin of uncertainty. Such rigidity translates into an inability to engage effectively with other political actors and hence a politics conducted as though its “author” were looking at the process of history from the outside (see Carr, 1970, 162) and may help to account for a lack of political suppleness later criticized by Lenin as an “excessive pre-occupation with the purely administrative side of the work” (Lenin, 1922, 595). Something like this point is at work in the following observation from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks:

Taken up again, systematized, developed, intellectualized by the Parvus–Bronstein group, [permanent revolution] proved inert and ineffective in 1905, and subsequently.

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It had become an abstract thing, belonging in the scientist’s cabinet. The [Bolsheviks who] opposed it in this literary form, and indeed did not use it “on purpose,” applied it in fact in a form which adhered to actual, concrete, living history, adapted to the time and the place; as something that sprang from all the pores of the particular society which had to be transformed; as the alliance of two social groups with hege-mony of the urban group. In one case, you had the jacobin temperament without an adequate political content; in the second, a jacobin temperament and content derived from the new historical relations, and not from a literary and intellectualistic label. (Gramsci, 1973, 84–85n.)

Lih is right, then, to insist upon the distinctiveness of Trotsky’s concep-tion of permanent revolution. The claim that others did not anticipate this conception only follows, however, on the assumption that the alternatives are exhausted in defining the appropriate end/aim of working-class interven-tion in the revolutionary process either as thoroughgoing democracy or as socialism. Lih jumps to this particular conclusion in consequence of several interpretive decisions that allow him simply to deduce the logic of political agency from the strategic aim of revolutionary politics, once defined, thereby effectively excluding issues of political agency from the discussion.

First of all, the theme of “permanent revolution” as it informs the think-ing of Marx and Engels is excluded from the purview of Lih’s discussion. As it features in their writings, this theme is sometimes predicated of the process of bourgeois–democratic revolution (in reference, for example, to the French Revolution of 1789), sometimes of a necessary/possible transition beyond it. It designates, however, not only a more-or-less distant terminus of the process, but especially the logic whereby the collision of social classes in the course of revolution clarifies the terms of their opposition, driving the more staunch partisans of revolution to increasingly radical measures, well beyond what they might initially have intended or even imagined, as the price of establishing and defending the revolutionary power, drawing hitherto quiescent lower strata into the maelstrom of revolutionary politics while pushing even some early protagonists of the initial aims of revolution into the camp of reaction. It designates not only very radical revolutionary aims but also a process whereby aims are developed and redefined in the course of revolution and it carries an implication that the scope of revolu-tionary ambition may be subject to redefinition in accordance with the cour-age, tenacity and political intelligence of agents acting within the process of revolution. It is difficult to suppose that this line of thought was unfamiliar to any of the Marxists engaged with the Russian revolutionary process and, consequently, that it did not enter into the uses of “permanent revolution” in that historical context. In this light, the references to socialist revolution by Kautsky, Luxemburg, and so on that Lih tries unpersuasively to marginal-ize need not be subordinated to a determinate strategic schema in order to

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figure as an essential aspect of the practice of orienting the working-class movement amidst uncertain and rapidly shifting patterns of possibility and constraint in the revolutionary process. And if Trotsky’s theory is understood, as Day and Gaido understand it, as emergent from this practice, there is a straightforward and significant sense in which these other authors may be said to have anticipated it.

Second, the international dimension of the revolutionary process figures in Lih’s account as a kind of ad hoc afterthought to escape the desperate posi-tion into which the logic of Trotsky’s commitment to a socialist revolution in Russia had driven him. As Trotsky presents it, however, the introduction of socialist measures is not a goal arbitrarily imposed upon the revolution-ary movement, but one that is immanent in the class position of the pro-letariat and necessarily emergent through the inexorable dynamics of the class struggle that constrain any possible leadership. In this light, by the way, Martynov’s Menshevik position, utilized by Lih as a critical counterpoint to Trotsky, might well be construed as a kind of partial vindication of the latter. In any case, as the Day and Gaido edition amply demonstrates, the notion that a spontaneous logic of proletarian struggle, solidarity and radicalization need not stop at national borders was hardly unique to Trotsky and certainly fed into a broader receptiveness to probing the socialist potential of the Russian revolutionary process. If a particular account of the spontaneous dynamic of working-class struggles fuels the logic of Trotsky’s conception of permanent revolution, then Day and Gaido’s inclusion of Ryazanov’s polemic against Plekhanov, organized around a “revolutionary economist” critique of what he takes to be Lenin’s surrender of working-class independence in the demo-cratic revolution, is indeed pertinent to understanding the development of the concept, Lih to the contrary notwithstanding. Ryazanov was hardly alone among proponents of permanent revolution in being actuated by issues of the political agency and political unity of the working class emergent from debates around Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and the subsequent split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Luxemburg and Trotsky, for example, writing critiques of the Leninist vanguard. That these criticisms, as Lih rightly sug-gests, target a caricature of Lenin’s views does not imply that there are no differences at work nor that this kind of misunderstanding cannot shed some useful light on the distinctive character of its proponents’ own views. In the context of these differences as to how the logic of political agency and class unity is to be understood and especially in light of Trotsky’s later characterization of his own earlier views as exhibiting “social-revolutionary fatalism,” Lih’s easy dismissal of the charge of “fatalism/determinism” that Day and Gaido direct at Plekhanov seems faintly ingenuous. This straw man argument leads Lih effectively to exclude concerns about the nature and ef-ficacy of working-class political agency from the context of his discussion of

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the logic and nature of the Russian revolutionary process. Socialist revolution and thoroughgoing democratic revolution thus figure as strict alternatives, lending Lih’s account a rigid cast, as though the aims of revolution were given outside and apart from the revolutionary process.

Department of Political ScienceLaurentian UniversitySudbury, Ontario P3E [email protected]

REFERENCES

Carr, Edward Hallett. 1970. Socialism in One Country. Volume I. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.

Dan, Theodore. 1970. The Origins of Bolshevism. New york: Schoken Books.Day, Richard, and Daniel Gaido, eds. 2009. Witnesses to Permanent Revolution. Leiden,

Amsterdam: Brill.Gramsci, Antonio. 1973. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Quintin

Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds. New york: International Publishers.Lenin, V. I. 1971 (1922). “Letter to the Congress.” Pp. 593–611 in Collected Works,

Volume XXXVI. Moscow: Progress Publishers.———. 1972 (1907). “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First

Russian Revolution, 1905–1907.” Pp. 217–429 in Collected Works, Volume XIII. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

———. 1973 (1909). “The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution.” Pp. 360–379 in Collected Works, Volume XV. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Lih, Lars T. 2012. “Democratic Revolution in Permanenz.” Science & Society, 76:4 (Oc-tober), 433–462.

Trotsky, Leon. 1969. Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects. New york: Path-finder.

———. 1975. My Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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A Maverick in european social Democracy: trotsky’s Political trajectory Between 1905 and 1917

jOHN MAROT

It is good that Richard Day and Daniel Gaido brought together a collection of articles, written by leading European Social Democrats between 1902 and 1907, on the nature of the coming revolution in Russia (Day and Gaido, 2011). It is even better that Lars Lih has decisively intervened to set the re-cord straight, by forcefully reaffirming what has generally and traditionally understood to be the uniqueness of Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory, that is, his appraisal of the driving forces, and the final political result, of that forthcoming revolution (Lih, 2012). Gaido and Day, however, deny Trotsky’s originality in this matter, claiming that Kautsky, Ryazanov, Luxemburg, Parvus and Mehring “anticipated” Trotsky’s scenario of permanent revolution — an incorrect conclusion, as Lih shows. My aim in this brief comment is to add to Lih’s intervention what I believe to be the chief explanation for Trotsky’s political isolation in the period 1907–1914 and, arguably, up to 1917.

Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory clearly set him apart from all Social Democrats, as Lih rightly reaffirms. However, Trotsky’s singular theory need not have led to his political isolation in practice, as Lih appears to imply. The reason Trotsky stood alone politically is one that few on the left, and even fewer in the Trotskyist tradition, are willing to entertain: Trotsky privileged theory over practice, at least in this instance. The kissing cousin to doctrinarism in theory is sectarianism in politics: Trotsky deliberately walked into the political wilderness after 1907 — and deliberately walked out of it only in 1917, under the impulse of mighty events. This assessment does not accord with Gaido and Day’s reverential defense of the “visionary” Trotsky, but it does, I believe, accord with the facts, to which I now turn.

Lih shows how all Social Democrats, including Trotsky, agreed that the material premises for socialism were not present in Russia: 100 million small-propertied peasants would have no interest in collectively organizing production. Notwithstanding the disinterest of the overwhelming majority of the population in socialized production, Lih restates the commonly held and correct view that only Trotsky thought the dynamics of the bourgeois–democratic revolution would inevitably lead the proletariat to seize power and make a socialist revolution, shattering the bourgeois limitations of the democratic revolution. The peasants would support such a revolution, not


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because it would bring socialism but because it would bring land redistri-bution and a swift end to gentry rule in the countryside. Though Russian Social Democrats differed in their assessments of peasant political capaci-ties, Trotsky, Lih writes, “arrived at the same practical goal of some sort of worker/peasant revolutionary government” advocated by Lenin, thus “put-ting Trotsky’s views on the peasants in the democratic revolution squarely” into the Bolshevik wing of Russian Social Democracy (455, emphasis added). Indeed, Trotsky’s “ideas about the democratic revolution itself were practical politics” up to at least 1917, Lih avers (459, emphasis added).

Nevertheless, should the working-class seizure of power in Russia fail to trigger socialist revolutions in the heartlands of capitalism, it was Trotsky’s prediction of inevitable conflict between the proletariat and its class ally, the peasantry, that “isolated him” among Russian Social Democrats, writes Lih, because Social Democrats were then trying to “enlist” the peasantry in the “democratic revolution” to overthrow Tsarism. “For this reason alone, what-ever its merits as predictive analysis, the Trotsky scenario was unacceptable as a party program” (460). Lih’s analysis raises the following issues.

Does the theory of permanent revolution contain within it the requirement that all Russian Social Democrats accept it as part of the program of the RSDLP? Lih does not ask this question because explaining Trotsky’s political trajectory is not the main object of his intervention; it is mine. Nevertheless, if the ques-tion were posed, I believe Lih would find no textual evidence that the Social Democrats’ mandatory programmatic adoption of the theory was in the theory.

What then prevents Trotsky and the Bolsheviks from making common cause at this juncture, given their agreement that the peasantry must pres-ently be considered an ally in the democratic revolution leading up to the overthrow of Tsarism? After all, the concluding part of Trotsky’s scenario is scheduled to take place only after the overthrow of Tsarism, not before. It follows that since the conflict between Bolshevism and Trotsky in the pre-1917 period on this question is only theoretical and latent, not practical and active, it seems that it is Trotsky who has isolated himself — and not the Social Democrats who have isolated him — by apparently insisting that So-cial Democrats accept the entirety of his scenario, including the concluding part, which has no practical political relevance in the here and now — an insistence expressed in Trotsky’s political behavior, if not in his speeches and texts; in his practice, if not in his theory. That, in this instance, Trotsky chose to privilege his theory over practical cooperation with the Bolsheviks — cooperation, moreover, that contained within it the potential to modify or inflect the Bolshevik attitude toward Trotsky’s ideas — is, in my view, a telling sign of Trotsky’s political inflexibility.

This conclusion seems to be further strengthened when we examine Bolshevism and Menshevism’s opposed attitudes toward the liberal bourgeois

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opposition. More precisely, it is Trotsky’s striking summary assessment of those opposed attitudes that I wish to spotlight, an assessment Lih does not integrate in his intervention. In 1909 Trotsky wrote:

Whereas the Mensheviks, proceeding from the abstract notion that “our revolution is a bourgeois revolution,” arrive at the idea that the proletariat must adapt all its tactics to the behavior of the liberal bourgeoisie to ensure the transfer of state power to that bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks proceed from an equally abstract notion — “democratic dictatorship, not socialist dictatorship” — and arrive at the idea of a proletariat in possession of state power imposing a bourgeois democratic limitation upon itself. It is true that the difference between them in this matter is very considerable; while the anti-revolution aspects of Menshevism have already become fully apparent, those of Bolshevism are likely to become a serious threat only in the event of victory. (Trotsky, 1905, 316–17, emphasis added.)

Thus, Trotsky writes about how the counter-revolutionary traits of Men-shevism had become apparent in the aftermath of the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, because experience had shown that the bourgeois–democratic revolution would never reach victory if the working class followed Menshevik leadership. On the other hand, the counter-revolutionary traits of Bolshe-vism would become apparent only in case of a proletarian victory led by the Bolsheviks, because the Bolsheviks would then insist on maintaining the revolution within its bourgeois–democratic limits — avoiding conflict with the peasantry — but reversing the proletarian victory.1

Clearly, in light of his own assessment of the Mensheviks, Trotsky’s opposition to them was immediate, direct, active and practical, excluding any political rapprochement with them. Equally clearly, and on the same grounds of effective politics, Trotsky should have joined the Bolsheviks long before 1917, trying at the same time to convince them of the correctness of his permanent revolution theory — but prepared to split with them in 1917 if they proved unwilling to lead the working class beyond the limits of the bourgeois–democratic revolution. Trotsky refused to follow this course. In this matter — and it was not a small one! — Trotsky proved to be incorrigibly doctrinaire right up to 1917, when the Bolsheviks came around to the theory of permanent revolution entirely independently of Trotsky, by adopting Lenin’s “April Theses” to guide their political activity.

1 “The leading role of the proletariat was part of the Social Democratic consensus about the Russian democratic revolution” writes Lih (440). Actually, as Trotsky shows, there was no consensus. Consensus broke down in 1904, when the Bolsheviks developed their views on the leading role of the working class, views they clearly counterposed to those then being put forth by the Mensheviks in Iskra, which the Mensheviks had placed under their editorial control as part of their campaign ignoring certain decisions of the Second Party Congress, held the previous year. The key text here is Lenin’s “The Zemstvo Campaign and Iskra’s Plan” (Lenin, 1961, 497–516).

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Even then, Trotsky still did not formally join the Bolsheviks until months later, in july 1917.

Finally, it is not just Trotsky who foresaw an antagonism of interests developing between the property-loving peasantry and the working class in case of a working-class victory: all Social Democrats did, and Lih readily recognizes this. However, no Social Democrat correctly grasped the actual nature of this conflict.2

Department of HistoryKeimyung UniversityDaegu, [email protected]

REFERENCES

Day, Richard B., and Daniel Gaido, eds. and trans. 2009. Witnesses to Permanent Revolu-tion: The Documentary Record. Leiden, Amsterdam: Brill.

Lenin, V. I. 1961 (1904). Collected Works, 4th English edition, Vol. 7. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Lih, Lars. 2012. “Democratic Revolution in Permanenz.” Science & Society, 76:4 (Oc-tober), 433–462.

Marot, john. 2012. The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History. Leiden, Amsterdam: Brill.

Trotsky, Leon. 1972. “Our Differences.” Pp. 316–317 in 1905. New york: Vintage. Originally published in Rosa Luxemburg’s Polish Marxist journal, Przeglad social-demokratyczny.

2 I study this in detail in “The Peasant Question and the Origins of Stalinism: Rethinking the Destruction of the October Revolution” (in Marot, 2012).

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Permanent Revolution: A Rejoinder

LARS T. LIH

Day and Gaido: A De Facto Retraction?

In their response, Day and Gaido state that I have unpardonably dis-torted their actual argument about the relation between Trotsky’s scenario of permanent revolution and the other writers collected in Witnesses. In my review, I identified their “central thesis” as the assertion that “Ryazanov, Parvus, Luxemburg, Mehring and particularly Kautsky ‘anticipated’ Trotsky’s scenario of ‘permanent revolution’.” I then mentioned the difficulty of pin-ning down the exact meaning of this thesis:

The exact sense intended by “anticipate” is unclear to me. Day and Gaido seem to mean it in a strong sense, namely, that certain writers presented the essentials of the theory long before Trotsky’s canonical Results and Prospects (1906). I need not try to sort this out, however, because in my view none of these writers did anticipate Trotsky, either in this strong sense or in some weaker one such as pointing the way or adumbrating specific themes. (436.)

Day and Gaido are indignant at this statement of their thesis and find it “pass-ing strange” that anyone acting in good faith would use the word “anticipate” to sum up their thesis.1 They write:

We used this expression [“anticipate”] in our main introduction when speaking of Ryazanov, whose account of the specificities of Russian history as distinct from the so-called “pattern” of Western Europe “anticipated” the historical outline that Trotsky later provided in Results and Prospects. We never suggested that Ryazanov or anyone else “anticipated” Trotsky’s conclusion that, despite its economic backwardness, in-deed, precisely because of the political and class consequences of that backwardness, Russia might press on with the introduction of socialism even before revolution came in Western Europe. (Day and Gaido, PR, 398–399.)2

1 The reader will note that in their contributions to this discussion, both Alan Shandro, who supports it, and john Marot, who rejects it, use the word “anticipate” to refer to the Day–Gaido thesis.

2 References in this rejoinder to Day and Gaido’s book, Witnesses (2009) will be given as (Day and Gaido, W); references to their Symposium contribution (this issue) will be given as (Day and Gaido, PR).


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Compare this claim to what they actually wrote in their introduction:

Readers will be struck not merely by the scholarly depth of [Ryazanov’s] analysis, but even more by the remarkable way in which it anticipates all of the arguments [emphasis added] set forth by Trotsky three years later in his famous Results and Prospects. (W, 33.)

In their response, Day and Gaido also strongly imply that they used “this expression” only in the general introduction of their book. This implication does not fit the facts. For example:

Ryazanov’s critique of the Iskra program is remarkable because it anticipates in almost every detail [emphasis added] the theory of permanent revolution, which is convention-ally associated with Leon Trotsky’s famous work Results and Prospects. . . . Ryazanov was the first Marxist to translate the burden of “backwardness” into the historical possibility of permanent revolution. (W, 70, 75.)

Whereas Ryazanov anticipated movement beyond a bourgeois revolution, Plekhanov believed Russia was about to win a constitutional order that would finally eliminate remnants of serfdom and establish a law-governed regime of private property and civil liberties. (W, 135.)

In another passage, Day and Gaido remark that in an essay of December 1905, Trotsky “gave his own conclusions in a way that directly anticipated Results and Prospects, his definitive statement of permanent revolution” (W, 500). Thus, in this case, Trotsky anticipates himself.

I call particular attention to the summary discussion on pp. 615–6:

Ryazanov effectively anticipated all of the major arguments [emphasis added] that Leon Trotsky subsequently incorporated into his famous Results and Prospects, which has conventionally been regarded as the initial and definitive statement of the theory of permanent revolution. . . . Kautsky and Ryazanov created the theoretical atmosphere from which Trotsky could appropriate and radicalize the conviction that “backward” Russia might in fact be in the forefront of world-historical developments.

According to Day and Gaido, “we state explicitly in the introduction to Chapter 17 that Trotsky was going further than anyone else was prepared to contemplate” (PR, 400). I can find no explicit statement to this effect in the introduction to Chapter 17. The closest I can find is the following, which says something quite different: “Leon Trotsky’s foreword to Marx’s account of the Paris Commune marks an important break with the naïve economic determinism that often characterized Second-International Marxism” (W, 497). Evidently Day and Gaido now want us to read this sentence with the assumption that Ryazanov, Luxemburg, Parvus and Kautsky never moved

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beyond “naïve economic determinism.” In my view, one of the great merits of the documents collected in this book and indeed many of the editorial comments is to show how false this assumption is.

When we compare what Day and Gaido say in their response to my article and what they say in the book itself, we find that they now explicitly deny a position that they just as explicitly affirmed, many times over, in their book. Should we not take this as a de facto retraction — grudging but effective — of a crucial thesis of their book?

Textual Interpretation: Obvious or Difficult?

Day and Gaido write that Plekhanov’s obtuseness is “simply a matter of historical fact. . . . Plekhanov ranked himself. We merely translated what he wrote” (PR, 399).

These statements are more than just witticisms. They express Day and Gaido’s real attitude about interpreting historical documents. For them, the meaning of the documents in this collection is plain and obvious, and anyone who disputes their own interpretation is simply denying self-evident historical facts. Thus the mere thought that “we tried to impose our own meaning upon the documents” — or, as I would put it, the possibility that they incorrectly interpreted some of these documents — “falls of its own weight” (PR, 398). Any alternative interpretation is perceived almost as a matter of personal insult.

My own interpretation of this material is documented at every step of the way with substantial citations. Is it too pedantic to ask someone who disagrees with my interpretation to explain why my various citations do not mean what I take them to mean, rather than contenting themselves with references to my “pre-formed ideological predilections” (PR, 400) or my lack of dialectics? yet Day and Gaido almost never get their hands dirty with actual textual argument.

Three quasi-exceptions prove the rule. Toward the end of their response Day and Gaido give a long citation from Rosa Luxemburg that is supposed to refute something I am supposed to have said (PR, MS10–11). The quoted passage makes the same point as another passage from Luxemburg that I quoted in my article (Lih, 2012, 441). Day and Gaido also affirm that Trotsky “never for a moment entertained the thought that the European revolution ‘may or may not happen’.” They remind me that Trotsky was an “internation-alist” and refer me to chapter 9 of Results and Prospects (PR, 402–3).

True, Trotsky used all of what Day and Gaido call his “rhetorical and literary genius” (W, 616) to make European revolution appear to be quasi-inevitable. The fact remains that he urged his Russian comrades to embark on a course of action that he himself said would end in disaster unless such a revolution occurred. Besides the citation in my article (458), Trotsky says, in Chapter 9 of Results and Prospects:

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Left to its own resources, the working class of Russia will inevitably be crushed by the counterrevolution the moment the peasantry turns its back on it. It will have no alter-native but to link the fate of its political rule, and, hence, the fate of the whole Russian revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in Europe. (Trotsky, 2010, 126.)

Be he never so internationalist, Trotsky could not guarantee that this deus ex revolutsiia would actually arrive in time to save the day. My paraphrase of Trotsky’s argument was meant to bring out the weak points he naturally tried to obscure, and his reliance on a revolution that might or might not happen is definitely one of them.

When we come to the 1902 exchange between Ryazanov and Plekhanov, we must observe that Day and Gaido do not merely translate this exchange; they also provide a running commentary in the form of introductions and footnotes. The footnotes often begin with “in other words,” or “the obvious implication is”; Day and Gaido then proceed to find meanings that are far from apparent in the text.3 As a result, we learn that Ryazanov is an “out-standing visionary” who argues that Russia’s upcoming revolution would be an exceptional one, “a permanent revolution, in which an entirely new socialist ‘pattern’ would be established both for Russia and for Europe” (W, 139). In contrast, Plekhanov is portrayed as a condescending pedant ready to crush Ryazanov’s bold new perspectives. The disconnect between this interpreta-tion and what’s really going on in these texts is close to surreal.

Like every other Russian Social Democrat in this period, Ryazanov thought the immediate task facing Russian Social Democracy was to bring political freedom to Russia by overthrowing the tsar, thus obtaining the space to carry on the class struggle in a way that would accelerate the advent of the socialist revolution. He affirms this goal again and again through the excerpts provided by Day and Gaido. I choose three such affirmations more or less at random (for other passages, including statements by other writers that are endorsed by Ryazanov, see W, 85, 89, 91–2, 99, 100–1, 106, 108, 121–2, 132, 133):

The most immediate national task of the Russian working class is at the same time one of the major tasks of the entire international proletarian movement. The overthrow of Russian absolutism, the main instrument of European reaction, will eliminate one of the greatest obstacles in the way of “the great emancipatory struggle” of the international proletariat. (W, 77.)

Sooner or later, the day will come when Russia will see the dawn of political free-dom. The more our party works for that great day, the more actively it participates

3 For a good example of this procedure, see fn. 41 (W, 154). Day and Gaido also rely on false antinomies: Ryazanov maintains A, while Plekhanov maintains B — even though A and B are perfectly compatible. An example is the passage from p. 135, cited earlier.

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today in every single event, the more closely it links its activity with every aspect of working-class life, the more rapidly and successfully will it develop “on the day after the revolution,” and the less will be the danger that in the arena of political life it will run into some bourgeois party that will rely on it for help and drag along behind itself a part of the working class. (W, 104.)

Social Democracy must make every effort to ensure that now, before the downfall of the autocracy and on the eve of the revolution, the workers’ movement becomes all the more closely aligned with socialism.4 Only in this way will revolutionary Social Democracy ensure that at the time of the revolution the working class will use all its energy and all its revolutionary passion to demand complete political freedom, without being dis-tracted from this, the main task, and without expending its resources in economic experiments. (W, 111.)

There is no indication whatsoever that Ryazanov, a self-proclaimed super-orthodox Marxist who thought that Social Democratic programs from the 1880s were perfectly usable in 1902, believed (or anticipated the belief) that the upcoming Russian revolution would embark on policies of socialist transformation of Russian society without waiting for a socialist revolution in Europe. To make their case for this highly implausible conclusion, Day and Gaido point to a) Ryazanov’s discussion of various “peculiarities” of Russia’s development that did not fit the “pattern” of Western Europe; b) a single use of the term “permanent revolution”; and c) a discussion of international revolution in the final paragraphs of Ryazanov’s 300-page critique. I analyzed the issues raised by (b) and (c) in my article. As far as (a) is concerned, are Day and Gaido seriously asking us to believe that Plekhanov was horrified by all Russian peculiarities — that he believed that “the appropriate response for Russia’s peculiar development was to make it conform with the West European ‘pattern’ as expeditiously as possible”? (W, 138).5 Such a position would not be “naïve economic determinism,” but more like lunacy. In fact, on the crucial question of the agrarian program, it is Plekhanov who insists on Russian peculiarities as against Ryazanov (W, 159–61).

As I see it, nothing in the Ryazanov passages cited by Day and Gaido indicates an innovative or heretical break with universal Social Democratic

4 When Ryazanov writes that the worker movement must be “closely aligned with socialism” even before the fall of the autocracy, he means that the Social Democrats should work to imbue the workers with an understanding and acceptance of the socialist goal. Ryazanov here shows his allegiance to Kautsky’s merger formula: “Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker movement.” For discussion of the canonical status of this formula in German and Russian Social Democracy, see Lih, 2006, Chapter 1.

5 The Russian word translated by Day and Gaido as “pattern” is shablon, a word taken from German that colloquially means a cliché, something trite or banal. Thus Ryazanov berates Plekhanov for relying on clichés about Western Europe. I very much doubt if Plekhanov ever affirmed that Russians should conform to a shablon about Europe.

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assumptions about the upcoming political revolution in Russia. One indi-cation of the anodyne nature of these passages: Plekhanov’s critique does not respond to any of them.6 If they were in fact heretical, Plekhanov didn’t notice it.

When we look at the genuine disputes between Ryazanov and Plekhanov, Ryazanov is often the one who looks like a passive fatalist. He argues that “the best that Social Democrats can do is leave it to bourgeois democracy to struggle against the remnants of pre-capitalist orders, while simply pointing out for their own part that destruction of such remnants is inevitable wher-ever capitalism has already become the prevailing mode of production” (W, 153). In response, Plekhanov argues that it is the duty of Social Democracy to fight and fight hard against abusive legal restrictions on the peasants that increase the burden of exploitation.

Various Misrepresentations

1. According to Day and Gaido, I charge them with undertaking their project “with an ideological mission” (PR, 398). No. I treated the book as presenting a challenging historical hypothesis (even if Day and Gaido now disavow it) that deserves to be taken seriously, examined critically and de-cisively rejected.

2. Day and Gaido are themselves not averse to attributing motives. They accuse me of being motivated by hostility to “Trotsky and Trotskyism” (PR, 400). No — unless any criticism of assertions by Trotsky or Trotskyists is taken as proof of such hostility.

3. “Lih is distressed by the fact that we attributed less than central im-portance to Lenin in this debate” (PR, 399). No. I have no problem with the quantity of Lenin documents in this book.7 My only comment on this score was that Day and Gaido had done a great service by including Lenin’s com-mentary on Kautsky (451). I am distressed by the quality of Day and Gaido’s remarks on Lenin, which I see as incorrect or misleading for the most part. But I explicitly sidestepped any general discussion of Lenin (434) and brought up his views only when necessary to clarify disputes among Social Democrats.

6 Plekhanov does not discuss the empirical question of exactly how progressive were the liberals, either in Germany or in Russia, but confines himself to stating the general prin-ciples governing the Social Democratic attitude towards them. Trotsky himself stated these principles in 1912: “you [the workers] should tell the liberal bourgeoisie, that now as always, you are ready to support each step that is genuinely aimed against the reactionaries, but that always — in the future as in the past — you will expose and hold up to scorn its pusil-lanimity, its waverings, its betrayals and its servility toward the reaction” (in Shelokhaev, ed., 2008, 797). Compare Plekhanov’s discussion in Witnesses, 146–7.

7 Day and Gaido have mixed me up with Paul Le Blanc, who did opine that the collection might have included more Lenin documents. I have no idea why Day and Gaido say that Le Blanc’s very admiring review (Le Blanc, 2012) “argue[s] that Witnesses is anti-Leninist.”

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4. My “fundamental problem” is my commitment to imposing “the rigid categories of either/or” on the revolution of 1905, so that “a revolution can be either bourgeois–democratic or socialist” and nothing else (PR, 402). No. My review says nothing about my own analysis of the 1905 revolution. My sole topic was how the Social Democratic writers collected in Witnesses saw events (for more discussion, see my response to Alan Shandro below).

5. According to Lih, Kautsky, Luxemburg et al. “decapitated” the Russian movement in Russia “by limiting their ambitions to bourgeois rule — or even bourgeois revolution — in Permanenz” (PR, 401). No. This is such a willful misunderstanding that I can only reply: go back and read what I said.

Alan Shandro

Alan Shandro devotes most of his remarks to setting forth Trotsky’s particular scenario and the differences between him and Lenin. I agree with much of what he says here. Particularly valuable is his discussion of Lenin’s point that (in Lenin’s words) a class coalition between the peasantry and the proletariat “does not at all presuppose either the existence of any particular powerful party, or parties in general” (Shandro, 407).

Unfortunately, by the time he actually gets around to a critique of my ar-gument, he has left himself only space enough to announce how unpersuasive I am but not enough to give a single concrete example of a mistaken textual interpretation. I “unpersuasively marginalize,” I throw in the international dimension only as an “ad hoc afterthought,” I rely on “easy dismissal” of a “straw man argument,” and so on (Shandro, 409–10).

My textual interpretations are based on a good faith effort to make sense of the documents included in this collection. At each step I give the reasons for my conclusions. Shandro tells me I am unconvincing, but never tells me why this or that citation does not mean what I take it to mean. I cannot change my mind about concrete texts because of vague, a priori suppositions such as the following: “It is difficult to suppose that this line of thought [found in texts by Marx and Engels] was unfamiliar to any of the Marxists engaged with the Russian revolutionary process and, consequently, that it did not enter into the uses of ‘permanent revolution’ in that historical context” (409).

Shandro makes some general remarks that are worth examining about my “discussion of the logic and nature of the Russian revolutionary process.” He finds it deficient because, among other reasons:

• Idonotmakeclearthat“thenotionthataspontaneouslogicofproletarian struggle, solidarity and radicalization need not stop at national borders was hardly unique to Trotsky” (410).

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• “Socialistrevolutionandthoroughgoingdemocraticrevolution...figure as strict alternatives, lending Lih’s account a rigid cast” (411).

• “concernsaboutthenatureandefficacyofworking-classpoliticalagency” are “effectively excluded” (410).

Please note that my article does not present my own views about the nature and logic of the revolutionary process. My aim was rather to set forth how these matters were viewed by some Social Democratic writers of the revolu-tionary period. Therefore, Shandro’s charges are really directed against the views of Kautsky and Co. (of course, as I present them). But these charges are singularly unpersuasive. Let me explain why.

On p. 438 of my article, I give an extensive passage from Lenin from which I derive four elements that were “common currency” among Social Democrats: “a) a far-reaching democratic revolution transforms Russia; b) the socialist proletariat plays a leadership role in this revolution; c) the Rus-sian democratic revolution sparks off a socialist revolution in Europe; d) the European revolution has a ‘repercussive effect’ on Russia and accelerates the advent of socialist transformation in Russia itself.”

On pp. 445–6, I give an extensive paraphrase of how these writers viewed the “logic and nature” of the revolutionary process. Putting together these two discussions, we find that the democratic and socialist revolutions are not seen as “strict alternatives,” but as dynamically interactive. One reason is the international context and the possibility of a “repercussive effect” (Lenin’s term) of different kinds of revolution upon each other.

Even when abstracting from the international context and looking only at Russia, these writers evaluated every step of the democratic revolution from the point of view of its contribution to a successful socialist revolution as soon as possible. Indeed, they thought of the democratic revolution as part of the social-ist revolution, as part of what needed to be done in order to get to socialism.

Contrary to Shandro, this way of thinking was not “most enduringly instantiated by Trotsky and conceived with the greatest clarity from his per-spective of permanent revolution” (Shandro, 406). Trotsky wanted a worker government to embark on socialist transformation in Russia, even without a prior European socialist revolution, even though he admitted and even emphasized that the majority of the population would resist to the point of “civil war.” All other Social Democratic writers rejected this scenario, not because of any deficiency in clarity or inability to escape rigid distinctions, but because they thought it was a lousy way to get to socialism (see my discus-sion of “the axiom of the class ally,” Lih, 2012, 450–61).

Finally, let us consider what Ryazanov, Kautsky, and Luxemburg actu-ally meant when they used the term “permanent revolution” in the writings

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collected in Witnesses. In my article, I paraphrased their meaning as follows (Lih, 2012, 446):

What is achieved during the revolutionary process will set the stage for a significant period thereafter. If the workers understand this, they will not get too discouraged after a temporary defeat and they will also not relax after a revolutionary victory. The duty of Social Democracy in a democratic revolution is therefore to ensure by all means possible that the proletariat keeps up its revolutionary pressure without interruption, right until the point when the maximum freedom possible under the circumstances is achieved and the revolution has been carried out “to the end.”

What is all this about if not “the nature and efficacy of working-class political agency”? Based on their experience of working-class socialist politics — and on their reading of Marx and Engels — these writers thought that unrelenting pressure by the working class was vital for a successful revolu-tionary outcome; that certain features of the psychology of the working class made it prone to prematurely relax the pressure; that a vital task of Social Democracy was therefore to combat any such temptation.

To conclude: the outlook of Social Democratic writers toward the Russian revolution was rich and complex. Their outlook does not deserve the epithets that, although flung at me, are really aimed at my exposition of their outlook: ignoring the international context, rigid and undialecti-cal, neglecting working-class agency. Trotsky came out of this milieu, but he arrived at conclusions that all the other writers found unacceptable. We therefore cannot say, as Shandro urges us to do, that these writers anticipated Trotsky, because Trotsky was simply clearer about the logic of the revolutionary process. Indeed, a better term than “anticipate” would be “reject in advance.”

John Marot

john Marot offers support to my basic conclusions and leads the discus-sion into new and constructive channels. He offers this concise summary of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” scenario: “Trotsky thought the dynamics of the bourgeois–democratic revolution would inevitably lead the proletariat to seize power and make a socialist revolution, shattering the bourgeois limita-tions of the democratic revolution” (Marot, 412).

This formula could be expanded as follows: Trotsky thought that the dynamics of the anti-tsarist political revolution would inevitably lead the proletariat to seize power in order to carry out the democratic revolution “to the end,” since only state power could shatter the obstacles to this goal set up by bourgeois political forces. So far, he was part of a wider current of opinion, but he also went on to argue that, once in power, the proletariat

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would inevitably be drawn into policies of socialist transformation, even though these policies would eventually lead to “civil war” with the peasants, unless help came from a successful socialist revolution in Europe.

In my article, I asserted that “the Trotsky scenario was unacceptable as a party program.” Marot asks whether Trotsky’s scenario in fact presupposed programmatic adoption. Good point — I misspoke, since even basic tacti-cal views of this kind would not be included in a party program. I should have said something like “official party views” or even “propagandized by a substantial party current of opinion.”

There is another reason why Trotsky may not have required any kind of official acceptance of his views. He often spoke as if the iron logic of class interest would force the Social Democrats to carry out his scenario — in which case, their prior views were irrelevant. This possibility brings up the issue of the implications of Trotsky’s scenario for his factional policy. Shandro thinks that this scenario implied a policy of reconciliation of all factions, whereas Marot thinks that Trotsky should logically have joined the Bolsheviks but that he refused to do so out of sectarianism. Choosing sides in this dispute depends on whether we believe Trotsky’s rhetoric in 1905–6 or his rhetoric in 1924. In 1905–6, he often spoke as if prior tactical views would inevitably give way before “the iron logic of class interest.” In this regard, we can ask Marot why he thinks that Trotsky’s opposition to Menshevik policies was “immediate, direct, active and practical” (Marot, 414). Trotsky might have assumed that the Mensheviks as well as the Bolsheviks would discard their “abstract notions,” come the revolution.

In 1924, looking back at 1917, Trotsky puts a different spin on matters. Now he says that if Lenin had not rearmed the party with the perspective of permanent revolution in April, the October revolution would not have occurred. The logic of events would evidently have counted for little in the face of the ideological inadequacies of “Old Bolshevism.”8 If this is the case, Marot is clearly right: Trotsky should have joined the Bolshevik faction and fought hard for his point of view ahead of time.

I offer another possibility, namely, that Trotsky’s efforts to unify the party did not have much to do with his views on permanent revolution one way or the other. The principal factional disputes, at least between 1910 and 1914, were over organizational matters, election tactics, and the like. In 1912, Trotsky would have laughed at the idea that he was the sectarian doctrinaire, as opposed to Lenin and his minuscule band of devoted followers who had the gall to declare themselves the party. (NB: Lenin himself had different views of his own actions.)

8 For a discussion of whether the “tenets of Old Bolshevism” were in fact inadequate to the challenges of 1917, see Lih, 2011. For the debates that arose in response to Trotsky’s Lessons of October in 1924, see Corney, forthcoming.

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Reading over the material from 1912, I do not get the impression that either Trotsky or his opponents thought that his permanent revolution sce-nario had anything to do with current disputes. Trotsky was certainly willing to work with people considerably to the right of his own views. Recently published material allows us to observe Trotsky’s actions at the anti-Bolshevik party conference in Vienna in 1912. In particular, we can compare Trotsky’s original draft for an election platform to the platform eventually published by the conference. If, as Day and Gaido suggest, the goal of a democratic republic is a sign of Plekhanov’s obtuseness, then Trotsky was equally obtuse in 1912, since his draft mentions only the democratic republic and the class struggle within bourgeois society that it makes possible:

To all of the crimes and to the whole state regime created for the sake of crimes . . . So-cial Democracy opposes a state system, founded on the full supremacy of the people, [namely,] the democratic republic. . .

Workers of Russia! Freedom of strikes, of assembly and association — the freedoms [you need for] your militant solidarity and your class struggle with the oppressors — these constitute your fundamental demand, the cornerstone of your existence as a class. In the name of full and unlimited freedom of your class struggle with bourgeois society for the high ideals of socialist equality and fraternity, Social Democracy calls you, the workers, to a decisive and unwearying struggle with the state system of op-pression and violence, with the Duma of the elite and the monarchy dripping with blood. (In Shelokhaev, ed., 2008, 793–7.)

Trotsky ended his draft platform with the resounding slogan “Long live the democratic republic!” But even this slogan was too much for most delegates, to whom it seemed irrelevant for an election campaign. The revised platform published by the Vienna conference mentioned the democratic republic, but removed it from the list of actual demands at the end of the platform (Shelokhaev, 949–56). Furthermore, even the brief mention of the socialist goal in the passage quoted above was excised. In fact, the final draft contains only a single passing reference to the fact that the Social Democrats protested against the tsar in the name of the socialist transformation of society. Trotsky accepted this compromise platform without protest.

To what extent did the Bolsheviks in 1917 adopt Trotsky’s earlier 1905–6 scenario? I cannot touch on this vast topic, except to repeat what I said in my article: in 1917 and all the way up to Stalin’s collectivization drive in 1930, the Bolsheviks never accepted the idea that socialist transformation in the countryside could proceed without the voluntary consent of the peasants.

3555 Marlowe AvenueMontreal, Quebec H4A [email protected]

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REFERENCES

Corney, Frederick C. Forthcoming. Trotsky’s Challenge: The “Literary Discussion” of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution. Historical Materialism Book Series. Leiden, Amsterdam: Brill.

Day, Richard B., and Daniel Gaido. 2009. Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Docu-mentary Record. Leiden, Amsterdam: Brill.

———. 2013. “Permanent Revolution — But Without Socialism?” Science & Society, 77:3 (july), 397–404.

Le Blanc, Paul. 2012. “Revisiting Permanent Revolution.” International Socialist Review. www.isreview.org/issues/82/featrev-permanentrevolution.shtml

Lih, Lars T. 2006. Lenin Rediscovered. Historical Materialism Book Series. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket.

———. 2011. “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context.” Russian History, 38, 199–242.

———. 2012. “Democratic Revolution in Permanenz.” Science & Society, 76:4 (Octo-ber), 433–462.

Marot, john. 2013. “A Maverick in European Social Democracy: Trotsky’s Political Trajectory Between 1905 and 1917.” Science & Society, 77:3 (july), 412–415.

Shandro, Alan. 2013. “Revolutionary Theory and Political Agency.” Science & Society, 77:3 (july), 404–411.

Shelokhaev, V. V., ed. 2008. Konferentsii RSDRP 1912 goda. Moscow: Rosspen.Trotsky, Leon. 2010. The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects. Seattle, Wash-

ington: Red Letter Press.

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permanent revolution: a rejoinder

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