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Permanent Revolution - a reply to Doug Lorimer

Author’s Note: This document was produced as a reply to the Democratic Socialist Party (Australia) pamphlet ‘Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution – a Leninist Critique’. It sparked a reply from its author, and two rejoinders. For the full debate go to www.dsp.org.au, click on ‘documents’ on the contents bar to the left.

By Phil Hearse

“No one, no force, can overthrow the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries except the revolutionary proletariat. Now, after the experience of July 1917, it is the revolutionary proletariat that must independently take over state power. Without that the victory of the revolution is impossible. The only solution is for power to be in the hands of the proletariat, and for the latter to be supported by the poor peasants or semi-proletarians. And we have already indicated the factors that can enormously accelerate this solution.” (VI Lenin, On Slogans July 1917, my emphasis PH.)

“We solved the problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in passing, as a "by-product" of our main and genuinely proletarian-revolutionary, socialist activities. We have always said that reforms are a by-product of the revolutionary class struggle. We said -- and proved it by deeds -- that bourgeois-democratic reforms are a by-product of the proletarian, i.e., of the socialist revolution.” (VI Lenin, Speech on the 4th anniversary of the revolution).

“My tactical conclusions coincided completely with those which Lenin drew at the same time in Geneva, and consequently were in the same irreconcilable contradiction to the conclusions of Stalin, Kamenev and the other epigones. When I arrived in Petrograd, nobody asked me if I renounced my ‘errors’ on the permanent revolution...Kamenev accused Lenin of Trotskyism and declared when he first met me: ‘now you have the last laugh on us’. On the eve of the October revolution I wrote in the central Bolshevik organ on the prospect of the permanent revolution. It never occurred to anyone to come out against me.” (Leon Trotsky, Permanent Revolution p221, Pathfinder edition).

Introduction: why debate?

The Australian Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) has produced a brochure by Doug Lorimer, one of its central leaders, criticising Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution and counterposing “Lenin’s theory of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”[i].

After the fall of the Soviet Union, and the defeats suffered by the workers’ movement and the left at the hands of neo-liberalism over the past 20 years, we are necessarily involved in a process of rebuilding the socialist movement internationally. In this situation - the fight for socialist renewal - international collaboration cannot be on the basis of total agreement on theory, strategy or tactics. Collaboration must also involve a fight for learning the lessons of past mistakes. It is inevitable then that international collaboration should simultaneously involve the breaking down of old boundaries, and comradely debate and polemic.

The DSP knows that all or some the members of a number of organisations with which it seeks to collaborate hold, or tend towards, the permanent revolution theory. These include, inter alia, the sections of the Fourth International, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Pakistani Labour Party, the NSSP in Sri Lanka, Solidarity in the USA and Socialist Democracy in Britain. But it is quite correct for the DSP not to have been swayed by petty “diplomacy” in forthrightly criticising permanent revolution in a very polemical pamphlet. Equally Doug Lorimer recently wrote a very sharp attack on Michel Löwy’s book on the national question[ii], despite the DSP’s collaboration with the French LCR and the Fourth International, of which Löwy is one of the best known theorists. This critique of Doug Lorimer’s pamphlet then follows the same policy: that international collaboration will go hand-in-hand with open critique and polemic.

The debate over permanent revolution of course mainly pertains to the semi-colonial and dependent semi-industrialised countries; and Australia falls into neither of these categories. However, insofar as the DSP influences some organisations in these countries, and insofar as Doug Lorimer’s brochure attempts a general strategic view in these countries which is different to permanent revolution, it can only be confusing and disorienting.

The theory of permanent revolution, as explained by Trotsky, does have some weaknesses in the light of 20th century experience. But these weaknesses apply just as much to the “democratic dictatorship” two-stage theory which Doug Lorimer defends. His general conclusion, that permanent revolution is “an inferior guide to revolutionary action compared to the Leninist theory and policy of a two-stage, uninterrupted revolution” is wrong. The reverse is true.

In this document I make the following criticisms of Doug Lorimer’s approach:-

1) The whole pamphlet is written on the basis of an obviously false assumption; namely that the social structure of ‘third world’ countries today is much the same as that in pre-1917 Russia or 1920s China - ie that the peasantry is the overwhelmingly numerically dominant class. The fact that this is today untrue in most dominated and semi-colonial countries is not referred to once in Doug Lorimer’s pamphlet. This is connected to the second error.

2) Doug Lorimer confines his critique to the experience of pre-revolutionary Russia, and to 1920s-30s China, and does not discuss either the other revolutionary experiences of the 20th century, or post-Trotsky attempts to analyse and re-analyse the theory in the light of subsequent experience. In his introduction Lorimer writes:

“I have also not attempted to take up the innumerable distortions of Lenin’s views on the class dynamics of the Russian revolution made by later Trotskyists and writers influenced by Trotskyism, preferring instead to concentrate on the original source of these distortions, ie Trotsky himself”. (Lorimer p9).

Thus into the dustbin of “innumerable distortions” go the writings of Isaac Deutscher, Marcel Liebman, Ernest Mandel, and two very important works which deal with these problems - Norman Geras’ “Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg”[iii] and Michael Löwy’s “Politics of Uneven Development - the theory of permanent revolution”[iv], not to mention the works of non-Marxist scholars like EH Carr. Löwy’s book in particular is a full-scale attempt to re-assess permanent revolution, taking into account all the most fundamental revolutionary experiences of the 20th century, and incidentally answering in advance every single point that Lorimer makes.

Thus instead of an attempt to re-assess Lenin’s and Trotsky’s theories in the light of historical and contemporary experience, Doug Lorimer’s pamphlet stays stuck in a pre-revolutionary Russian time warp, which contributes to the brochure’s doctrinaire flavour.

3) Doug Lorimer’s pamphlet fails to recognise that the solution of the national and democratic tasks of the revolution, in an epoch where ‘third world’ countries have achieved formal independence, but are still in the deepening iron grip of imperialist finance capital, cannot be solved without anti-capitalist measures, ie tasks of the socialist revolution. How can any state achieve real national liberation today without breaking the grip of the transnational corporations, World Bank, IMF and domestic banks and finance houses?

4) The DSP pamphlet gives a partial, one-sided and therefore false account of the debates inside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party up to October 1917, attempting to ignore the contradictions and inconsistencies in Lenin’s position, and to falsely caricature the position of Trotsky. In particular the pamphlet misrepresents the crucial debates inside the Bolshevik party in 1917. It further omits all references to and quotations from Lenin which tend to contradict the DSP view. One is reminded of the debate in the Russian Central Committee in 1928, when Bukharin, like Lorimer, was attempting to prove the continuity of Lenin’s policy with quotations. Trotsky interjected: “there are many quotations which prove the opposite”. Bukharin, caught off guard, replied: “I know that, but I’m choosing the quotations which support my view, not yours”!

5) Doug Lorimer tends to give a false picture of the nature and significance of the post-1923 struggles in Russia and elsewhere between partisans of the ‘two-stage’ and ‘permanent revolution’ positions - effectively writing out the struggle against Stalinism and its neo-Menshevik ‘two-stage’ positions.

6) Paradoxically, while attempting to paint Trotsky’s views in the worst possible light, Doug Lorimer comes up with definitions of what the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship’ might mean in practice which come close to being re-writes of permanent revolution. These theoretical concessions to Trotsky’s theory give back to Trotsky with the left hand what Lorimer thinks he has taken away with the right. We are thus left with an eclectic and dangerously confused mish-mash.

Despite what I say here about the importance of demonstrating theories by their contemporary relevance, I have necessarily been forced to take up Doug Lorimer at some length on his own chosen terrain - what happened in Russia.

The central strategic problem: class alliances in the dominated countries

The centre-piece of Doug Lorimer’s criticism of Trotsky, the crux of his whole argument, comes down to this. He claims that in order to move towards socialist revolution it is first necessary to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution, something Trotsky failed to understand. To complete the bourgeois democratic revolution, it is necessary to forge an alliance between the working class and the whole peasantry, on the basis of national and democratic demands, and this alliance can then take power in the form of a “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”. This alliance will include the “peasant bourgeoisie” and can then proceed to complete the bourgeois democratic revolution, in particular land reform, and only then can a break with the peasant bourgeoisie take place and the transition to socialist revolution be posed. This forms an “uninterrupted” process, but with a definite and distinct “national democratic” stage. It is thus a “two-stage” revolution. Lorimer argues:-

“The Bolsheviks projected a line of march that was necessary for the working class to take and hold power in Russia. The Bolsheviks recognised that a socialist revolution could only be carried out in Russia if the majority of the population (the workers and poor peasants) supported it. But the majority of workers, and above all the masses of poor peasants could only be won to support a socialist revolution through their own experience in struggle. As long as the bourgeois democratic revolution was not completed, the Bolsheviks argued, the poor peasants would remain united with the peasant bourgeoisie in the struggle against the landlords and would not see their problems stemmed not only from the vestiges of feudalism in Russia (the autocracy and landlordism) but also from capitalism. As long as this remained the case, the revolutionary proletariat would be unable to rally the majority of the country’s population, i.e. the semi-proletarian section of the peasantry, to the perspective of carrying out a socialist revolution.” (Lorimer p.19).

In the next section we go into whether this is an adequate account of what happened in Russia[v]. But even if it were, would this be applicable as a general schema for the ‘third world’ today? For South Korea, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Iran and South Africa? In fact social changes in a whole series of the dominated countries exclude such a strategy a priori, because the class composition of these countries - and the relative numerical weight of the different classes on a world scale - has changed dramatically. In 1929 Trotsky could write:

“Not only the agrarian, but also the national question, assigns to the peasantry - the overwhelming majority in the backward countries - an exceptional place in the democratic revolution”. (Permanent Revolution p.276 - my emphasis.)

Doug Lorimer writes:

“Trotsky’s inability to clearly understand that a proletarian-socialist revolution could not be carried out in a peasant country except on the basis of the completion of the tasks of the peasant-democratic revolution, led him to identify the Bolshevik perspective with that of Menshevism.” (Lorimer p.70. Trotsky’s ‘identification’ of Menshevik and Bolshevik policy is dealt with below).

Doug goes on to his conclusion - that permanent revolution is an ‘inferior’ guide to revolutionary action compared with what he takes to be Lenin’s theory - straight from his polemic about Trotsky’s theory “in a peasant country”, without a nod in the direction of the fact that today that most third world countries are not ‘peasant’ countries in the way that Russia was in 1917.

As late as the 1960s socialist writers as diverse as Ted Grant, Tony Cliff and Ernest Mandel could all write “the overwhelming majority of the world’s population are peasants”. This is not true at the turn of the millennium. As Michael Löwy, writing about the 1848 Communist Manifesto and its relevance for today, puts it:-

“That appeal (ie the Manifesto’s call for international working class unity -PH) was a visionary one. In 1848 the proletariat was still only a minority in most European societies, not to mention the rest of the world. Today the mass of wage workers exploited by capital - industrial workers, white collar workers, services employees, day labourers, farmhands - comprises the majority of the world’s population. It is by far and away the most important force in the class struggle against the global capitalist system, and the axis around which all other social forces other social struggles can and must orient themselves.” (Monthly Review, November 1998, pp22-3).

The problem with Doug Lorimer abstracting from the Russian experience and transferring it, without mediation of any kind, to contemporary conditions, is that the changes described by Michel Löwy have changed the relative weight of the classes within specific countries and not just on a world scale. As an example which I know a little bit about, let’s look at Mexico.

The Mexican example

In Mexico the peasants - individual peasant farmers with their own plots of land - are a small minority of the population. Already in 1960 50% of the Mexican population lived in towns, today the figure is around 75% (compared with about 15% in 1917 Russia). More than 20% of the roughly 98 million population live in Mexico City, whose population is incidentally bigger than that of countries like Belgium and Holland. The rural population is not in its majority composed of peasants but of agricultural labourers, working for a wage - and often only seasonally and intermittently employed.

In the cities, the proletarian population lives side by side with the legions of urban poor, often engaged in petty trade, criminal activity - in general the ‘informal’ sector. But even here, the urban poor are often disguised proletarians. For example, the vast majority of the 100,000 ‘ambulantes’ in Mexico City - street traders - are actually employees of mafia-capitalists who control the street trade. Another huge sector of the urban population is engaged in home working, producing everything from clothes to fireworks in their backrooms and back yards. These people, despite the fact that they may own their own (pitiful) ‘means of production’, are also disguised proletarians, selling their products to the vastly rich capitalists who control the trade for a pittance.

Now what do these changes in the social structure over the last 40 years mean for socialist strategy? The first point to make is that a society like Mexico is very different from Russia, not just from the point of view of social structure but from the point of view of the character of the agrarian question, which dominated the thinking of Russian Marxists about the peasantry. Lenin and Trotsky debated how to overthrow a semi-feudal aristocracy based on landed estates. But in Mexico there is no semi-feudal aristocracy, there is agribusiness, the thorough permeation of agriculture by capitalism, by capitalist social relations, and not the social relations of semi-feudalism. The enemies of the rural poor are Mexican capitalist farmers and international, especially American, agribusiness transnational corporations. Insofar as you can talk about latifundia in Mexico, it takes the form of big farms, linked to agribusiness and the rural bourgeoisie (not a semi-feudal aristocracy).

The demands of the rural poor come right up against the national and international bourgeoisie, and are therefore directly linked with the anti-capitalist (not anti-feudal) struggle. This is obvious to virtually the whole Mexican left, and reflected in the ideology of the main peasant organisations of struggle - like the OCSS (Organisacion de Los Campesinos de la Sierra del Sur - Peasant Organisation of the Southern Sierra) - which are socialist, anti-capitalist, explicitly linked with urban left organisations. In other words, there is no push whatever to create an independent party of the peasantry, counterposed to proletarian and socialist demands. Insofar as the left and progressive parties fight for the allegiance of the rural poor, it is against the right-wing bourgeois parties, particularly the governing PRI. In other words, in a historical sense, the battle for the allegiance of the rural poor is directly between the working class and the bourgeoisie. A striking confirmation of Lenin’s argument that:-

“If the peasant does not march behind the workers, he marches behind the bourgeoisie. There is and there can be no middle course.” (VI Lenin, The Year 1919).

A worker-peasant-indigenous alliance - which already exists in skeleton form - will be under the political leadership of the working class, and while putting forward demands to meet the needs of the peasants, will combine these with demands which meet the interests of the proletariat itself.

The governmental slogan which virtually the whole Mexican far left puts forward is “un gobierno obrera, compesino, idigena y popular” (a workers, peasants, indigenous and popular government). Even this of course does not capture the full complexity and diversity of the popular masses who will have to be mobilised to conquer state power. But such a government could not be anything but the dictatorship of the proletariat, ie a socialist government.

In a revolution in a country like Mexico there can be no talk of an alliance with the “peasant bourgeoisie” against the semi-feudal aristocracy, because there is no peasant bourgeoisie and no semi-feudal aristocracy. Does this mean that the demands of the peasants and the rural poor - in particular “land to the tiller” - are irrelevant or totally secondary? Not at all. For historical reasons the struggles of the peasants and indigenous people have enormous weight, and are enormously popular with the progressive sections of the urban workers. But it does mean that the crucial class to carry through a revolutionary transition is the working class itself. A worker-peasant-indigenous government could only be one under the political and ideological hegemony of the proletariat.

The spectacular growth in the urban population in many third world countries is directly linked to changes in agriculture, ie the intrusion of capitalist social relations, the subordination of the rural population to agribusiness. This has led to the destitution of millions of peasants and their transformation into landless rural workers, often employed for only a small part of the year and living a miserable, semi-starvation existence. Mass migration to the cities (Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Karachi and Jakarta are classic examples) is a logical move for the rural poor: they know that the miserable existence of the urban poor is generally better, with more opportunities, than staying in the countryside. But a paradoxical effect of these processes is sometimes to heighten, rather than diminish, the importance of the land question.

The intrusion of agribusiness, especially in this neo-liberal epoch, tends to involve counter-reforms in countries where limited land reform has already taken place (Mexico is an example). Nonetheless, individual or collective land ownership by the peasantry cannot be a solution to rural poverty in and of itself, so long as agribusiness retains its iron grip on the purchase and marketing of agricultural produce. Where agribusiness determines the prices and the quantities bought, rural poverty is bound to follow and the peasants become the indirect employees of national and international capital. (A recent article has explained why even in the United States independent small and medium farmers are being transformed into sui generis proletarians (Farmer as Proletarian, RC Lewontin, Monthly Review, July/August 1998, p.72]).

However, owning your own plot of land and/or being part of a peasant collective, while not freeing you of your subordination to agribusiness, is going to give you more economic possibilities than being a landless labourer. That’s why movements like Brazil’s MST (Movement of the Landless) and similar movements have such enormous popularity. But coming up against not a semi-feudal aristocracy, but against the domestic and international capitalist/agribusiness nexus, these movements tend to have a spontaneously anti-capitalist ideology and ally themselves with the urban left. Show me a leader of the MST, and I will show you a Guevarist, a Maoist, a partisan of semi-Marxist liberation theology or a supporter of the PT (Workers Party). You will not find the social and political basis for an ‘independent’ peasant party counterposed to the Left, you will not find a peasant bourgeoisie, and you will not - outside some limited cases like rural Pakistan or parts of pre-1994 Chiapas (where the social relations of bonded labour, semi-slavery, persist(ed)) - find anything like a semi-feudal aristocracy.

Of all people, Doug Lorimer and the DSP leadership, should know this because of their close attention to the debates in the Philippines Communist Movement. Remember, Doug, the early 1990s polemics by the Manila-Rizal leadership against the ‘semi-feudal, semi-colonial’ thesis of Sison and the CPP leadership, which was the theoretical basis of their Maoist, two-stage ‘bloc of four classes’ strategy?

The decline of the semi-feudal aristocracy on an international scale is a function (to state the obvious) that it is (was) a hangover from the feudal mode of production which in a world more capitalist than ever, no longer exists. Russia in 1917 was a very peculiar social formation, being at the same time an imperialist country, financially dependent on western imperialist powers (especially France and Britain) and having, simultaneously, a semi-feudal rural class and a huge majority of peasants in its population. Where exactly can you find a similar social formation in the world today?

One country which is overwhelmingly peasant in composition is of course the largest - China. Today only about 450 million people - about a third of the population - live in cities. This is a much bigger proportion than in 1917 Russia, and China indeed has some of the largest concentrations of the proletariat in the world. And there is indeed a peasant bourgeoisie, the kulak class created by Deng Xiaoping’s late ‘70s economic reforms which broke up the peasant communes - and have in successive stages led to China’s transformation into a capitalist state. However, Doug Lorimer’s theory could not possibly apply to contemporary China. The peasant bourgeoisie will not struggle for land reform against a non-existent semi-feudal landlord class, it will fight tooth and nail to defend its gains, together with the urban bourgeoisie, against the urban proletariat and the rural workers. Class struggle will develop along the axis of anti-capitalist struggle, under the hegemony of the proletariat.

Irrespective of whether Doug Lorimer’s theory of Russia is right or wrong, it should be ABC that it needs confirmation of its contemporary applicability by reference to concrete conditions today. And cannot be just assumed by swapping quotations from what Lenin and Trotsky said about 1917.

National and democratic tasks in the era of neo-liberal globalisation

The 1997 Asian financial crash was greeted with almost undisguised glee by sections of the ‘Washington consensus’ financial establishment. The World Bank waxed lyrical about the new possibilities of ‘globalisation’, by which they meant the buying up of South Korean, Indonesian and Taiwanese companies at bargain-basement prices by US companies. Neo-liberalism, the latest phase of imperialism, has clamped the semi-colonial and dependent countries under the most harsh regime of exploitation since the era of direct imperialist occupation.

The experience of the Asian ‘tigers’ and ‘dragons’ has disproved the idea that these countries are real independent centres of capital accumulation to rival the imperialist powers, and shown their financial dependence of the Western imperialist centres. However much they may sometimes strain at the leash, the bourgeoisie in these countries is bound hand to foot to the imperialists. As a consequence, the ideologies of bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalism which swept the third world in the 1950s and ‘60s, have been seriously undermined. The Nassers and Nehrus of yesteryear have been replaced by pale imitations, unwilling to take the faintest independent step against the imperialist powers. The national oppression of the semi-colonial and dependent countries has deepened and not lessened.

After the fall of the Berlin wall, the United States responded with a fake ‘democracy’ offensive. But a brief glance at Asia, Africa and Latin America today tells us that, far from democracy taking giant strides, neo-liberalism necessarily goes hand-in-hand with deepening repression.

For reasons explained earlier, the destitution of the rural poor and the immiseration of partially-employed agricultural labourers - together with the flight to the cities - has in many places increased the importance of the land question.

From these factors, we cannot conclude that there is any diminution of the centrality of democratic and national questions (including land reform) in these countries. What has changed is the class structure of many semi-colonial and dependent countries, strongly increasing the specific weight of the working class. This is a positive factor in the struggle for socialism. But the content of the struggle for real national liberation and real democracy is more than ever an anti-imperialist and thus anti-capitalist struggle.

DSP writer Norm Dixon has recently made the point that the struggle for national liberation is now even more than ever an anti-imperialist struggle. He argues:

“The struggle for national liberation has shifted overwhelmingly to demands to end the Third World's subservience to the dictates of the World Bank and IMF, rejection of the austerity programs formulated by these imperialist‑controlled institutions, and the demand to cancel foreign debt. As a result, the labour and socialist movements are more centrally placed and essential in the struggle for national liberation than ever before.” (Marx, Engels and Lenin on the National Question, Links no 13).

Exactly. Real national liberation today means breaking the dominance of imperialist finance capital over the peoples of the exploited countries. This of course is a task of the socialist revolution, not the democratic revolution. A solution of the national and democratic tasks of the revolution, the “completion” of the national-democratic revolution, is inconceivable without anti-capitalist measures, for example the establishment of a monopoly of foreign trade, the nationalisation of the banks and finance houses, a regime of workers control over the finance houses and big monopolies, and the expropriation of - or at least the state control and supervision of - the assets of transnational corporations.

Now, if Doug is going to turn round and say all these measures are quite compatible with the national democratic revolution, carried out by what he calls a “special form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”, he has really just baptised the first steps of socialist revolution with another name and agrees in essence with permanent revolution. If not, then he is going to be the partisan of a ‘democratic revolution’ which singularly fails - in the epoch of the domination of globalised finance capital - to solve the national and democratic tasks of the revolution.

The centrality of these anti-capitalist measures to solve the national and democratic tasks of the revolution was made by Trotsky in his writings on China. He argued:-

“The most extreme agrarian revolution, the general division of the land (which will naturally be supported by the communist party to the very end) will not by itself provide a way out of the economic blind alley. China requires just as urgently national unity and economic sovereignty, that is customs autonomy, or more correctly a monopoly of foreign trade. And this means emancipation from imperialism...” (The Third International after Lenin, Pathfinder edition, p.183).

These continuing importance of the national and democratic questions makes alliances centering on these issues - especially between the workers and poor peasants - essential for mobilising the forces of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, transition.

But a decisive issue facing the revolutionary movement in third world countries today is how to articulate the question of class independence, ie working class independence of strategic alliances with the bourgeoisie. There are no cook-book recipes which give precise tactical advice on how this is to be achieved in each concrete situation. Tactical and conjunctural alliances with forces from bourgeois nationalist and petty bourgeois nationalist traditions are absolutely inevitable in this period, in specific campaigns and movements. This is different to a strategic alliance, such as that envisaged in the Stalinist-Menshevik version of the ‘two-stage’ theory.

In the movements around national and democratic objectives today, the revolutionary forces have to advance the objective of a “workers and peasants government” - ie a government politically led by the working class, supported by the poor peasants and other oppressed groups. This can only be the first stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The DSP on Indonesia

If Doug Lorimer does not attempt to demonstrate his theory by reference to contemporary conditions, one DSP writer - former Green Left staffer and present Canberra branch secretary James Vassilopoulos - has attempted to do this with reference to Indonesia (Uninterrupted Revolution, GLW 373).

At the time of writing (October 1999) the political situation in Indonesia is extremely unstable, with right wing forces led by the army attempting to throw back the democratic gains made during and since the overthrow of Suharto. In this situation, the task of socialists in imperialist countries is to build solidarity, to the best of their abilities and in their own national circumstances, with the popular movements in that country. However this, as James’ article shows, cannot preclude debate about the strategy to be followed by socialists.

James polemicises against the views of the Australian ISO. But in doing so he makes an entirely failed attempt to squeeze Indonesia into the optic of 1917 Russia. He starts off by conceding that social reality is entirely different between the two countries:-

“How can Lenin’s policy of uninterrupted revolution be applied in Indonesia today? Indonesia is a capitalist country oppressed by imperialism. Russia was a weak imperialist power, with survivals of feudal relations in the countryside.”

So far, so good. But...

“The main significance of the Russian Revolution for Indonesia lies in the fact that in Indonesia, like Russia in 1917, the working class is in a minority. A socialist revolution cannot occur without the active support of the poor peasants.

“Before the 1997 economic crisis, there were some 86 million employed workers out of a population of 200 million in Indonesia. There are substantially fewer now since millions of workers have lost their jobs”.

86 million employed workers, even if this number has fallen since the 1997 Asian crash, is an enormous percentage of the economically active population. In an advanced country it would the be more than the whole of the economically active population, although in a poor country where children and the elderly often have to work, it is a smaller proportion. Nonetheless, we should bear in mind Lenin’s strictures about the social and political weight of the proletariat:-

“The strength of the proletariat in any capitalist country is infinitely greater than the proportion of the proletariat in the total population. This is due to the fact that the proletariat is in economic command of the central points and nerve centres of the entire capitalist system of economy, and because the proletariat expresses economically and politically the real interests of the vast majority of the toilers under capitalism.

“For this reason the proletariat, even if it constitutes the minority of the population (or in cases where the conscious and truly revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat comprises a minority of the nation) is capable both of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and of attracting subsequently (note: subsequently -PH) to it side many allies from among the masses of the semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois, who will never come out beforehand for the domination of the proletariat...but who will convince themselves from their subsequent experiences of the inevitability, justice and legitimacy of the proletarian dictatorship”. (VI Lenin, The Year 1919).

James continues:-

“According to the PRD (People’s Democratic Party) about 10.5 million workers are employed in manufacturing, 30 million in service and mining industries, and 46 million in agriculture. In the cities there are millions of urban poor, many of whom are semi-proletarians, having only occasional waged work, and engaging in petty trading activities for survival.”

At this point we should note that by any Marxist definition whatever, James has so far listed more than 40 million proletarian workers - even if we were to take the false step of discounting rural workers - ie 20% of the whole population, and a much bigger percentage than the Russian proletariat in 1917. James continues:-

“If Indonesia is to have a socialist revolution, a revolutionary alliance between the working class and the tens of millions of rural and urban semi-proletarians will have to be forged...To forge such an alliance the revolutionary workers will have to champion the immediate needs of the peasant masses, which centre on winning democracy and land reform.

“The majority of Indonesia’s rural population are still landowning peasants. In the early 1980s, almost 16 million small landowners grew subsistence and cash crops on some 16 million hectares.”

Of course, the algebra of revolution will never be solved by simple arithmetic, but at first blush I fail to see why the 16 million small peasant landowners are a majority against the 46 million rural workers. It would seem more logical to say that the economically active majority in the countryside are rural proletarians - at least on the basis of the figures which James quotes.

He goes on:-

“A Marxist party in Indonesia today would need to build a revolution as two stages of one uninterrupted process. In the first stage, an alliance would have to be forged between the workers and the whole of the peasantry. It would also have to include campus students (who largely come from urban bourgeois and middle class families) and the urban poor.

“Such an alliance would need to win the democratic right to strike, protest and organise.

“Under Indonesian law it is a crime to publish and distribute Marxist literature. So winning political liberty is crucial to being able to conduct open socialist educational and organising work among the masses of the people.”

In his account of the alliance that needs to be forged, James has left out the agricultural workers. Once this correction is made, the vast majority of this alliance would be composed of proletarians and ‘semi-proletarians’ - ie those directly exploited by capital. Such an alliance, while centering initially on democratic and national tasks, would be inevitably be under the organisational and political hegemony of the working class. And its victory would be, as explained by the theory of permanent revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the first step of the socialist revolution.

James Vassilopoulos’ whole account is an attempt to argue that because alliances between different social groupings have to be made, this alliance must be of the same type as the (DSP’s account of) the worker-peasant alliance in Russia. In fact, even in imperialist countries the working class will have to lead an alliance (and it will include sections of the petty-bourgeoisie, semi-proletarian sections of the urban poor and even students!). The question is - under whose political leadership and hegemony? There will never be any such thing as a “pure” workers’ revolution. As Lenin said in his polemic over the 1916 Easter rising in Dublin: anyone who expects to see a revolution where the workers line up on one side, and the bourgeoisie on the other - with no other forces or alliances involved - is doomed to be permanently disappointed.

James and the DSP are trying to make the urban poor and rural labourers into an ersatz substitute for the Russian peasantry. But in doing so, they are making an unwitting ‘workerist’ error in their conception of the proletariat. The proletariat today, in every country, is an immensely diverse, stratified and varied class. In the imperialist countries service workers of all kinds make up an enormous percentage of the working class, in some countries a bigger proportion than in manufacturing. The definition of the proletariat is not that it works in manufacturing, but the wage labour-capital relationship, ie the selling and exploitation of labour power, and the appropriation of surplus value from the labourers by the capitalist class. That is what makes millions of, for example, home workers proletarians. Obviously it is this definition of the working class which underpins Michel Löwy’s statement above.

We can see the false counterpositions involved in the “two-stage’ dogma in an astounding section of James’ polemic. Under the heading ‘Socialist revolution Now?’ he argues:-

“Should the PRD be calling for an immediate socialist revolution today? Such a call would have no mass resonance because the working class does not have sufficient class consciousness and organisation to carry it out and the poor peasants are inert.”

I don’t know if the Australian ISO advocates ‘immediate socialist revolution today’, but if so they are out to lunch. Any serious debate between a “two-stage” and “permanentist” perspective in Indonesia would not be about ‘socialist revolution now’, but overall strategic perspectives. The immediate tasks of the class struggle in any country revolve around an uneven combination of transitional, democratic, immediate economic and other demands, depending on the situation. ‘Socialist revolution now’ is only relevant in a revolutionary situation, and even then it is unlikely to be posed in those words.

What would we say about someone in the Italy who advocated ‘socialist revolution now’? Total ultraleft, at the very minimum. But we would not draw out from that, surely, that the revolution in Italy would be anything other than a proletarian and socialist revolution, and not a “two-stage” revolution? Despite the fact that 8% of the Italian population are individual landowning peasants, and that there is a large petty-bourgeoisie, and that a significant section of the population of some of the cities are ‘semi-proletarians’ (street traders and the like)?

The debate over perspectives in a country like Indonesia is about something else, namely this. Can the national and democratic tasks of the revolution, in particular land reform and freeing of the country from imperialist domination (is that not the central ‘national’ issue today?) be solved other than through a huge national alliance which involves at its centre the multi-millioned legions of the proletariat and semi-proletariat? And could such an alliance possibly be under the hegemony and leadership of any class but the working class? Won’t such an alliance, if it is victorious, come immediately and massively into conflict with local capital and imperialism, and not ‘semi-feudalism’? And how could such a victorious revolution, in a country as important to world imperialism as Indonesia, avoid an immediate and direct clash with the long-term interests of local capitalism and world, especially, US imperialism? We return to these questions below.

The debate inside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP)

Doug Lorimer’s pamphlet contains an interesting section in which he attempts to prove “Trotsky’s identification of Bolshevik policy with Menshevism”, which according to him had become by the early 1930s a “grotesque absurdity” (Lorimer pp 67ff). Could this be the same Trotsky who wrote “Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution” (three not two Doug), in which Trotsky scrupulously explained the differences between Bolshevism, Menshevism and his own pre-1917 views (Trotsky Writings 1939-40)?

Moreover, Trotsky in a painstaking and scrupulously objective way, explains the differences between the three views in Chapters 15 and 16 of the History of the Russian Revolution (The Bolsheviks and Lenin and Re-arming the Party). Doug Lorimer refers to Trotsky’s History as “providing an incomparable Marxist exposition of the events that led to the Bolshevik victory in 1917”. Has he forgotten that this whole book is written from the perspective of permanent revolution? Indeed is one of the most important expositions of the theory, it’s application to Russia and its theoretical underpinnings in the law of uneven and combined development? If Doug is right about the Trotsky’s views on the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, then at the core of Trotsky’s book is ‘grotesque absurdity’ bordering on falsification. Strange then, that he should recommend its “incomparable Marxist exposition”.

In “Three Conceptions” Trotsky is at pains to stress the tensions and contradictions within Lenin’s policy, and the fundamental change of 1917. The contradiction in Lenin’s policy, according to Trotsky, was on the one hand that he correctly identified that the Russian bourgeoisie would not lead its “own” bourgeois revolution, while at the same time failing to see the logical consequences of this; namely that if the working class in alliance with the peasantry led the revolution and took power, it would not and could not limit itself solely to the tasks of the bourgeois revolution and creating a bourgeois republic. Indeed, in the medium and long term, there cannot be a contradiction between the class(es) which hold the power, and the social programme which they implement.

Before we go on to a textual examination of what Bolshevik policy was, it is worth simply stating what the difference between the Doug Lorimer’s conception, and Trotsky’s conception, of the Russian revolution actually is. According to Lorimer, October 1917 saw the advent of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, which proceeded to complete the bourgeois revolution, and only after that in the summer of 1918 proceeded to the socialist revolution. But explicitly, October 1917 was not the socialist revolution.

According to the Trotsky (and -ist) explanation, the working class, supported by the poor peasantry seized power in a socialist revolution in October 1917, and first proceeded to solve the democratic tasks of the revolution, but combined this with tasks of the socialist revolution from the beginning. From the beginning, according to Trotsky’s conception, the working class held the power (which is, logically, the very definition of a socialist revolution, according to this conception). Trotsky’s account fits in well with the quotation from the 1921 Lenin speech at the beginning of this document:

“We solved the problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in passing, as a "by-product" of our main and genuinely proletarian-revolutionary, socialist activities. We have always said that reforms are a by-product of the revolutionary class struggle. We said -- and proved it by deeds -- that bourgeois-democratic reforms are a by-product of the proletarian, i.e., of the socialist revolution (VI Lenin, Speech on the 4th anniversary of the revolution).”

Equally, Lenin’s position in one of his most important works Economics and Politics in the Epoch of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, that the expropriation of the main groups of capitalists was accomplished “in a few months”, fits Trotsky’s position but not Lorimer’s. Lenin says:

“We accomplished instantly, at one revolutionary blow, all that can, in general, be accomplished instantly; on the first day of the dictatorship of the proletariat, for instance, on October 26 (November 8),1917, the private ownership of land was abolished without compensation for the big landowners -- the big landowners were expropriated. Within the space of a few months practically all the big capitalists, owners of factories, joint-stock companies, banks, railways, and so forth, were also expropriated without compensation.” (VI Lenin, Economic and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat - my emphasis, PH).

(How can “a few months”, with Soviet power, a Bolshevik-led government and a regime of workers’ control, be described as a “stage” in any but the most doctrinaire accounts? And how does this fit in with Lenin’s views in “Two Tactics” (1905) that the bourgeois revolution would be separated from the proletarian by a whole series of stages of revolutionary development?).

The two different accounts - those of Lorimer and Trotsky - do however point to a difference, which has long existed within the Trotskyist movement and beyond, about the definition of the class nature of any particular revolution or state. Doug’s position, inherited from Joe Hansen and the US SWP, prioritises the character of the relations of production - ie are they the social relations of nationalised property and national planning? The Trotsky conception implicitly prioritises another criterion: which class has the power, and which social relations does this class, and its political representatives, defend in an historical sense.

The logic of the Trotsky position is this: there is no socialist revolution in any country whatsoever, advanced or “backward”, which will carry out the socialist tasks of the revolution “all at once” (an absurd position which Lorimer attributes to Trotsky). As Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto, the working class will seize power “and then by degrees” socialise the economy. Are we to say, if the working class led by revolutionary organisations were to take the power in a country like France or Italy, that the socialist revolution had not happened until all basic industry was nationalised? If this were indeed to be the central criterion, we would probably have to conclude that all revolutions will have an initial, pre-socialist, stage. Indeed this was the trend of Joe Hansen’s thinking, made explicit by his latter-day caricaturers in the Jack Barnes loony-stage SWP (US)- that each socialist revolution would be preceded by a “workers and farmers government”.

The timing of the socialisation of basic industry is, especially in more “backward” countries, a complex question. It crucially depends on the issue of whether the working class (and its allies) are socially and technically capable of running industry themselves. In the advanced countries where the working class has a higher educational and cultural level, the transition time will probably be short. Indeed the idea that the US, British, Canadian or French bourgeoisie would go on conducting its normal business for any length of time under the supervision of a workers’ government, and with a regime of workers’ control, is totally far-fetched. A revolutionary workers’ government in an imperialist country would almost certainly be faced with a sustained counter-revolutionary offensive, and the need to take more-or-less immediate steps to expropriate the major industries, banks and finance houses.

But the Bolsheviks considered that the nationalisations of 1918 were “premature”, precisely from the point of view of the state of preparation of the working class to run industry. It was precisely to prepare for eventual socialisation that the Bolsheviks instituted the “regime of workers’ control and supervision” from the time they took power - the first step towards socialisation The socialisations of 1918 were determined above all by the logic of the class struggle, ie the fierce clashes between workers and capitalists, leading to strikes, lock-outs and factory seizures by the workers. The working class took the tempo of socialisation into its own hands; a workers’ government had no choice but to sanction these workers’ expropriations, or come into sharp conflict with the working class. Doug Lorimer’s implicit scenario, that the Bolsheviks judged that the bourgeois democratic revolution was now completed and thus proceeded to the socialist revolution (“item 2 on the agenda, comrades!”) is a schema imposed upon the real course of events. In reality the socialisations were determined by the logic of the class struggle, ie by the workers themselves..

All these things happened in a country where the workers, through the soviets and the Bolshevik party, had conquered state power, ie where the dictatorship of the proletariat already existed. This of course confirms the “uninterrupted” (or to use the word used by Marx and Trotsky: permanent) character of the revolution. It does not however confirm a rigid two-stage theory.

Doug Lorimer’s concessions to permanent revolution

In trying to define the character of the regime which existed after the seizure of power in October 1917, Doug Lorimer ties himself up in rather “permanent” knots, and indeed comes very close to putting forward re-writes of Trotsky’s theory. He says:-

“A revolutionary worker-peasant dictatorship, or state power, could only come into being if the workers in the cities overthrew and replaced state institutions of the tsarist landlord-capitalist state with their own organs of state power. The workers would use the state power they had conquered to rally the peasantry as a whole to consummate the bourgeois-democratic revolution and then, once the peasants came into conflict with the peasant bourgeoisie, to rally the poor peasants in the struggle for the transition to socialism. The proletarian-peasant dictatorship would therefore be the first stage of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, or as Trotsky himself described in Results and Prospects, a “special form of proletarian dictatorship in the bourgeois revolution”. (Lorimer p 41).

And again:-

“A state power which organises the working class, in alliance with the peasantry as a whole, to suppress the resistance of the big landowners and industrialists in order to carry to completion a democratic revolution would also be a form of proletarian dictatorship, of working class state power. But it would not yet be the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat, ie a state power that organises the working class and the semi-proletarian elements to suppress the resistance of the capitalists to the “abolition of bourgeois property in city and village”. It would be a special form of proletarian state power in the bourgeois democratic revolution, a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” (Lorimer p. 59, his emphasis).

In these quotes Doug Lorimer its attempting to guard his back, because he knows very well that the Bolsheviks routinely described their regime from the first day of the revolution as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. But in accepting that it was, in essence, the dictatorship of the proletariat, Lorimer is despite himself forced to veer towards permanentist perspectives. Who was it exactly in the RSDLP before 1917 who said that solving the national and democratic tasks would require the dictatorship of the proletariat? Wasn’t it the author of the theory of permanent revolution?

Compare what Lorimer says with a passage he himself quotes from Trotsky:-

“No matter what the first episodic first stages of the revolution might be in the individual countries, the realisation of the revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is conceivable only under the leadership of the proletarian vanguard...This in turn means that the victory of the democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat which bases itself upon the alliance with the peasantry and solves first the tasks of the bourgeois revolution.” (Permanent Revolution p. 277, Pathfinder edition, quoted by Lorimer p.74).

Now, there is a difference in emphasis between this quote and what Doug Lorimer says. But the similarity of positions - a worker-peasant alliance to create the proletarian dictatorship and solve the democratic tasks - will be obvious to anyone but the most doctrinaire. What is equally obvious is that neither of these two positions is anything like that defended by the Lenin or 1905 or 1908. Because, contrary to Lorimer, under the impact of the proof of events Lenin not only changed his position, but as a result demanded a change of the Bolshevik programme (and a change of the name of the party) in April 1917. Doug Lorimer imputes an identity to Lenin’s positions over the years 1905-17, in order to try to deny that he moved closer to Trotsky’s positions. It is to this we now turn.

Lenin: from ‘bourgeois republic’ to ‘Commune state’

Against the Menshevik notion of subordinating the revolution to the liberal bourgeoisie, Lenin and the Bolsheviks developed the idea that the democratic revolution would be led by the workers and peasants - against the resistance of the bourgeoisie itself. In making this decisive theoretical advance, the Bolsheviks leadership implicitly acknowledged the workings of the law of uneven and combined development, later formulated by Trotsky and explained in the History of the Russian Revolution, as applied to Russia. The Russian bourgeoisie did not suffer from some original sin of ‘cowardice’, but from the uneven development of imperialism. The Russian bourgeoisie (and Russian industry) had developed a totally (financially and politically) dependent position in relationship to French and British imperialism from which it was structurally incapable of breaking. It was this which determined its inability to complete the bourgeois revolution internally. This incidentally shows the incorrectness of attempting to define the political situation in any one country solely by ‘internal’ factors. As Trotsky succinctly put it:

“In reality, the national peculiarities represent an original combination of the basic features of the world situation.” (Preface to the German edition of Permanent Revolution, Pathfinder edition p.149).

The Bolsheviks thus developed the idea of the “workers and peasants democratic dictatorship” - democratic because it would carry through the democratic revolution. But the democratic revolution did not mean going beyond capitalism. In Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905) Lenin condemned as “reactionary” the idea of “seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism”. Indeed he went further:

“Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does this mean? It means that the democratic reforms that become a necessity for Russia do not in themselves imply the undermining of capitalism, the undermining of bourgeois rule; on the contrary, they will, for the first time, clear the ground for the wide and rapid, European and not Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class.” (collected works volume 9, p 29).

A question to Doug. Is this what happened in 1917? That the revolution for the first time made it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class?!

Compare Lenin’s view with what Trotsky wrote in the very next year, 1906:-

“The immediate task of the social democracy will be to bring the democratic revolution to completion. But once in control, the proletarian party will not be able to confine itself to the democratic programme, but will be forced to adopt socialist measures”. (Preface to the Russian edition of Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune).

Now, which of these two quotations, Trotsky’s or Lenin’s, best explains what happened in 1917-18? The answer is obvious. Lenin at the same time stressed a) the bourgeois character of the revolution, and b) the need to politically sweep aside the bourgeoisie. Trotsky identified a tension in these ideas; they faced a logical and not dialectical contradiction. How could the workers and peasants be put in power and then merely preside over the “European’ development of capitalism? Trotsky noted:-

“The political domination of the proletariat is incompatible with its economic enslavement. No matter under what political flag the proletariat has come to power, it is obliged to take the path of socialist policy. It would be the greatest utopianism to believe that the proletariat, having been raised to political domination by the internal mechanism of the bourgeois revolution can, even if it so desires, limit its mission to the creation of republican-democratic conditions for the social domination of the bourgeoisie.” (Results and Prospects, in Permanent Revolution, Pathfinder edition pp 101-2).

At the same time, Trotsky did not argue that all the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions could be carried out ‘simultaneously’ as Lorimer falsely suggests. In fact Trotsky said the opposite:-

“Political power is not omnipotence. It would be absurd to suppose that it is only necessary for the proletariat to take power and then by passing a few decrees to substitute socialism for capitalism. An economic system is not the product of the actions of the government. All that the proletariat can do is to apply its political power with all possible energy in order to ease and shorten the path towards economic collectivism.” (Ibid. p.100).

Lenin’s ideas about the likely course of the democratic revolution were already present in his major theoretical work The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). In this work Lenin argues that that there are two different routes out of semi-feudalism - the American and the Prussian. In the Prussian case semi-feudalism had been destroyed by the transition to capitalism ‘from above’, transforming the Junker landlords into capitalists, but clamping the peasantry into a situation of harsh authoritarian and ‘unfree’ exploitation. The American system, ‘capitalism from below’, had by contrast created a free peasant farmer class, the basis for a much more rapid development of fully capitalists relations in agriculture - ie bourgeois farmers and agricultural proletarians. (This is all explained in detail in Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below, Terence J. Byres, MacMillan/St Martins Press 1996). As Byres explains (see pp30 and ff) Lenin strongly favoured the ‘American’ development of agricultural capitalism in Russia. He did so, because at that time (1899) he had no conception that the national-democratic revolution could do any more than hasten the development of capitalism.

As Lenin later explained:

[The victory of the revolution can be achieved by] “ only a dictatorship because the accomplishment of transformations immediately and urgently needed by the proletariat will evoke the desperate resistance of the big landlords, bourgeoisie and czarism...But this of course will be a democratic and not a socialist dictatorship. It will not be able to touch (without a whole series of transitional stages of revolutionary development) the foundation of capitalism. It will be able, in the best case, to realise a radical redivision of landed property in favour of the peasantry, introduce a consistent and full democratism up to instituting the republic, root out all Asiastic and feudal features not only from the day-to-day life of the village but also the factory, put a beginning to a serious improvement of workers conditions and raise their living standard, and last but not least, carry over the revolutionary conflagration to Europe.” (“Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”).

It is not too hard to understand what this means. It is the establishment of a bourgeois republic by revolutionary means, against the resistance of the bourgeoisie itself. Socialist perspectives are postponed until after “a whole series of transitional stages of revolutionary development” (and it is obvious that he did not mean by this the ‘few months’ to which he referred in Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat). This was Lenin’s contradiction, at the same time his strength (revolutionary means) and his weakness (social objectives). Events in 1917 forced him to change his perspectives, and hence the programme of the Bolshevik party.

Lenin fights for the ‘Commune state’

Lenin argued that the February 1917 had, in the form of the Soviet of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Deputies, created the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry “in a certain form and a certain way”. But, he argued, unforeseen in the strategy of Bolshevism was that this ‘democratic dictatorship’ would voluntarily cede power to the bourgeoisie. Now a radical change was needed in Bolshevik strategy. The proletariat would have to seize power in a socialist revolution, supported by the poor peasants. He noted:

It was against this background that Lenin wrote one of his most important works, The State and Revolution, establishing the revolutionary and not reformist road to socialism, and the character of socialist democracy, ie soviet power, the self-rule of the workers. In its preface he wrote of the Russian revolution:

“Apparently, the latter [the Russian Revolution] is now (early August 1917) completing the first stage of its development; but this revolution as a whole can only be understood as a link in a chain of socialist proletarian revolutions being caused by the imperialist war.” (my emphasis - PH).

In the April Theses, which motivated the change in the Bolshevik programme, Lenin now wrote:

“The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution -- which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie -- to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.”

Note that both in On Slogans and the April Theses Lenin argues for the proletariat to take power, supported by the “poor peasants” and “semi-proletarians” (not the peasantry as a whole). Indeed, he specifically argued for a political break with the representatives of the ‘small proprietors’.

In his Letters on Tactics (April 1917) Lenin now wrote the following (I have quoted a long piece here because key formulations are missed out in Lorimer’s quotes):

“After the revolution, the power is in the hands of a different class, a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie.

The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term.

To this extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-democratic, revolution in Russia is completed.

But at this point we hear a clamour of protest from people who readily call themselves "old Bolsheviks". Didn't we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry"? Is the agrarian revolution, which is also a bourgeois-democratic revolution, completed? Is it not a fact, on the contrary, that it has not even started?

My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently ; they are more original, more peculiar, more variegated than anyone could have expected.

To ignore or overlook this fact would mean taking after those "old Bolsheviks" who more than once already have played so regrettable a role in the history of our Party by reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality.

"The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" has already become a reality (in a certain form and to a certain extent) in the Russian revolution, for this "formula" envisages only a relation of classes, and not a concrete political institution implementing this relation, this co-operation. "The Soviet

of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies" -- there you have the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" already accomplished in reality.

This formula is already antiquated. Events have moved it from the realm of formulas into the realm of reality, clothed it with flesh and bone, concretised it and thereby modified it.

A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, "Communist" elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Steklov, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the other revolutionary defencists), who are opposed to moving towards the commune and are in favour of "supporting" the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois government.

The person who now speaks only of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of "Bolshevik" pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of "old Bolsheviks").

The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has already been realised, but in a highly original manner, and with a number of extremely important modifications. I shall deal with them separately in one of my next letters. For the present, it is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.

"Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the