The pro-Ukraine Left looking right
How do we explain adherence to the theory of permanent revolution while abandoning it in practice?
If you read Trotsky’s basic postulates laid out in the previous post, with as few preconceptions as possible, the answer is rather obvious; the theory has been abandoned because it no longer appears to correspond with reality. There is little prospect of a democratic revolution, never mind a socialist revolution, in the near term in either Ukraine or Palestine for example, and, whatever about the objective premises of socialism being present (depending on what one considers objective factors) the crisis of humanity is not reducible to ‘the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.’
The last belief is comforting to the members, supporters and many ex-members of the small left wing groups because it licences their existence and previous years of activity. If the decisive requirement now for a socialist revolution is the existence of a sufficiently coherent and large revolutionary organisation, then building that organisation is key and the hinge upon which everything hangs.
However, reality impinges on even the most dogmatic. When the real world does not conform to what is desired and the agent of change – the working class – has suffered defeats and no longer seems to present an alternative, attempts to escape this take the form of politics based on the view of what should exist – justice and freedom etc. – expressed in terms of rights. However, the material interests that do exist will determine what justice and freedom will entail in the real world, which means that this sort of politics inevitably pretends that the world that exists is not the one we have come to know well.
Thus the right to self-determination of Ukraine (or Palestine), if dependent on US imperialism, will be expressed only in so far as it conforms to the interests of this imperialism. Justice and freedom will exist only in so far as they are consistent with its interests. Relying on US imperialism to deliver any of these because it is argued that there is something worse – Russian imperialism – must ignore its whole history.
The view that pressure from protests will force it to impose a progressive solution has no previous experience to support it and protests become a cry for help to precisely those we need to be saved from. In the case of Palestine, protests demand that US imperialism changes course and supports some sort of Palestinian state while solidarity with Ukraine demands that it drive forward with its current course and provide ever more powerful weapons.
Except ATACMS, HIMARS, F-16s, Bradley’s and Abram tanks are not the weapons of freedom and justice, never mind working class emancipation. Passive acceptance of the unlikelihood of working class action to end the war, resulting in substituting other agents of change, cannot get round the fact that working class emancipation cannot be achieved except by the working class itself. The view that it cannot provide the solution means not that some other agent will provide it but that a different solution will be imposed. In Ukraine this means ‘self-determination’ becomes a Ukrainian state with NATO membership, in permanent antagonism with Russia, with the permanent potential for further war; in other words no solution at all.
This demonstrates that demands such as self-determination dredged up from the past, that appear to have a revolutionary heritage, no longer have the same original rationale or purpose: support for the self-determination of nations in a world no longer consisting of empires and colonies but of independent capitalist states entwined in imperialist alliances usually only means support for one imperialism or another. Ukraine is so clearly an illustration of this that to declare support for it reveals a left not only no longer tied to socialist politics, but no longer tethered to the real world. This is one in which imperialism will do what it always does and the smaller capitalist states will follow.
It is instructive that polls showed no majority in Ukraine for NATO membership for years but that this didn’t stop the Ukrainian state creating CIA stations in the country to spy on Russia or pushing membership on a reluctant people, ultimately enshrining it in the constitution. Ukraine joined in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 while continuing to signal its support for imperialism through its contingent of troops in the occupation of Afghanistan. While now claiming to be a victim of imperialism, its special forces are fighting in Somalia under the direction of the US. All are sterling examples of the reactionary character of support for self-determination for already independent capitalist states and the consequences of abandoning a socialist analysis that doesn’t confuse the working class with its state.
The demand for self-determination of nations that applied to annexed and colonial countries with large peasant populations, now asserted in support of independent capitalist states that are part of imperialist alliances at war, is not essentially different from the policy of those ‘socialist’ parties that sent millions of workers to their death in World War I. Supporters of the imperialist alliance that includes Ukraine claim that it is fighting a Russian colonial project while the supporters of the imperialist alliance that includes Russia claim they are opposing the Western colonial project of regime change and dismemberment of the Russian Federation. In World War I, Marxists did not support German imperialism because its enemy was the biggest empire and colonial power in the world and the absolutist regime in Russia, or support Britain because Germany was seeking to extend its own colonial plunder and was allied to the decrepit Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The current imperialist war that is being waged in Ukraine is thus supported by what can only be called deserters from socialism who refuse to see what is in front of their eyes – an old-fashioned capitalist war that is sending hundreds of thousands of workers to their deaths, inflicts catastrophic destruction on the livelihoods of millions of others, and binds most of the working class to their own nation, their own state and their own ruling class. Nationalism triumphs again while these apostates dress it up as progressive ‘patriotism’, ‘de-colonialism’ or even ‘anti-imperialism’. What they can’t dress it up as is socialism.
They do not lead the working class in any direction that might advance its class consciousness or create the possibility of a minority becoming aware of the class conflicts going on underneath the war propaganda of the mainstream media. Rather they follow the working class as it follows its ruling class. Their political arguments, such as they are, are essentially no different from the dominant reactionary narratives. One that easily extends from ‘defending Ukraine’ to supporting the West’s military alliance NATO.
In what possible way can the need for the working class to have its own politics independent of, and opposed to, that of the capitalist system be advanced by supporting an imperialist alliance in war on the grounds that it is defending the right of another capitalist state to join ithis alliance? In what way would this be opposing imperialist war and defending the interests of the working class?
This situation can only prevail because there is no significant movement of the working class in the West (or in Russia) opposed to the war so support for one imperialist side or the other is seen as the viable alternatives. Were there to be actions by workers in Western countries against the war the left supporters of the war would be thoroughly exposed. Their position therefore not only arises from the current passivity of the working class but depends upon it.
The price paid by the small renegade left organisations committed to this is that they are not so much the naked emperor as the naked emperor’s subjects. Thus, they continue their attempts to build small ‘revolutionary’ organisations which hide their irrelevance through their complete capitulation to the bourgeois politics of their own country. They swim comfortably in the public mood because this mood is consonant with the actions and propaganda of its rulers and mass media.
What we are seeing is not only a failure to see the relevance of permanent revolution to the conflicts which exist but the process itself in reverse. Not permanent revolution as a general process of radicalisation but an accelerated de-radicalisation reflecting the effect of the defeats of previous decades. From the working class – led by socialism – being the only effective leadership of democratic struggle, we instead are to accept that a rotten and corrupt capitalist state in the vanguard of Western imperialism is the centre of today’s democratic and anti-imperialist struggle. Put like that, it makes no sense at all.
Back to part 3
Forward to part 5
Sráid Marx 
Actually the best account of the Marxism of Leon Trotsky that I have read is by Kunal Chattopadhyay. The first couple of hundred pages are a defence of permanent revolution against many modern book critics. However there is a further chapter called Against Imperialism that seems more apt than the defence of the ‘theory’ of permanent revolution. The book is rather long, over 600 pages, a little too supportive of Mandel and the Fourth International yet well worth reading.
The chapter I am referring to implies a sort of ‘method’ that Trotsky deployed while not providing a specific theory of Imperialism to rival other ones. The ‘method’ means referring to both economic crisis and political crisis in terms of a ‘world economy’ and ‘a world political situation’ even though both of these are in fact ‘abstractions’. A real abstraction takes things away from a concrete for the point of leaving behind the essential. This is like the movement from appearance to Being beloved of school metaphysics.
Trotsky uses terms like ‘world situation’ as well as ‘world economy’ to assess specific political processes. The Chattopadhyay refers to the essay ‘Germany, the Key to the International Situation’ as an explanation of German politics in the context of the world political situation.
Since with every abstraction something is taken away from the concrete, the result travels in the direction of a pure formalism of our understanding. That is just what a method is: a formal understanding that can be enriched depending on the specific ready to hand . So it is a formal understanding that is present in the books and essays of Trotsky that is more useful for today and tomorrow than the statements or protocols of any textbook version of permanent revolution. Trotsky actually offers variations on the main protocols of permanent revolution depending on the publication you happen to pick up and read.
I am not saying Trotsky or Kunal Chattopadhyay would agree with what I have just said, only this is what I have extracted as an interpretation.
It is perhaps a little less formal to try to explain the motions of a national economy of any one State on the basis of the motion of the ‘world capitalist economy’ yet it is still pretty formal. It is a lot more formal to try to explain the political motions taking place in any one State on the basis of ‘the world political situation’. Yet this is what the method of Trotsky calls forth. It of course adds on specific materials to an essential or formal understanding.
In politics Trotsky begins with the International bourgeois and the International working class and not with the National Bourgeoisie and the National Working class and of course the plurality of cultures and religions attached to numerous States. The International Bourgeoisie and International Proletariat can ‘seem like’ ideal abstractions in the concrete world of current affairs, of the political turmoil’s of the many nations and States.
However a supporter of Trotsky can argue that such class abstractions are ‘real’ and not ‘ideal’ because they lay below the appearance of the most important political developments. It is only in the face of great political developments like wars and revolutions that the abstractions stop being formal or essential and become real and concrete. This is the argument as I find it.
The theory is not redundant, any more than its basis, the concept of the United Front is redundant, or Lenin’s arguments set out in left-Wing Communism are redundant.
What do all these have in common? That a large section of the masses continue to have delusions in bourgeois-democracy. Those delusions extend to a continued support for bourgeois, and petty-bourgeois parties, including workers’ parties.
Even in developed capitalist economies, the bourgeois-democracy is not consistent, and sections of the masses still have illusions in a struggle to make it consistent. Do we ignore their struggle, because it is based on a delusion? Of course, not, as Lenin and Trotsky describe. That would be ultra-left sectarianism. Do we ignore the struggle of workers say to secure democratic control over the NHS, because it is based on the delusion that such control will ever be granted? No, of course, not, any more than we stand aside from workers wage struggles, even though, as Marx describes in Value, price and profit, such struggles are a diversion, and based on a similar delusion, when the workers should be, instead struggling for an end of the wages system.
We do not stand aside from those struggles based on delusions arising from the domination of the workers consciousness by bourgeois ideology, because to do so would by ultra-Left sectarianism, and would cut us off from the masses, and so any chance of breaking them away from those delusions. But, doing that does not at all mean appeasing those delusions either, nor appeasing their illusions in the reformist parties and leaders they currently look to. That is the whole point of the United Front, an alliance at the rank and file level, in action, of workers engaged in these struggles, based upon the principle – March separately, strike together. Its precisely on that basis we say to workers, you don’t, yet, agree with us, but we will support you in your struggle, anyway, and convince you along the way. Our only condition is that we engage in this struggle, independently, separated from the bourgeoisie, and its parties, who will betray you. We propose a struggle for your stated aims, based upon independent, working class organisations, workers’ councils/soviets, using proletarian means of the political strike, occupations and so on, the creation of workers defence squads, and militia etc.
The most obvious application of that principle is in relation to a struggle against fascism, as Trotsky described in The Action Programme for France. Just as the Bolsheviks did not sow bourgeois-democratic illusions in supporting the Russian masses struggle for a Constituent Assembly, but argued that the only way such an Assembly would be created was by the action of the soviets, so we do not sow bourgeois-democratic illusions in supporting the struggle of reformist workers who oppose attacks on bourgeois-democratic institutions by fascists. What we do argue is that similarly, any such struggle can only be successful if similarly carried out on the basis of an independent working-class, organised in its own proletarian organisations, separated from, and in opposition to the bourgeois parties and institutions.
The very nature of any such struggle, means that the theory of permanent revolution applies, because the dialectic it describes also unfolds. The workers who begin with those delusions in bourgeois-democracy, have to face reality as it imposes itself in the struggle. The bourgeois leaders of the workers’ parties inevitably try to hold back that struggle, and place the workers fate in the hands of the bourgeois and the capitalist state, its police, courts and so on. That was seen clearly in the approach of those leaders in opposing Moseley’s fascists at Cable Street for example, not to mention their application of the Popular Front in France, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930’s, and Chile in the 1970’s.
Its in this actual struggle that the masses are broken from the reformist leaders and parties, and from their delusions in bourgeois-democracy, or, if they are not, then the struggle is defeated, and counter-revolution ensues.
is the problem with a departing away from a good and relevant theory of likely action namely permanent revolution or the irrelevance of the theory to current historic conditions? There are those who still base practice on the theory, do they come out any better if the theory is redundant? Maybe practice would be better if they took up a more relevant theory.
is redundant?