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Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: the Documentary Record Historical Materialism Book Series Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Paul Blackledge, Leeds – Sébastien Budgen, Paris Michael Krätke, Amsterdam – Stathis Kouvelakis, London – Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam China Miéville, London – Paul Reynolds, Lancashire Peter Thomas, Amsterdam VOLUME 21 Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record Edited and translated by Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Witnesses to permanent revolution : the documentary record / edited and translated by Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido. p. cm. — (Historical materialism book series ; 21) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-90-04-16770-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Permanent revolution theory. 2. Trotsky, Leon, 1879-1940. I. Day, Richard B., 1942– II. Gaido, Daniel. III. Title. IV. Series. HX550.R48W58 2009 335.4’112--dc22 2008052017 ISSN 1570-1522 ISBN 978 90 04 167704 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS To Judith and Marielle Contents Preface ............................................................................................................. xi Introduction The Historical Origin of the Expression ‘Permanent Revolution’ ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ‘The Slavs and Revolution’ (1902), Karl Kautsky ........ 59 Chapter Two The Draft Programme of ‘Iskra’ and the Tasks of Russian Social Democrats (1903), N. Ryazanov .................................... 67 Chapter Three ‘Orthodox’ Pedantry (1903), G.V. Plekhanov ............ 135 Chapter Four ‘To What Extent Is the Communist Manifesto Obsolete?’ (First edition: 1903 – Revised edition: June 1906), Karl Kautsky .............................................................................................. 169 Chapter Five ‘Revolutionary Questions’ (February 1904), Karl Kautsky .............................................................................................. 187 Chapter Six ‘What Was Accomplished on the Ninth of January’ (January 1905), Parvus ............................................................................. 251 Chapter Seven ‘Up to the Ninth of January’ (1905), Leon Trotsky ............................................................................................... 273 Chapter Eight ‘After the Petersburg Uprising: What Next?’ (Munich, 20 January [2 February] 1905), Leon Trotsky .................... 333 Chapter Nine ‘The Revolution in Russia’ (28 January, 1905), Rosa Luxemburg ........................................................................................ 353 viii • Contents Chapter Ten ‘After the First Act’ (4 February, 1905), Rosa Luxemburg ........................................................................................ 365 Chapter Eleven ‘The Consequences of the Japanese Victory and Social Democracy’ (July 1905), Karl Kautsky ..................................... 373 Chapter Twelve Introduction to Ferdinand Lassalle’s Speech to the Jury ( July 1905), Leon Trotsky .......................................................... 409 Chapter Thirteen ‘Social Democracy and Revolution’ (25 November [12 November], 1905), Leon Trotsky ............................ 447 Chapter Fourteen ‘The Revolution in Permanence’ (1 November 1905), Franz Mehring ........................................................ 457 Chapter Fifteen ‘The Next Questions of our Movement’ (September 1905), N. Ryazanov .............................................................. 465 Chapter Sixteen ‘Our Tasks’ (13 November 1905), Parvus ................ 479 Chapter Seventeen Foreword to Karl Marx, Parizhskaya Kommuna (December 1905), Leon Trotsky ............................................................... 497 Chapter Eighteen ‘The Russian Revolution’ (20 December 1905), Rosa Luxemburg ......................................................................................... 521 Chapter Nineteen ‘Old and New Revolution’ (December 1905), Karl Kautsky .............................................................................................. 529 Chapter Twenty ‘The Sans-Culottes of the French Revolution’ (1889, reprinted December 1905), Karl Kautsky .................................. 537 Chapter Twenty-One ‘The Role of the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat in the Russian Revolution’, Speech to the Fifth (London) Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (25 May 1907), Rosa Luxemburg .................................................. 543 Contents • ix Chapter Twenty-Two ‘The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution and Its Prospects’ (November 1906), Karl Kautsky ..... 567 Chapter Twenty-Three ‘The American Worker’ (February 1906), Karl Kautsky .............................................................................................. 609 References ...................................................................................................... 663 Index ............................................................................................................... 679 Preface The year 2005 was the centenary of the fi rst Russian Revolution. Over the past century, countless volumes have been written on this subject in every language and from every conceivable political viewpoint. One might well wonder what remains to be said. We have discovered that there are new perspectives to consider, and they come from having 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. The theme of our anthology is the rediscovery and elaboration of the concept of permanent revolution in the years 1903–7. In researching this project we have collected and translated into English for the fi rst time a series of documents that bring fundamental issues to life in a way that no secondary account possibly could.1 One of our principal discoveries is that Leon Trotsky, while certainly the most famous and brilliant proponent of permanent revolution, was by no means its sole author; indeed, several major contributions came from a number of other Marxists, some of whom – such as David Ryazanov – have rarely been mentioned in this connection, while others – Karl Kautsky in particular – have most often been regarded as pseudo-revolutionaries whose real commitment was always to parliamentary politics. The documents that we have translated demonstrate not only that 1 The one document that has been fully translated previously is Kautsky 1983, pp. 352–403. We are grateful to Neil Harding and Richard Taylor (the translator) for kindly giving us permission to reproduce their work in this anthology. English versions of Kautsky 1905j and ‘Old and New Revolution’ (the latter under another title and without mentioning the source) appeared in pre-WWI socialist journals. In both cases the documents were checked against the originals and the fi rst one was collated from two different versions printed before and after the Russian revolution of 1905. Two of the documents by Trotsky – ‘Up to the Ninth of January’ and ‘After the Petersburg Uprising: What Next?’ – have previously appeared in English but in highly abridged versions. We have provided the complete text of both. xii • Preface Kautsky was a key participant in all discussions of permanent revolution, but also that in the years of the fi rst Russian Revolution his thinking was often closer to Trotsky’s than to Lenin’s. Historical research is inevitably a cumulative endeavour, and our work certainly owes much to the efforts of countless others. The task of historians is to clarify great issues fi rst, but the very act of doing so poses new questions. Nuances have to be discerned, hypotheses have to be validated, and great events can only be fully examined when traced to the consciousness of the actors themselves. In rediscovering the debate over permanent revolution, we owe a special debt to Reidar Larsson and Hartmut Mehringer, whose books served as uniquely helpful bibliographical guides.2 We had hoped to complete this project for the centenary of 1905. We missed that target because documents had to be retrieved from numerous libraries in places as far apart as Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Germany, Finland, The Netherlands and Palestine/Israel. In translating the documents from German and Russian into English, we have divided the work equally and tried to reproduce both the letter and the spirit of the original texts. There is never a perfect substitute for reading a text in the original; nor can a neatly published translation ever reproduce either the thrill that comes from discovering an obscure insight or the frustration of having to translate it from
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