In Defence of No. 31 £1 waged, 50p unwaged/low waged, €1.50 The April Theses and Permanent Revolution By Gerry Downing Trotsky’s theory pro- posed that the socialist revolution was necessary because of the combined and unequal character of the Russian economy. It had a highly concentrat- ed working class at the centre of huge modern factories and a weak at the centre of an overwhelmingly peasant economy. This would enable the work- ing class to take power in Russia first. However, this revolution had to be uninter- rupted: it could only begin on a national scale, but it could not halt at the spontaneous demo- cratic stage. Rather it must proceed directly to . This could only be completed on the international scale, with the victory of the working class in advanced metropolitan coun- tries, particularly Germany. This is the essen- tial political content of the April Theses. Charges of Trotsky’s failure to recognise the vital necessity for a democratic centralist par- ty of professional revolutionaries deeply em- bedded in the leadership of the working class are immediately conceded, as Trotsky himself did in 1917, as soon as he realised his mis- takes and whenever the issue later arose. trade union bureaucracy and their allies in the Where We Stand Labour party leadership as the most funda- WE STAND WITH KARL MARX: ‘The mental obstacle to the struggle for power of emancipation of the working classes must be the working class, outside of the state forces conquered by the working classes themselves. and their direct agencies themselves, we must The struggle for the emancipation of the fight and defeat and replace them with a revo- working class means not a struggle for class lutionary leadership by mobilising the base privileges and monopolies but for equal rights against the pro-capitalist bureaucratic mis- and duties and the abolition of all class leaders to open the way forward for the strug- rule’ (The International Workingmen’s Asso- gle for workers’ power. ciation 1864, General Rules). We are fully in support of all mass mobilisa- The capitalist state consists, in the last analy- tions against the onslaught of this reactionary sis, of ruling-class laws within a judicial sys- Con-Lib Dem coalition. However, whilst par- tem and detention centres overseen by the ticipating in this struggle we will oppose all armed bodies of police/army who are under policies which subordinate the working class the direction and are controlled in acts of to the political agenda of the petty-bourgeois defence of capitalist property rights against reformist leaders of the Labour party and the interests of the majority of civil society. trade unions The working class must overthrow the capi- We oppose all immigration controls. Interna- talist state and replace it with a workers’ state tional finance capital roams the planet in based on democratic soviets/workers’ coun- search of profit and imperialist governments cils to suppress the inevitable counter- disrupts the lives of workers and cause the revolution of private capitalist profit against collapse of whole nations with their direct planned production for the satisfaction of intervention in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghani- socialised human need. stan and their proxy wars in Somalia and the We recognise the necessity for revolutionaries Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc. to carry out serious ideological and political Workers have the right to sell their labour struggle as direct participants in the trade internationally wherever they get the best unions (always) and in the mass reformist price. Only union membership and pay rates social democratic bourgeois workers’ parties can counter employers who seek to exploit despite their pro-capitalist leaderships when immigrant workers as cheap labour to under- conditions are favourable. Because we see the mine the gains of past struggles.

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2 The April Theses and Permanent Revolution: An updated and edited version of a 2007 polemic with the Weekly Worker’s Jack Conrad and Mike Mcnair struggle for a democratic republic is clearly a false A stage that will allow a social- ist revolution (workers’ republic) to be fought for as the next stage in a revolu- tion but in the indefinite future. This Menshevik position allows the CPGB/ Weekly Worker to appear far more or- thodox in relation to the RDG’s Dem- ocratic Republic in Britain programme than they really are by defending Lenin’s pre-1917 ‘democratic dictator- ship of the and peasantry’, condemning stageism, but crucially having the same governmental slogan for the democratic republic. We will, therefore, analyse stageism and how revolutionaries understood the character of the coming revolu- tions in 19th century Germany and early 20th century Russia. We will look at its genesis in the writings of Marx mal Ataturk and the failed Chinese rev- and Engels, its relevance to the pro- olutionary epoch which ended of 1927 grammes of the German social democ- with the massacre of the Shanghai So- racy and its effects on the Russian viet. SDLP (Bolshevik). Then to Lenin’s Im- The victory of Hitler in 1933, Stalin- perialism the Highest Stage of of ism’s abandonment of third-stage ultra 1916 and its significance for the turn -leftism and the adoption of popular that he made in the April Theses and to frontism (total collapse into stageism) the Russian Revolution itself, the failed in 1934-35 signalled for Trotsky the revolutions in Germany in 1918-19 and need for the Transitional Programme 1923 the massacre of the Turkish as the programmatic perspectives of a Communists in 1920 by Mustafa Ke- new international. We have argued that

3 these perspectives and the programmatic ori- entation that flowed from them were fully justified by the revolu- tionary situations that developed at the end of World War II.[1] International revolu- tionary leadership was the prime question for humanity and democratic state [the CPGB’s “extreme the crushing of these revolutions by democracy”?] is inadequate because it is the alliance between Stalinism and based on this fundamental contradic- world imperialism proved that point tion between the political state and civil in the negative. society.” And: Marx and Lenin, 1843 to 1905 “In political democracy” man - not In 1843 Marx wrote On the Jewish merely one man, but every man - is Question, in which he argues with Bru- there considered a sovereign being, a no Bauer on the freeing of the Jews supreme being; but it is uneducated, from the ghettos that “to be political- unsocial man... man as he has been cor- ly emancipated from religion is not to rupted, lost to himself, alienated, sub- be finally and completely emancipated jected to the rule of inhuman condi- from religion because political eman- tions and elements, by the whole organ- cipation is not the final and absolute isation of our society - in short man form of human emancipation”. who is not yet a real species-being.” [2] He goes on to generalise this idea: However, in the Economic and Philo- abolishing political inequality in gen- sophical Manuscripts of 1844 Marx de- eral fails to look at social and eco- veloped this theory of alienation to nomic man. Several states in the US locate it in the labour process itself had abolished the property qualifica- and the working class as the revolu- tion for voting, “but the political sup- tionary class. The products of his pression of private property not only own labour in an ever-deepening cri- does not abolish private property: it sis oppresses man. Congealed labour, presupposes its existence”. capital, stands above him and outside As CJ Arthur argues in his introduc- of him and necessarily produces and tion to Marx and Engels’s The German reinforces private property, just as Ideology: man creates a god in the sky as an “Marx considers even the most perfect idealised self and then becomes op- 4 pressed by his own creation. dom in 1862) were aspiring to the Here is Marx setting out his break position of the landlords. The poorer with Hegel and Feuerbach: his new peasantry was being ground under- world outlook, which really does de- foot even more viciously than ever. mand a socialist and not a democratic The stage of capitalist exploitation revolution. The agency of the revolu- was unavoidable, he thought. Yes, as tion, the working class, had not yet against the bogus egalitarianism of developed its organisational and po- feudal rural relationships; no, as litical strength sufficiently to produce against the international socialist rev- soviets until 1905 in Russia and so olution. Therein lay the confusion solve the dichotomy between the po- lodged in ‘the democratic dictator- litical and the social. Nevertheless, it ship of the proletariat and peasantry’. was to social man that Marx devoted Following the defeat of the 1848 the rest of his efforts until his death revolutions Marx drew the political in 1883. conclusion that the “revolution in When some Russian Marxists wrote permanence” from the bourgeois to to Marx to suggest that it might be the socialist was needed, together possible to skip the stage of capitalist with an alliance with the peasantry in exploitation in their country he gave Germany - a “second version of the a conciliatory reply. Basically, the ar- peasants’ war”. It would be nice to gument was that because of the over- report that Marx and Engels then whelming peasant nature of Russia it followed this political line consistent- would be possible to move from the ly and imposed it on the German So- egalitarian rural economy of the Mir, cial Democrats. Alas, no. Correct as (village council), where strips in fields it was, it was merely a brilliant guess were allocated according to the needs when revolutionary times produced a of the individual families to socialism glimpse of the future, reinforced by a without going through the capitalist further glimpse afforded by the Paris sage. Possibly, thought Marx, if we Commune of 1871. get rid of the landlords. Despite Marx’s repudiation of the But Lenin answered the question in Gotha programme in 1875, by 1891 the negative when he produced his clearly two revolutions with a histori- work on Russian Agriculture in 1903. cal stage between them are mooted at [3] The villages were already far too Erfurt and Engels, despite his cri- socially differentiated, capitalism had tique of the draft, basically agreed to penetrated every pore of the village this. There were no Soviets to pro- economy, the kulaks (rich peasants, vide the link between the political who arose after the abolition of serf- state and civil society and therefore

5 no transitional demands to link the (in Britain and France) as the prime maximum and minimum. The Erfurt feature of the new imperialism: programme is understandable and ar- “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage guably methodologically correct for its of development at which the dominance time and place. It did not inevitably of monopolies and finance capital is es- lead to the August 4, 1914, betrayal of tablished; at which the export of capital the leaders of German Social Democ- has acquired pronounced importance; at which the division of the world among racy, but we really cannot ignore the the international trusts has begun; at world-historical changes then in train which the division of all territories of the that produced the Russian Revolution globe among the biggest capitalist pow- or the effects of the negative experi- ers has been completed.” ences afterwards. The 20th century has wrote Lenin in 1916. not passed in vain. The dominance of the export of cap- When Mike Macnair proclaimed his ital rather than the exports of manu- repudiation of Lenin’s Imperialism at factures (Britain overwhelmingly in the the CPGB’s ‘War and revolution’ period up to 1914); the emergence of school on December 2, it provided a monopolies and cartels in Germany logical reason for his championing the and the robber barons in the USA; and maximum-minimum Erfurt pro- the carving up of the world economy gramme of 1891. between these rival gangs of imperial- After all, if ‘the only thing that was ist robbers, which led to WWI - to an- new about global capitalism was Ger- alyse this raft of changes as quantita- many’ at the end of the 1890s, then it tive rather than qualitative is manifest- must make sense to look to extending ly incorrect, but does give Mike Mac- democracy to socialism via red republi- nair a more consistent position than canism, as there was no qualitative Jack Conrad, who defends Lenin’s Im- change in the world economy that perialism, combined with a 21st centu- could be reflected in the consciousness ry version of Erfurt. of the world working class. It was this understanding of imperial- Of course, this position is a thousand ism which underlies the international- times wrong because the world ism of the April Theses and led Lenin changed ineluctably and unalterably at to proclaim that he would sacrifice the the end of the 1890s to produce the Russian Revolution (certainly not glad- modern world of imperialist exploita- ly) for the German revolution. tion. Let us now lay another bogey to rest. In his Imperialism Lenin identified the After 1848 no genuine revolutionary emergence of the domination of fi- socialist still believed that the bour- nance capital over industrial capital geoisie would lead a revolution in Ger-

6 many and none believed that they would do so in Russia after 1905. Apt quotations by comrade Conrad establish this point beyond doubt. The Menshevik pro- gramme that the bour- geoisie could do this identified them as capit- ulatory stageists and Communist Party of Turkey founder Mustafa Suphi therefore provoked (right) and general secretary Ethem Nejat (middle) Lenin’s bitter opposition to them on this vital point. and how they could avoid being They were willing to concede the swamped by that backward peasantry. leadership of the revolution to the Although this was eventually the fate bourgeoisie and constitute themselves that befell the Russian proletariat cer- as the extreme opposition, as comrade tainly by 1928 (arguably as early as Conrad has pointed out. 1920), that revolution and its powerful However, Lenin did not think that a international echoes would not have socialist revolution was possible in been possible had the old Bolshevik Russia - he foresaw a democratic revo- formula survived. lution led by the working class in alli- Lenin famously polemicised against ance with the peasantry carrying out the opponents of his April theses - Sta- the tasks of the bourgeoisie: democra- lin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc - thus: cy, industrialisation, education, etc. “Whoever now talks only about the This was because he understood the ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship bourgeoisie were too weak and cow- of the proletariat and peasantry’ has ardly, fearful of the working class and lost touch with life, has, in virtue of compromised by absolutism to do so this circumstance, gone over, in prac- itself. tice, to the petty bourgeoisie against But the confusion lodged in the alge- the proletarian class struggle; and he braic ‘democratic dictatorship’ formula ought to be relegated to the museum of the Bolsheviks masked a lack of un- of ‘Bolshevik’ pre-revolutionary antiq- derstanding of how the working class uities (or, as one might call it, the mu- might solve the contradiction of being seum of ‘old Bolsheviks’).” in a tiny minority leading a revolution They would have compromised and in an overwhelming peasant economy destroyed the revolution by capitulat-

7 ing to national defencism in WWI and on the international scale, with the would have facilitated the victory of a victory of the working class in ad- semi-fascist bourgeois dictatorship. vanced metropolitan countries, partic- Kerensky’s bourgeois ‘democracy’ ularly Germany. This is the essential was not an option in 1917: the charac- political content of the April Theses. ter of the world imperialist economy Charges of Trotsky’s failure to rec- precluded it, as Lenin had analysed in ognise the vital necessity for a demo- his Imperialism the previous year. cratic centralist party of professional An earlier understanding on the im- revolutionaries deeply embedded in perialist nature of the world economy the leadership of the working class are and then his experience as the head of immediately conceded, as Trotsky the Petrograd soviet in 1905 led Trot- himself did in 1917, as soon as he re- sky to propose and defend his famous alised his mistakes and whenever the theory of Permanent Revolution, de- issue later arose. veloped in 1904. He saw the new form of participatory democracy em- After the revolution bodied in the 50-odd soviets that It would be nice to report that Lenin sprung up throughout Russia at the and Trotsky shook hands on the com- time and knew this was the solution ing together of Permanent Revolution to Marx’s “contradiction between the and the April Theses in 1917 and political state and civil society”. agreed to follow this line consistently Trotsky’s theory proposed that the thereafter in all countries and in every socialist revolution was necessary be- revolutionary situation. Alas, again no. cause of the combined and unequal The name, ‘Union of Soviet Socialist character of the Russian economy. It Republics’, was not adopted until had a highly concentrated working 1922, arguably when it was no longer class at the centre of huge modern true. factories and a weak bourgeoisie at And the Comintern, with Lenin and the centre of an overwhelmingly peas- Trotsky’s acquiescence, adopted posi- ant economy. This would enable the tions on Turkey which they had repu- working class to take power in Russia diated in Russia, and on Germany first. which were dictated by the diplomatic However, this revolution had to be needs of the Soviet state rather than uninterrupted: it could only begin on by the international revolution. Victor a national scale, but it could not halt Serge’s report of Lenin’s comments in at the spontaneous democratic stage. 1920 - “This is counterrevolution, but Rather it must proceed directly to so- we shall not be guillotined: we our- cialism. This could only be completed selves shall impose the Thermidor” - sounds all too believable in the light

8 of subsequent events. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk massacred the Turkish communists because he supposedly led a bourgeois revolu- tion. The Communist party of Turkey was founded at a congress in Baku on 10 September 1920. The congress elected Mustafa Suphi as the party chairman and Ethem Nejat as the general secretary. After its foundation, the party was recognized as section of the . The founding of TKP occurred in the midst of the Independence War, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. In order to counter the growing influ- ence of Turkish communists, Mustafa Kemal set up a parallel puppet com- munist party (Turkish: Türk Komün- 1926 anti-communist propaganda in Tur- ist Fırkası). key, could not have appeared without The founders of TKP, Mustafa Ataturk's say so, despite the CP denials. Suphi and his 14 other comrades, Top: The Turkish realm's biggest enemy communism. It should be crushed wherever were killed almost certainly on the it is seen. - Atatürk Head: Com- orders of Ataturk, an early version of munism Bones: Hostility towards reli- the massacre of the Shanghai Soviet gion Hostility towards wealth, Exploita- by Chiang Kai Shek in 1927. tivness towards workers Hostility towards democracy Divisiveness Denial of the fami- Political confusion between the pro- ly World domi- gramme of the bourgeois and the so- nance Hostility towards natiojhood- cialist revolution was unresolved, as it nhood Dictatorship Bloody massa- was in Ireland in where the first and cre Hostility towards free unions Corruption - slander - lie Shamelessness (literally testi- revolutionary Communist Party of clelessness) Bottom: Let's be very awake Ireland (November 1921 -1923) was towards communism that threatens Turkey. dissolved on Comintern instructions in favour of Jim Larkin’s opportunist Ataturk’s fake communist party Irish Workers League. The Shanghai summed this up well, saying, “Only massacre in 1927 led Trotsky to uni- Turks can produce Bolshevism versalise his theory of Permanent [revolutionary socialism], and Bolshe- Revolution. One of the leaders of vism can only be introduced from 9 above.” And Ataturk spelled out his Revolution and to universalise his and real position on communism in 1926: Lenin’s April Theses theory in books “Communism is the greatest foe of the like The Third International after Lenin Turkish world. It must be crushed following the disastrous defeats in Chi- wherever it is seen.” (Faruk Şükrü Yer- na of the previous year. Here the two sel, Eskişehir Newspaper, 1926). Today stages were clear and open. The Com- the Turkish Communist party never intern’s initial advice to enter Chiang mention the fate of Suphi and his com- Kai-shek’s Kuomintang was com- rades and lionise Ataturk. [5] pounded by Stalin’s advice to enter the And, even worse, Trotsky’s ally, Karl left Kuomintang following the massa- Radek, eulogised Leo Schlageter in his cre of the Shanghai Soviet in 1927. June 1923 speech, ‘The Wanderer into the Void’, in an effort to conciliate the Transitional Governmental far right in Germany in the violent re- slogan jection of the Treaty of Versailles and Let us now address the governmental the victorious allies: slogan, the prime transitional demand “We are not sentimental romanticists in revolutionary situations. In his Writ- who forget friendship when its object is ings on China Trotsky advocates the slo- dead, nor are we diplomats who say: by gan of the constituent assembly to ad- the graveside say nothing but good or dress the democratic aspirations of the remain silent. Schlageter, a courageous oppressed masses, but his orientation, soldier of the counterrevolution, de- and that of the Chinese Trotskyists, serves to be sincerely honoured by us, was always towards the working class the soldiers of the revolution.” [6] in the big cites of Shanghai, Peking and Following the murders of Luxemburg, Hong Kong. Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches in early ‘All power to the Soviets’ was the suc- 1919, the Social Democrats succeeded cessful Bolshevik formula, not in destroying the revolutions in Ger- ‘Forward to the democratic republic’, many and in the states of the former the Menshevik and Cadet formula. Austro-Hungarian empire dreadful Trotsky explains in The Third Internation- confusion surrounded the events of al after Lenin: October 1923.Trotsky was not in a po- “If, consequently, we are to take as our sition then to alter the Comintern’s starting point the Leninist analogy be- centrist vacillations and the Schlageter tween China and Russia, then we must affair demonstrated extreme confusion say: from the standpoint of the ‘political at the head of the Comintern. nature of the state’, all that could have It was not until 1926 that he really been obtained through the democratic began an open fight for the Permanent dictatorship in China has been put to the

10 test, first in Sun Yat-sen’s Canton, then and the institution of the proletarian on the road from Canton to Shanghai, dictatorship, the planned economy, which culminated in the Shanghai coup and production for human need in- d’etat, and then in Wuhan where the stead of profit. left Kuomintang appeared in its chemi- Though it is true that the capitalists cally pure form - i.e., according to the were not expropriated by the Bolshe- directives of the ECCI, as the organiser of the agrarian revolution, but in reality viks until late 1918 and a planned as its hangman. economy was not instituted until after that, nevertheless no serious revolu- “But the social content of the bour- tionary socialist would question that geois democratic revolution will fill the this was the trajectory adopted in initial period of the coming dictatorship of the Chinese proletariat and the peas- April 1917. ant poor. To advance now the slogan It was a workers’ state because the of a ‘democratic dictatorship of the working class held political power and proletariat and the peasantry’ after the the capitalist were about to lose not role not only of the Chinese bourgeoi- only political but also all social and sie, but also of Chinese ‘democracy’ has economic power. been put to a thorough test, after it has If this did not eventually succeed, it become absolutely incontestable that was not the fault of that orientation ‘democracy’ will play even a greater but the international character of the hangman’s role in the coming battles world economy (the advent of mod- than in the past, to advance this slogan ern imperialism) and the defeats of now is simply to create the means of covering up the new varieties of Kuo- the international class struggle, partic- mintangism and to prepare a noose for ularly in Germany, Austria-Hungary, the proletariat.” Italy and then China. Jack Conrad ignores the April Theses If the Soviets degenerated and died and its place in history in as representative of the democratic his polemics and only when pressed will of the masses, this was not be- does he give a partial and misleading cause of the machinations of Stalin or account of the significance of this their inherent inferiority to bourgeois world-historic document. This docu- democracy, as Jack Conrad and oth- ment rejected stageism and set the ers seem to suggest, but because of face of the Bolsheviks, after Lenin’s these international defeats, which exceeding bitter internal struggle, to- caused the rise of the bureaucracy wards the socialist revolution [4] which then combined with the ex- That is, not only towards the taking haustion of the masses and the revo- of power by the working class but the lutionary generation in the USSR. expropriation of the capitalist class The April Theses contain all the rele-

11 vant elements of the current debate about programme, because programme vitally rests on perspectives, and perspectives rest on our analysis of the interna- tional balance of class forces. There is no dem- ocratic republican stage between imperialism and the socialist revolution. Leo Schlageter and Karl Radek. The latter's tribute to The Soviets and the the former at a plenum of the Executive Committee of constituent assembly did the Communist International, June 1923, makes for represent a conflict be- painful reading, indicating confusion on both the herit- tween two forms of de- age of Lenin's April Theses and Trotsky's Permanent mocracy and the rule of Revolution at the very top of the Comintern at that time, just months before the revolutionary German two classes whose inter- events of October 1923. ests were irreconcilable. One had to suppress the other and it is Notes clear that the peasantry would domi- [1] Gerry Downing, Trotskyite economism? Weekly nate the assembly, as was evident in Worker, issue 651, 30.11.2006, more by: Leon Trot- sky’s Transitional programme is based on the com- the elections to that body. munist method of Lenin and the Russian Bolshe- The Bolsheviks won the cities, but viks, https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/651/ the SRs took the countryside. Bour- trotskyite-economism/ [2] K Marx and F Engels The German ideology ed CJ geois democracy demanded that the Arthur, pp8-9. Bolsheviks yield to the will of ‘the peo- [3] V. I. Lenin, February 1903, Marxist Views on the ple’ and concede that the ‘democratic Agrarian Question in Europe and in Russia, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1903/ dictatorship’ meant the rule of the feb/00.htm peasantry over the working class and [4] L Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and thence capitalist restoration. Perspectives (1928). [5] Communist Party of Turkey on commemoration of Ata- The Bolsheviks suppressed the con- türk, https://news.sol.org.tr/communist-party- stituent assembly because they repre- turkey-commemoration-ataturk-173492 sented the far more advanced partici- [6] Karl Radek, Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void, (June 1923), Speech at a plenum of the Exec- patory socialist democracy of the Sovi- utive Committee of the Communist International, ets. What revolutionary socialist would June 1923, English translation first published in say they were wrong to do so? Labour Monthly September 1923, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1923/06/ schlageter.htm. 12