A theory, not a history
Most short expositions of permanent revolution are histories in disguise: they narrate 1905, 1917 and the colonial revolutions and let Trotsky’s theses fall out of the story. Imperialism, Stalinism and Permanent Revolution, which Red Mole has recently republished, does almost the opposite. This is a theoretical pamphlet, grown out of a series of educational talks given in London to introduce the politics of the Fourth International, and its debts are worn openly. Section One is, on the author’s own account, closely based on Jacques Valier’s Impérialisme et Révolution Permanente; the whole draws heavily on Ernest Mandel, on Livio Maitan’s “The Theory of Permanent Revolution,” and — at very great length — on the World Congress resolutions of the (United Secretariat) Fourth International of the 1960s. It is, in other words, a distillation of the mainstream Mandelian tradition as it stood on the eve of the 1974 world congress, rendered by an anonymous hand, “John Robens”, for the British International Marxist Group. While the editorial work on the volume was done by John Ross, the book is explicit that the theorisation is a collective effort standing on the theoretical work of the Fourth International.
Read against the canonical restatements of that tradition — Mandel’s later What Is the Theory of Permanent Revolution?, Frank on the colonial revolution, Maitan on Latin America — three things stand out: how conventional IMG’s book was, how unconventional its method, and how much of the theory’s own programme it quietly leaves out.
How conventional the account is
On content, there are no heresies here. If one takes Mandel’s five-proposition summary of the mature theory as the yardstick, Robens states and defends every one of them:
The bourgeoisie of the backward countries cannot complete the national-democratic revolution. This is the spine of Sections One and Three: in the imperialist epoch “no colonial bourgeoisie can create an economy capable of competing in the world market,” so “all national bourgeois solutions … prove utopian,” and the native bourgeoisie is condemned to vacillate between imperialism and its fear of the masses.
The proletariat must lead, in alliance with the poor peasantry. The complete solution of the democratic and national tasks is “conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses” — and only through irreconcilable struggle against the national-liberal bourgeoisie.
The revolution grows over into socialist tasks without a bourgeois stage. Against the Menshevik–Stalinist theory of stages, Robens deploys Trotsky’s 1905 argument (the eight-hour day, resisted by lock-outs, forcing expropriation) to show how the democratic programme “places collectivism on the order of the day.”
National in its beginning, international in its completion. The whole of Section Two is a sustained assault on “socialism in one country,” ending where Trotsky ends: the way out of the contradictions of the workers’ state “will be found in the arena of world revolution.”
Permanence continues after the conquest of power. Section Five’s long anatomy of the transitional economy — commodity form, exchange value, “bourgeois right” in distribution, primitive socialist accumulation, the bureaucracy — is precisely the “permanence” of the revolution after October, and the case for political revolution against the bureaucracy.
The framework around these theses is equally orthodox. The USSR as a degenerated workers’ state and the Eastern European, Chinese, Cuban, Yugoslav and Vietnamese states deformed ones; the bureaucracy as a parasitic caste, not a new ruling class; it can be saved only by political revolution, never by self-reform; state-capitalist (Tony Cliff is named and dismissed) and bureaucratic-collectivist theories are wrong. Stalinism is counter-revolutionary on a world scale, and “socialism in one country” is its theoretical root, from which the standard catalogue of betrayals — Germany, China 1927, Spain 1936, the Popular Fronts, post-war France and Italy — is made to flow. A reader who knows the Fourth International’s positions of 1969 will recognise every one of them, frequently in the resolutions’ own words.
What is surprising
What is genuinely distinctive is not what Robens argues but how he grounds it.
Permanent revolution as an epistemology. The organising move of the pamphlet is not political but methodological. Again and again the argument turns on a single opposition: bourgeois “empiricism,” which “generalises” — reading a statement true of the whole back into each of its parts — versus the Marxist method of “abstraction,” which begins from the totality and refuses to read it back. Menshevism, Stalinism, focoism and Maoism are all convicted of the same logical error; permanent revolution is presented as the political corollary of a correct theory of knowledge. The vocabulary — “the concept of the epoch,” “problematic,” the world economy as “a mighty and independent reality,” the nods to Theoretical Practice — betrays the French, semi-Althusserian sources (Valier and the Critiques de l’Économie Politique school) far more than the Anglo-Trotskyist tradition. This is permanent revolution refounded on method rather than narrated through events, and it is a genuinely unusual thing to find in a forty-pence pamphlet.
The weight of economics. For a text nominally about permanent revolution, an extraordinary share of it is pure political economy. An entire section, “The Long Boom,” is a technical, value-theoretic account of post-war capitalism — organic composition of capital, rate of exploitation, the falling rate of profit, the dollar and the monetary crisis, the relative decline of US imperialism — lifted almost wholesale from Mandel and Valier. Section Five then gives a comparably technical derivation of the transitional economy from Marx’s categories of the commodity. The effect is to re-found permanent revolution on a theory of the world economy and its law of value, and thereby to make the theory absorb the two facts that most embarrassed classical Trotskyism: the long boom (capitalism did not collapse) and the survival and expansion of Stalinism (the bureaucracy was not swept away by the war).
Candour about Trotsky. Precisely because it separates method from prophecy, the pamphlet is strikingly willing to say Trotsky was wrong. It concedes flatly that his conjunctural predictions failed — capitalism did not slump after 1945, Stalinism was not overthrown in the war — and even that Trotsky “quite frequently made the serious theoretical mistake” of inferring present stagnation from the tendency of the epoch, producing “bizarre” ideas in some of his followers. Trotsky’s categories are defended; his forecasts are discarded. This is a more self-critical Trotskyism than a party pamphlet usually allows itself.
A hard line, generously argued. Robens takes his opponents seriously. Guevara, the OLAS declarations, Marighela, Douglas Bravo and Yon Sosa are quoted at length and often approvingly — “Trotskyism has much to learn from the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions” — even as focoism and Maoism are rejected. And a subtle recurring device does much of the analytical work: the gap between the intended and the objective effects of bureaucratic manoeuvres, so that de-Stalinisation, the Sino-Soviet split (memorably, “two Popes” discrediting the Church) and the Cultural Revolution all corrode the very bureaucracies that launched them.
Proletarian, not peasant. At the height of the far left’s romance with peasant and guerrilla war, the pamphlet insists — almost polemically — that the urban industrial proletariat remains “the revolutionary class par excellence” even in the colonial world, and that the real key is class differentiation within the peasantry, not the peasantry as a bloc. It is the most analytically insistent, and most contrarian, note in the book.
What is missing
The pamphlet’s gaps are as revealing as its arguments, and the largest of them is deliberate.
The subjective factor — the party, the programme, the strategy. The introduction says as much: this pamphlet treats “the objective elements” — Stalinism and the role of the bourgeoisie — and “further pamphlets will deal with the development of the struggle of the industrial working class itself.” So the active half of the theory is missing by design. Mandel’s fifth proposition insists that permanent revolution is not only an explanation but a strategy for victory; Robens gives the explanation and defers the strategy. There is no transitional programme here, no tactics, no worked account of how the Fourth International is actually to be built — only the demonstration that revolution is on the agenda and that the existing leaderships must fail.
The metropolis. For all the economics of the boom and the repeated invocations of May ‘68 and coming European civil wars, there is almost no concrete theory of what permanent revolution means in an advanced imperialist country: the specific democratic and transitional demands, the united front, the relation to the mass social-democratic and communist parties, structural reform versus dual power. The imperialist-country proletariat is named “the main protagonist” of the world revolution — and then handed to a pamphlet that, so far as we know, wasn’t planned at the time. Frank’s and Maitan’s concreteness about the colonial revolution has no obvious counterpart for the West from the IMG.
Concrete conclusions. Where Frank’s Report on the Colonial Revolution tests the theory against China, India, Egypt and Algeria in order to draw political lessons, Robens uses China, Cuba, Bolivia and Bengal chiefly as illustrations of a method. The revolutions confirm that Trotsky’s categories still explain the world; they are rarely made to yield operative strategy. It is a book about how to understand the revolutionary process, not what to do in it.
The newer questions. Women’s liberation, the radicalised youth and “new vanguard,” black revolt and the national question inside the metropolis appear only where the quoted World Congress resolutions happen to mention them; none is theorised. Workers’ control, which the tradition would soon make a central transitional axis, is barely present. And the pamphlet everywhere presents contested positions inside the Trotskyist movement as settled science, rarely signalling that other currents — including other bodies calling themselves Fourth Internationalist — read the same events differently.
Why reissue it
Two things make this pamphlet worth returning to the shelf. First, it is one of the more ambitious attempts of its generation to argue permanent revolution deductively, from Marx’s value theory and the concept of the world economy, rather than to narrate it — an approach closer to the French Marxism of the day than to anything then being written in English. Second, it captures the Mandelian Fourth International at a precise and now-vanished moment: after the “new rise of world revolution” of the late 1960s, confident that a long boom and a settled Stalinism could both be folded back into orthodox categories, and — as it happens — writing on the very hinge of 1973, months before the oil shock ended the boom it so carefully anatomised.
Hindsight sharpens rather than dissolves its interest. The pamphlet’s central wager — that the bureaucracy would never “fade away” but had to be broken by political revolution, and that capitalist restoration would require civil war against the workers’ resistance — was in 1989–91 both vindicated and confounded: the bureaucracies indeed did not reform themselves peacefully out of existence, yet capitalism was restored across most of the bloc without the workers’ civil war the theory said it must cost because of the absolute atomization of the working class by Stalinism. That tension is not a reason to dismiss the argument but a reason to read it — as a rigorous, self-aware statement of a position that history went on to test more severely than its author could have known.
Another important & illuminating posting - many thanks! May I also recommend to readers Michael Löwy's excellent book, 'The Politics of Combined & Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution' (1981), which had a great impact on my thinking when I read it.