TROTSKY AND PERMANENT REVOLUTION
2012
Lev Davidovich Bronstein
(1879-1940), born into a prosperous farming family in the Russia Empire, would become known as Leon Trotsky.
He was bright, curious, and engaging, and soon would be wrestling to understand the nature of the world in which he was born and the place he should hold within it.
The Russian realities that he came to know would become essential to the development of his “theory of permanent revolution� with which he became a central figure in the Russian and world revolutionary movements.
Labor and drudgery were facts of life for a majority of the people.
Yet there was more to life than that – something better for some, perhaps some day for all.
Russia was ruled by an all-powerful monarch – the Tsar.
He had a beautiful family that lived a life of considerable comfort.
This family was part of a thin layer of the population – hereditary landowning nobles – that enjoyed great wealth and power.
Much of the wealth was created by the peasantry – impoverished masses of people who engaged in farming and turned over most of their produce to the powerful upper classes.
The peasants were 80 percent of the population. Their material conditions stood in stark contrast to those of the Tsar and the landowning nobility.
Their labor created the wealth, but a very small percentage of that wealth was turned over to them -- and this was reflected in their quality of life.
Religion, something to give a sense of life’s meaning and to provide solace to those who suffer, was dominated by the Russian Orthodox Church. This was the official religion of the Russian state, fully supported by the Tsarist regime – other religions and other systems of thought were persecuted.
The Tsar was an earthy deity, whom God chose to rule over his people – and who should be strictly obeyed.
Those who chose a form of Christianity grounded in the radical equality consistent with teachings of Jesus, such as the Old Believers pictured here, were made to suffer for their beliefs.
Even greater persecutions were visited upon the Jews. Violent anti-Semitism was encouraged – poor Russians could join with more well-to-do Russians in attacking Jewish communities. These attacks were called “pogroms.”
The Russian Empire was known as “a prison-house of nations” – the Tsarist state sought to enhance its power and wealth in the global order by conquering weaker peoples and at the same time competing with the other great powers.
The Russian Empire required a strong military and some “modernization” – including industrial development – to realize its ambitions as a world power.
The regime fostered the development of industrial capitalism in Russia – with capitalists becoming junior partners in the social order and a growing class of exploited wage-workers adding a dynamic new layer to the mass of oppressed people.
Recruited from the peasant villages, this new working-class experienced urban and industrial capitalist realities that generated a new consciousness – greater literacy, expanding awareness of social and political issues, and also a growing discontent with the existing order, and with their new oppression as wage-workers.
Profound problems and injustices found reflection in the writings of Russia’s greatest Russian writers and intellectuals, which influenced the thinking of many. (Leo Tolstoy , Anton Chekov to left; Fydor Dostoevsky to right)
Even in more comfortable households, many educated and alert young people were becoming alienated with the established order.
In growing numbers, they gathered in secret meetings to discuss ideas, social problems, and possible ways of struggling for political freedom and economic justice. Some began organizing revolutionary groups.
The Tsarist authorities responded with repression.
Some of the revolutionaries sought to inspire and mobilize peasants to rise up by carrying out terrorist attacks on representatives of the repressive regime – including the Tsar. There were executions.
Many dissidents – in growing numbers – were exiled to Siberian prison camps.
For this era, the conditions of the Siberian exile were quite severe, often involving forced labor. While the lives of some were literally destroyed, many revolutionaries endured and became stronger.
Repression could not eliminate the growing perception and deepening feeling that the present system was an abomination, should be resisted, should be overthrown.
A revolution was envisioned that would eliminate all exploitation and oppression, placing control of the society into the hands of masses of laboring people.
While Trotsky was originally drawn to revolutionary populism’s focus on the peasantry, he became involved in a study group in which Alexandra Sokolovskaya introduced him to Marxism, with its emphasis on industrial capitalism and the working class leading the way toward a socialist future.
Alexandra and her pupil became lovers, then married, but ended up under arrest and in Siberian exile.
With Alexandra’s agreement, Trotsky escaped from Siberia and rejoined the revolutionary socialist movement abroad. There he met and fell in love with another revolutionary activist, Natalia Sedova, and they became life-long partners.
Trotsky was initially close to V. I. Lenin in the early Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, but when the party split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, he supported the Mensheviks in their opposition to Lenin’s tighter organizational perspectives. Prominent among the leading Mensheviks The Bolshevik/Menshevik split took place at the 1903 Congress of the RSDLP, its second national gathering – held outside of Russia to avoid arrests.
were Pavel Axelrod, Julius Martov, and Alexander Martynov, pictured here.
Trotsky soon broke politically from the Mensheviks because of their support for a worker-capitalist alliance to overthrow Tsarism. He shared the Bolsheviks’ perspective of a worker-peasant alliance in the democratic revolution.
SOCIALISM
was a goal that united Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Trotsky and others. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were in agreement that there was the need for a democratic revolution that would overthrow Tsarism and allow for the development of capitalism, which would eventually create the economic abundance and a working-class majority necessary for socialism.
Trotsky was to develop a different perspective.
In 1905 a peaceful mass demonstration of workers, led by a priest, carrying a petition to the Tsar asking for political rights and economic justice, was fired upon by the Tsar’s troops, resulting in many men, women and children being killed.
POPULAR RAGE LED TO THE REVOLUTIONARY UPSURGE OF 1905 The upsurge was so powerful that the Tsar temporarily backtracked, offering various reforms and allowing much more political freedom than had ever existed in Tsarist Russia – though definitely stopping short of actual democracy.
As soon as was possible, the Tsar would move to fully reclaim his power. But for a brief interval the radicalized working class was able to assert itself.
Masses of workers demonstrated, organized unions, flooded into the socialist movement, and also set up democratic councils – soviets – to plan their actions and control their communities. The most powerful of these was the Petersburg Soviet.
Trotsky became the chairman of the Petersburg Soviet, distinguishing himself as an eloquent spokesman and an effective organizer. When the Tsarist authorities finally repressed it, Trotsky played a central role in the trial defense. Exiled again to Siberia, he made another daring escape.
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution crystallized as he went through this experience.
The building-blocks for this theory (even the phrase “permanent revolution”) can be found in the writings of Marx, particularly from the tumultuous period of 1848-1850. Yet Trotsky challenged aspects of the “established Marxist wisdom.”
Stages of society An influential interpretation of Marx’s view of history sees a world-historic stairway of different economic systems being the basis for different stages of history – with the insistence that one cannot jump over one stage of history (for example, jump over the full development of capitalism in order to get from the feudal to the socialist/communist stage).
Socialism/Communism Capitalism Feudal societies (including Tsarism) Ancient slave civilizations Primitive tribal communism
This 1830 masterpiece by Delacroix, “Liberty Leading the People,” shows a mostly working-class crowd that includes, however, a top-hatted capitalist. They are united in the revolutionary struggle to overturn the monarchy and vestiges of the old feudal order. This worker-capitalist alliance for a democratic revolution – consistent with the notion of ascending from the feudal to the capitalist steps of History’s grand stairway – defined for many Marxists the necessary path for Russian revolutionaries.
Yet from the 1848 waves of revolution onward, the capitalist class in general has been more frightened of revolutionary workers than of kings and nobles. In the democratic struggles, more often than not, capitalists betrayed democracy and compromised with tyrants. Only workers were prepared to remain true to the democratic revolution.
Drawing theoretical and practical conclusions from history and from his own experience, Trotsky was guided, for the rest of his life, by the theoretical perspective of Permanent Revolution. This contains three major components.
PERMANENT REVOLUTION the transformation of the democratic revolution into a proletarian revolution; the protracted work of economic and cultural transition; and the necessary international spread of the revolution.
1) Democratic revolutions can only be carried out consistently and successfully under the leadership of the organized working class, in alliance with the peasants and other oppressed sectors of the population.
This means that the democratic revolution naturally becomes a workers’ revolution, placing political power in the hands of the working class. Workers will not be inclined to, and should not, turn power over to their capitalist oppressors – so the revolution’s result is a workers’ state.
2) The revolutionary process will not end – there will be an ongoing transformation of political, social, economic, and cultural life.
There will be transformations in consciousness and human relations, an expansion of social improvements, human rights and popular power, all going in the direction of socialism.
At the same time, it would be impossible to complete the transition to socialism within the confines of a country like Russia. Only a minority of the population were educated workers, and a low level of economic productivity could yield only a modest economic surplus – limiting possibilities for socialism and the free development of all. Efforts to create socialism in a single country under such conditions would amount to what Trotsky once called “a skinflint reactionary utopia.”
Naturally, the global capitalist economy – and certainly the various national powers rooted in that economy – would persistently challenge, undermine, assault and seek to destroy any such effort to build a cooperative commonwealth of the workers, the poor, and the oppressed. This would sometimes take military form and always economic form.
3) Only through the spread of working-class revolutions around the world could assure a country like Russia a socialist future – for military but especially for economic reasons.
The labor movements and masses of workers and oppressed in the developed capitalist countries, inspired by the Russian Revolution, would need to mobilize to establish working-class political power and socialist transition in their own countries.
The example and lessons of the Russian Revolution could be helpful in strengthening the struggles of workers and the oppressed in other lands.
The world’s peoples, oppressed by colonialism and other variations of imperialism, would be inspired to struggle for independence and at the same time for a transition to a global socialist economy that would be beneficial to all.
A global movement, a global process of struggle by the working classes of all countries, in alliance with peasants and all of the oppressed, would be required to create – and would be capable of creating – a socialist world.
For a socialist world to be possible, and for socialism to be fully achieved in any country, the chains of capitalism would need to be removed from the global economy.
Revolutionary internationalism was not just a pious wish – it was a necessity if there would be a better future worthy of human potential.
In 1914-1918 a horrendous war of imperialist slaughter devastated the workers, peasants and others throughout Europe. There were revolutionary reactions – especially in Russia, where the Tsar was overthrown in February/March of 1917.
Trotsky, Lenin, and many others living in exile hurried back to Russia. Concluding that Lenin had been right about organization and that there was a dramatic convergence with his own political perspectives, Trotsky joined and became a leading figure among Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Trotsky in Russia, 1917
Trotsky, Lenin, Lev Kamenev
In October/November 1917, the Bolsheviks successfully rallied masses of workers and peasants to the pathway Trotsky had envisioned in the theory of permanent revolution.
A Soviet Republic was declared.
A powerful alliance of imperialist powers and pro-Tsarist forces, plus other internal opponents of the Revolution, mobilized in a brutal onslaught to destroy the Bolshevik (renamed Communist) regime. Trotsky distinguished himself by organizing the Red Army and leading it to victory during the Russian Civil War.
The civil war, foreign interventions, economic embargo, and general social crisis resulted in democratic rule by the soviets being replaced by a Communist dictatorship.
It was anticipated that the spread of socialist revolution to other countries would relieve the pressures on the new Soviet Republic, allowing advances toward socialist democracy. A Communist International (Third International) was created to help revolutionaries throughout the world establish workers’ rule and socialism. Monument to the Third International
Lenin and others at first congress of the
by Vladimir Tatlin
Communist International, 1919
Lenin, Trotsky and others devoted considerable attention, energy and resources to the work of the Communist International, which carried out impressive work at its first four congresses. But the hoped-for revolutions in other lands did not triumph – the Soviet Republic remained isolated in a hostile capitalist world. Lenin at opening session of at second congress of the Communist International, 1920
Trotsky and others at the congress’s closing session
Russia’s Revolution was overwhelmed by calamities --
• assaults from many hostile capitalist powers, • civil war launched by hostile internal forces, • economic devastation due to war & inexperience, • emergency dictatorial measures, • defeated revolutions leading to isolation & despair, • mistakes, brutalization, bureaucracy & corruption among the revolutionaries
-- which blocked democracy & socialism.
It has been argued, even by some co-thinkers and supporters, that the Bolshevik dictatorship seriously compromised the original goals of the revolution. The fact remains that Lenin, Trotsky and many other Bolsheviks (now Communists) were committed to the expansion of workers’ control, and to the triumph of the revolutionary-democratic principles animating the insurgent working-class of 1917.
Lenin’s sustained illness and death (1922-24) facilitated the success of Josef Stalin in securing immense power within the growing party and state bureaucracies. Stalin’s approach (what came to be known as “Stalinism”): >expanded bureaucratic power at the expense of workers’ democracy, >eliminated inner-party democracy, >pushed through a perspective of establishing “socialism in one country”, >engineered a murderously brutal “revolution from above” to modernize Russia (at the expense of many thousands of workers and millions of peasants), >opportunistically corrupted & disoriented Communist parties throughout the world, >established rigid state controls over the culture and intellectual life of society, >established a grotesque personality cult, > repressed and killed many more (real and imagined) opponents than Tsarism had.
Trotsky led the most effective and sustained opposition to the development of Stalinism, what came to be known as the Left Opposition. But it was too little too late. In 1927 he was arrested and sent into internal exile – finally expelled from Soviet Russia in 1929.
The actual norms and ideals of the early Communist movement were defended by Left Oppositionists who organized protests even in Stalin’s prison camps in the late 1920s and afterward. In the late 1930s, with many thousands of other victims of Stalin, they were all killed.
From the start of his 1929 exile until his death in 1940, Trotsky continued to defend revolutionary Marxism and the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution, and to combat the destructiveness of Stalinism.
Trotsky did what he could to explain the world as he saw it, the history that he had helped to make, and the needs for the ongoing struggle of the working class and the oppressed in the face of new realities of the 1930s. He sought to organize a network of revolutionaries throughout the world that became known as the Fourth International.
The members of fairly small Fourth International groupings in a variety of countries sought to live up to the vibrant traditions of revolutionary Marxism.
Above: Laura Gray cartoon. Middle: Diego Rivera mural, U.S. Trotskyists in bottom row. Below left: Chinese Trotskyist leaders. Below right: British Trotskyist meeting .
A critical-minded and supple thinker, Trotsky – guided by the theory of permanent revolution – applied revolutionary perspectives to new realities:
the 1930s capitalist crisis, the rise and struggle against fascism, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, the approach of the Second World War, and more .
Much of Trotsky’s family – including two sons from his marriage with Natalia, and two daughters from his earlier marriage, plus his first wife Alexandra – were destroyed either directly or indirectly due to the intensifying violence of Stalinism. Trotsky and Natalia were able to save and begin to raise a grandchild – Vsevolod (Seva) Volkov, who later became known as Esteban Volkow.
Anti-Trotsky propaganda poster in the USSR during the Stalinist purges.
The place of exile for Trotsky and Natalia shifted from Turkey to France to Norway and, at last, to Mexico.
Artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo helped persuade Mexican President Lazaro Cárdenas to provide Trotsky political asylum.
Portrait by Rivera
Lazaro Cárdenas, revolutionary nationalist President of Mexico
Kahlo, André Breton, Reba Hansen, Natalia, Rivera, Trotsky Portrait by Kahlo
In the Transitional Programme for socialist revolution, which Trotsky developed in consultation with comrades in the Fourth International, it was argued (echoing Rosa Luxemburg) that humanity is at a crossroads of “socialism or barbarism.�
The barbarism of fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, “democratic� imperialism, and global war engulfed the world – bringing to life, on a far greater scale, the dark visions presented by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya in the early 19th century.
Trotsky was drawn, in his final years, to the dark violence and dynamic grotesques portrayed in the work of José Clemente Orozco – which captured certain horrific aspects of twentieth-century reality that eluded Rivera’s more heroic frescoes.
Orozco self-portrait
Trotsky distinguished himself in clearly seeing the grim realities while refusing to abandon the struggle for a better world – giving all that he was and all that he had to that struggle.
Trotsky was the foremost revolutionary critic (and therefore a primary target) of Stalinism. His criticisms intensified as the dictator initiated a massive and murderous assault on real, potential, and imagined opponents on Stalin’s Left. Stalin personally oversaw the monitoring of his exiled opponent, and in 1937 he ordered Trotsky’s assassination – a “special task” that was finally accomplished in 1940.
The banner reads: “Workers of the World Unite in the Fourth International.” Regardless of organizational affiliation, many can find remarkable insights and challenges in examining the life and ideas of this uncompromising revolutionary. Detail from Diego Rivera’s mural “Man at the Crossroads.”
”My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth. “Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. “Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full.” -- from Trotsky’s last testament, 1940