Introduction
Cuba: the nexus, by Gery Lawless
The politics of the anti-Trotskyist coalition, by Sean Matgamna
See also:
Ernest Mandel on Cuba, referred to by Lawless
More on permanent revolution, and yet more
More on the Irish Workers' Group and related debates
Introduction
The articles reprinted here, from a dispute in the Irish Workers’ Group (IWG) in 1967-8, are important for seeing how the term “permanent revolution” has been used in certain ways to rationalise a world-view on the radical left, and how the political trend represented today by Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty dug our way out of those misuses.
The IWG was a regroupment to the left of the Communist Party, small and short-lived, but including many activists who figured in the 1968-9 political explosion in Northern Ireland. The original nucleus of our political trend were in the IWG, and the dispute was largely between them and the central IWG leadership. There, the chief figure was Gery Lawless (1936-2012).
He appears in his article here as proposing arguments of the “USFI”, the mainstream of “orthodox Trotskyism” then led by Ernest Mandel (cited here with his pen-name Germain). In fact Lawless led a motley coalition. Dispute on Cuba might rally people because the Cuban regime then had a much more revolutionary aura than today, and was enthusiastically supported by almost all the anti-Stalinist left as well as by Stalinists.
What was “permanent revolution”? In 1904-5 Leon Trotsky developed the idea that the working class - rather than capitalistic liberals or even radical middle-class democrats - could lead the overthrow of Tsarism in Russia. The workers could win the support of the peasantry - too scattered and economically stunted to become the leading force in its own right - and take power. That victory could spread to workers’ victories in the more economically advanced countries, and with their help Russia could move towards socialism with no bourgeois “stage” intervening.
The Russian working class, though a minority in the country, was strong in modern factories in the big cities; the Russian bourgeoisie was disproportionately weak, tied to the landowners and to foreign capital; the urban middle class was also disproportionately weak.
Trotsky called this perspective “permanent revolution”, drawing the phrase from Marx. The Bolsheviks made it reality in October 1917. Or, at least, the initial steps of it. The working-class risings in Europe which followed October 1917 were defeated, and so Russia’s workers’ government could not build socialism, but instead was ousted by Stalin’s bureaucratic counter-revolution.
In the decades that followed, “permanent revolution” perspectives, extended to other countries with fresh workers’ movement, weak bourgeoisies, and rebellious but scattered peasantries under landlord, colonial, or autocratic rule, became one of the chief ideas of “Trotskyism”. The Stalinists counterposed a “stages” strategy: in less-developed (and even in quite developed) countries, the workers should first aim for a bourgeois “democratic stage”, or “advanced democracy”; only at the next “stage” would direct socialist politics become operational.
Lawless indicted our people, Sean Matgamna in particular, as sectarian hyper-critics of Cuba and (therefore, he claimed) “revising the theory of permanent revolution”. How? The argument worked via a scheme rather than from investigation of the realities of Cuba.
Trotsky had said that such measures as land reform, national independence (and, wrote Lawless, with Ireland in his mind, national unity) would not be won by the weak bourgeoisie in colonial and similar countries. Anything that went so far as to win them must be the socialist working-class revolution, in some form. Cuba had done land reform and defied the USA. Therefore it must be a victorious workers’ state.
The conclusion for other countries (and it would be developed for Ireland too) was that sufficiently hot nationalist struggle against the big powers would become socialist struggle.
Our 1967-8 reply did not feel confident to reject the terminology (“deformed workers’ state”) which we had inherited from our “orthodox Trotskyist” tradition. It did, however, insist on realities.
Admit that in some (technical?) sense China could be called a “deformed workers’ state”? But you must then also register “an elite caste in full control”, “oppression of the working class”, and “monstrous terror”. A “monstrosity”. The working class had played no role, “none at all”, in installing it.
The Cuban regime then had great popular support, was less repressive than China’s, had a lighter bureaucracy. But it had “originated apart from the working class”, it was a “form of Bonapartism” (the state standing above society), and “gross Stalinist degeneration” was likely.
The spirit of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” indicated identification with Cuba’s workers, and with those workers ready to fight for workers’ rule, not with the regime. To interpret permanent revolution as a scheme requiring Marxists to accept regimes like Cuba’s as a full victory of socialist revolution would mean “foreshortening it by a head” and making it into “a reactionary theory”.
Martin Thomas
Cuba: the nexus
By Gery Lawless
Elsewhere in this document I noted that Comrade Matgamna had avoided mentioning Cuba, and I asked him where he stood on this question,
I did this, not because I wish to score debating points, but because I believe that a lot of important things flow from the political stand that we take on Cuba. This is not my full statement on Cuba. I hope that before the next (recalled?) AGM at which all the points can be thrashed out, I will make a further contribution to the discussion on Cuba.
With the entry of the Red Army into Europe and the victory of the Chinese Revolution, the World Trotskyist movement was thrown into ideological turmoil, and we had the “second birth” of the state capitalist theory.
For our generation the victory of the Cuban Revolution seems destined to do the same. The reason for that is that Trotskyists believed that the building of the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution, replacing the degenerate Communist movement, was an essential prerequisite of the victory of world revolution and the establishment of Workers’ Republics. But, although the Fourth International continues to be built, nowhere, for certain objective and subjective reasons, have we constructed a mass party. Yet major social transformations have taken place. Despite the fact the Trotsky himself recognised this possibility, the establishment of China, Cuba and Eastern Europe has split the Trotskyist movement. Four main tendencies developed:
(i) The International Socialist Group, who surmounted the problem by defining the states in question as “State Capitalist”.
(ii). The group around M. Pablo who, without ever spelling it out, decided that there was no need for a Fourth International.
(iii) The SLL, who recognised the need for the Bolshevik-Trotskyist Party, but nevertheless think Cuba is a petit—bourgeois, bonapartist state, that since the revolution was not led by a Bolshevik Party it could not have established a Workers’ State,
(iv) The vast majority of Trotskyists, who remembered that Trotsky had foreseen the possibility, and, not being blinkered theoreticians, recognised. that. China, Eastern Europe and Cuba were Workers’ States, albeit deformed: and from this recognised that “the weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has opened up the possibility of coming to power with a blunted instrument”, while still insisting that these are exceptions, and we base our perspective on the rule, not the exceptions.
Therefore we still recognise the need to build the revolutionary party.
Comrade Matgamna has said that his only difference with Healy’s SLL on Cuba is that, logically, Healy should extend this line to China. From this flows Sean Matgamna’s semi-state-capitalist line, and his opposition to the Fourth International.
The state-capitalist/workers’ state controversy has been gone over many times before. I do not need to go through it all again. But this attitude to Cuba, even if Comrade Matgamna remains formally a workers’ statist, means that he has revised another basic Trotskyist position — the theory of the Permanent Revolution.
The Marxist analysis of the relationship of the bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions in the modern world was first suggested to Marx by the German revolution of 1848, and then in this century was fully developed by Trotsky.
This analysis is called “the theory of the Permanent Revolution”. (See editorial Irish Militant, December. 1966; Shane Mage, An Solas No.11). Basic to this theory was the belief that the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie existed in embryo, even in the Cromwellian revolution; and played a significant: part in the Great French Revolution. But this factor is, in modern times, so much more important that, for the bourgeoisie in the backward or semi-colonial countries, the basic political emotion is fear of the working class.
Moreover, economically, the bourgeoisie of a backward country is most intimately linked to the old land-owning class and the colonial power. For these reasons the bourgeoisie and its parties are incapable of carrying through the tasks of the bourgeois—democratic revolution. Basically these tasks are agrarian reform, national unity and national independence. Not only has the Cuban revolution carried out these tasks (with the exception of the Guantanamo base), but it has carried out many tasks of the socialist revolution.
The conclusion, therefore, is inescapable. Either one estimates Cuba as a workers’ state and estimates its state power as the dictatorship of the proletariat (even if it is somewhat distorted); or one takes the position that, the bourgeois-democratic revolution in a backward country can be carried out, by class forces other than the proletariat. To maintain the latter is to revise the theory of Permanent Revolutions
I bring this out because, as I said before, I do not believe that it is accidental that Comrade Matgamna, in his wide and detailed document, missed out on Cuba altogether. It is not that he has no position on Cuba; I know he has. It is an honest position, although in my opinion, a wrong one. What is dishonest is that he should keep silent on it for fear of antagonising some people he hopes to win to his side. (On the question of Cuba, ultra-leftism and party building etc., I would like to refer comrades to Ernest Germain’s excellent Marxism v Ultra-Leftism ).
• Despite the promise of a “further contribution”, this is all I have, or anybody I know, has of Lawless on the issue. If anybody has more, send it and we will reunite it with the rest of Lawless. I suspect there is not a lot more. He deliberately repeated Mandel. His politics were an attempt to justify the Russian action in shooting down east Berlin workers in 1953; ours were siding with the workers and against the Russians, as emphatically as we could within the “orthodox Trotskyist” degenerated workers’ state formula — SM.
The politics of the anti-Trotskyist coalition
By Sean Matgamna
“As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away!”
On p.12 of Internal Bulletin 4, Prosecutor Lawless points an accusing finger: “I notice, reading over Comrade Matgamna’s articles, and those of his letters to me which I still have, that nowhere does he take a firm stand on Cuba. Where do you stand on Cuba, Comrade Matgamna? Why, in a polemic that ranged so widely, are you completely silent about Cuba?”
And on p22: “... I do not believe that it is accidental that Comrade Matgamna, in his wide and detailed document” (Trotskyism or Chameleonism) “missed out on Cuba altogether....” And why, Comrade Matgamna, did you evade the issue of Burma? And of the class character of the CP of Outer Mongolia? Why, in a document dealing with the internal structure of a Trotskyist Party, and the concrete reality, history and problems of the Irish Workers’ Group, are you so evasively silent on these and other vital questions? What are you hiding?
A Trotskyist Faction circular in early January has already in anticipation answered the question on its merits. But Lawless, in his two pages of “gleanings” from Germain on Cuba, exists in his own right, and we will find his ideas here relevant to the other issues in dispute. His intention was to use some of the processed arguments against Healy of the USFI, against us. But he has in fact done more than he thinks.
His two pages on Cuba contain enough confusion to drown Lawless and give his allies a good wetting too, Taken together with his section on the revolutionary party, presumably his answer to Trotskyism or Chameleonism, we get the most demonstrative proof of the deep political confusion of Lawless. His document is nothing less than a detailed political self-portrait. Let us examine it.
On p21, summarising the experience of the Cuban Revolution, Lawless spells out! his own full position. He thinks that though “Trotskyists believed (sic!) that the building of the Fourth International as the World Party of the Socialist Revolution, replacing the degenerate communist movement was (sic) an essential prerequisite of the victory of world revolution...”, “major social transformations have taken place...” with “the establishment (?) of China, Cuba and Eastern Europe.” Which has “split the ‘Trotskyist movement.” Amidst all the confusion, ani the varied positions, the good guys, supported by Gery Lawless, reached a number of conclusions which he understands as follows:
“... not being blinkered theoreticians, (the USFI) recognised that China, Eastern Europe and Cuba were Workers’ States, albeit deformed: and from this recognised that ‘the weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has opened up the possibility of coming to power with a blunted instrument’, while still insisting that these are exceptions, and we base our perspective on the rule, not the exceptions.” Throughout these two articles the Stalinist bureaucracy is mentioned once, without issue, and the ‘albeit deformed’ is added as an afterthought, also without issue.
Lawless thinks that we don’t need revolutionary parties in the deformed workers’ states - a blunted instrument was enough. And is the process at an end? He doesn’t say... he implies it is, that the establishment of deformed workers’ states is a victory (without qualification? He doesn’t qualify it) for the world revolution. As “exception” (rather frequent exception!) the blunted instrument can substitute for the Trotskyist Party. And is that all? The blunted instrument leads to power... and that’s the end of the chapter. Presumably. Lawless repeats it often enough.
Thirties
Trotskyists in the thirties and afterwards held to the elementary Marxist view that the working class could only take power consciously (even if, having taken it, they could lose it, giving rise to the transitory regime of a bonapartist workers’ state). The instrument of the drive towards power could only be a Party of the kind Lenin built - a Trotskyist Party. Bitter experience of the treachery and ineptitude of Stalinism and Social Democracy reinforced this. But the Trotskyists were a small minority, and Stalinism, the most dangerous enemy, was buttressed by the Soviet state. It reinforced and perpetuated the conditions which had bred it by securing a succession of defeats which held back the proletariat.
After World War 2, the Stalinists sold out the revolution in western Europe, France and Italy particularly. But in East Europe and China (where, despite all Mao’s efforts to form a coalition with Chiang Kai-shek, that stupid reactionary insisting on attacking and gave Mao the choice of victory or death), in peculiar conditions, under the pressure of imperialism and in face of the weakness of local capitalism, the Stalinists took the state power and began “major social transformations”. What emerged at the end of these transformations were deformed workers’ states analogous to Russia - bureaucratised, with an elite caste in full control, material privileges, sometimes vast, for the parasitic bureaucracy side by side with economic and political oppression of the working class - all maintained on the basis of a monstrous terror, since somewhat modified. These were nearer to the Orwellian nightmare than to any sort of socialism.
Yet because of the elimination of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, and a serious overturning in the economy, they were no longer bourgeois states. Going beyond capitalism, they did not and have not yet reached the stage of direct workers’ power. The world economic and social pressures itemised by Trotsky as the basis of the theory of Permanent Revolution unfolded in a somewhat different pattern, with the bureaucratic caste substituting for the working class in the initial stages: the reason for this was the defeats of the workers’ movement brought on by Stalinism, the influence of the Stalinist bureaucratic ideology and practice, the terrible backwardness and poverty of the countries involved - and above all because of the lag in the proletarian revolution in the advanced countries, which would have qualitatively transformed the situation of backwardness and isolation.
Instead of a healthy development of the Permanent Revolution, with the working class as the leader and organiser, leading up to the classic style of the October Revolution, we get a twisted and deformed development leading to the formation, partly under the influence of the existing Russian motel, of grossly deformed workers’ states. If the Russian revolution degenerated in isolation, the new workers’ states never reach the stage of direct workers’ power but are warped during birth.
Trotskyists extended and adopted the analysis of Russia to interpret these states as deformed workers’ states. This designation by the Trotskyist movement was adopted, not as some in the Lawless faction think, because they were somehow socialist. They were understood to be transitional regimes. Analyses such as state capitalism were rejected because of the impossibility of squaring the new realities of these states with modifications of the old categories such as state capitalism. And also, because to accept such analysis would mean a total change of historic perspective by the world Trotskyist movement, basing its strategic orientation on the conception that this is the imperialist era of wars and revolutions, the highest and last stage of capitalism. If the deformed workers’ states are state capitalist, this would demand a total reappraisal right dow the line, recognition that we were living in an era of vastly expanding capitalism (the Shachtmanite theory of bureaucratic collectivism had even worse implications, including the exploding of the whole Marxist appreciation of the necessary logic of historic development.) Recognising that only events could close the unended chapter which saw the birth of deformed workers’ states, they opted for the most optimistic variant.
The Trotskyist movement, while rejecting the blanket repudiation of the social transformation in the deformed workers’ states, which was typical of those who adopted state capitalism in that period (and who took this even to the point of being “neutral” on Korea) did not stop at saying “the weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has opened up the possibility of coming to power with a blunted instrument.” It said that these are partial steps in the proletarian revolution, half-way stepping stations which will have to be completed and supplemented by a future workers’ revolution to achieve direct power by the working class and eliminate the privileges and control of the ruling bureaucrats. The Trotskyists insisted that the political revolution necessary in these states likewise demands the preparation of proletarian combat parties to lead them. Hungary, where the spontaneous rising of the workers was smashed is today generally taken as the most, concrete proof of the truth in that position.
Stress
Without this stress on the monstrous incompleteness, the extension of the degenerated/ deformed idea would have meant the collapse of Trotskyism at the feet of the Stalinist bureaucracy. (And this is the logic of the position Lawless expresses in his document),. Those Trotskyist groups which neglected this aspect (and there has been a wave of such groups ever since, coming at each turning point) soon stopped being Trotskyist. Those who neglect it today are on the way to formally abandoning Trotskyism.
The superiority of the orthodox Trotskyist position was in avoiding both the Stalinist identification of the revolution with its bureaucratic deformities, losing sight of the workers, and the similar fault of the state capitalists and others who lost sight of the actual gains of the social transformation, The Trotskyists supported these gains critically. They supported absolutely the workers’ revolution that was and is ripening against the bureaucracy, and declared that in any clash between the workers and the bureaucracy in the deformed workers’ states, revolutionaries must be with the workers - unconditionally. Logically they understood that revolutionary working class parties had to be built within the Stalinist states to lead the political revolution.
It is a fact that, beginning with the Tito-Stalin break, the Trotskyist movement, formally adhering to this position (for the most part) has seen sections of itself interpreting the deformed workers’ state theory in such a way as to blur the perspective of the political revolution. Such groups have inevitably become satellites of the actual ruling forces within these states. Many of these groups reason rather in the manner of Lawless in IB4 - the revolution has been made, not only without us (“For Comrade Matgamna’s sake I will spell it out - these revolutions were not lead by Trotskyist Parties”) but even without the working class. These become disorientated and fall to fellow-travelling with the bureaucracy, usually at first with one national grouping or other, maintaining the orthodox Trotskyist position for the others. Pabloism is the name given to this internalisation within the Trotskyist movement of what is properly called Deutscherism, expressive of a whole trend and a variety of intermediate positions. In 1953 the Fourth International split on this issue.
The Cuban Revolution, a similar development in many ways to the Chinese but without the horrors, occurred from ‘59 on. How to appreciate this new development naturally presented difficulties to the Trotskyist movement, The SLL and others, reacting against Pabloite-type capitulation to bureaucracy, but stupidly over-reacting, took up the most illogical position imaginable on Cuba, which essentially, considering their view that China is a workers’ state, amounted to saying that only the Stalinists could create a deformed workers’ state. The old ISFI and the SWP correctly classified Cuba as a workers’ state: as an inversion of the SLL, though, they have taken a consistent position of being virtually uncritical of the Cuban leadership. Some of them sometimes even appear to think it is a healthy workers’ state - which is nonsense. However encouraging the Cuban revolution compared with the Stalinist horrors of the past, it is still bonapartist and proletarian “democracy” is at a primitive, plebiscitary level at best.
The Cuban regime is an extremely popular form of Bonapartism originating apart from the working class, retaining a separate identity and not subject to direct popular democratic control. Given this sort of regime, the possibility, and in certain conditions the inevitability, of gross Stalinist degeneration exists. Amidst other indication, Trotskyists - albeit strange Trotskyists - have been jailed in Cuba for their politics. And the recent affair of the “micro-faction” of Escalante is hardly suggestive of a model socialist democracy (whatever we think of Escalante).
Without direct soviet-type democracy the Cuban revolution remains incomplete. Nor can there be a vacuum for much longer - and all the recent signs point to a rapid hardening of the hitherto rudimentary bureaucracy. The establishment of soviet democracy would be a political revolution, though it is still hard to estimate the degree of resistance the regime will put up against a workers’ drive for a Leninist regime in the country. However unique has been the Cuban revolution so far in its low level of bureaucracy, there was never any guarantee against its growth and hardening. The only guarantee can be direct workers’ power. Any “Castroite” illusions, though perhaps for a while less unattractive than, say, Maoist ones, can only be suicidal in the long run.
Therefore simply to say without qualification, without elaborating on the need for a political revolution, that a blunted instrument is enough (i.e. bureaucratised party, Russian army, or peasant armies) in backward countries, is to break with Trotskyism. Its only logic is capitulation to one or another of the ruling bureaucracies. Lawless in fact openly draws the most extreme “Pabloite” conclusions, and if these aren’t his conclusions, why did he start his section by saying that a party wasn’t always necessary, and why does he continually stress the “blunt instrument”? A blunt instrument will not suffice to gain the victory for the world social revolution, to consolidate healthy proletarian regimes within those states where capitalism has in fact been overthrown. As to why Lawless insists on this blunted instrument, even to the extent (as we shall see) of reckless misquotation, and exactly what he has in mind, we will see in Part II.
On p22 Lawless does some more spelling for us, again using Germain’s book as primer. With the bravery only possible to the stupid, Lawless accuses mo, because of my alleged “state cap” line on Cuba, of revising the theory of the Permanent Revolution. We will have to see who revises what.
Guns
Children playing with guns are bound to hurt themselves. When Lawless, whose understanding of the proletarian revolution allows him to be satisfied with the deformed Stalinist monstrosities, raises the question of the permanent revolution, he is playing with dynamite. Of course he just lifts Germain’s point that in view of what has actually happened in Cuba the Healyite contention that it is still a bourgeois state means that their appreciation of the progressive role of the bourgeoisie is very high indeed, and makes nonsense of the conception basic to the permanent revolution theory, that they are hopelessly feeble. Naturally Lawless adds his own gibberish, but frankly I haven’t time or space to take it all up, But if we take his points, together with his blanket use of the “quotation” about blunted instruments, and his following exposition of the permanent revolution, the only one whose conception of the permanent revolution is called into question is Gery Lawless.
Trotsky understood the conception of the permanent revolution as a process nationally and internationally of world revolution that could last decades. According to the Trotskyist conception, the deformed workers’ state is a transitional stage in the unfolding of this process in the backward countries. A deformed workers’ state means precisely that it is not completed, the workers have not taken direct power in the sense of the permanent revolution, and bureaucratic forces have substituted for the activity of the working class in the early stages. There is an interregnum. The deformed workers’ states, including Cuba, are still in the process of Permanent Revolution, a process which will end only with the establishment of proletarian democracy.
If, like the Healyites, one insists that essentially nothing has changed, then this does put some strains on the permanent revolution theory. If, on the other hand, like Lawless in his document one makes no mention of and no provision for the completion of the process in the deformed workers’ states (either in Cuba or elsewhere), if one says or implies that the permanent revolution has been “confirmed”, one is also “revising” the permanent revolution, and in the most deadly way possible. The permanent revolution is a perspective of working class action; its real protagonist on a world scale, and whatever forces dominate at the initial stages, is the proletariat; its conclusion is full democratic world-wide workers’ power.
This is Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution. If, through a process of permanent revolution “power has been taken” without qualification or mention of political revolution, in the Stalinist countries, then one is foreshortening it by a head. One winds up in the absurd position that the permanent revolution has been confirmed in countries like China, yet still the working class is oppressed by a parasitic bureaucracy and a question mark or denial is placed over the future workers’ political revolution. Who is revising the Permanent Revolution?
If continued belief in the permanent revolution demands recognition of its completion in even some of the deformed workers’ states, this cuts off the perspective of the workers’ political revolution, the revolutionary proletarian element of the deformed workers’ states theory. This in turn would make the Permanent Revolution a reactionary theory, and continued adherence to its letter would mean a breach with everything Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International to fight for.
The Trotskyist Faction and Workers’ Fight are Trotskyist. We are hard-line defenders of what we understand as Bolshevism - and even if we sometimes in the middle of the night feel awareness of the incongruity, we can still see no other alternative open to us. We are Trotskyists because we are convinced that Trotskyism is necessary for the self-emancipating revolution of the proletariat. It is the best theoretical preparation for it. Lawless, on the other hand, in his “adherence” to a parody of the Permanent Revolution, seems unaware that his version amounts to a reliance on and identification with other forces, and leads to the anti-Trotskyist conclusion that the permanent revolution can be confirmed while a bureaucracy lives on the backs of the suppressed working class.
The absence of any mention of the orthodox Trotskyist conception of the future of the deformed and degenerated workers’ states, and in relation to the Permanent Revolution, shows Lawless’s “conception” of the Permanent Revolution as not Trotskyist in any sense: he saves his belief in the Permanent Revolution by ignoring the working class completely. The working class played a marginal role in Cuba, none at all in China - in fact they immediately felt the repression of the peasant Red Army. Yet Lawless presents this as the Permanent Revolution. This is all the more a crime because of the people in the Lawless faction who understand the workers’ state designation in an entirely Stalinist fashion; and also those whose preconceived revulsion from the Permanent Revolution theory will be reinforced by the conception of it put forward by Lawless.
If this is Trotskyism, if adherence to either the deformed workers’ states theory or the permanent revolution means we stop with the statement which Lawless stops with, that “power can be taken with a blunted instrument” - without even asking who takes direct power - then we must repudiate Trotskyism in the name of the future proletarian revolution in these countries. Defending the Permanent Revolution against the “secret state caps”, Lawless succeeds only in making a very powerful “case” for rejection of the Permanent Revolution by all revolutionary socialists,
Fortunately it is Lawless’s conception of both the permanent revolution and degenerated workers’ state theories that is wrong. For orthodox Trotskyists the permanent revolution is still a continuing process, the degenerated workers’ state an intermediary stage; Bolshevik Trotskyist parties within these countries remain absolutely necessary, no less so that in the capitalist countries, to prepare for the taking of direct power by the working class.
Stalinist
If we take the ideas in IB4 seriously we must conclude that Lawless is not just a Pabloite, or a Deutscherite - but a straight Stalinist! At best a critical Stalinist. He equates, without qualification, the deformed monstrosities such as China and East Europe with the unfolding of a world revolution, removing the need for Leninist parties; and he sees, merely in passing, the deformities and bureaucracy as just blemishes.
Thus he shows that he understands neither the proletarian revolution, nor the permanent revolution, nor, since it is the instrument of the working class in these, the conception of the Party. Midas couldn’t avoid turning everything he touched into gold: at the opposite point Gery Lawless cannot avoid turning every political question he touches into a complete and utter caricature. Naturally he must be a caricature “Pabloite” as well.
Throughout the above discussion I have taken without comment the quotation about blunted instruments which Lawless present as a passage from Cannon’sInternational Socialist Review Sept ‘67 article. Lawless seized on my bringing in of Cannon as an easily accessible arbiter in the dispute about what kind of party we need, to try to make Cannon into a general infallible prophet on every question. I of course would not be willing to accept this, and if Cannon took the position that Gery Lawless takes I would attack him for it. Insofar as Cannon’s article seems ambiguous towards those in the Trotskyist movement who have a too uncritical attitude to Cuba, I would disagree.
This said, it remains a fact that the passage from Cannon on which Lawless hinges his almost Stalinist line (that a blunted instrument has already led to the victory of the revolution in places like China) is a blatant misquotation, The “passage” from Cannon is in fact a quotation by Cannon from the Reunification Congress documents. As I read the article, Cannon quoted this in order to discuss its inadequacies.
“In its resolution adopted at the 1963 Reunification Congress... the Fourth International has taken into account this variant of political developments as follows: ‘The weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has opened the possibility of coming to power with a blunted instrument’.
“However, this factual observation joes not dispose of the entire question or even touch its most important aspects. The deformations of the regimes emanating from the revolutionary movements headed by the Stalinised parties, and the opportunism and sectarianism exhibited by their leaderships since assuming power, notably in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and China, demonstrate that the need for organising genuine Marxist parties is not ended with the overthrow of capitalist domination. The building of such political formations can become equally urgent as the result of the bureaucratic degeneration and deformation of post-capitalist states in an environment where imperialism remains predominant and backwardness prevails” - International Socialist Review, p.29, September-October 1967
