This week’s episode is brought to you by Audible. Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment all in one place. At Audible, you can find the largest selection of audio books, ranging from bestsellers to new releases, to celebrity memoirs, to books about languages and business and motivation, and original entertainment from top celebrity, creators and thousands and thousands of popular podcasts. As an Audible member, you will get one credit every month, good for any title in their entire premium selection, which means the latest best sellers, the buzziest new releases, the hottest celebrity memoirs, or some title on your bucket list that you’ve been meaning to pick up. And those titles will be yours to keep forever in your Audible library.

This week, I am going to recommend a book that I’m a little late to, since I’ve been busy with other things, but I finally cracked The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper and holy smokes. It’s great. It is a wonderful new addition to the 501 reasons why the Roman empire collapsed and it is by far the best and most comprehensive explanation for climatic, biological and geologic factors. It is not obtuse geographic determinism, uh, it simply lays out clearly how the natural setting of the Roman empire was an active player, not just a passive setting for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it’s just, it’s really great. I’m loving it.

So, to start your membership, visit audible.com/revolutions or text revolutions to 500 500. That again, visit audible.com/revolutions. Or text revolutions to 500, 500.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.46: the Permanent Revolution

Last time, we talked all about the arguments and differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. But one of the things they all agreed on was the two-stage revolutionary process necessary to move the medieval tsarist empire to a future socialist republic. They also agreed that what we now call the Revolution of 1905 was that first bourgeois democratic stage. They simply disagreed about whether this stage required the social democrats to support and follow the liberal bourgeoisie, or whether in the Russian case, it could be accomplished by a coalition of workers and peasants acting as much against those liberals as against the tsar.

Today, however, we are going to talk about the novel theory proposed by Leon Trotsky, which incorporated, expanded, and at times contradicted these ideas, and which subsequently entered the lexicon as the theory of permanent revolution.

Now, just to catch up with Trotsky, since we haven’t really talked about him since, before I went on hiatus, remember that when the Revolution of 1905 broke out, he was one of the few émigré intellectuals to race back home. He then ran around doing clandestine work and wound up one of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet by the end of the year. He celebrated the October Manifesto, and was then dramatically arrested in December, 1905 when the first wave of reaction came, Trotsky got tossed in prison and remained in limbo for just under a year before being sentenced to exile in Siberia at the end of 1906.

But, as these things go in Siberia, his actual confinement was very loose. He faked an illness and then bribed an alcoholic coachman to take him west. After weeks on the road, he passed through St. Petersburg on his way to Finland before anyone even knew he was gone. After reconnecting with Martov and Lenin in Finland — separately, mind you, because they were enemies, even though they were also at this point, practically neighbors — he went on to London with everybody else for the Fifth Party Congress. In London, Trotsky tried to stay detached from the Bolshevik-Menshevik factionalism — he himself was ideologically disposed towards the Bolsheviks, but was personally more connected to the Mensheviks –, but Trotsky could never simply be a peacemaker, and more often than not, he felt into the scrum is a wild card more than he elevated himself up to play the role of conciliator.

In the midst of debating all the agenda items at the congress in London, in the spring of 1907, Trotsky was at one point afforded about fifteen minutes, where he briefly outlined an idea he had been tinkering with since at least 1904, but which he fully flushed out while he was in prison in 1906. It was a rethinking of potential strategies, tactics, and goals for the party based on what he considered to be a more precise analysis of Russian historical development and the current state of the global economic and political system.

Now, this was a brief address, it was only about fifteen minutes and it had little impact on the immediate proceedings. But in time it came to loom very large, and so I want to take this opportunity to explain it all in full.

First, let’s talk about the origin of the phrase, permanent revolution. So far as I can tell, Karl Marx first used the phrase in 1844 in his book, the Holy Family, but he was using it in the concept of Napoleon’s hijacking of the French Revolution, and transforming it from permanent revolution into permanent war, and how they needed to go back to permanent revolution. But he then returned to the phrase in 1848 and again in 1850, in the context of how German workers should respond to the Revolution of 1848. Assuming that that revolution would usher in a period of bourgeois liberal rule, Marx told the workers to maintain their own independent organizations with their own leaders and their own goals. The ascendant liberal bourgeoisie would surely try to co-op the working classes, using phrases and languages of reform to coax the workers into dissolving their own groups, merging into the liberal parties and becoming merely an electorate, providing votes to liberal politicians. In this context, Marx talked about the program of permanent revolution and making the revolution permanent by maintaining their own parties and structures and goals to keep pushing the liberals through this stage to policies that tended to grow the political power of the workers and undermine the political power of the liberals, rather than the other way round. In this way, they would hasten the advent of the second socialist revolution.

But though we see this phrase ‘permanent revolution’ bandied about in the mid-19th century, this is not really the way Trotsky will be using it in the early 20th century. And to get to Trotsky’s conception, we need to briefly detour through an émigré living in Berlin, who was a leading Russian Marxist intellectual at the time, and who will eventually play one enormously pivotal role in the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917 whenever we finally get there. His birth name was Israel Lazarevich Gelfand, but in his political life, he was known by several different pseudonyms, most generally, and by me here today, as Alexander Parvus.

Parvus was a Lithuanian Jew born in 1867 and the son of a family of artisans. In the mid 1880s, he went off to university in Switzerland where he encountered socialism and Marxism for the first time. He graduated with a doctorate in political economy in 1891, but had his degree flagged and formally diminished by the university administration, who were displeased that he deployed Marxist analysis in his dissertation. After graduating, Parvus did not return to Russia, but instead settled in Berlin, where he became active in the left wing of the German social democratic party, and became good friends, allies, and collaborators with people like Rosa Luxemburg and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Evolving into an erudite, cultured, and occasionally brilliant writer, Parvus was a respected Russian socialist, both among his fellow Russians and among European socialists generally. After Iskra started, Parvus became a regular contributor, with his columns invariably featured on the front page. His reputation then skyrocketed in 1904, when at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war, Parvus predicted both defeat for Russia and resulting domestic upheavals, at a moment when everyone, conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike, assumed Russia would trounce the Japanese and emerge stronger than ever. When all of his predictions came true, Parvus suddenly enjoyed the reputation of being a brilliant prophet.

Now, during the summer of 1904, as the first inkling that all his predictions were about to come true filtered back from the far east, Parvus opened his doors to Trotsky. In the wake of the original Bolshevik-Menshevik split, trotsky found himself homeless, both politically and also literally, and he moved in with Parvus in Berlin. Living together for the next several months, they conversed and debated and collaborated with each other. Trotsky left this period taking with him a few ideas imprinted upon him by Parvus that he later developed in his own creative and idiosyncratic way. One was the firm belief that European capitalism had successfully advanced to becoming a truly international force above and beyond national boundaries. Marx may have said that the struggle for socialist revolution would first be national and then international, but that was fifty long years ago, and the capitalist bourgeoisie had long since broken out of their national borders. The fight now, today, would be international, whether they liked it or not.

Parvus also seems to have given Trotsky the basic conception of what the tsarist apparatus actually was. Its nature, its origin and its purpose. Parvus argued the tsarist empire was different from western monarchies, which grew organically as expressions of the feudal estates. In Russia, the tsarist regime developed principally to resist encroachments from their more economically and technologically advanced neighbors like Sweden and Poland and Lithuania. It was thus a military bureaucracy that combined ancient Asiatic despotism with modern western armies, which as we will see in a moment becomes meaningful to Trotsky’s analysis of the nature of revolution in Russia.

Both of these notions Trotsky carried with him going forward, as both he and Parvus departed for Russia when the revolution of 1905 got going. Tossed in prison by the end of the year, Trotsky had lots of time to think more, read more, and start putting new ideas down on paper, specifically in a pamphlet he wrote in prison called Results and Prospects.

But before we get to Results and Prospects, we need to talk about one of the other big concepts that undergirds the theory of permanent revolution. And that is the theory of uneven and combined development. This is a very important concept about which entire books can and have been written, and which I will now try to sum up in like two paragraphs.

Basically the theory of uneven and combined development says that with the spread of European imperialist capitalism across the globe, a process that was clearly complete by the dawn of the 20th century, from China to Africa, to South America, it was impossible to ever again, consider national regional, or even local economic and social development in isolation. Now using quotes around the terminology employed by Trotsky and historical materialists, the spread of colonialist capitalism meant that the development of so-called primitive, or backward, or pre-modern societies would never progress along their own natural and organic paths. The encounter with technologically advanced capitalism simply precluded it.

Now what the lingo ‘uneven and combined’ means, is that societies on the periphery of the European capitalist empire, those colonized parts, now contained a bizarre mix of the very old and the very new, the very primitive, and the very advanced. You had rivers with both rafts and steamboats. Transportation networks that saw railroads chugging alongside donkeys. The latest in futuristic technology existing alongside the oldest traditional ways of life. And usually the way this played out is that specific geographic pockets of those societies would become very technologically advanced, because of the arrival of colonial capitalism was mostly about resource and raw material extraction. So areas with mines, oil fields, timber forests, or places where you could mechanize cash crop farming, would all become rapidly modernized and industrialized, while  maybe just a few miles away, people were still living just as their ancestors had lived for thousands of years. But as the specific sectors and geographic areas saw their advancement accelerated fantastically, the encounter with European capitalism would also hinder and disrupt the natural growth of other sectors as the European capitalists look to dump their manufactured goods on colonial consumers, basically pouring acid all over various nascent sectors of the local economy before they had a chance to blossom.

This also meant that in many ways, the whole course of modernization in any society that encountered such European colonial capitalism could be compressed, because all the technological components and social modes of behavior already existed. They just needed to be adopted, rather than slowly developed over time.

So now we can return specifically to Russia, because Trotsky absolutely considered Russia to be one of these colonized areas on the periphery of western European capitalism that was undergoing uneven and combined development. They were simultaneously primitive and advanced. And indeed because the Witte program of the 1890s was importing the very latest in technological advances, in steel working, in mining, and railroad construction, those parts of the Russian economy were actually among the most advanced in the whole world, because they were ordering the latest and the best out of the Western catalog. This, even as their agricultural sector was amongst the most backward on the planet. Uneven and combined development.

Trotsky believed this state of affairs meant Russia could plot a different and more direct course through the democratic revolution to the socialist revolution, which he outlined in a pamphlet he wrote in prison in 1906 called, as I said, Results and Prospects. This pamphlet was not published until much later, but it clearly spells out Trotsky’s ideas at the time, ideas that would play a huge role in the Bolshevik approach to the revolution of 1917, and so we’re going to spend the rest of today’s episode just kind of working our way, through it.

In the first sections, Trotsky lays out how the actual course of Russian history meant that the theoretical course of historical materialism could not, and would not, play out the way it had in the west. In the first chapter, Trotsky expanded on Parvus’s ideas about the history of the tsarist apparatus, that its existentially threatening encounters with Sweden and Poland and Lithuania starting in the 1500s forced the tsars to adapt, to protect their territory. The tsarist state then started gobbling up nearly all the surplus produce of its empire to feed and fund their large armies. This not only turned the Russian state into a centralized military dictatorship, it also short-circuited the development of any potential Russian bourgeoisie, because excess wealth did not accumulate in private hands, it all went to service the state and the army.

Trotsky continues this theme in the second chapter on the development of Russian cities and towns. Rather than being early centers of trade and industry and commerce like in the west, russian towns were little more than administrative outposts, either serving a military function, or as a home base for tax collection. They produced almost nothing and were neither economically creative nor producers of independent wealth. This Trotsky contrasted with western examples, where the towns created both the large bourgeoisie, the great merchants and the bankers, but also the petty bourgeoisie, the shopkeepers and artisans and small time traders, who would eventually, at least in France, fill out the energetic ranks of the sans-culottes. This just didn’t happen in Russia. And that meant that when modern capitalist development finally did take place in Russia, it was not an outgrowth of, and funded by, those commercial towns of the medieval period, it was actually financed by foreign capital. Bourgeois democratic revolution is premised on the existence of an energetic, wealthy, and ambitious bourgeoisie ready to burst out of the fetters of feudal constraint. But that class simply did not exist in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. But, Trotsky said, a class that did exist in Russian towns at the beginning of 20th century thanks to uneven and combined development was a disproportionately large class of proletarian workers. So observing the historical development of Russian towns and cities led Trotsky to the conclusion that there was now at the beginning of the 20th century, at least, a unique imbalance between the strength of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And this is key to Trotsky’s whole program.

Trotsky then proceeded to a discussion of the three big revolutionary debates that must be understood: 1789, 1848 and 1905. Trotsky in that in 1789, the very strong French bourgeoisie became the leaders of an entire national struggle against the Ancien regime. They guided this struggle, and they gave everyone national slogans and direction and purpose. 1789 is essentially the model bourgeois democratic revolution that everybody looked to.

But then when it came time for central Europe to be hit by the bourgeois democratic revolution in 1848, Trotsky found the liberal bourgeoisie wanting to be leaders of the national revolution, I mean, most of them were literally classified as liberal nationalists, but they were not strong enough or decisive enough to accomplish this task on their own. With the specter of the French Revolution hanging over everyone’s head, they both needed the urban proletariat workers, and the petty bourgeoisie tradesmen, and the peasants to make their struggle successful, but these liberal bourgeoisie so deeply feared the forces they were unleashing, that at the decisive hour they retreated from revolution rather than pursue it. In essence, Trotsky said, they feared autocracy less than the people, and so their revolution failed.

Then finally the Russian revolution of 1905 mostly followed the German trajectory, rather than the French trajectory, but even more so, because the Russian bourgeoisie was even weaker and more dependent than the Germans had been in 1848. Now true, the Union of Liberation linked businessman and professionals and workers in a cross class alliance that culminated with the general strike of October 1905, but then the bourgeoisie went into full retreat, and refused to pursue one of the most basic democratic boardwalk demands: the arming of the national guard. As we have seen many, many times over the course of the Revolutions podcast, national guards are supposed to be the shock troops for a liberal bourgeois revolutionary action against absolutism, but the Russian bourgeoisie, too few in number knew that this meant they would have to arm workers and peasants, and this they did not want to do, again, fearing the people more than they feared the tsar.

After this historical survey, Trotsky concluded that the specific nature of Russian economic, social, and political development meant that ironically enough, the late developing and relatively small Russian proletariat wielded potentially decisive weight inside the system. He scoffed at those who said the rise of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were always and inevitably synchronous. That if the Russian bourgeoisie was weak, it meant axiomatically the Russian proletariat must be weak. But as Trotsky believed he had shown, the strength of the Russian proletariat was actually untethered from the strength of the bourgeoisie, especially because most industrialization in Russia was state directed and financed by foreign banks. So the previous fifteen odd years of economic development, what we know as the Witte boom, had seen an explosion in the size and strength of the industrial workers, even as the bourgeoisie remained small and weak.

Trotsky also argued that the nature of the Russian economy at that moment, meant even though they were relatively few in numbers and still dwarfed by the rural peasantry, the Russian proletarian workers wielded potential power that far outpaced the power of the larger and quote unquote more advanced working classes of Britain and France and the United States. Their western cousins had to contend with incredibly powerful bourgeois elements who were able to push back against them. The Russian proletariat did not have to contend with any such power at all. And on top of that, even though they remained a quantitative minority, their qualitative strength was enormous. Uneven and combined development meant that with some segments of the economy very, very industrialized, the industrial workers in those segments could, if they wanted to, affect the entire operation of the Russian empire. What, after all had sparked the general strike of October, 1905? A few thousand railroad workers, who brought the entire empire grinding to a halt.

So the proletariat’s position that close to the actual gears of the Russian economy gave them enormous disproportionate power to bring absolutism crashing down. And in the absence of a bourgeoisie or a peasantry capable of carrying out the democratic revolution, they must be left to the proletariat. And then, they would simply accomplish the tasks that were always assumed to be the work of the bourgeoisie. Politically, that meant democracy, civil rights, national self-determination, and in the Russian sense, an end to tsarist absolutism. Economically, it would mean an end of medieval property relations, land reform and redistribution, and the further acceleration of industrial development to create the economic and material basis for future socialism. In Russia, the bourgeoisie could not do this, and so Trotsky said, the proletariat would have to do it.

When he takes his next step though, Trotsky starts drifting way outside of what anybody considered Marxist orthodoxy. Because what he was proposing is that the proletariat sees power directly from the tsar, and form the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But remember Marx’s concept is that this would happen only after a majority of the population had been proletarianized, and converted from rural peasants, into urban wage workers. The workers quote, unquote seizing power to create a quote unquote dictatorship was simply describing a process whereby the majority of the population would assume power over itself. That infamously misunderstood phrase dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to simply mean rule of the many, rather than rule of the few. But Trotsky is here actually proposing a small minority of well-positioned and politically conscious workers taking the lead in seizing power over the state right now, here today, not waiting until they formed a majority.

But at least in the beginning, Trotsky did not anticipate trouble, because he figured the vast majority of the population, that is the peasants, would undoubtedly support the new revolutionary proletarian government, because that government would be the entity advancing and guaranteeing what the peasants wanted most out of the revolution: the destruction of medieval property relations and the redistribution of rural land. This could and would be done by the workers on behalf of the peasants, and thus the peasants would look to the workers rather than the bourgeoisie as their liberators. Once this stage had been accomplished, the Russian proletariat seizing power directly from the tsar, we get to the permanent revolution part of the theory of permanent revolution. Having accomplished the tasks of the democratic revolution, the proletariat must not give up power. They must not hand things over to the liberal bourgeois parties and retreat, and wait until conditions were ripe for socialism. Trotsky thought that that would be an insane blunder, especially in the Russian context, where most of the capitalist and industrial development was already being directed by state forces anyway. Instead, the workers must stay in power and use that state power to advance Russia towards socialism. Instead of two discrete stages of revolution, one led by the bourgeoisie, the second led by the proletariat, Trotsky is instead proposing the proletariat make one sustained push through the creation of democracy to the further economic development of Russia, and then straight onto socialism without ever giving up power. It would be one permanent revolution.

Trotsky was not insensible to the difficulties that might obstruct this one sustained push, and in fact, addressing those difficulties was the core part of the other major component that made the permanent revolution permanent. And that was that it could never stop at the borders of Russia, it must absolutely be carried out to the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world. Trotsky saw zero chances for success of any Russian revolution, democratic or socialist, if it did not trigger socialist revolution in the west, and then get cover and support from those new socialist governments. Trotsky saw major reactionary dangers from both conservative forces that would seek to restore the tsar, but also from the peasantry, once the proletarian government moved from the democratic tasks on to the socialist tasks. Trotsky took it as an essential point that land must be collectivized, and its productive power concentrated to create the material basis of socialism and actually make Russian agriculture productive enough to feed everybody.

But this process would almost certainly lead to a breach with the peasantry. Now Trotsky advised taking things slow and piecemeal: first only collectivize large noble estates, and leave communal land and individual small pieces of property alone. He said it would be a huge blunder, in fact, if they did everything all at once, because it would just make the peasants immediately counterrevolutionary, rather than saving all that for later. But they were probably going to wind up fighting against the proletarian government one way or the other.

So Trotsky concluded Results and Prospects by taking a stab at predicting the likely course of events once the proletariat sees power in Russia and found themselves facing these two great threats. In front of them, the full force of the reactionary powers of Europe, trying to restore those are, and behind them, angry peasants, potentially furious about plans to nationalize and collectivize the land. Trotsky thought that though this put the proletariat government in an incredibly precarious position, it would only be temporary, because Trotsky was also convinced the revolution in Russia would be the first domino of European socialist revolution. It would be the signal, the starting gun, whatever metaphor you want to use. And he actually laid out exactly how he thought it was going to go: it would start with that great lynch-pin of European history, Poland. Once the tsar and his armies had been removed from the picture, you could pretty much guarantee a revolution in Poland would follow quickly. But this meant that the Germans and the Austrians would be unable to tolerate such a revolution in neighboring Poland, and they would surely march their armies to the border. This would have two effects: first, the very idea of German and Austrian armies marching east would induce the Russian armies, now commanded by a proletarian government to march west, not to conquer Poland, but to defend it. But the second effect was even more important, because once this conflict got going, socialists and workers in Germany and Austria would recognize the golden opportunity to rise up and seize power once their militaries were occupied off on the Polish frontier. So rather than enlisting and fighting their proletarian cousins in Poland and Russia, they would instead go into insurrection and overthrow their own government.

Meanwhile, the bourgeois government of the French third Republic would already be in a massive crisis, because of the Russian proletariat, having seized power in St. Petersburg would of course repudiate all the debt that Russia owed to French banks, which would crash the French economy and open up space for the French socialists and workers to seize power. So by this very simple act of the proletariat knocking over the tsar, would create an inevitably predictable sequence of events that would lead to socialist governments controlling all of western and social Europe, and then being able to return, and offer aid and support to the Russian comrades as they continued the permanent revolution onto socialism, QED.

This obviously is not how it went. Nor was it even close to how it went. Because though it appeared on paper to be an obvious straight line, Trotsky was sketching all this out in 1906 and 1907 on the assumption. An assumptions shared by all his fellow Marxists who were busy arguing strategy and tactics and alliances in May 1907, that the revolution in Russia was still very much an ongoing concern. They were shocked and horrified to discover that just a few weeks after departing London, Prime Minister Stolypin successfully launched his coup against the Second Duma, rewrote the Russian Constitution, and the Russian people hardly made a peep of protest.

So instead of striding back into Russia to become the vanguard of European socialist revolution, they all had to scatter back into their lives as émigrés. Lenin and Krupskaya wound up in Switzerland for the next decade; Martov went off to Paris and even though he was broke refused to leave; Trotsky wound up bouncing around here and there, still carrying his notion of permanent revolution in his head, and believing its two main components were still true: that the proletariat in Russia could and should seize power directly from the tsar, and then carry out one sustained permanent revolution that then must link with a wider international revolution, or be doomed to failure.

Obviously though, a lot is going to happen over the next several years to upend a lot of socialist theory, ideology, predictions, and prognostications. But Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is going to adapt, and its resiliency will carry all the way through to the Revolution of 1917, when the Marxists would get the band back together, and try again.