11
INTRODUCTION
“Trotsky is the one for whom there is no room either in pre-1990 Really Existing Socialism or in post-1990 Really Existing Capitalism, in which even those who are nostalgic for Communism do not know what to do with Trotsky’s permanent revolution.”1 Slavoj Žižek wrote these words at the beginning of the millennium and, in this case, he expresses a sentiment with which readers of International Socialism are likely to agree. The question of “what to do” with the concept of permanent revolution is one that this journal first addressed in a systematic way with the publication of Tony Cliff’s major reappraisal of 1963, in which he augmented Trotsky’s original concept with that of “deflected permanent revolution.”2 Cliff’s article was part of a wider revisionist project. In the two years before his assassination in 1940, Trotsky made a number of claims about the world system and committed himself to a series of predictions about its future development. These included: that global capitalism had entered a period of permanent and irreversible decline, that the Russian Stalinist regime was an inherently unstable and historically unique formation that was doomed to collapse, and that the coming revolutions in the colonial and semicolonial world would be led by the working class, as the Russian Revolution had been in 1917. In fact, following the Second World War, capitalism entered the greatest period of growth in its history; Stalinist Russia expanded territorially through conquest, and its basic structures were independently replicated by Stalinist parties in the Third World; and—as this outcome suggests—the revolutions that occurred there were led not by the working class but by elements of the middle class, who then became the managers of a new bureaucratic state. Given these outcomes, some revision of Trotsky’s final perspectives was inescapable, but short of abandoning them altogether, this could be done in one of two ways.
One way, ultimately adopted by adherents of what Isaac Deutscher called Orthodox Trotskyism, was effectively to revise reality so that it corresponded with the theory—a necessary consequence of treating particular judgments by Trotsky as beyond falsification. In Alasdair MacIntyre’s words, “It transformed into abstract dogma what Trotsky thought in concrete terms at one moment in his life and canonized this.”3 Canonization involved two strategies of reality avoidance. The first was the recategorization of social classes: a party led by petty-bourgeois intellectuals and consisting of militarized ex-peasants could, for example, be described as representing “the Chinese working class” and its victory in 1949 hailed as a socialist revolution. But even those Trotskyists who treated Marxist class theory with greater seriousness than this could still avert their gaze from the truth with a second strategy, namely the adoption of an arbitrary formal definition of a “workers’ state,” where state ownership of the means of production became the only deciding factor, although the working class had neither led nor even participated in the revolution, did not in any sense control the new state, and was subjected to a ruthless police dictatorship.
The second way, taken by Cliff and his initially small band of followers, was to revise the theory in the light of reality. Cliff held fast not to specific judgments by Trotsky but to the central tenets and methods of historical materialism that underpinned the latter’s greatest achievements. Above all, Cliff cleaved to the self-activity of the working class, not as an optional if desirable extra, but as the indispensable core of Marxism as a theory of socialist revolution. In his autobiography, Cliff recounted how, starting from this perspective, he “devoted a lot of time and effort to developing three interlinked theories to deal with the three areas of the world” where Trotsky’s predictions had proved false, “Russia and Eastern Europe, advanced capitalist countries, and the Third World”: “The three theories were: state capitalism, the permanent arms economy, and deflected permanent revolution.” This “troika,” Cliff writes, “make a unity, a totality, grasping the changes in the situation of humanity after the Second World War.”4
Cliff was therefore responding to changes in the world capitalist system that Orthodox Trotskyism refused to recognize; but there have been similarly dramatic shifts since Cliff concluded his reconsideration of the Trotskyist legacy. State capitalism still exists as a policy option for governments, as the quasi- nationalization of banks during the financial crisis of 2007–08 has shown, but the era of state capitalism as a general tendency within the system ended between the emergence of neoliberalism in the mid-1970s and the fall of the Stalinist regimes in 1989–91. Vast sums are still wasted (in economic as well as moral terms) on arms, but military expenditure no longer acts to stabilize the system.5 What then of the third component of “the troika”? Has deflected permanent revolution also become an essentially historical category?
In International Socialism 126, Leo Zeilig argued that deflected permanent revolution remains relevant today, despite the declining significance of the other component of the troika most closely related to it: “While the central role of the intelligentsia in the absence of a self-conscious working class subject is an absolute law in Cliff’s theory, the importance of state capitalism for the deflected permanent revolution is neither absolute nor a requirement.”6 Zeilig applies the concept to Africa, a continent that, with the partial exception of Egypt, Cliff himself did not discuss, but the individual countries Zeilig considers do fall into one of Cliff’s categories, that of “deviations from the norm” of deflected permanent revolution.7 The “norm” was established by those revolutions that had resulted in the most complete state-capitalist outcomes under Stalinist leadership independently of Russia, particularly those in China and Cuba, although at the time when Cliff was writing in the early 1960s he could also have referred to North Vietnam, Albania, or Yugoslavia. The “deviations” were those—actually the majority of cases—where the outcome was a mixture of state and private capitalism under radical nationalist leadership that may have been influenced by Stalinist ideas and organizational methods, but that often—as in the cases of Egypt or Iraq—oscillated between trying to incorporate the local Communist Party and trying to suppress it. With the very important exception of India, the most typical examples of the “deviations” were to be found in North Africa and the Middle East. Zeilig’s use of the concept is illuminating in relation to those African states in which liberation movements were either completed (Ghana) or at least begun (Zimbabwe) within the postwar period of decolonization that formed the context of Cliff’s argument; but is it also the case that the theory can be applied to contemporary Africa and, by extension, the rest of the global South?
I remain unconvinced. Not because I disagree with, for example, Zeilig’s analysis of the recent events in the Democratic Republic of Congo—quite the contrary—but rather because these seem to me to have little to do with permanent revolution, deflected or otherwise. Trotsky saw permanent revolution as a strategy that would enable the less developed countries to decisively break with feudal, tributary, or colonial rule under working-class leadership and move directly to socialism as components of an international revolutionary movement. Cliff saw deflected permanent revolution as the process that ensues when the working class does not carry through that strategy and another social force takes on the role of leadership, enabling the break with precapitalist modes of production or foreign domination to take place, but only in order for the countries in question to become parts of the capitalist world system. Although Cliff did not use the term, he effectively treated deflected permanent revolution as the modern version or functional equivalent of the bourgeois revolution.8 Both the original and the revised concept therefore involved fundamental social transformations leading to either socialism (permanent revolution) or state capitalism (deflected permanent revolution).
Yet the term now tends to be used, as in Zeilig’s article, to mean political events of far less significance. That this can be done without undue conceptual stretching suggests, at the very least, that there was always an ambiguity in Cliff’s revision of Trotsky, which I think has two sources. One, which Cliff directly inherited from Trotsky, is the presence of an outstanding set of bourgeois revolutionary “tasks” that can be carried out by either the working class (permanent revolution) or by the middle class “intelligentsia” (deflected permanent revolution). Much of the continued validity of both concepts therefore depends on how these tasks are defined and whether they are still outstanding. The other is the absence of any discussion of the relationship between permanent revolution and the prior process of uneven and combined development, which was central to Trotsky’s original conception. Nor did Cliff deal with the subject in later writings. Despite describing uneven and combined development as “the essence of the permanent revolution” in the first volume of his biography of Trotsky, the discussion is confined to a mere five pages across that work as a whole, all relating solely to Russia.9 Yet, as we shall see, reintegrating the law of uneven and combined development with the strategy of permanent revolution will help answer many of the unresolved questions raised by its “deflection.”
FROM BOURGEOIS TO PERMANENT REVOLUTION
Trotsky was not alone in arguing that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the bourgeoisie was no longer capable of carrying out the revolution that bore its name.10 Where he went far beyond his fellow revolutionaries was in claiming that the Russian Revolution could lead not only to the overthrow of absolutism, the establishment of representative government, and the capitalist development of the productive forces, but to socialism itself. This was conditional, however, on the Russian Revolution being assisted by the revolutionary movement in the advanced West, whose own success could provide the material resources for socialist development that Russia lacked as an individual state. Trotsky was later to generalize this conception of permanent revolution, describing it as “the general trend of revolutionary development in all backward countries.”11 He also made what seemed at the time to be minor qualifications in relation to the two main social classes, but these contained possibilities, the realization of which formed the background to Cliff’s article.
On the one hand, Trotsky thought that even where foreign dominance was “concealed by the fiction of State independence,” the ruling bourgeoisie was capable of resisting imperialism, at least up to a certain point.12 This tended to be the case in countries that had never been formal colonies, or that ceased to be such during the era of classic bourgeois revolutions. The most obvious examples were the first and last destinations of his final exile: Turkey and Mexico. In this context he described the period of the 1930s as generally being one “in which the national bourgeoisie searches for a bit more independence from the foreign imperialists” and in which revolutionaries were “in permanent competition with the national bourgeoisie as the one leadership which is capable of assuring the victory of the masses in the fight against the foreign imperialists.” As the notion of “competition” suggests, although the organizations of the national bourgeoisie were in some senses “the Popular Front in the form of a party,” they played a different role from the entirely reactionary Popular Fronts in Europe and North America: “It can have a reactionary character insofar as it is directed against the worker; it can have an aggressive attitude insofar as it is directed against imperialism.”13 Trotsky had written off the possibility of decolonization without permanent revolution, seeing the relative freedom of states like Turkey or Mexico as exceptional; but what were the implications of states with a similar relationship to the world system (i.e., backward capitalism) multiplying, as they did from 1947 onward with the creation of India and Pakistan?
On the other hand, Trotsky was also aware that the level of capitalist economic development, “the hierarchy of backwardness,” varied enormously across what we now call the global South.14 As a result, the size of the working class and its ability to influence events was also subject to massive differentiation. Trotsky was the opposite of a utopian voluntarist, and he accepted that a certain degree of social weight was necessary on the part of a working class before it could aspire to taking power; what was possible in India and China would not necessarily be possible in equatorial Africa or Afghanistan. It was always necessary to establish working-class organizational and political independence, but “the relative weight of the individual and transitional demands in the proletariat’s struggle, their mutual ties and their order of presentation, is determined by the peculiarities and specific conditions of each backward country and—to a considerable extent—by the degree of its backwardness.”15 However, even in those countries where the working class was much smaller than the Russian in relative terms, the global nature of the socialist project would enable them to overcome this obstacle.
SOCIAL OR POLITICAL REVOLUTION?
What then were the “tasks” that Trotsky thought had to be accomplished in the process of passing from the bourgeois to the proletarian revolution? In Cliff’s summary, the bourgeoisie is “incapable of carrying out the thoroughgoing destruction of feudalism, the achievement of real national independence and political democracy,” which he treats as the main tasks of the bourgeois revolution: “A consistent solution to the agrarian question, of the national question, a break-up of the social and imperial fetters preventing speedy economic advance, will necessitate moving beyond the bounds of bourgeois private property.”16 A more orthodox Trotskyist, Michael Löwy, similarly concluded from a study of Trotsky’s works that what he calls the “democratic tasks” of the bourgeois revolution are “the agrarian democratic revolution,” “national liberation,” and “democracy.”17These are potentially very demanding criteria indeed, many of which remain unmet throughout the entire global South and indeed beyond today. In some places Trotsky seemed to realize that this was a problem. He was reluctant to describe the Japanese Meiji Restoration of 1868, for example, as a bourgeois revolution, referring to it instead as “a bureaucratic attempt to buy off such a revolution,” while at the same time acknowledging that the Meiji regime had accomplished in a matter of decades what it had taken Russia three hundred years to achieve.18 But if the notion of “tasks” were taken seriously in the case of Japan, then this would mean that the bourgeois revolution was only consummated when agrarian reform and representative democracy were imposed by the US occupiers between 1945 and 1955. Unfortunately this introduces further problems, since the American Revolution itself was presumably unfinished until the black population achieved full and formal civil rights with the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Amendment Act, the 1967 judgment in the case of Loving v. Virginia allowing “mixed” marriages, and so on.
The question of democracy is particularly important here, since with the partial exception of France, even the classic bourgeois revolutions did not lead to the installation of representative democracy. In fact, if we take bourgeois democracy to involve, at a minimum, a representative government elected by the adult population, where votes have equal weight and can be cast without intimidation by the state, then it is a relatively recent development in the history of capitalism. Far from being intrinsic to bourgeois society, representative democracy has largely been introduced by pressure from the working class, often involving the threat of revolution, and extended by pressure from the oppressed.19 To insist that countries in the global South are only completely capitalist when they have achieved stable representative democracy, apart from committing a category mistake (capitalism=economy; democracy=polity), is to expect a more complete outcome there than was achieved in the countries of the developed world. There are still important unresolved democratic issues in many countries, but they have nothing to do with the accomplishment or consolidation of capitalism.
This is what Cliff seems to have been implying in an important article from 1950 where he wrote of German unification “from above” during the 1860s: “The ‘Bismarckian’ path was not the exception for the bourgeoisie, but the rule; the exception was the French revolution.”20 The general conclusion was drawn by Alex Callinicos in a 1982 review article of Löwy’s book for International Socialism, when he noted the problem of making “an identification of bourgeois-democratic revolution with merely one of its cases,” which is of course the French, “and making its specific features . . . necessary components of any ‘genuine’ bourgeois revolution”: “Surely it is more sensible, rather than invoke the metaphysical concept of a ‘complete and genuine solution’ [to the tasks of the bourgeois revolution], to judge a bourgeois revolution by the degree to which it succeeds in establishing an autonomous centre of capital accumulation, even if it fails to democratize the political order, or to eliminate feudal social relations.”21 I agree with these conclusions; but they have certain implications for the theory of deflected permanent revolution that we have not considered. “Deflection” originally involved shifting from proletarian to bourgeois revolutionary objectives, but what can it mean if the real task of the bourgeois revolution has largely been accomplished on a global scale? In any case, “establishing an autonomous centre of capital accumulation” is scarcely an outcome that the working class can be expected to accomplish in the absence of the bourgeoisie!
The root of the problem is illustrated by the two main cases that Cliff discusses: China and Cuba. From the evidence of Cliff’s autobiography, China seems to have been the main model for deflected permanent revolution; indeed he describes the 1963 article as being a “distillation” of his earlier book Mao’s China (1957), with additional material on Cuba, which, at that time, was the most recent addition to the roster of state-capitalist regimes.22 Before 1949 China stood historically before the completion of the bourgeois revolution: there was effectively no central state, the agrarian sector still contained tributary and feudal relations, and it was subject to oppression by several competing imperialist powers. Cuba by 1959, on the other hand, was a bourgeois state—a very weak one, of course, overawed by the US state and penetrated by organized crime, but it seems to be an abuse of language to say that it was in any sense precapitalist, nor was the working class striving for power in the 1950s in the way that the Chinese working class had in the 1920s. In order to understand the difference between these two revolutions, we need to establish an important distinction first made by Marx in 1840s and later adopted by Trotsky: that between social and political revolutions.23
Political revolutions sometimes have social aspects and social revolutions always have political implications, but the terms nevertheless indicate an essential difference. Political revolutions are struggles within society for control of the existing state, but they leave the social and economic structure intact. These revolutions have been relatively frequent in history, from the Roman civil wars, which led to the abandonment of republican rule for the principate in 27 BCE, to the Eastern European revolutions of 1989–91, which swept away the Stalinist regimes and began what Chris Harman called the “sideways” movement from Eastern state capitalism to an approximation of the Western trans-state model.24 They may involve more or less popular participation, may result in more or less improvement in the condition of the majority, but ultimately the class that was in control of the means of production at the beginning will remain so at the end (although individuals and political organizations may have been replaced on the way). The class that was exploited within the productive process at the beginning will also remain so at the end (although concessions may have been made to secure its acquiescence or participation). Social revolutions, however, are not merely struggles within existing society but result in the transformation of one type of society into another and, as such, are extremely rare—so rare that we only know of two, and one of these has not yet succeeded: the bourgeois revolution and the socialist revolution.
The relation between these two types of revolution is complex. Some revolutions that, taken by themselves, appear to be merely political revolutions are in fact part of a more extended social revolution. In relation to the bourgeois revolution, the English Revolution of 1688 has this relationship to the Revolution of 1640; similar cases could be made for the French Revolution of 1830 in relation to that of 1789 or, reversing the chronological order of importance, the American Revolution of 1776 in relation to the Civil War of 1861–65. More importantly in the context of this discussion, some revolutions end up as political revolutions because they are failed social revolutions. In relation to the socialist revolution, this is clearly the case with the German Revolution of 1918.25A similar case could also be made for the Portuguese Revolution of 1974—and indeed most of the so-called democratic revolutions to have taken place since, above all, that of Iran in 1978–79.
China experienced a social revolution in 1949: it could have been the socialist revolution, if the movements of the mid-twenties had succeeded, but ended up instead as the functional equivalent of the bourgeois revolution instead—a lesser but still decisive systemic shift. Cuba only experienced a political revolution, which did not fundamentally change the nature of the economic system and represented—using Harman’s term, but reversing the direction of movement—a sideways shift from a highly corrupt market-capitalist economy to one on the state-capitalist model. This would have been more obvious if US paranoia about encroaching “Communism” had not effectively forced the new Cuban regime to ally with Russia and adopt state-capitalist forms of organization—which was certainly not Castro’s original intention. There were, in other words, two different types of revolution encompassed by the term “deflected permanent revolution” from the very beginning. As capital increasingly sweeps away even the remnants of previous modes of production and the social formations that included them, the pattern of revolutions has increasingly tended toward the “political” rather than the “social” type: the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe; the subsequent displays of “people power” in the Philippines, Thailand, and Serbia; and the “color revolutions” in the former republics of the USSR. Capitalism endlessly reproduces differences in power and autonomy—the “unevenness” that I discuss below. Except in a handful of cases (Afghanistan, Nepal, Tibet) the unstable but structured inequality that results is not an unresolved issue from an earlier period, not a remnant of feudalism or colonialism, but a result of the normal operation of competitive accumulation expressed at the level of the states system.
At least one leading thinker in the International Socialist (IS) tradition did argue that none of the cases of deflected permanent revolution involved social revolutions, although without using the latter term. Discussing the same examples as Cliff in an article forInternational Socialism written during the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, Harman noted:
In none of these cases was there a shift from one mode of production to another. In each case those who had control of the exiting state apparatus used it to reorganize industry, reducing internal competition to a minimum to accumulate in the face of external pressures. That does not mean that there was never any opposition to such a move—“police” actions of various sorts were often taken against old, “private” capitalist interests who resisted the changes. But these were possible without any mobilization of the mass of the population for full blooded social revolution, indeed in some cases without any mobilization of the mass of the population at all.26
This perhaps goes too far, not only in respect of the Chinese Revolution of 1949 but a minority of the revolutions that followed it. Before the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974, for example, feudal social relations were still dominant and the state was the nearest to the European absolutist model of any remaining in the world.27 Nevertheless, Harman’s central point about the nonsocial nature of the revolution is correct; but it does raise the question of whether retaining the term “deflected permanent revolution” has any benefits other than providing the consolations of familiarity. It is possible, of course, to explicitly detach it from the “tasks” of the bourgeois revolution, real or imagined, and instead relate it to the possibility of working-class leadership in accomplishing democratic tasks (as in Thailand) or to anti-imperialist struggle (as in Iraq) on the road to socialism—and this is more or less how the term tends to be used; but this has the danger of obscuring what is at stake.
Political revolutions, changes of regime by nonconstitutional methods, are a fact of life in the global South and likely to remain so, but these can take place without involving any independent working-class intervention. If one Russian-backed gang of scoundrels replaces another US-supported collection of villains (or vice versa) in, say, Kyrgyzstan, and some working-class people take part in accompanying demonstrations, this is not an example of deflected permanent revolution. There are of course very important recent examples where the working class has irrupted into what would otherwise been an internal ruling-class dispute, thus opening up the possibility of social(ist) revolution, and again Iran in 1978–79 is the key example; but their failure to seize power meant that the revolutions remained at the political level. Again, this is not an example of deflected permanent revolution: Iran was a capitalist state, the working class was defeated, and one wing of the bourgeoisie emerged triumphant over another on the basis of a different strategy for accumulation. This struggle between two alternatives (social revolution based on the working class versus political revolution that involves the ascendancy of a different section of the bourgeoisie and is organized by political Islamists) still obtains in Iran and also in Egypt, the two areas of the Middle East where new upheavals are most clearly being prepared. As we shall see in due course, they are not alone. Before turning to the question of what is generating these potentially revolutionary situations, however, we need to address the nature of the class (or class fraction) that Cliff argued had replaced the working class, allowing the process of “deflection” to take place.
THE INCAPACITIES OF THE BOURGEOISIE
Cliff identified the “revolutionary intelligentsia” as a substitute for the revolutionary bourgeoisie in the global South. No summary can substitute for actually reading his exemplary analysis of this group, but the main characteristics that he ascribed to it are important to note here. As nonspecialists, members of the intelligentsia can offer to represent the “nation” against other, merely sectoral groups. The backwardness of their nation offends them, not simply as a matter of civic pride but because in material terms it means they are unable to find work—at least, work in the state apparatus at a level appropriate to their education. As the traditional aspects of their society are increasingly destabilized by the irruption of capitalist development, they find it hard to maintain its values, looking instead to those of efficiency, modernization, and industrialization, all of which are apparently embodied in the USSR. They claim to love “the people” but simultaneously feel guilty at their relative privilege and distrustful of those less educated or intelligent than themselves. Above all, they are hostile to democracy and strive to exclude the masses from their strategies of transformation, except in a subordinate or supportive role, which is why their preferred method is one of military struggle on a guerrilla or even conventional basis.28 Harman subsequently extended the argument in an important article on political Islam. Although Cliff’s category was originally used with reference to “Stalinism, Maoism and Castroism,” Harman now claimed that it was equally applicable to “the Islamist intelligentsia around Khomeini in Iran,” who “undertook a revolutionary reorganisation of ownership and control of capital within Iran while leaving capitalist relations of production intact.”29
The brilliance of this collective portrait is not in doubt, but was the class fraction it describes really a new development in the history of capitalism? The classical Marxist tradition was more skeptical than is generally thought about the extent to which the bourgeoisie had been at the forefront of revolutionary struggle, even in 1640 or 1789.30 Trotsky tended to regard the petty bourgeoisie as the driving force behind successful bourgeois revolutions up to and including the French.31 He also recognized, however, that other social groups had also played this role, including feudal landlords in Prussia during the 1860s and—potentially at least—the working class in the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s. He did not, of course, claim that the bourgeoisie had never played a revolutionary role: simply that this was not a necessary condition for a revolution to qualify as bourgeois.32 But in the cases where the bourgeoisie did lead, it is important to understand which sections were involved.
The bourgeoisie does not only consist of capitalists, in the literal sense of those who own or control capital. Further, it is historically demonstrable that, down to 1848 at least, the most decisive leaderships tended to emerge from those sections of the bourgeoisie without direct material interests in the process of production, who were simultaneously less concerned with the destructive effects of revolutionary violence and more able to overcome the competitive economic divisions within their class.33 Are the leaders of the “deflected” revolutions so very different from those who led them between 1789 and 1848? Guevara trained as a doctor, but Robespierre was a lawyer, Danton a journalist, Roux a priest; only a very few, of whom Roederer was the most important, could seriously be described as capitalists. In some respects the parallels are exact. As Eric Hobsbawm notes of the radicalism of students and intellectuals in 1848: “It was largely based on the (as it turned out temporary) inability of the new bourgeois society before 1848 to provide enough posts of adequate status for the educated whom it produced in unprecedented numbers, and whose rewards were so much more modest than their ambitions.”34 John Rees once observed that the intelligentsia “had, in an earlier incarnation, often been a crucial element of the practical leadership of the classical bourgeois revolutions,” without however drawing any conclusions.35 But if the above argument is correct, then the bourgeoisie’s supposed abdication of its revolutionary role after 1848 was in fact simply an expression of the hostility that the core membership of this class had always displayed toward plebeian intervention, now heightened by the even greater threat posed by the working class.
The two real changes after 1848 lay elsewhere. One was that the noncapitalist sections of the bourgeoisie, which had previously given revolutionary leadership and which might have been less paralyzed by fear of the working class, were increasingly integrated into a society in which their former frustrations and humiliations were rapidly becoming things of the past. The other was that sections of the existing ruling classes of Europe and Japan (such as the Prussian landlords to whom Trotsky refers) that had previously resisted revolution now embraced a top-down version in order to make their states capable of military competition with their rivals—or, in the case of Japan, to avoid the fate of colonization and dismemberment that had befallen China. In the colonial world after 1945, the core bourgeoisie had inherited the traditional fear of revolution from their predecessors, but the “revolutionary intelligentsia” were not in the position of their European equivalents after 1848; in fact they far more closely resembled them before 1789. In other words, they could not look forward to wealth, power, and recognition without a revolution. In some cases they did not need to take action for themselves because the process of transformation was initiated by an army coup.
This type of event, distantly related to the “revolutions from above” in Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1860s, had of course begun before the advent of Stalinism with the Turkish Revolution of 1919, led by groups that Ellen Kay Trimberger calls “autonomous military bureaucrats.”36 This is one area in which Cliff’s account needs to be qualified, as it is not entirely clear that “intelligentsia” is sufficiently broad a category to include the leading social forces involved in these revolutions, at least two of which (those led by Nasser in Egypt and by Mengistu in Ethiopia) were among the most important of the “deviations from the norm” of deflected permanent revolution. These military leaders, who are quite often junior officers, do of course have one important characteristic in common with members of the intelligentsia in that they can also claim to represent “the nation” beyond mere factional interests. In the majority of cases where a military solution was not available, however, the intelligentsia needed to mobilize themselves. What was new in these situations was not therefore the existence or activity of a “revolutionary intelligentsia” hitherto unknown: both were already familiar from the history of the nineteenth century. It was rather that this class fraction felt able to take action in the knowledge that they did not need to fear the working class. Why not?
Cliff offers a number of reasons why the working class in the global South did not play the role envisaged by Trotsky, down to the early 1960s. Of these, the general influence of ruling-class ideas and the illiteracy and inexperience of the workers are clearly relevant, but they were also factors in the situations of Russia in 1917 and China in the 1920s; they are not in themselves an explanation. Other reasons have genuine explanatory power and remain extremely pertinent even today. Many workers in urban industry retain links to small holdings in the countryside, to which they return in times of unemployment, making the permanent formation of class consciousness and organization difficult. Conversely, those workers who are in stable employment can have relatively higher living standards than the rural masses, making the possibility of alliances with them less likely. Those trade unions or community groups that do exist are often led by non-working-class elements—“outsiders,” with different interests and political goals—and are heavily reliant on support from the developmental state, which tends to impose an apolitical agenda acceptable to the regime. Both these leaderships and the personnel who run the state apparatus are influenced by Stalinist politics, the key subjective element in controlling and lowering the aspirations of the working class.37 But many of these characteristics were also present in prerevolutionary Russia: workers with links to the countryside; trade unions established by agents of the state; and industries where trade unions did not exist, even before the ban that followed the Revolution of 1905.38 Some deeper level of explanation is required.
The absence of a revolutionary party is clearly part of the explanation, but parties themselves can only have a meaningful existence where certain determinate conditions allow them to form and grow. Lack of revolutionary leadership can explain the outcome in China during the 1920s or in Iran in 1978–79, where major upheavals took place and Cliff’s other inhibiting conditions were overcome, but not where such situations did not arise. At the end of his discussion of workers in the global South, Cliff writes: “An automatic correlation between economic backwardness and revolutionary political militancy does not exist.”39 But Trotsky never argued that such an automatic correlation did exist; for him it was conditional, and Cliff does not refer to, let alone discuss, the enabling condition that Trotsky saw as fundamental to its establishment: uneven and combined development.40
This was the central absence in Cliff’s revision of Trotsky. The theory of uneven and combined development explained what occurs when the process of overleaping takes place in the colonial or neocolonial world, where it is not possible to fully catch up with, let alone overtake, the developed West, but only to do so in a fragmentary or partial way. The resulting combined formations, because of their inbuilt social instability, paradoxically made revolutionary outbreaks more likely than in the developed world with its greater levels of stability and reformist traditions. In other words, the presence of combined and uneven development made it possible for a strategy of permanent revolution to be pursued with greater likelihood of success; its absence made it, not inevitable, but less likely that such a strategy would be pursued in the first place, leading to the process of “deflection” highlighted by Cliff.
Permanent revolution, and consequently deflected permanent revolution, may now be historical concepts, but uneven and combined development is not, with important implications for the possibility of socialist revolution beginning in the global South. Following Trotsky, Tim McDaniel argues that there were four reasons why what he calls the “autocratic capitalism” of tsarist Russia tended to produce a revolutionary labor movement. First, it eliminated or reduced the distinction between economic and political issues. Second, it generated opposition for both traditional and modern reasons. Third, it reduced the fragmentation of the working class but also prevented the formation of a stable conservative bureaucracy, thus leading to more radical attitudes. Fourth, it forced a degree of interdependence between the mass of the working class, class-conscious workers, and revolutionary intellectuals.41 McDaniel claims that a comparable situation has since arisen only in Iran, but this seems to unnecessarily restrict the applicability of the model to situations that resemble prerevolutionary Russia closely in formal terms.42 In fact, the relentless expansion of neoliberal globalization and the consequent irruption of industrialization and urbanization into areas they had previously bypassed, often under conditions of intense state repression, mean that the responses identified by McDaniel are being reproduced in places as distinct as China and Dubai.43But these are only the most extreme examples of a general trend that is characteristic of the current phase of capitalist development. Two points need to be made in relation to the process.
One is that it is not limited to the global South but extends to the less developed parts of the First and former Second Worlds. As Beverly Silver writes:
Strong new working-class movements had been created as a combined result of the spatial fixes pursued by multinational corporate capital and the import substitution industrialization efforts of modernizing states. In some cases, like Brazil’s automobile workers, labor militancy was rooted in the newly expanding mass production consumer durable industries. In other cases, like the rise ofSolidarnosc in Poland’s shipyards, militancy was centered in gigantic establishments providing capital goods. In still other cases, like Iran’s oil workers, labor militancy was centered in critical natural resource export industries.44
The second point to be made is that, in the global South proper at least, the process is still unable completely to transform those societies. The state “containers” within which uneven and combined development unfolds, including China, will never achieve the type of total transformation characteristic of the states that formed the original core of the capitalist world system, at least in any foreseeable timescale. One intelligent conservative commentator, Edward Luttwak, has referred to “the perils of incomplete imitation” whereby developing-world ruling classes “have been importing a dangerously unstable version of American turbo-capitalism, because the formula is incomplete.”45 What is missing? On the one hand, the legal regulation to control what he calls “the overpowering strength of big business,” and on the other internal humility on the part of the winners and acceptance of the essential justice of their personal situation by the losers within the system.46 Uneven and combined development is therefore likely to be an ongoing process, which will only be resolved by either revolution or disintegration. In the meantime, China and other states like India and Brazil where growth has been less dramatic remain both inherently unstable in their internal social relations and expansive in their external search for markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities. It is in this inherent instability that the possibilities for permanent revolution lie. This does not mean that wherever uneven and combined development exists today the working-class movement will automatically adopt what Trotsky called the “boldest conclusions of revolutionary thought.” In circumstances where Marxist ideas (and those of secular radicalism more generally) are either unavailable or discredited after the experience of Stalinism, movements will reach for whatever ideas seem to assist them in their struggle, regardless of their antiquity—but they will transform them in the process, contrary to what is asserted by reactionaries in the West.
CONCLUSION
The late Fred Halliday once expressed his own disillusionment after the fall of the Soviet empire, rejecting the revolutionary possibilities of uneven and combined development:
The insight of Trotsky was that of locating the history and revolution of any one country in a broader, contradictory context, in seeing how ideas and forms of conflict, like forms of technology or economic activity, could be transposed to contexts very different from that in which they originated. The mistake of the Marxist approach was to conclude that, in the end, the combination would prevail over the unevenness. The unevenness, evident above all in the widening income gaps between rich and poor on a world scale, has continued to grow, and is replicated dramatically in an era of capitalist globalization. But because of the fragmentary character of states, the spatial and political distributor of that unevenness, the combination, the world revolutionary cataclysm, did not occur.47
To this we reply: combination is not “the world revolutionary cataclysm,” it is the objective enabling condition for it to take place. And if the cataclysm has not yet occurred, this is largely because of the absence of the missing subjective condition that Trotsky recognized in 1917 and that Cliff highlighted back in the 1960s: the revolutionary organization capable of giving focus to the social explosions that the process of uneven and combined development brings in its wake. Whatever else may have changed since both men wrote, the necessity for the party remains, if the incredible energies unleashed by uneven and combined development are not to be wasted yet again, with terrible consequences for the world and those who live in it.