Permanent Revolution (group)

Last updated
Permanent Revolution
FoundedJuly 2006 (2006-07)
Dissolved28 March 2013 (2013-03-28)
Headquarters London, United Kingdom
NewspaperPermanent Revolution
Ideology Trotskyism
Political position Far-left
Colors  Red
Website
permanentrevolution.net

Permanent Revolution was a Trotskyist group formed in July 2006 by expelled members of the League for the Fifth International (L5I). It took its name from Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. The group dissolved itself on 28 March 2013. [1]

Contents

History

The group website carried publications with the same name from 1983-1994. [2] The group was founded after a two-year dispute against the perspectives adopted by the L5I at its 2003 congress. [3] It first organised as a tendency, then as a faction. [4]

The split followed a discussion of how to assess the impact, on class politics in general and the level of class struggle, of two changes:

  1. The effect of the restoration of capitalism in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1990.
  2. The defeats of the working class movement in the 1970s–1980s, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom.

The group gathered together a minority which argued that almost without exception the international left had undertaken no serious reexamination of world perspectives and economy since a "stagnation phase" in the 1970s and 1980s. [5] It felt that as a result the international left had been unable to explain either the marginalisation of the left or the failure of important protest movements against capitalism (such as the anti-capitalist movement, anti-war movement and Social Forum movements) to sink significant roots into the world working-class. [6] [7]

Permanent Revolution argued the L5I perspectives adopted at their Sixth Congress in 2003 that the engine of the world economy had "halted", that world capitalism was in a "period of stagnation" and as a result the world faced a "pre-revolutionary period" were fundamentally inaccurate and the refusal of the L5I to correct these perspectives in the light of experience proved they had decisively broken from the method of revolutionary Trotskyism. In contrast, Permanent Revolution argued that the integration of the former workers states into world capitalism, when combined with the defeats of the working class in the 1970s–1980s, had allowed capitalism to revive itself through globalisation. [8]

Furthermore, it argued that while the working class movement was no longer in the counter revolutionary phase of the 1990s, the movement had still not fully recovered from those defeats and rather was in a transitional period, with uneven struggles, not yet usually generalised or sustained. [9]

Theory

Permanent Revolution claimed to stand in the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky and for the revolutionary programme developed by the early Comintern and the early Fourth International. However, it differed from other Trotskyist organisations in three ways:

  1. Permanent Revolution believed that Trotskyism requires a "perspective" as the most concrete assessment of the situation must be made in order to enable the application of revolutionary Marxist ideas to the real situation of the class struggle at any given moment. It emphasised Marx's view that it is necessary to understand the world in order to change it. [10]
  2. Permanent Revolution considered the League for the Fifth International (LRCI) to have been a healthy period within Trotskyism and saw itself as following on from the LCRI which also argued that the Fourth International had degenerated after the Second World War because of a refusal to fundamentally reassess its perspectives. [11] It felt that through a similar refusal the L5I suffered a similar process of disorientation and degeneration which culminated in the L5I abandoning the Trotskyist programme as a method of intervention into the actual class struggle. [12]
  3. Permanent Revolution paid special interest to an analysis of how globalisation offsets the tendency of the rate of profit to decline and enables capitalism to escape the stagnation period which defined the world economy through the 1970s and 1980s.

Members

At its inauguration in London in July 2006, Permanent Revolution claimed to have had 33 members. [13] [14] Its founding meeting involved participants from Britain, Ireland, Chile, Czech Republic, Sweden, Australia, Austria and observers from Argentina. A meeting in September 2006 agreed a Founding Statement [15] which restates its intention to relaunch an international tendency committed to building a new Leninist Trotskyist International. Twenty-four British members were expelled from the L5I as well as four Australian members, several Irish members and one member from Sweden.

Dissolution

In 2013, a dissolution statement was published on Permanent Revolution's website, stating that the left needs to organize itself in radically different ways, and maintenance of Permanent Revolution as a distinct group would interfere with those aims. [16]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trotskyism</span> Variety of Marxism developed by Leon Trotsky

Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and a Bolshevik–Leninist as well as a follower of Marx, Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism, and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working-class self-emancipation and council democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin's theory of socialism in one country in favour of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Trotskyists criticize the bureaucracy and anti-democratic current developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fourth International</span> Revolutionary socialist international organization

The Fourth International (FI) is a revolutionary socialist international organization consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky, also known as Trotskyists, whose declared goal is the overthrowing of global capitalism and the establishment of world socialism via international revolution. The Fourth International was established in France in 1938, as Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union, considered the Communist International as effectively puppets of Stalinism and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power. Thus, Trotskyists founded their own competing Fourth International.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Socialist Appeal (Britain)</span> Political party

Socialist Appeal is the British section of the International Marxist Tendency. It describes itself as a "Marxist organisation which stands for the socialist transformation of society." Its stated aim is to build a revolutionary leadership capable of leading the working class in a struggle against capitalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Posadas</span> Italian-Argentine Trotskyist Revolutionary (1912–1981)

Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli, better known under the pseudonym J. Posadas or sometimes Juan Posadas, was an Argentine Trotskyist whose personal vision is usually described as Posadism. Originally a collective pen name of the leadership of the Grupo Cuarta Internacional in Argentina in the 1940s, it was also used by Dante Minazzoli initially.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fourth International Posadist</span> Trotskyist faction founded 1962 by J. Posadas

The Fourth International Posadist is a Trotskyist international organisation. It was founded in 1962 by J. Posadas, who had been the leader of the Latin America Bureau of the Fourth International in the 1950s, and of the Fourth International's section in Argentina. Between their split from the International Secretariat of the Fourth International in 1962 and Posadas' death in 1981, Posadists developed a strain of communism that included several fringe ideas, which brought them into conflict with more mainstream left-wing groups.

The Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) was a Trotskyist group in the United States established in 1973 and disbanded in 1989.

Raya Dunayevskaya, later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist humanism in the United States. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.

The Spartacist League is a Trotskyist political grouping which is the United States section of the International Communist League, formerly the International Spartacist Tendency. This Spartacist League named themselves after the original Spartacus League of Weimar Republic in Germany, but has no formal descent from it. The League self-identifies as a "revolutionary communist" organization.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) is the name of two Trotskyist internationals; one with sections named Socialist Equality Party which publishes the World Socialist Web Site, and another linked to the Workers Revolutionary Party in the UK.

The Fourth International (FI), founded in 1938, is a Trotskyist international. In 1963, following a ten-year schism, the majorities of the two public factions of the Fourth International, the International Secretariat and the International Committee, reunited, electing a United Secretariat of the Fourth International. In 2003, the United Secretariat was replaced by an Executive Bureau and an International Committee, although some other Trotskyists still refer to the organisation as the USFI or USec.

The third camp, also known as third camp socialism or third camp Trotskyism, is a branch of socialism that aims to oppose both capitalism and Stalinism by supporting the organised working class as a "third camp".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Socialist Workers Party (UK)</span> Far-left political party in the United Kingdom

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a far-left political party in the United Kingdom. Founded as the Socialist Review Group by supporters of Tony Cliff in 1950, it became the International Socialists in 1962 and the SWP in 1977. The party considers itself to be Trotskyist. Cliff and his followers criticised the Soviet Union and its satellites, calling them state capitalist rather than socialist countries.

Michel Pablo was the pseudonym of Michalis N. Raptis, a Trotskyist leader of Greek origin.

Workers' Power is a Trotskyist group which forms the British section of the League for the Fifth International. The group publishes the newspaper Workers Power and distributes the English-language journal Fifth International.

Revolutionary socialism is a political philosophy, doctrine, and tradition within socialism that stresses the idea that a social revolution is necessary to bring about structural changes in society. More specifically, it is the view that revolution is a necessary precondition for transitioning from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production. Revolution is not necessarily defined as a violent insurrection; it is defined as a seizure of political power by mass movements of the working class so that the state is directly controlled or abolished by the working class as opposed to the capitalist class and its interests.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Marxist Tendency</span> Political international

The International Marxist Tendency (IMT) is a Marxist political international. It was founded by Trotskyist political theorist Ted Grant and his supporters following their break with the Committee for a Workers' International in 1992. The organization's website, Marxist.com or In Defence of Marxism, is edited by Alan Woods. The site is multilingual, and publishes international current affairs articles written from a Marxist perspective, as well as many historical and theoretical articles. The IMT is active in over 40 countries worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tony Cliff</span> Jewish-British socialist activist (1917–2000)

Tony Cliff was a Trotskyist activist. Born to a Jewish family in Palestine, he moved to Britain in 1947 and by the end of the 1950s had assumed the pen name of Tony Cliff. A founding member of the Socialist Review Group, which became the International Socialists and then the Socialist Workers Party, in 1977 Cliff was effectively the leader of all three.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Socialist Tendency</span> International group of Tony-Cliff-inspired Trotskyist organisations

The International Socialist Tendency (IST) is an international grouping of unorthodox Trotskyist organisations espousing the ideas of Tony Cliff (1917–2000), founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain. It has sections across 27 countries; however, its strongest presence is in Europe, especially in Britain.

References

  1. "Permanent Revolution – Workers Power". Permanent Revolution. 28 March 2013. Retrieved 21 September 2018.[ permanent dead link ]
  2. "Permanent Revolution - Permanent Revolution First Series (1983-1994)". 14 March 2009. Archived from the original on 2009-03-14.
  3. Article #632 Archived 2012-04-04 at the Wayback Machine Weekly Worker
  4. A few words on the Workers Power split, July 6, 2006 KitNotes.co.uk
  5. Revolution round the corner?; Workers' Liberty Home, 16 July 2006
  6. World economy, politics and the class struggle: the international perspectives of the International Permanent Revolution
  7. More on the Workers' Power split Tuesday, July 04, 2006]
  8. International /Globalisation
  9. 2007: Prospects for the class struggle
  10. Theses On Feuerbach Karl Marx, edited by Friedrich Engels
  11. The Fourth International fails to reassess Trotsky's post war perspectives Permanent Revolution
  12. "Weekly Worker 679 - Thursday June 28 2007". Archived from the original on 2007-07-08. Retrieved 2007-07-31.
  13. Background on the Workers' Power split workersliberty.org
  14. The Split in the League for the Fifth International permanentrevolution.net
  15. Founding Statement
  16. "Permanent Revolution - dissolution statement". Permanent Revolution. Archived from the original on 21 August 2013. Retrieved 10 April 2021.