"In Defense of Revolutionary Continuity"

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bulletin now available Support socialist fund drive The August issue will be a reduced 12-page summertime Issue. We will resume regular publication of a 16-page İssue in September.—The Editors 2 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 1984 In Defense of Revolutionary Continuity, a Socialist Action pamphlet by Dianne Feeley and Paul Le Blanc, 74 pages, 34.00.

In "Their Trotsky and Ours," (New International, Vol.1, No.1) SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes insists that Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution has consigned its adherents to the sidelines of revolutionary history. To Barnes, the real continuity of revolutionary Marxism bypasses permanent revolution and flows directly from Lenin and his celebrated "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry."

In Barnes' view, such a "workers» and farmers' government" —a two-class coalition government that is not yet a "proletarian dictatorship" —is a necessary intermediate stage in the revolutionary process. Its task is the completion of the democratic, i.e., anti-imperialist revolution. Barnes urges his readers to cut their "sectarian" allegiance to permanent revolution and rediscover the "genuine Leninism" that is today propounded by the current led by the Cuban Communist Party.

In their pamphlet In Defense of Revolutionary Continuity, Dianne Feeley and Paul Le Blanc expose the fraudulent roots of Barnes' warmed over "old Bolshevism."

As Feeley and Le Blanc show, "permanent revolution,"-that is, the conThe latest issue of Socialist Action Information Bulletin contains articles addressing two key issues which came under dispute within the Socialist Workers Party during, and in the wake of, the SWP's 1981 pre-convention discussion.

July 1984 Editor: Alan Benjamin Associate Editors: Mark Harris Michael Schreiber Managing Editor: Nancy Gruber Business Manager: Kate Curry Editorial Board: Les Evans, Dianne Feeley, Jeff Mackler, Jim Richter, Nat Weinstein Staff: Paul Colvin, Larry Cooperman, Robin David, May May Gong, Millie Gonzalez, Hayden Perry, Linda Ray, Phil Ruble, Joe Ryan, Kwame M.A. Somburu, Marion Syrek, Sylvia Weinstein Socialist Action (ISSN 0747-4237) is published monthly for $6 per year by Socialist Action Publishing Association, 3435 Army St., No. 308, San Francisco, CA 94110. Second-class postage is paid at San Francisco, Calif.

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Rates: 3 issues for $1.00; 12 issues for $6.00; Canada and Mexico $12.50; $30.00 airmail for all other countries; $14.00 surface mail for all other countries. cept that the Russian revolution could not overthrow tsarism and institute a far-reaching agrarian reform unless the by Dianne Feeley & Paul Le Blanc ATSaeialist Acțiom Pamphter $4.

revolution was led by the working class and took anti-capitalist measures—was a key component of the Bolshevik strategy of 1917. How then does Barnes justify discarding the concept?

Barnes argues, first, that Lenin also believed that Russia would undergo an "uninterrupted" transition from the These issues were first, the relationship of "Trotskyism" and Leon Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution" to "Leninism" and V.I. Lenin's theory of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry;" and second, the role of and need for the Fourth International, the world organization founded by Trotsky in 1938. By their very nature, the disputes over these issues go to the programmatic foundation of the SWP.

This issue reprints three articles which defend the traditional positions of the SWP and the Trotskyist movement on these two topics. The first two selections, Les Evans' Lenin and the Theory of Democratic Dictatorship and Ernest Mandel's The Debate Over the Goals and Character of the Russian Revolution, were initial responses to the first signs of the SWP leadership's new interpretation of the Bolshevik strategy of 1917.

The third article, The Need for a Revolutionary International, by Mandel and John Ross, was written partly in response to the SWP leadership's support in its 1981 Draft Political Resolution for an as yet non-existent "mass Leninist International," which was implicitly counterposed to the Fourth International.

The Need for a Revolutionary International originally appeared in the Spring 1982 issue of International Marxist Review published in Britain. The Evans and Mandel articles on Leninism were published in an internal SWP bulletin in 1982 (in the case of Evans, 16 months after it was submitted for publication!), and were incorporated into the program of the Opposition Bloc in the SWP national committee in early 1983. This program was later adopted by the expelled members of the SWP who formed Socialist democratic to socialist revolution, and that the "democratic dictatorship" was the instrument of that transition. Building on this view of pre-1917 Leninism, Barnes argues that Lenin's call for such a "workers' and peasants' government" avoided Trotsky's mistaken underestimation of the peasantry as a revolutionary force against feudalism.

Feeley and Le Blanc ably dismantle this theoretical construct, showing that Lenin embraced Trotsky's view of the course of the revolution in his famous Theses of April 1917. They also trace Barnes' arguments to their roots in the 1920s writings of Joseph Stalin.

Feeley and Le Blanc show that in Trotsky's view, the workers' government brought to power by the revolution would of necessity require the support of the peasant majority, manifested on the governmental level by representatives of that class. Because of the vacillating and atomized nature of the Russian peasantry, however, Trotsky insisted that the working class must have hegemony in the revolutionary government. "Underestimation of the peasantry," then, was a red herring used by Stalin to mask his retreat from Leninism.

Turning the argument on Barnes, Feeley and Le Blanc show that Stalin's resurrection of the "democratic dictatorship" during and following the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 made it possible for the conservative Soviet bureaucracy to justify relying on alliances with bourgeois forces in other lands to protect their "socialism in one Leon Trotsky Action as a public faction of the SWP.

Les Evans is the former editor of the SWP's theoretical magazine, International Socialist Review, and helped edit Trotsky's writings on China and Spain. Expelled from the SWP in 1983, he was a founder of Socialist Action and is a Socialist Action was founded at a national conference in October 1983.

In February our first National Committee meeting launched a $16,000 fund drive to finance our growing activities, especially our burgeoning publishing efforts. These include the improvement of our monthly newspaper, the regular publication of the Socialist Action Information Bullethis strategy has been a dead-end, dooming the revolutionary upheavals to defeat at the hands of even the "progressive bourgeoisie." The disaster of 1927 in China was repeated in Indonesia in 1965 and in Chile in 1973.

Barnes' rush to embrace this caricature of Leninism reveals the profound discontinuity with Bolshevism that is beginning to pervade the program of the SWP. It has its ramifications in the SWP's virtually uncritical support for the "anti-imperialist" Khomeini regime in Iran, and in its refusal to support any demonstrations in this country in protest of the crushing of the Polish workers by the bureaucracy.

Feeley and Le Blanc illustrate that the "turn to the Cubans" espoused by Barnes and the present SWP leadership and their adoption of the "democratic dictatorship" theory as expounded by Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, is linked to the marginalization of the SWP as a force in the class struggle in the United States itself.

The SWP leadership's resurrection of the "democratic dictatorship," however, is a panacea which will not solve the crisis of the party. Rather, by intoducing the concept of two-stage revolution, it threatens to undermine the entire programmatic foundation of the SWP.

In Defense of Revolutionary Continuity is a useful tool for reaffirming the profound links connecting Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution to the successful strategy utilized by the Bolsheviks in 1917. As in the Russia of 1917, permanent revolution today remains a powerful weapon in the arsenal of revolutionary Marxism. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin member of its national committee. Ernest Mandel and John Ross are leading members of the Fourth International and of its Belgian and British national sections.

Vol.1, No. 5 $2.00 tin, and the expansion of our national organization.

In addition to our newspaper and information bulletins, we expect to begin publication of a theoretical magazine later this year. Please help to ensure that our expansion campaign continues to be a success. Send your contributions and subscriptions to Socialist Action, 3435 Army St., No. 308, San Francisco, CA 94110.

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