One year of Permanent Revolution

Permanent Revolution is one year old. The first anniversary of our birth as a political group has not prompted wild celebrations by the adoring masses of every continent … yet....writes Mark Hoskisson...But for those of us who are part of this small but dedicated band of swashbuckling Trotskyists, who have produced five journals, several pamphlets and a host of leaflets and who have maintained our high profile cyber presence via the website, this birthday merits a glass of cordial for the comrades.

Building a political organisation is always a difficult task. Building a revolutionary communist organisation in a period of capitalist expansion and in the long afternoon shadow of the collapse of “communism” is doubly hard. And building such an organisation in circumstances where there are many other groups nominally engaged in the same project begins to look impossible.

There are plenty of people out there who, surveying such disadvantages, conclude that we must be slightly mad. Others may sympathise but find the obstacles too daunting and search for easier options. Many simply disagree with our goal and believe, to one degree or another, that the way forward lies through reforms within the existing world capitalist system rather than through its revolutionary destruction.

But we are not deranged or hopelessly utopian. We are motivated by two fundamental beliefs. The first is the belief that the existing system deserves to be overthrown and that it can be. The second is that in order to achieve this goal we need to creatively re-elaborate Marxism so that it once again becomes an inspirational weapon of truth rather than a schematic dogma engaged in an elaborate game of hide and seek with the truth.

Capitalism uses an army of marketing graduates, journalists and broadcasters, priests and politicians to convince millions of workers that it is the best of all possible worlds. If its propaganda weapons fail it uses an army of highly trained police and soldiers to kick and kill people so that they submit to the rules of this world. But neither can be wholly successful. Capitalism is driven by the need to exploit. Those workers whom it exploits will always and everywhere at some time or another try to defend themselves. The mask of civilisation slips and the brutal reality stands exposed.

Bush and Blair bomb their way through the Middle and Near East, provoking civil war and resistance to their military campaign for the imposition of capitalist globalisation. The G8 summits issue sanctimonious pledges of aid to Africa but thousands of German youth see through the hypocrisy and blockaded the most recent summit, fighting pitched battles with riot police along the way.

The once “revolutionary” even “terrorist” ANC in South Africa slashes the wages of black workers and uses the police to break up trade union demonstrations only to be met by a huge general strike as the black masses realise that “their” government belongs to capitalism and not to them. The miners of Bolivia spearhead a movement of thousands of workers to prevent multinationals stripping their country of its precious resources while they are left to starve.

Exploitation is evident everywhere and resistance to it all will always come. Securing the triumph of that resistance and the destruction of a system based on exploitation is motivation enough for us. We are sure it will become motivation for many thousands more, across the world, in carrying through the work of forging a revolutionary party that the working class can use to secure its final victory.

These fundamental beliefs have shaped the work of Permanent revolution during its first year of existence. We have not burst into the room proclaiming to whoever happened to be inside it that we are the fully formed alternative with the answer to everything, merely requiring the addition of more recruits in order to fulfil our date with revolutionary destiny. Instead, we have tried to address key questions of contemporary politics and show the relevance of revolutionary Marxism in answering these questions.

Our five journals and our website have tried to do two important things:

• Address a range of issues that are of concern to millions from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint
• Develop a good humoured, honest and loyal debate on our views and the views of other left groups

These are important things to do in the present ideological and political climate. We have been through a period in which political and industrial defeats – such as the defeat of the miners in Britain back in the 1980s and the restoration of capitalism in the Stalinist USSR and its satellites states – have weakened the attractiveness of revolutionary Marxism. The notion of a revolutionary party is deeply unpopular amongst millions who are suspicious of the bureaucratic monstrosities that passed for such parties in the second half of the twentieth century or indeed in the sects who aped the bureaucratic centralism of the bigger organisations.

The defeats have also undermined the base organisations of the working class in many countries. Trade unions are weak and the principles of trade unionism weaker, again thanks to the betrayals of those time-serving officials who either ran away from a fight or who sold the fights out at the decisive moment. Not only is individualism rife in the workplaces but many workers, including the huge new working classes in the global south, look to the new reformism embodied by NGOs and charities.

Restoring the credibility of Marxism means engaging in a creative debate about its answers to the relevant political, economic and ideological questions of the day. That is what our journal has tried to do. And it means being open to something that too many post-Bolsheviks seem to fear more than death: admitting that we might be wrong on this or that question, major and minor. Nowhere is the need for such debate more evident than on the issue of the economics of globalisation, the nature of imperialism and why the dickens capitalism is undergoing such a long and sustained period of growth.

This has been an important theme in our first year. But not the only one. The real state of the workers’ movement, the nature of prostitution and its implications for the oppression of women, the use of micro-credit as a solution to poverty and a means of empowering women, the revolutionary upheavals in Venezuela and Bolivia, the answer to climate change, the weaknesses of anarchism as an ideology, major developments in Ireland, France, the Scottish Socialist Party, an analysis of radical Islam, and questions surrounding the problem of building a revolutionary youth movement: these and other topics have all been written about, commented on and debated in the pages of our journal. By anyone’s standards that’s not a bad record for one year.

As we enter our second year we make no promises about either our own meteoric rise to leadership of the world working class or the impending revolutionary crisis of the system. There are countless journals and websites in which the socialists seeking refuge from reality can satisfy themselves by reading such guff. But we do promise to carry on telling the truth, debating our answers to the class struggle and continuing to build our publications, our website and our group into something that will be taken seriously by serious people, hopefully in increasing numbers.

Happy birthday to us.

Thu 05, July 2007 @ 23:28