Permanent Revolution (Hardcover)

PERMANENT REVOLUTION PREFACE AMERICAN EDITION As THIS book goes to press in the English language, the whole thinking part of the international working class, and in a sense, the whole of civilized humanity, listens with particularly keen interest to the reverberations of the economic turn taking place on the part of the former czarist empire. The greatest attention in this connection is aroused by the problem of collectivizing the peasant hold ings. And no wonder in this sphere the break with the past assumes a particularly clear-cut character. But a correct evaluation of collectivization is unthinkable without a general conception of the socialist revolution. And here on an even higher plane, we are again convinced that everything in the field of Marxian theory is bound up with practical activity. The most remote, and it would seem, abstract disagreements, if they are thought out to the end, will sooner or later be expressed in practise, and the latter allows not a single theoretical mistake to be made with impunity. The collectivization of peasant holdings is, it is under stood, the most necessary and fundamental part of the socialist transformation of society. The volume and tempo of collectivization, however, are not only determined by the governments will but, in the final analysis, by the economic factors by the height of the countrys economic level, the relationship between industry and agriculture PERMANENT REVOLUTION and consequently by the technical resources of agriculture itself. Industrialization is the motive force of the whole newer culture and, by that, the only conceivable basis of socialism. In the conditions of the Soviet Union, indus trialization means first of allthe strengthening of the base of the proletariat as a ruling class. Simultaneously, it creates the material and technical premises for the collec tivization of agriculture. The tempos of both these pro cesses are interdependent. The proletariat is interested in the highest tempos for these processes, in so far as the new society that is to be created is thus best protected from external danger, and at the same time creates a source for systematically improving the material level of the toiling masses. However, the tempo that can be accomplished is limited by the whole material and cultural position of the country, by the mutual relationship between the city and village and by the most urgent needs of the masses, who can sacri fice their today for the sake of tomorrow only up to a certain point. The best and most advantageous tempos are those which not only produce the most rapid develop ment of industry and collectivization at the given moment, but secure the necessary resistance - of the social regime, that is, first of all the strengthening of the alliance of the workers and peasants, which alone prepares the possibility of further successes. From this point of view, the general historical criterion by which the party and state leadership directs the development of industry as planned economy assumes decisive significance. Here two principal variants are possible a the course described above towards the economic entrenchment of the proletarian dictatorship in one country until further victories of the international proletariat revolution the viewpoint of the Left Opposi tion b the course towards the construction of an isolated national socialist society and at that in the shortestPREFACE, historical time the present official viewpoint. These are two distinct, and in the final analysis, directly opposed theoretical conceptions of socialism. Out of these flow basically different strategy and tactics. In the limits of this foreword we cannot consider anew the question of the cofcstruction of socialism in one country, Other of our works are devoted to this, particularly The Criticism of the Draft Program of the Comintern. Here we limit ourselves to the fundamental elements of the question...