* Hausa farmer, Niger
Reuters/Finbarr O'Reilly


Let’s take a step back, put more of the landscape in the frame. At the risk of oversimplifying, I’ll attempt to lay out Trotsky’s point. Nations, then and now exist at various states of development. More precisely, they exist in various states of backwardness and they’re all trying to play catch-up. Backward countries need capital, and they’ll do almost anything to get it. It’s a sad fact of life: backward countries are badly led. A good measure of how badly a country is led is the percentage of subsistence farmers. Workers aren’t a whole lot better off: they leave the farm, only to spend their days doing manual labor in the factory, getting a fraction of the profits, but hey, it is a step up and don’t blame the capitalist, that’s the way these things work. These backward countries can’t wait around for bad leaders to die off and better ones replace them.

Countries with fewer farmers have the luxury of plenty of capital. An enterprising worker can run down to the bank with a good idea, get a loan and buy the means of production. Once he’s got a nice little company running, he can expand his business. If it’s a really great idea, a venture capitalist will fund him into the big leagues. The subsistence farmer has no such options.

Forget all this crap about Wicked Capitalism, said Trotsky and Lenin. Capital is the lifeblood of any society. The wickedness arises mostly in poor backward countries, where feudalism was never abolished. All things being equal, there’s no excuse for poverty: mechanize a society, educate all the children, get capital down to ground level and people will lift themselves out of poverty. Okay, so we’re a rural society in Russia, we don’t have an infrastructure of roads. We’ll build railways and leapfrog with technology in response. And forget the workers for now, workers can unionize or they can break out to specialized labor. They said let’s deal with the subsistence farmers first: they’re the manifestation of the backwardness. All those effete Narodniks, hopping and skipping around like a bunch of idealistic hippies in their happy communes, not one of them ever had to plow a field or go hungry in the winter. They’re useless. We have two enemies, said Trotsky: amoral external capitalist forces intent on exploitation and immoral internal feudal forces intent on getting rich while the country is looted by the external forces.

Now just wait a minute, said the Menscheviks. You are not going to shortcut the development process by imposing a new class of overlords. It took centuries for the industrialized societies to develop. If the Revolution doesn’t have a broad base of support, if it doesn’t have dissenting voices and a pluralist system, so much for all that fine talk about all things being equal and people lifting themselves out of poverty. This business about a Central Committee to direct all the development, isn’t that just a new sort of feudalism? You’re not industrialists, you’ve yet to make a dime on your own or run a business or make a payroll, who are you to talk about macroeconomics? You’re drinking Alexrod’s kefir and he pays your rent and you’re printing your little pamphlets on the press he bought. If this revolution doesn’t happen from the ground up, if you just smash what’s there without a system to replace it, you’ll either get anarchy or tyranny, more likely the first then the second, and then you’ll be stuck where we are now with the Tsar and his cronies.

* Okhrana fugitive photographs
Leon Trotsky, two upper right
Okhrana Records, Hoover Institution


Well sure, said the Bolsheviks. That’s all true. But what happened when we tried it your way? All that hooey about peaceful coexistence and organizing the workers and gradual progress: have you forgotten the Tsar’s secret police and the torture and the prisons and the endless steppes of Siberia? Here we are in London, chased out of our own country. Unless and until we overthrow feudalism, the vested interests will use the apparatus of the State to crush you like bugs. We’re not blaming the capitalists, they take logs and turn them into furniture and sell that furniture to the comfy bourgeois in Paris and Milan. That’s all fine and good in its way. Our problem isn’t the capitalists, it’s the feudalists. You’ve been sitting around for a decade and more, rattling on about the Tsar’s evils. You’ve done nothing but piss ink and endlessly deconstruct Marx and construct castles in the clouds. The Tsar and the nobility are already on thin ice. The Revolution will happen, with or without you, and very likely without us as well. If you don’t like our Central Committee, perhaps you prefer outright anarchy or the predations of another empire like Poland or Austria-Hungary or the Ottomans or all of ‘em at once. Someone’s got to lead this thing and it might as well be us. Take sides now, because you’re starting to sound like all those condescending Christian idiots like Tolstoy, wringing your hands at the suffering of the muzhik (peasant), but doing nothing.

Trotsky pipes up at this point in the yelling match. Look, he said, you’re both right. Plekhanov is right about No Shortcuts. Lenin is right about the Revolution. We face a radically different problem, one for which Marx offers no solution, the problem of a backward, agrarian society. We’re in brand new territory here, I’ve got this idea. I’ll call it the Permanent Revolution. Every society is really just a wrapper for its economy. Every advance in human society upsets the apple cart, destroying old economies and creating new ones. Industrialization made a hash of what preceded it. Masses of people moved off the farms to tend the machines in the factories, and a tractor does in a day what a hundred men couldn’t do in a week.

But, says Trotsky, though Plekhanov has a point about No Shortcuts, there’s no reason why we have to go through the pattern of the West, where first the barons and later the city people formed up an alternate structure to undo the King’s feudal powers. The Kings never adapted to capitalism and lost relevance. The bankers and industrialists and the newly-emerged middle class replaced the feudal powers. Though we’re a backward country, we have several distinct advantages. For one, we don’t have to repeat their mistakes. We don’t have to tolerate this intermediate step of bourgeois capitalism: we take democracy right down to ground level and let the people sort it out from the start of the revolution. Once we put the means of production in the hands of the subsistence farmer, educate his children, eliminate illiteracy and blow out the feudalists, we can put Russia on the road to progress.

Let’s not entertain any illusions, Trotsky continues, the ruling class never surrenders peacefully. We’re talking about a complete change in the social order. Lenin is right, first we get rid of the feudalists and it will mean open warfare. This isn’t a mere changing of the guard. This Permanent Revolution means we create a new economic reality and therefore a new political reality. If the farmer is on our side, we have an overwhelming majority. Trotsky said:

Conclusion:

* Sayyid Qutb


This series has taken on a life of its own, and yet more is coming. In this exposition of Trotsky, I am repeatedly struck by the parallels between the early years of the 20th Century and the opening years of this century. The American revolutionaries were never tempted to create a monolithic power structure: our separate States would never surrender their autonomy to a centralized federal system. The French Revolution had no such forces in play: in France, power concentrated in the hands of the few, creating a situation Napoleon could exploit. America’s revolution succeeded only because it was a sidebar to a larger War of Empires as the British fought the French for control of the Caribbean. America was unbelievably lucky, we would go on to quarrel with both the French and British but were not overthrown.

The dictators and revolutionaries lurk there still. Though the developing world cycles through advances in technology in our own form of the Permanent Revolution, the Third World is trapped in poverty. Billions of persons still live in abysmal poverty. In repressive regimes all over the world, secret police hound the intelligentsia into exile. In a nondescript apartment building in Hamburg, Mohammed Atta patiently planned his assault on the United States. It may seem we have won some respite from terror, as Trotsky said “The intelligentsia armed itself with dynamite. A whole generation was wasted in this struggle.”

I prophesy an Islamic Trotsky will emerge, is already emerging. He is writing now, perhaps exiled from Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Algeria or Iran. He is blogging, and he is being watched by our intelligence agencies. And with him is an Islamic Lenin with less patience than his Trotsky. That Islamic Lenin will pave the way for the rise of a psychopathic Islamic Stalin: all of them will have read the works of Leon Trotsky in translation.

The Islamic world is primed for the appearance of this man. The Islamic countries, like Russia, have missed the boat of Industrialism, they sink ever further into chaos and competing ideologies. Their universities have become hotbeds of radicalism, and everywhere the voice of reason is drowned. The reforms of Nasser and the Ba’athists were all from above, and they have failed. As with Russia after the liberation of the peasants, Iraq has become a factionalist hell.

The era of Osama bin Ladin is passing away. Osama bin Ladin was guided by Sayyid Qutb as silly old spiritual Plekanhov had been guided by Marx’s irrelevant vision. Plekhanov failed because he never understood the peasant. Lenin succeeded because he had Trotsky to preach his sermons. We are nearing a crucial fork in the road as an industrialized world: our versions of the Tsar’s police can send all the revolutionaries they catch to our gulags in Guantanamo, but it will do no good. Never send a thinker to Siberia and let him live.

Sayyid Qutb once said: “We pay little heed to our native spiritual resources and our own intellectual heritage; instead, we think first of importing foreign principles and methods, or borrowing customs and laws from across the deserts and beyond the seas... we turn our eyes to Europe, America, or Russia, and we expect to import from there solutions to our problems.”

We all know how the story ended. Trotsky failed. Or did he? Trotsky gives us something unique, a vision of the Permanent Revolution: a revolution mankind has endured and must endure in all times and all places. The nation-state is failing: as with capitalism, democracy must be both a universal and a local thing. Capitalism by itself is not the solution, nor is democracy alone. At some point, the masses must be given the means of production, or they will revolt. Billions of the world’s poorest people are denied justice and they suffer in silence. We who sit in comfortable circumstances see their suffering and offer them platitudes. I offer you the words of Paul Simon:

* Sudanese refugees


It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry

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