Doug Lorimer

The following article was written at the request of Farooq Tariq, general secretary of the Labour Party Pakistan, as an initia

By Doug Lorimer
In Links No. 26, Murray Smith, a former leading member of the Scottish Socialist Party and now a leading member of the Ligue Communiste

By John Nebauer

Review of Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution: A Leninist critique, by Doug Lorimer, Resistance Books, Sydney, 1998, A$6.95.

John Nebauer is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia.

• Ultra-left
• Convergence?
• Hungarian lesson

After Lenin, Trotsky was the foremost leader of the Russian Revolution. His contributions to the international socialist movement and to Marxism were immense. Trotsky's leadership of the Military Revolutionary Committee in November 1917 helped ensure the victory of the Bolshevik uprising. His classic History of the Russian Revolution remains the best account of the events that led to and followed the demise of the Romanov dynasty. As the founder of the Red Army, Trotsky played a vital role in defending the revolution from the forces of reaction. Later, he led the opposition to Stalinist degeneration and provided a Marxist analysis of the bureaucratic regime.

By Doug Lorimer

• Historical materialist theory
• Bauer's theory of nations
• Necessary but not sufficient characteristics
• 'Cultural-national autonomy'
• Oppressed and oppressor nations
• Reactionary consequences of the subjectivist theory
• Footnotes

Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question is a collection of essays written over the last 24 years by Michael Löwy, director of research in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. The book was published under the auspices of the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Research and Education, founded by Ernest Mandel and other leaders of the Trotskyist Fourth International.

"In the world, the tendency today is to bury Marxism and communism. The equation is simple: the collapse of the European socialist bloc is the end of the ideology and the theory that inspired their existence. But Marxist and communist ideas have today, perhaps more than ever, the possibility of demonstrating their viability.”

With these words Maria Luisa Fernandez, the Cuban consul-general, opened the Marxism 2000 conference in Richmond, just outside of Sydney, from January 5 to 9. Her speech followed a welcome by Colin Giles, a representative of the local Darug Aboriginal people.

Marxism 2000, initiated and organised by the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), was the second Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference; the first was held in April 1998, also in Sydney.

Far from being a collective international obituary to the ideas and practice of Marxism, Marxism 2000 was instead a vibrant reassertion of the urgent need to build an alternative to the capitalist system and a reminder that such an alternative is the only way to solve massive global inequalities.

• Transformation of the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution
• Bolshevik policy and Two Tactics

• Once again on the purpose of my pamphlet
• 'Two Tactics' and the bourgeois revolution
• The 'democratic dictatorship' and the bourgeois republic
• Lenin's and Trotsky's 'conceptions' of the revolution and 1905
• The October Revolution and 'permanent revolution'
• Once again: what is the socialist revolution?
• National oppression, national-democratic revolution and socialism
• Conclusion: what's wrong with 'permanent revolution'?

By Phil Hearse

• The DSP's position on revolutions in the dominated countries
• The socialist revolution, Russia and Spain
• Russia: how the revolution opened the way for capitalism and bourgeois rule (according to Lorimer)
• Spain
• Conclusion: agreement and differences between the DSP and permanent revolution

"The International of Crime and Treason [i.e., the counter-revolutionary coordination of imperialism—PH] has in fact been organised. On the other hand, the indigenous bourgeoisies have lost all their capacity to oppose imperialism—if they ever had it—and they have become the last card in the pack. There are no other alternatives: either a socialist revolution or a make-believe revolution."—Ernesto Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental 1967 (emphasis added).

"You must struggle for the socialist revolution, struggle to the end, until the complete victory of the proletariat. Long live the socialist revolution!"—V.I. Lenin, "Speech at the Finland Station" on arrival back in Russia, April 1917

by Doug Lorimer

By Doug Lorimer

• 1921 Comintern resolution
• Public debate
• Party discipline
• Ideological heterogeneity
• Lenin's struggle for a Marxist party
• Notes

The disintegration of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union opened an important debate within the Marxist movement about how to evaluate the history of the socialist movement, and especially of the Bolshevik Party, the party that led the world's first successful socialist revolution. One of the central aims of Links has been to provide a forum for such debate.

It is obviously important to carry out this evaluation in a way that does not make the mistake of confusing Stalinism with the theory and practice of the Bolsheviks when Lenin was the foremost leader of that party. Moreover—as was only to be expected—there are different views of what constituted the theory and practice of Bolshevism. Some of these differences have revolved around the role of Grigory Zinoviev.

By Murray Smith

The Second International

Split and unity, 1905-06

The party reconstituted in 1912

by Doug Lorimer