Permanent Revolution Must Be Understood By Workers As The Way Forward to Overturn the Capitalist System - Part III - The International Working Class

Capitalism is a worldwide system and the working class must view itself as standing in opposition to the worldwide capitalist system, not simply as an isolated working class in one country

Part I discussed the need for class consciousness among the working class - that there are two opposing forces in society, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Part II illustrated the need for the working class to form its own organizations separate from any other bourgeois organizations, especially the corporate trade unions. Workers must form their own rank-and-file committees on the shop floors that are organized by the workers and controlled by the workers. In Russia, these committees were known as soviets, the most famous one being the Petrograd Soviet, which was chaired by Leon Trotsky in 1905-06.

A third aspect of the theory of permanent revolution is that workers organizations must be international. To isolate workers organizations in one country, or one nation-state leads to isolation and eventual failure, as the entire capitalist system operates worldwide. So too must workers organizations be international to combat capitalism on a world scale.

Trotsky wrote: “The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis in bourgeois society is the fact that the productive forces created by it can no longer be reconciled with the framework of the national state. From this follows on the one hand, imperialist wars, on the other, the utopia of a bourgeois United States of Europe. The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion, only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.”

“The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it. Socialist construction is conceivable only on the foundation of the class struggle, on a national and international scale.”

“The permanent revolution is no isolated leap of the proletariat; rather it is the rebuilding of the whole nation under the leadership of the proletariat. That is how I conceived and interpreted the prospect of the permanent revolution, beginning with 1905.”

(The Permanent Revolution, Leon Trotsky, 1931, First English and American editions of Permanent Revolution 1931, re-translated by John G. Wright, for Progress Publishers/Militant Publishing Association).

The theory of Permanent Revolution shows that only the working class can lead a socialist revolution, as opposed to the claim that we can rely on bourgeois forces to attain a socialist revolution.

We are currently in a worldwide revolutionary period. Capitalism has been rapidly consolidating its forces, but in so doing has exposed to the world its most barbaric contradictions. The survival of the capitalist system is reliant on the barbarities of openly and proudly committing genocide in Gaza, openly and proudly refusing to provide basic material relief to hurricane refugees in the Appalachians, openly and proudly cutting off the water supply for the most densely populated city in the U.S., Los Angeles, at a time when predictable Santa Ana winds have ripped large urban swaths of land to shreds, and openly and proudly refusing to take strong public measures to prevent the spread of not one, but possibly two pandemics (Covid-19 and H1N1 “bird flu” which may be imminent).

There are many other examples of the manner in which this barbarity is being exposed, but the working class is showing signs of becoming conscious of its class status during this time. The explosion of rage against predatory and parasitic health insurance companies in the U.S. resulted in the gunning down of the CEO of United Health Care (UHC), the largest health insurance company in the U.S., which routinely denies claims by its customers, despite the fact that they are required to pay many thousands of dollars per year simply for the “privilege” of having UHC deny their claims. This act of vigilantism does not advance the move towards a socialist society, but the outpouring of support for the act by large masses of the public of all ages and income ranges, illustrates how the public is solidly against the utter barbarity of the capitalist health system in the U.S.

This is only one example of the expression of the public who can no longer tolerate many of the capitalist contradictions staring us in the face.

It is important for workers to quickly understand the power of the productive forces and become conscious of their class power as soon as possible. The longer the working class waits to consolidate its own power, the more the barbarity will increase, and workers, socialists, and other oppressed groups will be the ones who suffer the most.