Phil Hearse’s polemic against my pamphlet (Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution: A Leninist critique, Resistance Books, Sydney, 1998) proceeds from a fundamentally false assumption, i.e., that my pamphlet “attempts [to give] a general strategic view” of revolution in “the semi-colonial and dependent semi-industrialised countries”. He alleges that my pamphlet presents Lenin’s policy of carrying out the proletarian revolution in semi-feudal Russia in two-stages (a bourgeois-democratic and then a socialist stage) “as a general schema for the ‘Third World’ today”. Nowhere in my pamphlet, however, do I make such a claim.

Marx and Engels were not the first to develop and advance a vision of a classless society. As they themselves noted, earlier thinkers had developed “in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Utopian pictures of ideal social conditions; in the eighteenth, actual communistic theories… [in which] it was not simply class privileges that were to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves”.

Perhaps around the Xmas dinner table this year, being quizzed by parents you haven’t seen for many months, or an aunt you haven’t seen for years, comrades have been met by a familiar refrain:

You’re a socialist? How could you be a socialist today?

The Communist Manifestois the most famous of all documents produced by the socialist movement. It appeared in February 1848, on the eve of an explosion of popular revolutionary struggles in France and Germany – revolutionary mass movements that the Manifesto had foreseen.

Comrade Chris Slee’s answer to the question of whose policy was confirmed by the October Revolution – Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory or the Bolsheviks’ policy of a “two-stage revolution” – seems to be that both were partially proved right and both were partially proved wrong.

Dear Phil,

I thought it would be helpful to follow up the brief comments in my letter in this week’s Green Left with a direct letter to you on the points raised in your letter in GLW 211.

Rather than begin by responding to the specific arguments you raised in your letter, I think it will help clarify the issues if I begin with a general presentation of how I assess the differences between Lenin and Trotsky on the relationship between the bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions. I will then take up the specific arguments raised in your letter.

The fundamental aim of the revolutionary Marxist party is to organise the socialist revolution. In order to realise this aim, the party must win the ideological and political allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the working class. This cannot be accomplished simply through propaganda alone. It is a general law of history that only through collective experiences of struggle, of action, can broad masses begin to free themselves from the domination of ruling class ideology and become receptive to revolutionary ideas.

The crimes of rampaging capitalism today are all too visible. Susan George’s talk last night, the talks and panels today, have given us many reminders. We’re here BECAUSE we’re conscious of this. And we’re also conscious, and perhaps a little afraid, of the tremendous financial, military, ideological resources at the disposal of the ruling classes.

This is a time of major upheavals in the world socialist movement. The developments unleashed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power are leading to possibly the biggest shake-up in the socialist movement since the victory of Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Communist party. We are confronted with the possibility of the definitive exposure and defeat of Stalinism, which has shackled the Communist movement since the death of Lenin.