A recent reevaluation of Trotsky and Trotskyism in the Morning Star from the Marx Memorial Library contained one key misconception, based on a misunderstanding of a phrase. The notion of “Permanent Revolution” gains a lot in translation. A clearer synonym would be “uninterrupted”.

What it applies to specifically is not as the article argues the relationship between revolutions across the globe and the consolidation or otherwise of socialist states (of which more later) but the specific argument among Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as the Russian Revolution was fought out as to what was possible and necessary; essentially what kind of revolution did it have to be?

The dominant view in both currents before it broke out had been that, because Russia was an politically primitive absolutist monarchy with an underdeveloped capitalism and a primarily peasant population, it had to go through a “bourgeois democratic” revolution, like England in the 1640s or France in the 1790s to sweep away feudalism, allow broader capitalist development and set the stage for a longer term struggle for socialism, which would require a further revolution at a later date, when conditions were “ripe”. The position of the working class and its parties in such a revolution was to support it but, ultimately, to know its place and not try to lead it. This has been described as stageism.

Trotsky’s argument was that this did not take account of economic and political development being not only uneven but combined. The conditions for less developed countries were (and are) significantly affected, and often determined, by the power of the more developed. This is true on all sorts of levels, including cultural. It means that less developed countries are not destined to simply follow in the footsteps of the more developed and become comfortable, well off bourgeois democracies, just a bit later. Bodies like the Tony Blair Institute that still maintain this point of view are at pains not to notice that already developed Imperial powers act consciously to maintain an exploitative relationship that keeps the majority of humanity indebted, overpowered and poor. The phrase “developing world” is a delusionary euphemism that disguises the imbalance of wealth and power with the Fabian notion of the inevitability of gradual incremental positive change. But capitalism outside the metropolitan centres is a sour fruit that rarely ripens.

Aspects of unevenness in the case of Imperial Russia is that where industry had developed, it was often relatively advanced, often owned by overseas capital and concentrated in some of the biggest factories in the world in the core cities, creating a large new industrial working class in the centres of political power, including a highly skilled layer who formed the backbone of the Worker’s Parties in Russia, just as their counterparts did of the Shop Stewards Movement in Britain but, because the contradictions were so much more severe in Russia, they were politically far more sophisticated and a lot tougher.

Revolutions are necessarily chaotic, shattering events. They can be conceived as an attempt to find a new stable order when a social and political order is collapsing. On some levels they are liberatory – “the festival of the oppressed” – as people previously denied a voice or power at any level find it and express it – at another it is a violent struggle for power in its most naked form – “the most authoritarian thing there is” (both quotes from Lenin). Who and what do people look to and organise around as a source of possible stability when the old gods have visibly failed? In Russia, the working class looked to its own organisations.

What became quite evident in Russia in 1917 is that there was no way that any sort of bourgeois democracy was on the agenda. The Provisional Government that tried to make the transition from Tsarism, had an insufficiently strong class base inside the country and, through its reliance on support from the Entente powers, was locked into continuing Russian participation in the First World War, even as that drove on the disintegration of its armed forces and hardship on the home front, fueling radicalisation in the factories, barracks and villages.

Even though the Provisional Government was led by a self-described Socialist, Kerensky, and leaned for its support on the Menshevik leaders of the Petrograd Soviet, they were balanced between two forms of class power, that of the Soviets – or Worker’s Councils – and that of the army High Command, itching to intervene at home and “restore order”. One or other of these fundamental forces had to win out. This would also determine the result in the countryside, where the collapse of Tsarist order left the landlords at the mercy of a restive peasantry becoming emboldened to take their land and shrug off their overlordship.

Lenin’s view was that the most determined leaders of the working class either had to seize state power or be destroyed. The revolution had to become a Socialist revolution, as the class that it represented determined the order it attempted to construct. The “Bourgeois democratic phase” was leapfrogged, or collapsed into the socialist phase, or was carried forward in an uninterrupted way. It had to be so because the Russian capitalist class was not strong enough to consolidate a new social order on its own terms as leaders of the people against the old regime, instead they were aligning with the military war lords, from Kornilov to Kolchak and Deniken, to crush the terrifying underclasses that had erupted out of their place. Fascism with Russian characteristics. The revolution had to push beyond those limits and establish a socialist state as the only possible way to avoid that. The revolution had to become “permanent” in the sense that Trotsky had meant it.

This was extremely difficult, took place in very grim circumstances and was rapidly isolated. The collapse of social order and centuries long habits of deference to suddenly collapsed dynasties in central Europe, Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs, did not lead on to successful socialist revolutions that could have broken the Russians out of their isolation, but instead to the reassertion of capitalist power in potentially revolutionary circumstances through Fascist movements, as in Italy and Germany, or the consolidation of the state around military strongmen, like Pilsudski in Poland or Mannerheim in Finland, or a mix of the two as in Spain. A broad movement across the continent described locally by Rumanian playwright Ionescu as “rhinocerisation”.

Crushing worker’s movements at home had the inevitable implication that the Soviet Union would also have to be a target internationally. The defeat of isolated revolutions in Hungary and Bavaria, and the failure of mass occupation of factories by workers in northern Italy underlines the point that sustaining a socialist revolutionary state at that point was only possible in a large country with immense resources that was simultaneously somewhat removed from the centres of imperial power.

This poses a key question. Given that revolutions take place in the weakest imperialist link, what is the relationship between consolidating power in one state and class struggles internationally?

All successful revolutions from 1917 onwards have taken place in the imperial periphery. Think China, Vietnam, Cuba. There have been no successful revolutions in the imperial heartlands. The closest to this was probably Portugal in the mid 1970s; the dynamics of which would repay a closer look.

To express this as a paradox. Socialism cannot be fully realised “in one country”, but it has to start in one; and that means state power in a state. Socialism, properly understood, is a state of struggle in which the Working Class or a Party embodying it, has state power – which includes control of the armed forces, police and so on, but a capitalist class still exists, can even prosper, but does not dominate the state, and in which that state exists in a world still dominated by imperialism and imperialist states. This is necessarily a process of political struggle that takes place over decades, both internally and externally and there is a dialectical link between the two. It is not a fully developed state of being in which all contradictions are, or could be, resolved in one fell swoop in the revolutionary moment. A revolution starts the process, it does not resolve it.

There is no blueprint for this. There is a tendency for currents on the Left in the wealthiest countries to have an essentially theological view of what socialism is. That a quick and painless big strike will lead to a quick consolidation of a complete worker’s democracy. This sometimes goes along with treating the thoughts of our illustrious forebears not so much as guides and prompts but as Holy Writ, historical experiences not so much as unique combinations of common elements that should be understood in their specificity, but as models to follow in abstraction from actual circumstances; and sometimes taking the form of self aggrandising analogies (I once heard a small poll tax demonstration in Chelmsford that was met with police horses as being “just like 1905”).This often goes along with a dismissive and hostile attitude towards the revolutions that have actually taken place, essentially because they are in places that are much poorer than the imperial centres. As one member of the AWL put it to me once, “nothing less than a complete workers’ democracy will do.”

International waves of turmoil, from the 1848 revolutions through to ’68 in Europe or the Arab Spring in 2011, hold out a promise of a simultaneous great leap forward but have always, so far, fallen short and see the restoration of the old order in an adjusted and often fiercer form afterwards. Nevertheless, the spread of socialist states is an essential defence for those that already exist, and the existence of those that exist is a condition for others to make a breakthrough. This is not counterposed to domestic consolidation and in fact are an essential aid to ensuring that the pressures on it are not simply coming from Imperialism. “Create two, three, many Vietnams”, as Che Guevara put it. There is no “national road” in isolation. All struggles affect each other.

The question for established socialist states is whether they make a virtue of necessity or not. Having carried out a revolution in conditions of siege and relative underdevelopment and under constant imperial pressure means that mistakes, sometimes serious ones, will be made. Sometimes these are from excessive voluntarism, like the Soviet “Third Period” or China’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Sometimes from the sort of stodgy complacency and demoralisation characteristic of the late Soviet period, leading at the end to the counter revolutionary embrace of capitalism among the nomenkaltura. The question for the leading political forces in these revolutions is whether they learn from these, adapt and move on in the unrelenting struggle with the immensely powerful and resourceful opposition of world imperialism, centred in the United States, or succumb to it.