Permanent revolution v stability

[Tubby Isaacs]

I'm probably not doing Marxists justice in saying the phrase "permanent revolution" has me quaking in my boots. They just brought in a new till at work and that has me in enough of a tizzy.

Aside from my temperament, which (like Mike Dickon's health) is not the issue, are there not good reasons for preferring stability? The instability of turbo capitalism is one thing I don't like about it. Stability means planning, which is a good thing.

What kind of a guy are you?

[Bruno]

Permanent revolution v stability

I need others to do the major planning for me so that I can swoop in last minute, offer a brilliant tweak or two, look like a genius and take most of the credit without getting sullied by all the petty soul-destroying detail and planning that made my innovations possible in the first place.

[E10 Rifle]

Permanent revolution v stability

It's a bit of a false option isn't it that? And in any case the uber-capitalism of recent years has borne more of the hallmarks of permanent revolution than anything the left could, or has ever, come up with. See also the government's obsessive tinkering with public services - something the Trot background of many a New Labour minister has served them well for.

Incidentally, sectariana fans, Permanent Revolution is the name of one of the few remaining six-paper-sellers-in-a-room-above-a-pub Trot sectlets still operating inside the Labour party. Or I think they are anyhow - that might have changed.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

PR aren't in the Labour Party are they? Mind you, I've never met one, so I can't be sure.

It's a much-misunderstood phrase, as it goes. The sort of thing you're talking about has nothing to do with the theory either in a classical Marxist or in a Trotskyist sense.

[E10 Rifle]

Permanent revolution v stability

Actually, I think you're right TonTon. It's only cos someone I know in Hackney CLP knows someone else in the CLP who lives with a PR activist. Got confused. As one does.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Permanent revolution v stability

Yeah, I rather thought I was misunderstanding it. I could look it up but can someone explain it here? I assume it has something to do with stopping post-revolution elites getting too comfortable.

The opposition I set up is indeed contrived but there seemed to be something worthwhile in it, re dynamics v planning- perhaps I should have put it in those terms and not abused the Marxist phrase.

To use a rather 70s example, incomes policy to facilitate planning v free collective bargaining as a right. How do we decide between the two?

[E10 Rifle]

Permanent revolution v stability

From a trade union perspective, I don't think incomes policies - or even too set-in-stone national agreements - are all that healthy for the internal dynamics of a union: they discourage grassroots workplace activism and encourage bureacratic inertia and aloofness. We see a kind of example of this in our union (which covers Britain and Ireland), where the Republic has top-down cross-sector national pay agreements and a much less dynamic activism base than here. You could even see it as a paradox of the Thatcher laws.

The thing with incomes policies, I guess, is how transparently and democratically they're arrived at.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Well, Marx used it to describe the importance of independent working-class political organisation, really, in quite specific circumstances. He urged the German working class not to rely on the petty bourgeoisie, since:

“while the democratic petty bourgeoisie want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible...it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world - that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers”.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Trotsky took that a stage further. In the early 20th century, the accepted view among Marxists was that a socialist revolution could only happen in an advanced industrialised nation. Only after a long process of industrial development and a transition through a bourgeois democratic regime could the working class mature enough to pose the question of socialist revolution.

They thought that the coming revolution in Russia would be a a bourgeois revolution, resulting from a conflict between the productive forces of capitalism on the one hand, and autocracy, landlordism, and other surviving feudal elements on the other.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Lenin was one of those who believed this - although he, quite rightly, rejected the Mensheviks' view that what was required for this bourgeois revolution was an alliance of the working class with the bourgeoisie.

Lenin envisaged a coalition comprising the workers' party and a peasant party, a 'democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasantry,' in which the peasant party would have the majority. The 'democratic dictatorship' would establish a republic, expropriate the large landowners and enforce the eight-hour day. Thereafter the peasantry would cease to be revolutionary, would become upholders of property and of the social status quo, and would unite with the bourgeoisie.

The industrial proletariat, in alliance with the proletarian and semi-proletarian village population, would then become the revolutionary opposition, and the temporary phase of 'democratic dictatorship' would give way to a conservative bourgeois government within the framework of a bourgeois republic.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Trotsky, on the other hand, didn't believe that the peasantry was capable of playing an independent role.

He also argued that in order to achieve a consistent solution of the agrarian and national questions and a break-up of all the social and imperial fetters preventing economic progress, the revolution would have to go beyond the bounds of bourgeois private property. 'The democratic revolution grows over immediately into the socialist, and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.'

And finally, the completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in that it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

ok?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Permanent revolution v stability

Thanks, TonTon, I'll read this and think about it.

In the meantime, E10, what I had in mind for setting the incomes policy is rather what happens with interest rates- or rather what did briefly under the Major government. Independent committee advises, results published, elected politicians decide. Obviously I'd want the committee to be rather less bankerish than that. But would that be transparent and democratic?

I wonder too how much the incomes policy was adhered to in practice.

[E10 Rifle]

Permanent revolution v stability

From where would the members of these "independent committees" be drawn? Whose interests would they serve?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Permanent revolution v stability

Well, very different from the MPC anyhow. So trade union leaders are the easy bit, not sure who else. Small business representatives, under some better organisation than they have now. Academics- chosen I'm not sure how. There's the democratic politician who gets the final say.

However they're chosen it's a pretty top down approach.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Why would you be doing it? I missed that bit.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Permanent revolution v stability

An incomes policy? In the seventies it was part of controlling cost-push inflation. Unlike a public sector pay policy, it applies to everyone, so it's got something to be said for it.

More broadly, it comes from the principle that wages are such a large part of the economy, they need to be planned to achieve the "best" result, just like other aspects of the economy are planned.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

The best result for workers, or for bosses?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Permanent revolution v stability

Bosses (while they exist, and indeed worker-controlled institutions when they don't) do better out of having inflation controlled because they can plan investments and the like. Workers should well benefit from this. And of course it needs a progressive tax system too.

As for high inflation, it seems to cause problems. But of course much of this is down to the things done to bring it under control. What would happen with a long term rate of say 20%, I don't really understand. But my natural caution (which is still not the issue) combined with the fact that some societies who have done pretty well like West Germany haven't been keen on inflation, makes me fear that.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Bosses get their money from paying workers less than the value of their work. "Controlling" wages means supporting them in this. Workers would be off their heads to accept such a further restriction on their rights.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Permanent revolution v stability

Yeah, that's historically the left's position, against incomes policies. But they control what bosses pay themselves, which isn't bad. And the right didn't like them for that reason.

Aside from a question of who controls the business, say it's worker controlled. (I'm trying to avoid sounding like Will Hutton). Won't there be a benefit to them in controlled inflation? Who benefits from having pay settlements immediately undermined by inflation?

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Well you're accepting the idea that pay rises are a significant factor in inflation, which I can't agree with you on.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Permanent revolution v stability

I'd say it was significant though there are other things, like oil prices quadrupling, to keep the seventies theme going.

I think you can get in a fairly unproductive circle. But I agree that the idea that if teachers get a bit more money (or whoever the government is "facing down" at any one time) then the wheels will come off is indeed rubbish.

[WOM]

Permanent revolution v stability

Tubby Isaacs wrote:

The instability of turbo capitalism is one thing I don't like about it. Stability means planning, which is a good thing.

Tubby Isaacs wrote:

The instability of turbo capitalism is one thing I don't like about it. Stability means planning, which is a good thing.

Oh, hello.

Neat thread.

It's a funny thing. It's said that if there's one thing 'the market' likes, it's stability. Uncertainty doesn't do anybody any good. Currently, a significant number of people have a significant enough amount of savings to get the consumer market rolling again. Thing is, they're uncertain about tomorrow's job prospects, so they're sitting on their wallets. The stagnation of Japan's economy for...oh...15 years, was said to be due to their consumers liking the certainty of their vast per capita savings sitting in the bank vs. the uncertainly of spending it in the face of potential job losses.

But, I disagree that stability means planning. You simply can't plan an economy. Especially in a global market. Too many things are either unknown or outside your control. However, I think increased regulation can lead to greater stability. When everyone is playing by the known rules, they can work within the constraints. The notion of deregulation leading to prosperity has been proven false. As has the sick joke of self-regulation by any particular industry you might want to cite.

Just my two cents.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Permanent revolution v stability

Regulation doesn't do anything to change the fundamentals of capitalism though, does it? It's an unstable system, there will be booms and there will be recessions, some bigger than others. Regulation doesn't address that instability at all.