And I don't mean through donations. Of course I'd accept a sugar daddy, but I draw the line at sex work: I take too much care with my trim & youthful physique to have it despoiled by tawdry, lucrative encounters.



Scholarship season is upon me. If I'm going to make it through school, I'm going to have to get grants. Which means saying smart things about topics I'm interested in. Not too smart - don't want to appear uppity; not too political - don't want to offend the liberal academics prone to fainting fits. But I need to say something coherent, make an "original research contribution."

Grad students trying to do anything original is a crock of shit; it's a shell game meant to panic us into slinking away to our rooms, working feverishly to prove ourselves to neoliberal funders, who are much happier to have us competing with each other than fighting them. It promotes the myth that we're intellectuals, not workers; that we can make it on our own, rather than through collective action; that the breakneck pace of academia is simply our ever-increasing excellence, not a work speed-up to push through more highly-trained technicians in the service of capitalism... let's try that again.

I don't expect to come up with anything very original. But Marxism sounds original, because so few people study it: for once, my obscurity can be an advantage. For grant applications, I'm going to take a Marxist concept I'm interested in, dress it up in social-democratic phraseology, and hope the bright-eyed panellists looking for 'synergy' and 'governance' don't see through it.


Why don't you tell us about your nice proposal?

That's where you, the intelligent reader susceptible to flattery, comes in. A lot of smart leftists read this blog. I've got a few ideas, and I want to bounce them off you. I can't promise you anything in return - except that if I'm successful, you won't have to read me complaining about being poor, and that's something.

Taking Lenin's proviso into account - if you wait for a pure socialist movement, you'll wait a long time - I'd like to figure out what common characteristics socialists could - and do - share. I have an inspiration: the 2003 Resistances to Capitalist Globalisation from the Fourth International. It's a fine document, describing the global trajectory of capitalism and anti-capitalist social movements. But it's the product of the collaboration of dozens of activists - I can't redo that.

But I can focus on one aspect of the problem. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution makes a lot of sense to me. Briefly, he says:

a) In semi-feudal countries, the bourgeoisie is too weak, and dependent on foreign capital, to lead the bourgeois revolution. So the working class has to do it. It sweeps away pre-capitalist social formations, to usher in full capitalist development and create the material abundance necessary for socialism.

b) But it can't stop at establishing a bourgeois republic. The bourgeoisie is happy to let them make a revolution, but will turn on the workers at the first chance it gets. The working class has to keep on fighting to create a socialist republic.

c) In this struggle, the working class has to ally with non-socialist forces: the peasantry, the middle classes, etc. But it has to maintain its independence, because those classes will fight for their own interests, not against capitalist exploitation as a whole.

d) Finally, the revolution can't stop at national boundaries, otherwise the capitalists will regroup and fight back. Socialism can't exist in one country.


There's a good chap, why don't you make the revolution and I'll be along shortly.

This seems pretty logical to me. I think Trotsky's takes on the 2nd Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, and the Spanish Civil War, are bang on. How could we apply it today? What lessons might it hold?

The obvious answer is none. David Whitehouse, review editor International Socialist Review, says it was a theory for a tiny working class in a largely peasant country, with a weak and undeveloped bourgeoisie. Times have changed: today, the working class is a majority in most countries; the bourgeoisie have allowed democratic rule and national development; local ruling classes are fully integrated into transnational capital; there are no pre-capitalist countries any more. So there's no need for the working class to finish the 'historic tasks' of the bourgeoisie. Onwards to socialism.

Paul D'Amato, managing editor of ISR, dismisses him (which must make for some interesting editorial meetings.) He says Trotsky never meant to establish schematic stages for socialism. He began to think highly of the peasantry's capacity to fight for socialism. Numerous bourgeois tasks remain today: most poor countries haven't made the leap to a stable, democratic republic, despite World Bank rhetoric. The bourgeoisie play the same role they always have, coopting and crushing revolutionary movements, and D'Amato mentions Portugal and South Africa as examples. The problem isn't capitalism, whose class structures haven't changed that much - the problem is subjective, the problem of revolutionary leadership.



Both of them make good points. Whitehouse is trying to come to terms with what's changed in capitalism, and I think its transnationalism is at a qualitatively higher level than before. He also seems to gloss over what ruling classes have done to hang on to power. He mentions the changing circumstances of the working class, referring to Mike Davis' Planet of Slums and the rise of the informal proletariat, to suggest the working class is bigger than ever - and this is true. But D'Amato is correct to say that proletariat is disorganized: just having a larger working class means little in of itself. In fact, Davis writes about the new forms of organization in slums, and it's not socialist: it's evangelical Christianity and Islam.

D'Amato also makes the point that generalizations are impossible. He quotes Trotsky:

The laws of history have nothing in common with a pedantic schematism. Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity their backward culture is compelled to make leaps. From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the law of combined development-by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.

I don't know, fellas, I think young Trotsky might be on to something.

We can discover those laws, but they're still at a high level of abstraction. We can't predict in advance how they'll be applied. For that, we need an in depth study of the class structure, and resulting social forces, of a country.

D'Amato suggests an application, referring to Palestine, and the Palestinian working class's need to ally with Arab working classes in the region. (Sub-question: and the Israeli one?) But international solidarity doesn't require a fancy theory: it's leftist common sense. I think it might be more interesting to use PR as a way to understand the links between political economy and political practice. How do current conditions of capitalist development change the class structure of a society, impacting the potential for the formation of working class movements?

To the blogosphere: any thoughts on this? Do you think PR is still relevant? If not, why not? If so, where might be an interesting place to apply it?