Andrew in his two quotes from Deutscher misunderstands Deutscher's (mis)understanding of Trotsky's theories of the social structure of the Soviet Union and the theoretical standing of the Permanent Revolution. I put the parentheses in the previous sentence because it is not so much Deutscher's misunderstanding as Andrew's use of Deutscher to mean the opposite of what he said. It is obvious to me that Andrew does not know what Deutscher is referring to and arguing against.
*What Deutscher Was Talking About! (*And Andrew's Out of Time interpretation) Unfortunately, Andrew does not realize that Deutscher's analysis of social relations within the Soviet Union directly related to his re-evaluation of the theory of the Permanent Revolution. Deutscher believed that the Soviet Union, and the countries in the Soviet sphere, and finally the revolutions in places like China, Cuba, Vietnam, were ushering in a revolution from above. First, there would be extreme and violent industrialization through a planned economy. Stalinism and related Communist Party-led revolutions were non-capitalist dictatorships whose functions were quick industrialization. These types of dictatorships were necessary for reasons Trotsky set out in the Permanent Revolution, essentially the bourgeois class in the many places is too weak to fulfill this role of industrialization and "Republican" government around representative democracy. Deutscher's belief was that once this process of bloody and violent Stalinist (and Maoist) industrialization took place these countries would democratize from above, without a political revolution. In other words Stalinism, and like bureaucratic formations, would "evolve" into Worker's Democracies and eventually. He also expected that other "Third World" countries would go through the same process. Then all of these Workers Democracies would then form close international economic and political institutions that would out-compete the rich capitalist powers. What was in the air at the time of Deutscher's writing was what we later called "Third Worldism;" the idea that the poor of the Third World would do what the proletariat in the rich capitalist countries did not do. Deutscher's theory has a cousin relationship to Third Worldism. *Both of the quotes from Deutscher that Andrew gives us without much thought, are illustrations of Deutscher's general theory and don't make sense without that theory. *Deutscher's criticism of Trotsky was that Trotsky believed that socialism, worker's democracies, and an international cooperative economy could not exist on an international scale without revolutions in the advanced capitalist nations. That any worker's state of any kind that was created anywhere would ultimately be unstable and be under constant attack from international capital without revolutions in places like Germany and the United States. I think that Trotsky was proven to be more correct than Deutscher in this sense. This is true no matter what evaluation you have of Trotsky or Deutscher overall. If readers of this list-mail want to start somewhere I would suggest Marcel van der Linden's *Western Marxism and the Soviet Union*. Chapter Four,* "From the 'Great Patriotic War' to the Structural Assimilation of Eastern Europe (1941-56).* There are two sections of that chapter that are especially pertinent, the first is called "The Deutscher Debate" and the second right after that is a discussion of James Burnham. Instead of thinking things through, Andrew uses Deutscher to display a weird neo-Stalinist idea about Trotsky's personality. Jerry On Sun, Apr 11, 2021 at 8:05 PM Andrew Stewart <[email protected]> wrote: > Oh please Louis, you are just trying to shoe-horn into this an excuse to > prove Trotsky didn't drop the ball here. He even says it more clearly in > the anthology you uploaded! > > > *Moreover, Permanent Revolution has taken a course very different from > that which Trotsky had predicted. In accordance with the tradition of > classical Marxism, he expected its next acts to be played out in the > “advanced and civilized” countries of the West. Readers of this anthology > will see for themselves how large Germany, France, Britain (and the United > States) loomed in his revolutionary expectations and how urgent was the > immediacy of the hopes he placed on them. Instead, the underdeveloped and > backward East has become the main theatre of revolution. It is not that > Trotsky overlooked the East’s potentialities—far from it—but he saw these > as being secondary to the potentialities of the West, which in his eyes > were to the end—decisive.This fault of perspective (if this is the right > term here) is closely connected with the Marxist assessment of the role of > the industrial working class in modern society, an assessment summed up in > the famous epigram that “the revolution will either be the work of the > workers or it will not be at all.” Yet not one of the social upheavals of > the last two decades has been strictly “the work of the workers.” * > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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