[MARTIN Collins (SO 120) argues that Trotsky's theory…]
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-03-24Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 13 →
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MARTIN Collins (SO 120) argues that Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is applicable to Ireland today. •Permanent revolution has never been something in the revolutionary cookbook for which the peasantry was the main ingredient, but a means of looking at how to make a revolution in countries where capitalism had thoroughly distorted any 'natural' or 'national' economic development.
A strategy based on such an analysis is "the only possible way to win in Ireland."
This whole frame of reference seems to be to be wrong, scholastic, and a vulgarisation of Trotsky's theory. If all that comrade Collins is saying is that the solution to the national and social problems facing Irish workers is a working class solution - the seizure of power by the working class, then, of course, there can be no disagreement.
Whilst personally I do not think that it is necessarily true that a united Ireland can only be achieved on a socialist basis, a capitalist Ireland is clearly not something to which socialists limit the aim of their struggle.
But comrade Collins is not merely saying this. He is further claiming a) that the theory of permanent revolution applies to Ireland, and b) that the theory of permanent revolution is to do with strategy in 'distorted' economies.
First, the theory of permanent revolution was related to countries in which the bulk of the population were peasants, i.e. in its original formulation to Russia. Trotsky's analysis was that the combined contradictions created by the development of capitalist social relations and the crisis of pre-capitalist agriculture for at any rate the crisis created by the transition to, not the fully fledged development of, capitalist agriculture), generated social tensions in which the working class was placed at the heart of the class struggle as a whole, and no other class would be able to effecSocialist Organiser no 125, March 24, 1983, Page 14
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