Michael Lowy: 'The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: the Theory of Permanent Revolution', Verso, 1981, £4.50; Maxine Molyneux and Fred Halliday: 'The Ethiopian Revolution', Verso, 1982, £5.95.
Michael Lowy's book is overdue, by about fifty years. It deals more thoroughly with the overall theory of world revolution than any work since Trotsky's Permanent Revolution which was published in 1928. First he traces the theory's origins in the philosophical method of Marx and Engels. He then examines the development of the concept in order to submit it to the crucial tests posed in the second half of the book: does the theory help us to understand and to change reality? With this format he has produced an excellent educational tool, one which, despite the occasionally stodgy language, will be of great practical use to militants.
The theory of permanent revolution has three major postulates. First, because of the internationalisation of the productive forces and social classes, socialist revolution is on the agenda in even the most 'backward' countries. Second, the passage from democratic tasks to socialist tasks in the revolution is uninterrupted; that is, the bourgeois democratic tasks of the revolution cannot be completed by the national bourgeoisie, but only through socialist revolution. Finally the future of the revolution depends on its extension internationally. There can be no socialism in one country.
Considering that for the last decade this theory has been propagated only by small groups of revolutionaries, the paucity of the alternatives on offer is truly remarkable. Apart from spontaneist ideas the only alternative theories in the workers' movement are the fifty seven varieties of warmed up Stalinist dogmas: the 'national democratic revolution' made by a 'bloc of four classes' determined to take a 'non-capitalist road' towards a 'new democracy' ushering in a 'state of socialist orientation'. It is surely worth noting that many countries which have taken such an option following social upheavals have invariably turned out to be capitalist — and usually dictatorships to boot.
Ethiopia is a case in point. In Maxine Molyneux and Fred Halliday's new book The Ethiopian Revolution we are treated to a detailed account of the overthrow of Haile Selassie's imperial regime in 1974. Selassie presided over one of the most backward social systems in the world. Even one year later only 4 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product came from industrial production, while roughly four fifths of the population were subsistence farmers and that many on the left underestimated the depth and significance of the revolution. The replacement for Selassie, the Derg, (a military cabal with a secret membership of low-ranking [illegible]) aspires towards modernising the economy, and has presided over an extensive land reform. In its own words it has embarked upon a 'National Democratic Revolution'.
But Molyneux and Halliday lack the analytical and theoretical tools to explain the nature of this revolution. Despite a wealth of description of the power struggles within the Derg led by the 'ruthless and cunning' 'Marxist-Leninist' leader Mengistu, the authors cannot explain why the majority of the people within the Ethiopian state is in revolt against the new rulers. The overthrow of Selassie was a catalyst unleashing a tide of national movements in Tigray, Ogaden, Eritrea and across the Horn of Africa, which threatens not only the unity of the Ethiopian imperial state, but also the very social relations within the region a point which the authors miss entirely. The Derg's response to this is well known: having eliminated the opposition of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP) in the major cities via the 'red terror' of 1977 which liquidated thousands of leftists, Mengistu has mobilised the largest army in Africa against the 'secessionists' in the north, south and east of the country.
The theory of permanent revolution explains these events. While the Ethiopian revolution is saddled with the Stalinist ideology of the National Democratic Revolution and a military leadership it will be incapable of advancing the interests of the exploited beyond a certain point. The Stalinists will no doubt reply that in a country as backward as Ethiopia they have to go one step at a time — first the 'national democratic revolution' and then the socialist revolution. This argument completely misses the point. It is precisely because the economy is so backward that the revolution must go all the way, rather than proceeding in preconceived stages. Of course the lack of a powerful and experienced working class is an added obstacle to the revolution, but the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) is testimony to the existence of forces in the region who are prepared to go all the way. The EPLF itself adheres to a theory of the 'national democratic revolution' but in practice it breaks from this framework.
The theory of permanent revolution is an alternative perspective to that of the Stalinists and, for that matter, of Molyneux and Halliday: one which explains that the future of the revolution in the Horn depends above all not on power struggles within the bonapartist regime of Mengistu, but on the self-organisation of the masses in the region towards deepening the socialist revolution. That is the importance of the movements in Eritrea and Tigray, and of the class struggle throughout the Horn, subjects which all receive short shrift in the account by Molyneux and Halliday. (The Eritreans are advised for instance that they should, reasonably, offer to swap a piece of Eritrea to give Ethiopia access to the Red Sea — in return for 'autonomy' for the rest of the nation, p.191).
In reality the Stalinist 'theories' of the 'national democratic revolution' are not strategies for revolution at all. They are simply political expedients for Soviet foreign policy. Whatever best suits the interests of the Kremlin is 'revolutionary', 'Marxist-Leninist' and so on. This theory divides the world into two camps — that of the Soviet bloc and of imperialism — rather than between the two fundamental classes on a world scale, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The definition of a regime as 'revolutionary' depends on whether it buys its weapons from the Kremlin, which sea routes it can control and so on.
The travesty of this approach is apparent with the case of Somalia, Ethiopia's neighbour. The Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party was transformed in the eyes of the Kremlin in the course of a few days of 1977 from a 'friendly' traveller on the 'non-capitalist path' to being a reactionary agent of imperialism after the Somali invasion of the Ogaden in 1977. This point is reinforced at this very moment in the Horn where Soviet helicopter gunships flown by North Yemeni pilots began on 16 February to disperse lethal nerve gases across the mountains and plains of Eritrea, as part of the latest massive Ethiopian offensive against the Eritrean revolution.
Lacking the perspective of permanent revolution Molyneux and Halliday end up as apologists for the Mengistu regime and its Soviet backers. As Lowy points out so clearly in his book, this is not an academic argument. From the defeat of the Chinese revolution in 1926-27, to Indonesia in 1965 and Chile in 1973, Stalinist 'theories' have been responsible for huge and bloody defeats of the workers and peasants of the third world. This is the logic of 'two campism' by which theories are concocted not to make revolutions but to gain advantage for the Kremlin in its war of manoeuvres with the imperialists.