Break With FI and Permanent Revolution
Barnes' article Their Trotsky and Ours also underpinned the party's decisions in the 1980s to abandon its support for Leon Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution, and its withdrawal from the world Trotskyist movement and the reunified Fourth International. It is based on Barnes' speech and explains the SWP's view on Trotskyism. Barnes repudiated the traditional Trotskyist understanding of Permanent Revolution in favor of Lenin's pre-WW1 positions of the "democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry", and a view highly sympathetic to the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada. The speech was a preface to the expulsion of a significant minority of the SWP, and was regarded by the opposition as a complete break with the party's traditions.
As national secretary, Barnes played a key role in the expulsion of more than a third of the party's members in 1983 and 1984, those who supported the USFI. In 1990, Barnes wrote on behalf of the SWP to withdraw it from close relations with the Fourth International and to recognize the reality that it was now part of a 'Pathfinder tendency' consisting of the SWP and several Communist Leagues of co-thinkers in other countries.
Read more about this topic: Jack Barnes
Famous quotes containing the words break, permanent and/or revolution:
“At the heart of male bonding is this experience of boys in early puberty: they know they must break free from their mothers and the civilized world of women, but they are not ready yet for the world of men, so they are only at home with other boys, equally outcast, equally frightened, and equally involved in posturing what they believe to be manhood.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The revolution must end and the republic must begin. In our constitution, right must take the place of duty, welfare that of virtue, and self-defense that of punishment. Everyone must be able to prevail and to live according to one’s own nature.”
—Georg Büchner (1813–1837)