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 permanent revolution, break, permanent and/or revolution:
““More!” is as effective a revolutionary slogan as was ever invented by doctrinaires of discontent. The American, who cannot learn to want what he has, is a permanent revolutionary.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.”
—Michel Foucault (1926–1984)
“A country whose buildings are of wood, can never increase in its improvements to any considerable degree.... Whereas when buildings are of durable materials, every new edifice is an actual and permanent acquisition to the state, adding to its value as well as to its ornament.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“If to be masculine is to be smart, do let [woman] try; or are you afraid, if she has the chance, that a few of your laurels will droop?”
—M.C. R., U.S. women’s magazine contributor. The Revolution (March 19, 1868)