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 with, break, permanent and/or revolution:
“The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“In marble halls as white as milk,
Lined with a skin as soft as silk,
Within a fountain crystal-clear,
A golden apple doth appear.
No doors there are to this stronghold,
Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. In marble walls as white as milk (Riddle: An Egg)
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)