Permanent Revolution (group) - History

History

The group was founded after a two-year struggle against the perspectives adopted by the L5I at its 2003 Congress. It had first organised as a tendency then as a faction.

The split followed a discussion of how to assess the impact, on class politics in general and the level of class struggle, of two changes:

1. the effect of the restoration of capitalism in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1990
2. and of the defeats of the working class movement in the 1970s/80s, particularly in the USA and United Kingdom.

The group gathered together a minority which argued that, almost without exception, the international left had undertaken no serious rexamination of world perspectives and economy since a "stagnation phase" in the 1970s and 1980s. It felt that as a result, the international left had been unable to explain either the marginalisation of the left or the failure of important protest movements against capitalism (such as the anti-capitalist movement, anti-war movement and Social Forum movements) to sink significant roots into the world working-class.

Permanent Revolution argued the L5I perspectives adopted at their Sixth Congress in 2003, that the engine of the world economy had “halted”, that world capitalism was in a “period of stagnation” and as a result the world faced a “pre-revolutionary period,” were fundamentally inaccurate and the refusal of the L5I to correct these perspectives in the light of experience proved they had decisively broken from the method of revolutionary Trotskyism. In contrast Permanent Revolution argued that the integration of the former workers states into world capitalism, when combined with the defeats of the working class in the 1970s/80s, had allowed capitalism to revive itself through globalisation.

Furthermore, it argued that while the working class movement was no longer in the counter revolutionary phase of the 1990s, the movement had still not fully recovered from those defeats and rather was in a transitional period, with uneven struggles, not yet usually generalised or sustained.