Theory of Permanent Counterrevolution

* Essay: The Theory of Permanent Counterrevolution. By Kees van der Pijl, 2005

URL = https://www.academia.edu/13702210/The_Theory_of_Permanent_Counterrevolution

Abstract

"After the repression following the bourgeois revolts of 1848 in Europe Marx and En'=gels adjusted their original ideas of working class class revolution with the theory of permanent revolution -it held that since the bourgeoisie no longer could be counted on to side with the workers against the ruling classes, socialists should move from the stage of democratic revolution straight to that of socialist transformation. The international dimension of this theory &as emphasised by Trotsky when he reformulated the theory in the early stages of the Russian revolution but one can also turn the argument around by seeing that beginning with the repression of the 1850s, a process of permanent counterrevolution has evolved which has passed through phases of retrenchment and attack, without allowing the initiative to pass to the side of revolution ever again. From this Perspective, fascism and Fordism, the successive editions of the Cold War, covert action, military interventions and full-scale wars are all part of this counterrevolutionary process. It owes its permanency to its unrelenting imposition which in each case works to isolate revolutionary challenges with the concentrated strength of the international forces and yet today, against the background of a deepening crisis of exhaustion of capitalist discipline, has reached its apogee without having obliterated the forces of resistance worldwide. This paper presents a first outline of the argument of a forthcoming book, The End of Political Compromise in Capitalism."

Phases

Three Phases of Permanent Counterrevolution

Kees van der Pijl:

"The epoch of permanent counterrevolution that opened up in the mid-19th century, with 1848 the most significant single date, passed through three phases.  One was the contender state phase, in which the counterrevolutionary response to challenges was combined the diversionary use of violence (repression and/or war) with the accelerated mobilisation of the productive forces to catch up with the liberal West. Fascism was the high point of this phase and it ended in 1945 with the defeat of the Axis Powers.

 The second was the American Century phase, in which the Atlantic ruling class contained state socialism, but the latter, locked in the confrontation as a contender bloc, also worked to stultify further democratic development. The West now was forced to calibrate the use of extreme violence and intervened selectively to support local ruling classes, from Greece in 1947 and 1967 and Turkey (several times) to Indonesia, Chile and Argentina, not forgetting the wars in Korea and Vietnam; whilst the Soviet bloc maintained discipline on its side (Hungary, Czechoslovakia). This phase ended in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR.

 The third phase is the contemporary systemic crisis phase in which we witness an across-the-board drift towards authoritarianism and proliferating violence in the framework of the ‘War on Terror’ accompanying the exhaustion of the social and natural substratum of globalising capital and state capitalism alike."

Excerpt

From the conclusion:

"In the aftermath of the 1848 revolts, the bourgeoisie lost its appetite for general popular revolts and began to withdraw from alliances with the population at large and especially with the working class, embarking instead on what I call a process of permanent counterrevolution. It combined the propagation of economic liberalism and the suppression of its corollary, political liberalism, where it threatened to spill over into socialism. This counterrevolution, occasionally in response to real revolutions (the Paris Commune, the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Cuban revolutions), but more often in anticipation of them, has deployed a range of different forms, combining into a permanent process fascism and Fordism, the successive editions of the Cold War, covert action and parafascism, military interventions and full-scale wars as well as colour revolutions. In the process of suppressing radical currents at home and abroad, Atlantic liberalism provided a series of inbuilt emergency provisions to ensure that the property-owning classes would be insulated from popular demands, economic from (excessive) political liberalism. These were put into practice in three phases, each in different zones of the global political economy. In the first phase, from the 1850s to 1945, Britain was ‘the rock on which the counterrevolution will build its church’ (Marx), but concrete emergencies arose primarily in the ‘semi-peripheral’ contender states: France, followed by Germany, Italy and Japan, and a host of secondary contenders in southern and eastern Europe, Turkey and Iran, and Latin America. They were responded to by authoritarian clampdowns which culminated in the totalitarian fascisms that went down in the Second World War, when a viable liberal capitalist alternative still was available in the form of US Fordism.

Secondly, in the American Century phase, the United States inherited Britain’s hegemonic role in the Lockean heartland, both as the engine of globalising capital and the ‘rock on which the counterrevolution will build its church’. However, with a Soviet bloc facing it as the new contender and a Third World emerging from the process of decolonisation seeking its way between east and west, the US calibrated its counterrevolutionary interventions by deploying a parafascist apparatus for repression and war-making, besides building the largest military machine in human history. This complex has long escaped democratic control and today is wreaking havoc the world around.

Nevertheless, especially since 1991, capitalism and hence the ability to sustain the counterrevolution are beginning to lose ground, in what I call the systemic crisis phase. We have definitely entered a new epoch—one of daunting challenges in terms of social dislocation including unprecedented levels of organised crime, as well as ecological destruction on a scale ranking with the great extinctions of the past. The ‘optimism of the will’ itself has become endangered in the face of many trends and events fueling the ‘pessimism of the intellect’, but somehow it cannot be extinguished."

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