The Permanent Revolution, and, Results and Prospects

As THIS book goes to press in the English language, the whole thinking part of the international working class, and in a sense, the whole of " civilized" humanity, listens with particularly keen interest to the reverberations of the economic turn taking place on the part of the former czarist empire. The greatest attention in this connection is aroused by the problem of collectivizing the peasant holdings. And no wonder : in this sphere the break with the past assumes a particularly clear-cut character. But a correct evaluation of collectivization is unthinkable without a general conception of the socialist revolution. And here on an even higher plane, we are again convinced that everything in the field of Marxian theory is bound up with practical activity. The most remote, and it would seem, "abstract" disagreements, if they are thought out to the end, will sooner or later be expressed in practise, and the latter allows not a single theoretical mistake to be made with impunity. The collectivization of peasant holdings is, it is understood, the most necessary and fundamental part of the socialist transformation of society. The volume and tempo of collectivization, however, are not only determined by the government's will but, in the final analysis, by the economic factors : by the height of the country's economic level, the relationship between industry and agriculture PERMANENT REVOLUTION and consequently by the technical resources of agriculture itself. Industrialization is the motive force of the whole newer culture and, by that, the only conceivable basis of socialism.…