The theory of the permanent revolution presents a model in which completing the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in so-called backward countries flows naturally into the socialist revolution because the common interests of feudalists, landlords, and national capitalists with the imperialists are far greater than any common interest with the poor peasants, middle peasants or proletarians.
On 29 August, 1917, Lenin wrote From a Publicist’s Diary in which he publicly endorsed Trotsky’s analysis:
You do not have to give these demands (seizure of the landlords’ land and its division amongst the peasants) a lot of thought to see that it is absolutely impossible to realise them in alliance with the capitalists, without breaking completely with them, without waging the most determined and ruthless struggle against the capitalist class, without overthrowing its rule.[11]
Lenin also concluded that the presence of the Soviet Union meant that colonial and semi-colonial countries, certainly those in Asia, did not need to pass through a capitalist phase. This was endorsed by the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East held in September 1920 which declared most definitely that the poor peasants of the East did not have to proceed via bourgeois democracy; did not have to pass through a phase of capitalist development before they could go over to a Soviet system.[12] The Congress also accepted that the Russian experience had demonstrated that middle peasants would support socialist revolution if the resulting regime approved the seizure of the landed estates and their distribution to the peasants by the peasants.
This analysis is, of course, quite the opposite of the ‘bloc of four classes’ proposed by Mao and Stalin. At the time it assumed governmental power in 1949, the CCP already had control over those sectors of the economy most important for a socialist transition; heavy industry and banking. The big estates and landlordism had to be eradicated and the land distributed amongst the peasants, preferably by the peasants themselves, and this should and could have been done quickly. The artificial delay in the move to a workers’ state was based on erroneous ideological concepts.
Of course the theory of the permanent revolution in no way precludes the development of pre-capitalist, colonial countries into capitalist countries as happened with India. It argues that the struggle for national democratic demands opens the possibility of direct transition to a workers’ state as happened in Russia 1917-1918, and was brilliantly confirmed in China in 1949-1953. The theory also provides a guide to the limits that will be imposed on the struggle for national independence if the national bourgeoisie retain the leadership. In countries such as India the struggle ended with the conquest of political independence, but the completion of the democratic tasks was only partial, as the position of women and the poor peasants only too clearly demonstrate. Nor does the theory reject the possibility that certain external factors could intervene to generate the bourgeois revolution and the capitalist mode of production. In certain specific circumstances it might be in the interests of a section of the imperialists to force through a capitalist transformation in a relatively backward country. This is what began in Japan, in 1852, when Commodore Perry used gunboat diplomacy to force Japanese ports to open to American trade, and continued after WWII when the US administration feared Japan could be lost to Communism if its economic foundations were not restructured and strengthened.