Yuri Krasin's The Contemporary Revolutionary Process carries 1985 on its spine, but the book was finished before the year it announces. Nothing in its eleven essays knows that Konstantin Chernenko would die in March 1985, that a new General Secretary would within weeks begin talking about uskoreniye (acceleration) and then perestroika, or that the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress of February 1986 would revise the very vocabulary Krasin treats as settled. The words perestroika, glasnost and Gorbachev do not appear. The latest Party congress cited anywhere in the volume is the Twenty-Sixth, of 1981, quoted a dozen times as the current word; the most recent source in the apparatus is a 1984 Progress edition of Andropov's speeches. This is a Chernenko-interregnum manuscript in a 1985 jacket, and it reads like one — the last full-dress statement of the CPSU's doctrine of the "world revolutionary process" before the ground moved under it. That timing is not incidental to how the book should be read. It is a summing-up delivered on the eve of the event that would settle its central claim, and it has the serene confidence of a doctrine that does not yet know it is about to be tested.
Krasin was a senior theorist of the Soviet party-academic establishment, a specialist in Lenin's theory of revolution who had spent a career on exactly the questions this book systematises. The volume is not reportage and not polemic in the manner of the anti-Trotsky pamphlets Progress was issuing in the same years — Mikhail Basmanov's Contemporary Trotskyism, the Basmanov–Leibzon Revolutionary Vanguard. It is the general theory those books presuppose: an attempt to state, at the level of principle, the laws governing revolution in the second half of the twentieth century. Its companion is the 1975 Progress volume Leninist Theory of Socialist Revolution and Our Time, drawn from the same doctrinal well; where that book and Rostislav Ulyanovsky's writing on Asia and Africa work particular regions, Krasin works the architecture. The commission, in other words, was to give the international communist movement its map of the whole — the definitive account of how the pieces of world revolution fit together, and of who moves them.
The map is worth stating precisely, because its precision is the point at which it can be argued with. For Krasin the revolutionary events of the age — he opens with a genuine roll-call: Chile, the Portuguese Revolution of the Carnations, the Vietnamese victory, Laos, Nicaragua in 1979, El Salvador, the transformations in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia — are not a scatter of separate national dramas but moments of a single process. "For all its diversity, fragmentation and complexity, it is an indivisible and integral process," with "its own inherent objective laws." That process has three great forces: the world socialist system, the working-class movement in the capitalist countries, and the national-liberation movement of the former colonies. And it has a hierarchy. The decisive force, the one that gives the others their scope, is "existing socialism" — the Soviet bloc as a state formation. Krasin is unembarrassed about this. He writes of "the interests of existing socialism as the leading force in the world revolutionary process," and of socialism as "the leading force and the vanguard of the world-wide social revolution." The changing balance between the two state systems is the mainspring; peaceful coexistence is the form the contest takes in the nuclear age; and revolution advances, above all, as the weight of the socialist camp grows.
Follow that logic to its root and you reach the sentence that gives the book away. The "main contradiction of our epoch," Krasin writes, "is, in effect, the shift of the antagonism between labour and capital into the sphere of international and inter-state relations." Read that twice. The class struggle — the conflict between those who work and those who own — has been relocated. It no longer runs primarily through the factory, the street or the ministry of any given country; it runs between two blocs of states, "one of which is backed by the state-organised working class, and the other, by monopoly capital." The proletariat's antagonist is no longer, in the first instance, its own bourgeoisie but a rival government. And the proletariat's own weapon is, correspondingly, a government: "existing socialism, as the leading progressive force in the basic contradiction of our epoch." What began, in Marx, as the self-emancipation of the exploited has become the foreign policy of a group of states.
This is the hinge on which the whole book turns, and it is worth naming plainly what it costs. Once revolution is defined as the advancing weight of the socialist bloc, the human content of revolution — the exploited acting for themselves — becomes secondary, a variable that the "objective laws" will sort out. Krasin does not hide this; he theorises it. In his account of life inside the bloc, he writes that the development of socialist society proceeds through "dialectical leaps which, however, do not require the substitution of one socioeconomic formation for another," and that "the new ways and means for their resolution" of social contradictions are precisely those "not involving class struggle or social revolution." Inside the leading force of world revolution, in other words, there is no more class struggle and no more revolution. History's motor has been installed in a machine that has switched it off. The exploited of Chile, Salvador and Soweto are to be liberated by the growth of a system whose own defining virtue is that within it nobody struggles against anybody. The doctrine asks the world's workers to invest their emancipation in a state that has declared its own social peace complete.
The Fourth International's tradition had a name for a workers' state whose bureaucracy had made social peace with itself and reoriented its politics around the defence of the existing order, and it had made the argument half a century before Krasin. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936) Trotsky traced exactly this migration of the revolutionary idea from class to state. "The 'theory' of socialism in one country," he wrote, "already signalized an effort to liberate Soviet foreign policy from the program of international revolution"; and the end point of that effort was a bureaucracy that, "having betrayed the world revolution, but still feeling loyal to it," had directed its chief energies to "neutralizing the bourgeoisie" and dreamed of nothing grander than "an eternal pact of non-aggression between socialism and capitalism." Krasin's peaceful coexistence is that pact, forty-nine years on, elevated from a diplomatic expedient into the master principle of the world revolutionary process. What Trotsky described as a symptom of degeneration, Krasin presents as the crowning achievement of Leninism. The two men are looking at the same thing. They disagree only about whether it is a betrayal or a triumph — and the disagreement is the whole quarrel between the two traditions descended from October.
Here it is worth applying the test that this series applies to every volume: not whether the book uses militant vocabulary — it does, and so did Trotsky — but whether its central category can ever be turned on the author's own side. In Krasin the answer is a clean no. The CPSU appears throughout as the subject that combats opportunism, revisionism and adventurism; it is never once their possible object. The bloc is the actor of history and never the thing acted upon; its "subjective mistakes and miscalculations" are conceded in the abstract but attached to no named decision, no dated event, nothing a reader could check or contest. The word Czechoslovakia does not appear in a book about the world revolutionary process written seventeen years after 1968; Hungary appears only as the name of a country that "carried out" its revolution. A doctrine in which the leading force is by definition beyond criticism is not a theory of history but a theology of one of its institutions — and a theology is falsified not by argument but by events.
The book's treatment of Chile shows the doctrine working on a real case, and it is the sharpest place to test it, because here the theory issues a concrete verdict about a concrete defeat. Krasin returns to Chile repeatedly; the Popular Unity government of 1970–73, overthrown by Pinochet's coup and, in his own honest phrase, "strangulated by fascist reaction," is his central laboratory. His reading is unambiguous. The Chilean Communist Party, he writes, adopted a strategy of a multi-stage revolutionary process, "a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism" — and this was correct. The catastrophe is charged to the left. He quotes Carlos Altamirano, then general secretary of Chile's Socialist Party, who held that the party "sees the revolutionary process as an uninterrupted advance, without stages or premature consolidations within the existing capitalist system," and condemns this as an "ultra-leftist view" that could only produce "an instant break-up of the bourgeois system." The extremists in the Socialist Party, on this account, disorganised the alliance with the middle strata and handed reaction its opening. The strategy that ended in the National Stadium is vindicated; the people who wanted to arm the workers are blamed.
Every element of this is answerable, and was answered — in some cases before Krasin wrote, in one case by the very tradition he indicts. The charge against Altamirano — "uninterrupted advance, without stages," a "leap" over the democratic phase — is word for word the caricature of permanent revolution that Stalinism had aimed at Trotsky since the 1920s, and Trotsky had dismantled it in The Permanent Revolution (1930) by pointing out that it describes nobody's actual position. "The dictatorship of the proletariat," he wrote there, "does not come after the completion of the democratic revolution," but grows out of it "through a number of sharpening social clashes"; his repeated retort to the accusation of skipping stages was simply, "Where is the ignoring of the democratic stage?" The theory of permanent revolution was never a call to leap over democratic tasks; it was an argument about which class would have to carry them out. Krasin, like the polemicists before him, convicts the left of a position it did not hold, and the refutation was sixty years old and in print.
More to the point, the Fourth International's actual reading of Chile was the reverse of Krasin's, and it was published as the events unfolded. Six weeks after the coup, Intercontinental Press laid the defeat not at the door of those who pressed too fast but at that of those who held the masses back: because the task of building a revolutionary party "was not undertaken," it wrote, "because of the treacherous role played by the Social Democrats and above all the Stalinists," "the Chilean workers were thus left disarmed politically." The Popular Unity strategy of legality and gradual advance — the strategy Krasin praises — had, on this reading, kept the workers within a constitutional framework and a faith in the "constitutionalist principles" of the officer corps right up to the morning the officers moved. The disagreement is exact and it is total. For Krasin the workers of Chile were destroyed by an excess of revolutionary impatience; for the tradition this series writes from, they were destroyed by a strategy that disarmed them in the name of not frightening the middle class.
Ernest Mandel had already given that argument its general form, and its most damaging historical precedent, in a text written before any of the events Krasin analyses. In "Peaceful Coexistence and World Revolution," published in the International Socialist Review in the spring of 1970 — a full-length treatment of precisely the doctrine Krasin systematises — Mandel walked back through Spain in the 1930s, where the Communist Party had insisted the workers subordinate social revolution to the anti-fascist war: "the CP called upon them to win the war first, and then to complete the revolution. This led to the crushing of the revolution, which could only produce defeat in the war." The formula Krasin recommends for Chile — democratic tasks first, stage by measured stage, socialism deferred to a later and safer moment — is the Spanish formula, and Mandel had already traced where it leads. He had also, in the same essay, named the specific illusion Krasin still trades in: the Soviet expectation of a stable "state of national democracy" in the newly liberated countries, which Mandel argued the actual class dynamics of the post-colonial world were tearing apart. That the counter-argument was in print, from the pen of the man Soviet publishing treated as the arch-heretic, and that Krasin's book proceeds as though it did not exist, is itself a finding: this is a doctrine that has decided in advance which objections it will hear.
One further mechanism deserves notice, because it recurs across this series and Krasin performs it too. He derives the whole edifice of peaceful coexistence from Lenin, and specifically from the Decree on Peace of 1917. But in the passage where he does so, the words inside the quotation marks are not the doctrine being credited. Lenin is quoted saying that the Bolsheviks are "establishing completely different international relations," and that a transitional epoch has opened "throughout the whole period in which there remain two property systems" — neither of which contains the phrase "peaceful coexistence" or the policy Krasin hangs on it. The pedigree is asserted in Krasin's own voice; the citation, examined, points somewhere else. The Decree on Peace did not use the term, which entered Soviet diplomacy later. This is the same move that recurs whenever these volumes derive a foreign-policy doctrine from Lenin: the quotation marks are produced as evidence, and the thing they are meant to prove is not inside them.
None of this makes the book worthless, and it would be a poor introduction that pretended otherwise. Krasin is a serious writer working at the top of his tradition's capacity, and there are registers in which the book is genuinely honest. Its opening survey of the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1970s is not propaganda; it is an accurate and even generous inventory of real movements — the Carnation Revolution, the Sandinista victory, the Salvadorean insurgency, the southern-African liberation wars — and Krasin names Pol Pot's "bloodstained regime" for what it was and welcomes its overthrow, at a time when this was not a costless thing to write. He quotes at length, and fairly, the Salvadorean Communist leader Schafik Handal on the transitional character of a democratic anti-imperialist power, letting a voice from the actual struggle speak. His insistence that revolution cannot be imported — that socialism "has nothing in common with the vulgar adventurist 'export of revolution' concepts," and that the transformation of any capitalist country "is the business of the working class and the other progressive forces of these countries" — is a real principle, honestly held, and it sits awkwardly against the state-centred logic of the rest of the book in a way that is to Krasin's credit. His rejection of the "spurious North–South face-off" in favour of a class analysis of imperialism is sharper than much of what passed for radical development theory at the time. And he concedes, of Chile, that the Popular Unity's own economic programme failed to reach the urban middle strata — a genuine self-criticism, even if it is aimed away from the strategic question it should have raised. He closes the whole work with a modesty rare in this literature, presenting his theses as "considerations which remain open for further discussion and deeper analysis." A reader is not asked to despise this book. A reader is asked to notice where its honesty stops.
Where it stops is the leading force. Everything in Krasin's system rests on the durability and momentum of "existing socialism" — on the premise that the socialist bloc is the growing weight that will tip the world's balance and, by growing, carry the exploited everywhere toward liberation. The book was finished around 1984. Within seven years the leading force had ceased to exist. The Soviet Union dissolved, the bloc it anchored dissolved with it, and it did so not under the blows of imperialism but from its own internal exhaustion — the exhaustion of a system that, as Krasin had insisted, no longer generated any internal struggle capable of renewing it. It is not necessary to gloat over this, and it would be cheap to read 1991 back into 1985 as though Krasin should have seen it coming; he could not have, and neither did his opponents predict the date. But the collapse is a verdict of the event on the doctrine, and it fell exactly where the two traditions had located their disagreement. Krasin had staked world revolution on the permanence of the Soviet state and had theorised that state as a place beyond class struggle. Trotsky had argued, in the book this series holds up as the standard, that a workers' state resting on an unaccountable privileged bureaucracy was not a summit but an unstable and provisional formation, liable to be pulled apart by the contradictions it refused to name. When the leading force came apart, it was Krasin's certainty, not Trotsky's warning, that the event refuted.
That is finally what makes The Contemporary Revolutionary Process worth reprinting. It is the most lucid available statement of a way of thinking that identified the fate of world revolution with the fate of a group of states — and it was published at the last moment when a serious theorist could still make that identification and believe it settled. Read today, its confidence is its most instructive feature. Here is the doctrine complete, its logic followed to the end, its alternatives dismissed, its verdict on Chile pronounced — and here, standing just outside the frame, is the history that was about to answer it. Krasin asked his readers to trust that the exploited would be freed by the growing weight of an existing state. The century's last decade returned the question to the exploited themselves.