Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25. No. 13. 1962
Socialist Dispute
Socialist Dispute
Sir,—I would like to draw your read attention to a slight inaccuracy in Salient's account of my address to the Socialist Club on the subject of the Sino-Soviet dispute. Your reporter has generally reported my remarks faithfully but by adding one word not used by me has tended to blur the issue somewhat. Your reporter wrote: "The Chinese he argued espoused the Trotskyist position on the question of the role of "national bourgeois revolutions." The word "bourgeois" should of course be omitted. It is central to the Trotsky's concept of the Permanent Revolution that in colonial countries the peasantry and the proletariat together form the principal motive force for the overthrow of the old order. The bourgeoisee in colonial countries do not—on this theory—ever adopt the completely revolutionary role historically performed by the same class in Britain, France and Western Europe generally. Yours faithfully. H. C. Macneill.