Permanent Revolution

The theory, due to Trotsky, that a proletarian socialist revolution may develop continuously from a previous non-socialist revolution. The actual phrase is taken from Marx's Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League (1850).

Trotsky depicted Russia as an example of uneven development, combining the most modern and the most backward social and economic forces. Industrialization had been forced by an absolutist state and financed by foreign capital. As a result, the domestic bourgeoisie would not establish hegemony and thus could not lead a democratic revolution. In contrast, the proletariat acquired a significance beyond its size because of the large scale and concentration of industry and its own levels of organization and consciousness.

Given the impotence of the bourgeoisie, it was left to the proletariat to accomplish the democratic revolution. However, a workers' government could not be restricted to those tasks because it would be influenced by the continuing class struggle. Once set in motion the revolution would become an uninterrupted process, the democratic stage merging into the socialist.

Trotsky acknowledged that the material base for socialism did not exist in Russia but he contended that this could be resolved by the second part of the theory—the international character of the revolution. Russia was just a link in the chain; it could not survive without the support of the European proletariat.

— Geraldine Lievesley

"Permanent Revolution" was Leon Trotsky's explanation of how a communist revolution could occur in an industrially backward Russia. According to classical Marxism, only a society of advanced capitalism with a large working class was ripe for communist revolution. Russia met neither prerequisite. Further, Karl Marx conceived of a two-stage revolution: first the bourgeois revolution, then in sequence the proletarian revolution establishing a dictatorship for transition to communism. Trotsky argued that the two-stage theory did not apply. Rather, he said, Russia was in a stage of uneven development where both bourgeois and proletarian revolutions were developing together under the impact of the advanced West.

Trotsky predicted that once revolution broke out in Russia it would be in permanence as the result of an East - West dynamic. The bourgeois majority revolution would be overthrown by a conscious proletarian minority that would carry forward the torch of revolution. However, a second phase was necessary: namely, the proletarian revolution in Western Europe ignited by the Russian proletariat's initiative; the West European proletariat now in power rescues the beleaguered proletarian minority in Russia; and the path is opened to the international communist revolution.

Trotsky's theory seemed corroborated in the 1917 Russian revolution. Tsarism was overthrown by a bourgeois Provisional Government in February which the Bolsheviks then overthrew in October. However, the second phase posited by Trotsky's theory, the West European revolution, did not materialize. The Bolsheviks faced the dilemma of how to sustain power where an advanced industrial economy did not exist. Was not Bolshevik rule doomed to failure without Western aid?

Usurping power, Josef Stalin answered Trotsky's theory with his "socialism in one country." Curiously, his recipe was similar to a strategy Trotsky earlier proposed, namely, command economy, forced industrialization, and collectivization. With the communist collapse in Russia in 1991 both Trotsky's and Stalin's theories became moot.

Bibliography

Trotsky, Leon. (1969). The Permanent Revolution. New York: Pathfinder Press.

—CARL A. LINDEN