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permanent revolution
“The theory of permanent revolution is much more than just a theory. It is the bedrock of the Marxist program and strategy for revolution in the underdeveloped countries today. It began as Leon Trotsky’s attempt to develop beyond the early writings of Marx and Engels, and come to terms with the changes brought about by the rise of imperialism. A few of the key ideas clashed with traditional “orthodox Marxism” and were only confirmed in the heat of the Russian Revolution in 1917 . . .
. . . Trotsky’s theory was based on the ‘law of combined and uneven development’. Orthodox Marxism held that all countries undergo the same pattern of development as the advanced ones. Trotsky challenged this notion.
Economically ‘backward’ countries, he argued, were not only unequal, but developing in a combined way alongside more advanced economies. This meant they could appropriate, or have imposed on them, advanced forms of technology and economic production without the intermediate stages of development which the first capitalist countries had gone through. Backwardness and the most advanced productive technology would be combined in a variety of new social formations . . .
. . . As imperialism spread, it pulled country after country into the world capitalist market – countries which had no undergone the type of bourgeois revolutions that had swept away old feudal regimes, and opened the door to capitalist development as had happened in Britain, Holland and France. Trotsky recognized that even if the underdeveloped countries were to have bourgeois revolutions it was impossible for them to enter the market as equal competitors. Their small, weak national capitalist classes were totally subordinate to the bankers, politicians and military forces of the imperialist powers. They could merely struggle for a slightly larger slice of the cake, and this only through alliances with their peasant masses and the rising working class. The ‘backward’ countries were developing capitalist economies, but the tasks of the bourgeois revolution still had to be carried out . . .
. . . While the bourgeois revolution clears the way for capitalist development, it also creates important openings for the working class to organize itself to press its own independent demands. But the question remained – who should carry out these tasks and to what end? . . .
. . . The very act of implementing the tasks of the bourgeois revolution would fatally undermine the bourgeoisie itself. Not only would imperialism be affected, but also the national bourgeoisie would be threatened too, especially if their land holdings were broken up and distributed to the peasants. The bourgeoisie would then be forced to resist its own revolution with all its power. (To this day there is not a bourgeois regime in the whole of the Third World that heads a country where all three major tasks of the bourgeois revolution – democracy, national liberation and land reform – have been genuinely carried out). If the working class were to pursue its class interests it would have to embark on the course of socialist revolution by breaking the economic power of the bourgeoisie. The completion of the tasks of the bourgeois revolution would therefore take place simultaneously with the beginning of the socialist revolution. There would be no gap between fixed ‘stages’: instead the revolution, to be successful, had to be an unbroken, uninterrupted one, ‘permanent’ in the sense of ‘permanent session’, and culminating in a revolutionary workers’ government, the dictatorship of proletariat. . .
. . . Trotsky [also] insisted that revolutions and counter-revolutions are not constrained within national boundaries. The class struggle, he argued, can have far-reaching effects right across the world, thus reinforcing the need for revolutionaries to organize on an international scale and fight to mobilize solidarity with struggles in countries other than their own [hence the need for a international organization of revolutionaries].
Summary of Trotsky’s Basic Postulates of Permanent Revolution
1. The revolution is international in character.
2. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat will complete the tasks of the bourgeois revolution in colonized countries.
3. The question of land distribution and national independence assign an exceptional role to the peasantry, in alliance with the proletariat.
4. This alliance will be built under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard, organized in a revolutionary party.
5. The working class will lead this alliance with the peasantry.
6. There is no intermediate stage, of the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants.
7. to enforce a slogan for the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry playing an equal role can only have a reactionary effect.
8. The democratic revolution grows directly over into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.
9. The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it.
10. The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena.
11. This approach eliminates the category of countries that are ‘unripe’ for socialism. Different countries will go through the process of socialist transformation at different tempos.
12. The theory of socialism in one country consistently opposes the theory of permanent revolution. [note – the theory of ‘socialism in one country’ was developed by Stalin to justify focusing on “building” socialism first in the USSR, before spreading it world-wide. –YSA]
13. The theory of socialism in one country reduced the Communist International to an auxiliary weapon against military intervention in the Soviet United, not for extending revolution.
The text above is excerpted from a bulletin published by Socialist Action/Canada titled “Basic Marxism Education Kit.” They in turn got the text from October, 1988 issue of Socialist Outlook, the newspaper published by SA/YSA’s comrades in Britain. Where different, the original British spelling has been changed to American.
