Permanent revolution

Permanent revolution is a Marxist theory detailing the growing over of the liberal–bourgeois revolution into the proletarian–socialist revolution. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels addressed it in works such as Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850). The Great October Socialist Revolution in November 1917 proved the original Marxist formula of "permanent revolution" correct, as the Bolsheviks had managed to carry out a successful proletarian revolution eight months after a bourgeois revolution; thus, the bourgeois revolution "grew into" the socialist revolution.

Leon Trotsky formulated a revisionist distortion of the theory; Trotsky posited that socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union without the immediate aid of revolutions in Western Europe. This view, Eurocentric in nature, proved incorrect as socialism was able to be successfully built in the Soviet Union without revolutions in the West, and furthermore, Trotsky's distortion is an ultra-left theory that attempts to skip stages and not take material conditions into account. Trotsky's theory also underrated the role of the peasantry in the revolutionary process. Trotsky's theory serves a counter-revolutionary role as it argues against building socialism in one country, and thus, against liquidating and expropriating the bourgeoisie of that country.