Permanent revolution
Permanent revolution is a concept within Marxist theory that describes the idea that a liberal–bourgeois revolution can transition into a proletarian–socialist revolution. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels addressed it in works such as Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850).[1]
The most prominent application of this theory came during the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, successfully executed a proletarian revolution just months after the February Revolution had overthrown the Tsarist regime and established a provisional government. This sequence of events exemplified Marx's notion of permanent revolution: rather than two distinct revolutionary phases, Russia experienced an immediate transition from one form of revolution (bourgeois) to another (socialist).
Leon Trotsky's revisionist distortion
Leon Trotsky formulated a revisionist distortion of this 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.
Trotsky's distortion is an ultra-left theory that attempts to skip stages and not take material conditions into account. Trotsky's theory also denied 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.[2]
References
- ↑ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1850). Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League.
"Although the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realization of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development, this time they can at least be certain that the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will thereby be accelerated. But they themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.
- ↑ Joseph Stalin (1926). Concerning Questions of Leninism, III. The Question of "Permanent" Revolution.
"This does not mean, of course, that Leninism has been or is opposed to the idea of permanent revolution, without quotation marks, which was proclaimed by Marx in the forties of the last century. On the contrary, Lenin was the only Marxist who correctly understood and developed the idea of permanent revolution. What distinguishes Lenin from the 'permanentists' on this question is that the 'permanentists' distorted Marx’s idea of permanent revolution and transformed it into lifeless, bookish wisdom, whereas Lenin took it in its pure form and made it one of the foundations of his own theory of revolution. It should be borne in mind that the idea of the growing over of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into the socialist revolution, propounded by Lenin as long ago as 1905, is one of the forms of the embodiment of Marx’s theory of permanent revolution."