Write on the “Revolution in Permanence”. (2022, 10 Marks)
The phrase belongs to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850). Leon Trotsky later turned it into a theory of how a socialist revolution could begin in a backward country. It answers a question classical Marxism left open: what workers do when the bourgeois revolution is unfinished.
Marx and Engels, 1850
After 1848 they warned that the democratic petty bourgeoisie would “bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible” once its own aims were met. The workers’ task was “to make the revolution permanent” until the propertied classes had lost power and the proletariat had conquered the state — not in one country alone. Their battle cry: Die Revolution in Permanenz.
Trotsky’s Theory
The orthodox scheme of Georgi Plekhanov and the Mensheviks held that Russia must first pass through a bourgeois-democratic revolution and a long capitalist phase. In Results and Prospects (1906), after the 1905 revolution, Trotsky rejected this two-stage view:
- A weak bourgeoisie: tied to Tsarism and foreign capital, it could not complete land reform, democracy and national freedom.
- Proletarian leadership: under combined and uneven development, a small but concentrated working class in modern factories would lead the revolution, supported by the peasantry. In power it could not halt at bourgeois limits; democratic and socialist tasks would merge.
- International extension: an isolated workers’ state in a peasant country could not build socialism. Revolution in Western Europe had to follow and rescue it. As The Permanent Revolution (1930) put it: “The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena.”
Against Socialism in One Country
From 1924 Joseph Stalin held that the USSR could build socialism in one country. Trotsky replied that “the completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable.” Stalin won; Trotsky was deported in 1929 and murdered in Mexico in 1940.
Assessment
- Partly vindicated: V. I. Lenin‘s April Theses (1917) converged on Trotsky, and October did fuse democratic and socialist tasks. When the German revolution failed, the isolated Soviet state bureaucratised, as Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1936) argued.
- Limits: it underrated the peasantry and nationalism. Mao Zedong won through a peasant army and a staged “New Democracy”.
- India: the communist parties chose stage theories — the CPI’s national democratic, the CPI(M)’s people’s democratic and the CPI(ML)’s new democratic revolution. Trotskyism stayed marginal.
Conclusion
“Revolution in permanence” is Marxism’s most internationalist answer to backwardness. Its diagnosis of weak bourgeoisies and isolated revolutions proved acute; its hope of a rescuing world revolution did not.