Permanent revolution

Trotsky's permanent revolution is an explanation of how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that have not achieved an advanced capitalist mode of production. Trotsky's theory also argues that the bourgeoisie in late-developing capitalist countries are incapable of developing the productive forces in such a manner as to achieve the sort of advanced capitalism which will fully develop an industrial proletariat; and that the proletariat can and must therefore seize social, economic and political power, leading an alliance with the peasantry. Trotsky also opposed Joseph Stalin's principle of socialism in one country and stated that socialist revolutions needed to happen across the world in order to combat the global capitalist hegemony. According to Trotskyists such as Russian historian Vadim Rogovin (1937–1998), the success of Stalin's theoretical position had a significant and negative impact on the international revolutionary process.

Marx's view of "permanent" revolution sees revolutionary activity as continuously ongoing until the revolutionary forces achieve a defined goal (such as socialism or communism). This contrasts with the permanent (that is, ongoing forever) revolutionary activity envisaged in Maoist Continuous Revolution Theory.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Marx first used the term in the phrase "by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution" in the following passage from The Holy Family (1844) in which he wrote that "Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society ... He perfected the terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. " Marx said that Napoleon prevented the bourgeois revolution in France from becoming fulfilled; that is, he prevented bourgeois political forces from achieving a total expression of their interests. According to Marx, he did this by suppressing the "liberalism of bourgeois society" and did it because he saw "the state as an end in itself", a value which supported his "political aim of conquest". Thus, he substituted "permanent war for permanent revolution". However, the final two sentences show that the bourgeoisie did not give up hope, but continued to pursue their interests. For Marx, permanent revolution involves a revolutionary class (in this case, the bourgeoisie) continuing to push for and achieve its interests despite the political dominance of actors with opposing interests.

By 1849, Marx and Engels were able to quote the use of the phrase by other writers (Eugen Alexis Schwanbeck, a journalist on the Kölnische Zeitung [Cologne Newspaper]; and Henri Druey), suggesting that it had achieved some recognition in intellectual circles.

Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League

Marx's most famous use of the phrase permanent revolution is his March 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League. His audience is the proletariat in Germany, faced with the prospect that "the petty-bourgeois democrats will for the moment acquire a predominant influence", i.e. temporary political power. He enjoins them as such:

While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.

In the remainder of the text, Marx outlines his proposal that the proletariat "make the revolution permanent". In essence, it consists of the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to politics both before, during and after the struggle which will bring the petty-bourgeois democrats to power.

Political programme of demands which threaten the bourgeois consensus

In an article two years earlier, Marx had referred to "a programme of permanent revolution, of progressive taxes and death duties, and of organisation of labour". This confirms the impression that Marx's theory of permanent revolution is not about revolution per se, but rather more about the attitude that a revolutionary class should adopt in the period of their political subjection, including the programme of political demands they should propose. This aspect is raised in the Address. As well as overtures for organisational alliance with the petty bourgeoisie, Marx is concerned about attempts to "bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable". Therefore, the workers' party must use their autonomous organisation to push a political programme which threatens the bourgeois status quo along the following lines:

1. They can force the democrats to make inroads into as many areas of the existing social order as possible, so as to disturb its regular functioning and so that the petty-bourgeois democrats compromise themselves; furthermore, the workers can force the concentration of as many productive forces as possible – means of transport, factories, railways, etc. – in the hands of the state.

2. They must drive the proposals of the democrats to their logical extreme (the democrats will in any case act in a reformist and not a revolutionary manner) and transform these proposals into direct attacks on private property. If, for instance, the petty bourgeoisie propose the purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways and factories simply be confiscated by the state without compensation as the property of reactionaries. [...] The demands of the workers will thus have to be adjusted according to the measures and concessions of the democrats.

In this passage, we can see that Marx believes the proletariat should refuse to moderate its demands to the petty-bourgeois consensus and advocate extensive nationalisation. Furthermore, the demand of the workers should always seek to push the bourgeois further than they are prepared to go, without the revolution threatening them as well.

In context

Marx concludes his Address by summarising the themes elucidated above:

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.

Since Marxism emphasises the contingency of political developments on material historical circumstances (as against idealism), it is worthwhile to have some idea of how Marx saw the context in which he advocated permanent revolution. It seems that he believed that "the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama [in Germany] will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will thereby be accelerated". That is, the petty-bourgeois are expected to come to power in Germany at the same time as the direct victory of the proletariat in France. Furthermore, Marx seems to believe that the former and hence of both is "imminent" (cf. the third paragraph of the Address). Therefore, Marx clearly believes that Europe is entering a time and is at a level of development of the productive forces in which the proletariat have the social revolution within their reach. Although circumstances did not develop as anticipated, this observation proved accurate at the dawn of the 20th century leading into the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

Relation to Trotskyist theory

Marx and Engels advocated permanent revolution as the proletarian strategy of maintaining organisational independence along class lines and a consistently militant series of political demands and tactics. However, at no stage does Marx make the central claim with which Trotsky's conception of permanent revolution is concerned, i.e. that it is possible for a country to pass directly from the dominance of the semi-feudal aristocrats, who held political power in Russia in the early part of the 19th century, to the dominance of the working class, without an interceding period of dominance by the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, Marx's statements in his March 1850 Address explicitly contradict such a view, assuming a "period of petty-bourgeois predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the proletariat". In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky argues that this was shortened to the period between February and October 1917.

It must be borne in mind that for Marx the dominance of the bourgeoisie as a prerequisite for subsequent proletarian rule holds on a world scale as The Communist Manifesto makes clear that despite : "Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle" (loc. cit.). Trotsky's theory took it for granted (as did Vladimir Lenin in The State and Revolution) that the domination of the world by the bourgeoisie was complete and irreversible after the emergence of imperialism in the late 19th century. The uncertain relationship between international and national parameters in relation to class power underlies many of the disputes concerning the theory of the permanent revolution.

In the preface to the 1882 Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly raised the issues Trotsky would later develop: "Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development".