Trotsky's Permanent Revolution

[Redcanadian123]

I feel a tad embarrassed asking this question; but what exactly is the idea of permanent revolution? I know it was a system devised by Trotsky, but that is the one concept I have always had trouble understanding. So, if someone can explain it for me, that would be great.

[pariscommune1966]

I feel a tad embarrassed asking this question; but what exactly is the idea of permanent revolution? I know it was a system devised by Trotsky, but that is the one concept I have always had trouble understanding. So, if someone can explain it for me, that would be great.

Trotsky's theory was an attempt to understand the conditions for countries in which the demands of the bourgeois-demcoratic revolution have not yet been completed and to lay out a prognosis for revolution in those same countries. He started out from the idea that, for those countries which have entered into the capitalist world system at a point later in time than the major capitalist powers, those later entrants cannot embark on a path of independent capitalist development in the same way as established capitalist states but rather come to exhibit the conditions of "combined and uneven development", which, for Trotsky, means that those countries, undergoing capitalist development in a radically changed international context, come to exhibit social and economic structures that combine capitalism and pre-capitalist social structures in a number of ways, such as the existence of modern industry based on foreign investment with archaic social structures in the countryside. So, in his analysis of Russia, for example, Trotsky was conscious of the fact that in the early twentieth century there still existed in Russia vast landholdings which exercised strong economic power over tenants, and that Russia was by and large a rural country in which the main body of agriculture had not been mechanized or even converted to a cash economy, but at the same time, in the cities, Russian industry tended to be amongst the most advanced in Europe, in terms of the number of workers employed in each industrial plant, for example, as well as the total industrial capacity in Russia, because of Russia's industrial base being based on foreign investment from countries like France and Britain, rather than Russia having to go through each link in the "chain" of industrialization in the way that those countries had.

The importance of this concept for Trotsky lies in the impact it has on class relations and revolutionary tasks, because, on the one hand, the bourgeoisie, operating alongside feudal remnants and in an international context rooted in imperialism, is not capable or willing of carrying out the historical tasks that are normally associated with the bourgeoisie in a Marxist historical scheme, that is, tasks like the establishment of political democracy, the reformation of land ownership, and the construction of the economic preconditions for independent capitalist development. At the same time, the proletariat, even whilst it may form a numerical minority, comes to possess a political power out of all proportion to its numbers, and it is this context, then, that the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution become part of the historical role of the proletariat. These ideas, about the proletariat having to take on the role of carrying out the bourgeois-democratic revolution, were not in themselves specific to Trotsky in the context of Marxist theory in Europe, because people like Lenin were also putting forward similar analyses, but the decisive intervention of Trotsky was to say that the proletariat, having embarked on the bourgeois democratic revolution, cannot stop at bourgeois-democratic tasks, but, in order to carry out those tasks consistently and defend them, will have to move onto the terrain of the socialist revolution, and so, this way, the revolution becomes "permanent", moving from one historical terrain to another with the proletariat as the leadership.

This is how the revolution is permanent as a process in time, but Trotsky also argued that the revolution would have to be permanent in space as well, by expanding rapidly beyond the borders of the country in which it originated, because no one country would be able to organize and build socialism on its own, especially wither evolution beginning in those relatively less developed countries where the conditions of combined and uneven development are present.

This aspect of world revolution is, of course, in many ways a crucial issue, because the experience of revolution in the twentieth century would suggest that we have to move towards an understanding of revolution not as a single cataclysmic event that spreads around the world from a single point, but as a more protracted process, in which revolution occurs in some places before others due to the specific historical conditions of those places, with those places then having to build socialism independently at the same time as lending support to movement still fighting for liberation.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I feel a tad embarrassed asking this question; but what exactly is the idea of permanent revolution?

"Civil war with the peasantry" (http://www.revleft.com/vb/trotskys-permanent-revolution-t149111/index.html) (to quote Trotsky himself)