Permanent Revolution is a Marxist theory most closely associated with Leon Trotsky, devised as an explanation of how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that had not achieved advanced capitalism.

The theory states that the bourgeois democratic tasks in countries with delayed bourgeois democratic development, for example somewhere like Nepal, cannot be accomplished except through the establishment of a workers' state, and further, that the creation of a workers' state would inevitably involve the building of socialism. Thus, the accomplishment of bourgeois democratic tasks passes over into proletarian tasks, and it is in this sense that the revolution is "permanent" in that it must be "continuous" until "final" victory.

Trotsky's theory was developed as an alternative to the Social Democratic theory that undeveloped countries must pass through two distinct revolutions. First the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution, which socialists would assist, and at a later stage, the Socialist Revolution with an evolutionary period of capitalist development separating those stages. This is often referred to as the Theory of Stages or as Stagism.

In less technical terms, this basically means that in countries that aren’t very economically advanced, in places like Africa and Asia, the only way for a capitalistic democracy to come about is through the creation of a workers state, because the upper class are too tied to the old undeveloped life to complete their tasks; build a complete democracy that the workers can take advantage of.

The theory also stated that once established, the workers state would be too weak to survive on its on; it can’t rely on other capitalist countries to help it economically, so similar revolutions in other countries must spring up so the workers states can economically survive. This was probably one of the failures of the Russian revolution, that it was the only successful one of its kind, and because of this people like Stalin came up with the Socialism in One Country theory, which can only be described as a failure. I think that even Stalin proved this part of the Permanent revolution, when at the end of WW2 Communism was instilled on all the Eastern European countries, despite the lack of a proletarian revolution.

An example of part of the theory in action, I think, has been the Bolivarian revolution in South America. Granted Chavez’s Venezuela could hardly be described as a workers state, but the principals of the Permanent revolution are still there: the rejection of the right wing in order for economic stability, similar governments springing up in places like Peru and Chile, and now he is talking of socialism in Venezuela and a united South America.

Also Cuba is a good example of how important the theory is for a any revolution, because it can be argued that although Castro has successfully created a workers state, only Che Guevara worshipers would try and argue that Cuba is democratic, thus the Cuban revolution is not permanent, because Cuba hasn’t been economically advancing since the 60’s which it surely would have done if it was a democratic workers state.

In Britain today, in my opinion, any successful socialist movement would have to take into account many parts of the permanent revolution. Without doubt, many of the bourgeois tasks have been completed, but there is a lot that remains to be done. For example, the suffrage of the youth continues to be ignored, and the fact that in the 21st century we still have a monarchy puts our economic development into perspective. In this sense revolutionaries in all countries, economically developed or not, have to make sure that what they are trying to accomplish is permanent