Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850)
공산주의자동맹 중앙위원회 담화 (1850)
The circular that Marx addressed to the Communist League in March 1850, drawing the lessons of the defeated revolution of 1848. Expecting the petty-bourgeois democrats to gain power for a time in the next revolution, it held that the workers' party, even in alliance with them, must keep its own organisation and demands and "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". It was the first text in which "permanent revolution" carried a strategic meaning.
In depth
The Address expected the democrats to try to end the revolution as quickly as possible once some of their demands were met, and held that the workers must put forward a programme going beyond them. The revolution was to be made permanent until the association of the proletarians had progressed sufficiently far "not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world". English Wikipedia notes that because it assumes a period of petty-bourgeois predominance it differs from Trotsky's later claim that bourgeois rule could be skipped. Copies of the League's addresses also served as evidence after Nothjung's arrest in 1851 and in the Cologne Communist Trial.