Permanent Revolution
연속혁명
Trotsky's theory that a democratic revolution in a backward country must pass over into proletarian power, whose survival in turn depends on the revolution's international extension. Formulated out of the experience of 1905, it became the axis of opposition to socialism in one country.
In depth
The problem of 1905
The revolution of 1905 left Russian Marxists with a question. If the bourgeoisie that was to carry out the tasks of a bourgeois-democratic revolution was too weak and too dependent on tsarism to do so, who would carry them out? The Mensheviks held that the democratic stage would be completed in alliance with the bourgeoisie and that a long interval would precede any transition to socialism, while Lenin answered with the formula of a democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants.
Trotsky's answer differed. In Results and Prospects (1906) he argued that a democratic revolution in a backward country could not complete even its own tasks without passing over into proletarian power. Settling the land question and the national question required working-class power, and a working class that had taken power could not stop at bourgeois tasks.
Three elements of the theory
The theory can be summarized in three propositions. First, the democratic and socialist revolutions are not separated into stages but continue as one process. Second, that process cannot be completed within one country and depends on international extension. Third, the transformation of economic and social relations continues after the revolution without a terminal point.
The second proposition became the focus of later dispute. It contained the prediction that workers' power in a backward country would be isolated without international support in resources, technology, and markets, and that isolation would produce bureaucratization and retreat. Trotsky read Soviet development in the later 1920s through this frame.
Dispute and reception
The October Revolution of 1917 was read as a practical confirmation of Trotsky's formulation, and he himself wrote that Lenin's April Theses had arrived at the same conclusion. After 1924, however, the theory became a target of inner-party struggle. As the line of socialism in one country was established, permanent revolution was defined as a theory that denied the achievements of the Russian revolution and distrusted the peasantry, and the name was used pejoratively for the platform of the Left Opposition.
Trotsky answered these criticisms and restated the theory in The Permanent Revolution (1929). The concept was afterwards invoked repeatedly in strategic debates over the Chinese and colonial revolutions, and it is treated as a reference point in later twentieth-century discussions of dependency and of uneven and combined development.