Political revolution (Trotskyism)
정치혁명 (트로츠키주의)
In Trotskyist theory, a revolution that overthrows a government or political regime while leaving property relations intact. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936) Trotsky argued that the revolution to remove the Soviet bureaucracy would not be a social revolution like October but a political revolution that restored workers' democracy while preserving the nationalised means of production and the planned economy. The French revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which swept away an old ruling layer without changing the economic foundations, are cited as historical examples.
In depth
In chapter 11 of The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky wrote that the revolution the bureaucracy was preparing against itself would not be social, like the October Revolution of 1917: this time it was not a question of changing the economic foundations of society or replacing one form of property with another. History had known not only social revolutions that replaced the feudal regime with the bourgeois one, but also political revolutions that swept away an old ruling clique without disturbing the economic foundations of society. After the political revolution, that is, the overthrow of the bureaucracy, the proletariat would have to carry out a number of very important reforms in the economy, but not a new social revolution. If, on the contrary, a bourgeois party overthrew the ruling caste, it would be a counter-revolution overturning the property relations themselves.
The concept is the counterpart of the characterisation of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state. After the Second World War Trotskyists applied it to the "deformed workers' states" of Eastern Europe and China. They saw the possibility of political revolution in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968 and opposed the Soviet interventions that crushed them; the Tiananmen protests of 1989 were read in the same light. Movements with capitalist aims, such as Yeltsin's in 1991 or Solidarity in Poland, were mostly seen not as political revolutions but as capitalist counter-revolution, although Trotskyist groups disagreed over how to judge the collapse of the Eastern bloc.