4. The Theory of The Permanent Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter contends that the theory of the permanent revolution, far from being a heretical deviation, represents the authentic revolutionary core of Bolshevism, confirmed by the events of 1917 and subsequently distorted by Stalinist factionalism. In 1905, all three tendencies of Russian Social Democracy agreed the coming upheaval would be bourgeois-democratic, but disagreed fundamentally on class leadership. The Mensheviks assigned the bourgeoisie the leading role, with workers merely offering support. Lenin and Trotsky both rejected this, recognising the Russian bourgeoisie as counter-revolutionary. Trotsky’s actual slogan—“Neither Tsar nor Zemtsi, but the People!”—demonstrates his insistence on a worker-peasant alliance, contrary to Johnstone’s false claim that he ignored the peasantry. Johnstone also caricatures the theory as a “leap” from Tsarism to socialism, ignoring its permanent, uninterrupted character.
Trotsky’s 1905 prognosis held that the revolution would inevitably lead to workers seizing power, supported by part of the peasantry. Only a workers’ and peasants’ government could solve the bourgeois-democratic tasks. Once in power, the proletariat would not hand it back, but would pass uninterruptedly from democratic to socialist measures. The revolutionary government could only take the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Both Trotsky and Lenin defended Marxist internationalism against the Menshevik view that socialism was impossible in Russia, insisting conditions for socialism were mature on a world scale. The difference between them was that Trotsky alone predicted the dictatorship of the proletariat could come to power in backward Russia before the socialist revolution in the West, whereas Lenin’s formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” was intentionally algebraic, leaving the precise class character of the revolutionary government to be filled in by history.
The experience of 1917 confirmed Trotsky’s prognosis. The Provisional Government proved counter-revolutionary, incapable of solving a single task of the bourgeois-democratic revolution precisely because it was a bourgeois government. Lenin and Trotsky independently concluded it must be overthrown, while every single “Old Bolshevik” advocated support for it. Kamenev attacked Lenin’s April Theses as an unacceptable attempt to transform the bourgeois revolution into a socialist one, thereby indicting Lenin for Trotskyism. Lenin explicitly discarded the “democratic dictatorship” slogan in April 1917, stating that anyone who still used it was behind the times and against the proletarian class struggle. Lenin explained that the workers failed to take power in February not because of objective necessity, but because they were unorganised and insufficiently conscious, a failure compounded by the betrayal of the Mensheviks and SRs.
The chapter argues that Lenin’s silence on the permanent revolution after 1917, his approval of Trotsky’s works, and an official note in his Collected Works expressing agreement, prove Lenin broadly concurred with Trotsky after October. Differences were secondary and historically resolved. Trotsky’s only “crime” was that his theory was confirmed by events. The Stalinist attack on permanent revolution is actually an attack on Bolshevism’s revolutionary essence; “Trotskyism” was invented in 1924 by Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin for factional struggle, backed by a bureaucracy seeking privilege and order. The Stalinist “theory of stages” is a mechanical caricature; Communist Parties today pursue class collaborationism (e.g., Indonesia, Greece, Iraq), which is a “malicious caricature of Menshevism.” The February Revolution did not complete bourgeois-democratic tasks; the October Revolution solved them and proceeded uninterruptedly to socialist measures—this is the permanent revolution.