2. The Permanent Revolution is Not a ‘Leap’ by the Proletariat, but the Reconstruction of the Nation under the Leadership of the Proletariat¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Trotsky systematically refutes the charge, levelled by Radek and others, that his theory of permanent revolution collapses the bourgeois and socialist stages into a single, reckless proletarian leap. He insists that this accusation fundamentally misrepresents his position. Trotsky never denied the bourgeois character of the revolution’s immediate tasks; his disagreement with the Mensheviks concerned the driving forces and perspectives. He argues that the proletariat could come to power in a backward country before a more advanced one, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat grows out of the bourgeois-democratic revolution precisely because no other force can solve the agrarian tasks. Once in power, the proletariat would secure peasant support through land reforms and state resources, not by ignoring the peasantry. Trotsky cites his own 1905 writings to show he consistently argued that the peasantry is incapable of an independent political role and that the revolution welds the oppressed masses of town and country around the proletariat. The permanent revolution, he clarifies, is not a leap in isolation but the reconstruction of the whole nation under proletarian leadership.
Trotsky also addresses the misrepresentation of Parvus’s 1905 position. Parvus did not advocate a leap to socialism; he confined a workers’ government to democratic tasks, envisioning a regime on the Australian model where a workers’ party governs without ruling, implementing reformist demands within a bourgeois framework. Trotsky notes that Bukharin’s claim that Parvus invented this comparison retrospectively is false, as the 1905 quotation Radek himself provides proves Parvus’s limited perspective. By an irony of fate, the Right-Centrist bloc of 1923-28 sought to pull the dictatorship of the proletariat toward precisely this Australian-style workers’ democracy—closer to Parvus’s prognosis than to Trotsky’s. Trotsky recalls that Russian petty-bourgeois ‘socialists’ had long depicted Australia as a workers’ and peasants’ country building socialism in one country through protective tariffs and ‘socialist’ legislation. Radek, he argues, should have foregrounded this, rather than repeating fairy tales about Trotsky’s fantastic leap over democracy.