Why do revolutions need to be ‘permanent’ to survive?

Protesters take part in Nepal’s ‘Gen Z’ revolution (Pic: WikiMedia Commons)

What can revolts in less economically developed countries, like the so-called “Gen Z” movements, achieve?

Is socialist revolution even possible in countries where the working class is not the majority?

Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution explains the potential for socialist revolution to develop from mass movements wherever they erupt.

The theory was born out of a huge wave of mass strikes and insurrections that swept the Russian Empire in 1905.

Trotsky was at the centre of events. He was elected chair of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

Socialists threw themselves into the revolution—but they disagreed fiercely over what it could achieve.

Karl Marx had written, “The country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed the image of its own future.”

Some seized on this to argue that Russia would have to pass through the same stages as more developed countries before socialism would be possible.

The moderate Russian socialists, the Mensheviks, expected any revolt against the tsar to be led by middle class progressives.

They could then establish a liberal government and allow capitalism to flourish.

Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks said the Russian bourgeoisie were too scared of the working class to lead a revolution.

They argued for an alliance of peasants and workers to resist tsarist oppression.

But even Lenin argued that socialism would come on the back of capitalist development.

He wrote, “We Marxists should know that there is not, nor can there be, any other path to real freedom for the proletariat and the peasantry, than the path of bourgeois freedom and bourgeois progress.”

By 1906, the revolution was defeated and Trotsky was in prison, reflecting on the leading role workers had played in 1905.

Trotsky broke decisively from the idea that society must pass through predetermined stages.

He argued, “The privilege of historic backwardness permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specific date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages while at the same time combining a series of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.”

Different countries reached different levels of economic development, but all existed within one world system. Trotsky described this as “combined and uneven development”.

In Russia, industry was built by the tsarist state in collaboration with foreign capital.

There were big concentrations of workers in Moscow and St Petersburg, surrounded by a vast sea of peasants.

But, as Trotsky argued, “The proletariat will stand before the peasants as the class which has emancipated it.”

The working class would not stop at bourgeois democracy but would demand economic changes leading to total emancipation.

The revolution would become “permanent”.

It would also need to become permanent in another sense. Russia was less developed and lacked the material basis for socialism.

For socialism to survive and develop, it would have to spread internationally.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 vindicated Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which Lenin then supported.

The working class re-established workers’ councils and took power under Bolshevik leadership.

The new workers’ state was based on the majority taking democratic control over what they produced.

Trotsky’s theory was also proved negatively. The revolution failed to spread, which fatally undermined the development of socialism from below.

Stalin filled the gap left by a working class ravaged by civil war and famine and isolated from powerful allies abroad.

The theory of permanent revolution revealed the potential for workers to lead socialist revolutions even when they were in a minority in society.

That potential was not realised outside Russia. Next week’s column will explore why.