A significant contribution to an understanding of Permanent Revolution; By David North

The central aim of Witnesses to Permanent Revolution is the reconstruction of the impressive intellectual scope of the discussion out of which the theory of permanent revolution emerged. While not contesting the decisive role played by Trotsky in its elaboration and, most significantly, its strategic and practical application in the struggles of the Russian working class, Day and Gaido seek to acquaint the reader with the contributions made by other important socialist thinkers, such as Franz Mehring, Rosa Luxemburg, Alexander Helphand (Parvus), Karl Kautsky, and the much less well-known David Ryazanov. Trotsky would not have objected to a detailed account of the origins of the theory with which he had become so intensely and personally identified.

In 1923 the factional attacks on Leon Trotsky, launched by the Politburo troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, developed rapidly into a campaign against the theory of permanent revolution. All of Trotsky’s alleged personal failings and political errors, his so-called “underestimation of the peasantry” and his inveterate “anti-Bolshevism” had their source, it was proclaimed over and over, in this pernicious doctrine. Between April and October 1917, the theory of permanent revolution provided the strategic foundation of the Bolshevik Party’s struggle against the bourgeois Provisional Government and its Menshevik allies. But only six years later, it was being denounced as a heretical deviation from Marxist principles. As he witnessed not only the distortion of his own ideas but also the falsification of the history of socialist theory, Trotsky wrote with evident exasperation: Read more>>>