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Quote of the Issue Permanent revolution means the dictatorship of the proletariat In regard to Egypt today, reformists mouth the phrase “permanent revolution”, gutted of revolutionary content: the programme for socialist revolution. Writing at the time of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, Leon Trotsky advanced the theory and programme of permanent revolution, stressing that the agrarian revolution, political democracy and other tasks could not be realised by the weak and dependent bourgeoisie. Rather, as Trotsky later summarised in generalising the perspective of permanent revolution to all dependent capitalist countries, the programme of permanent revolution takes as its starting point the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. “With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leaders of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.... “Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry the tasks of the democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even seriously posed. But the alliance of these two classes can be realized in no other way than through an irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national-liberal bourgeoisie.... “The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.... “In a country where the proletariat has power in its hands as the result of the democratic revolution, the subsequent fate of the dictatorship and socialism depends in the last analysis not only and not so much upon the national productive forces as upon the development of the international socialist revolution.” — The Permanent Revolution (1929) reprinted in The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (1969) |
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