Trotsky also opposed Joseph Stalin's principle of socialism in one country and stated that socialist revolutions needed to happen across the world in order to combat the global capitalist hegemony.
According to Russian historian Vadim Rogovin (1937–1998), the success of Stalin's theoretical position had a significant and negative impact on the entire course of the international revolutionary process.
[2] This contrasts with the permanent (that is, ongoing forever) activity envisaged in Maoist Continuous Revolution Theory or in Tom Moylan's critical utopian discourse.
By 1849, Marx and Engels were able to quote the use of the phrase by other writers (Eugen Alexis Schwanbeck, a journalist on the Kölnische Zeitung [Cologne Newspaper];[4] and Henri Druey),[5] suggesting that it had achieved some recognition in intellectual circles.
[6] His audience is the proletariat in Germany, faced with the prospect that "the petty-bourgeois democrats will for the moment acquire a predominant influence", i.e. temporary political power.
In essence, it consists of the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to politics both before, during and after the struggle which will bring the petty-bourgeois democrats to power.
In an article two years earlier, Marx had referred to "a programme of permanent revolution, of progressive taxes and death duties, and of organisation of labour".
As well as overtures for organisational alliance with the petty bourgeoisie, Marx is concerned about attempts to "bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable".
[6]Since Marxism emphasises the contingency of political developments on material historical circumstances (as against idealism), it is worthwhile to have some idea of how Marx saw the context in which he advocated permanent revolution.
[6] Therefore, Marx clearly believes that Europe is entering a time and is at a level of development of the productive forces in which the proletariat have the social revolution within their reach.
Marx and Engels advocated permanent revolution as the proletarian strategy of maintaining organisational independence along class lines and a consistently militant series of political demands and tactics.
On the contrary, Marx's statements in his March 1850 Address explicitly contradict such a view, assuming a "period of petty-bourgeois predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the proletariat".
Trotsky's theory took it for granted (as did Vladimir Lenin in The State and Revolution) that the domination of the world by the bourgeoisie was complete and irreversible after the emergence of imperialism in the late 19th century.
The uncertain relationship between international and national parameters in relation to class power underlies many of the disputes concerning the theory of the permanent revolution.
[10] Leon Trotsky's conception of permanent revolution is based on his understanding—drawing on the work of fellow Russian Alexander Parvus—that a Marxist analysis of events begins with the international level of development, both economic and social.
The basic idea of Trotsky's theory[12] is that in Russia the bourgeoisie would not carry out a thorough revolution which would institute political democracy and solve the land question.
However, its basic theses can be found in such popular outlines of communist theory as The ABC of Communism which sought to explain the program of the Bolshevik Party by Yevgeni Preobrazhensky and Nikolai Bukharin.
According to Russian historian, Vadim Rogovin, the leadership of the German Communist Party had requested that Moscow send Leon Trotsky to Germany to direct the 1923 insurrection.
However, this proposal was rejected by the Politburo which was controlled by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev who decided to send a commission of lower-ranking Russian Communist Party members.
In essence, a section of the Bolshevik Party leadership, whose views were voiced at the theoretical level by Bukharin, argued that socialism could be built in a single country, even an underdeveloped one like Russia.
While their conclusions differ, works by mainstream Trotskyist theoreticians such as Robert Chester, Joseph Hansen, Michael Löwy, and Livio Maitan related it to post-war political developments in Algeria, Cuba, and elsewhere.
He further argues that the use of Marxist concepts by such elements (most notably in Cuba and China, but also for example by regimes espousing Arab socialism or similar philosophies) is not genuine, but is the use of Marxism as an ideology of power.
However, he argues that Trotsky "certainly had done a great service to revolutionary communism by drawing out attention over and over again to the theory of permanent revolution since Lenin died in 1924 and the sinister anti-revolutionary reign of Stalin started".
In the face of what Tagore termed "the next diabolical machineries of vilification and terror of Stalinocracy", Trotsky kept "the banner of revolutionary communism flying in the best traditions of Marx and Lenin.