---
Title: Permanent revolution
Description: Revolution in which the proletariat comes to political power under the program of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, setting its own objectives from then on and transforming the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist one.
Author: School of Marxism
URL: https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Permanent%20revolution
---


> Revolution in which the proletariat comes to political power under the program of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, setting its own objectives from then on and transforming the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist one.

## Origins

The term "Permanent revolution" was first used by Marx in 1850 in an address of the Central Committee of the Communist League to its members, scattered across Germany. The framework is that of the bourgeois revolution in Germany, a revolution whose [primary objectives](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/National%20and%20democratic%20tasks%20of%20the%20bourgeois%20revolution) are the creation of a national market, state centralization and the laying of the foundations for the spread of big industry and the emergence of a mass proletariat. But the bourgeoisie, the origin of the movement, has formed a bloc with the reactionary forces (the Prussian king and the Prussian landowners, the "junkers"), and the petty bourgeoisie, the democrats, display the political impotence characteristic of a class without a historical program of its own.

Marx proposes that the German communists act as the left wing of the democratic movement and push its proposals to the limit with the aim of making the revolution "permanent", that is, so that the revolutionary process itself takes on a socialist objective.

> We have seen that the democrats will come to power in the first phase of the movement, and that they will be obliged to propose measures of a more or less socialist nature. (...)
>
> It will be asked what counter-measures should be proposed by the workers. Naturally, at the beginning they will not be able to propose actual communist measures; but they can compel the democrats to attack the old social order on as many fronts as possible, to disrupt its regular procedures, to compromise themselves, and to concentrate in the hands of the state, as far as possible, the productive forces, the means of transport, factories, railways, etc. etc.
>
> The proposals of the democrats, who are in no case revolutionary but merely reformist, must be pushed to the point where they turn into direct attacks on private property; thus, for example, if the petty bourgeoisie proposes the purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must say that, since these railways and factories are the property of the reactionaries, they must simply be confiscated by the state without compensation.
>
> If the democrats propose proportional taxes, the workers must demand progressive taxes; if the democrats declare themselves in favour of a moderate progressive tax, the workers must insist on a tax which, step by step, gradually, means the ruin of big capital; if the democrats propose the regulation of the state debt, the workers must demand the bankruptcy of the state.
>
> The demands of the workers will depend on the aims and measures of the democrats. If the German workers are only to come to power and achieve their class interests after a prolonged revolutionary development, they can at least be sure that the first act of this revolutionary drama will coincide with the victory of their class in France, and this will certainly accelerate the movement of their own emancipation.
>
> But they themselves must do the greater part of the work; they must become conscious of their class interests and take up the position of an independent party. They must not let themselves be diverted from their line of proletarian independence by the hypocrisy of the democratic petty bourgeoisie. Their battle cry must be: "The Permanent Revolution".
>
> ["Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League"](https://www.marxists.org/espanol/m-e/1850s/50_circ.htm). Karl Marx, March 1850.

The model served as a reference for revolutionaries in countries like Russia. At the beginning of the 20th century the bourgeoisie had created a proletariat of 25 million people, highly concentrated in a few regions and surrounded by a veritable ocean of almost 100 million petty-bourgeois peasants. All this under an autocratic, feudal state, propped up, however, by the bourgeoisie itself. The Russian bourgeoisie will not merely be inconsistent in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, as the German one had been in 1848, but reluctant, if not openly hostile.

The revolution of 1905 would show that only the proletariat could set in motion and lead the bourgeois-democratic revolution, but only by mobilizing behind it a massive peasantry mobilized on its own agrarian program. The slogan of the "Democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" and Lenin's theorization of the "Permanent revolution" will in reality represent the same approach, which anticipates the revolution of 1917: archetype and successful case of a permanent revolution.

> The agrarian problem, and with it the national problem, assign to the peasants, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the population of the backward countries, an exceptional place in the democratic revolution. Without the alliance of the proletariat with the peasants, the aims of the democratic revolution not only cannot be realized, but cannot even be seriously posed. However, the alliance of these two classes can only be achieved through an irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the liberal-national bourgeoisie.
>
> Whatever the first episodic stages of the revolution in the various countries may be, the realization of the revolutionary alliance of the proletariat with the peasant masses is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard organized in the Communist Party. This in turn means that the democratic revolution can triumph only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, resting on the alliance with the peasantry and aimed in the first place at realizing the objectives of the democratic revolution.
>
> Assessed historically, the Bolshevik slogan "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" meant nothing other than the relations characterized above between the proletariat, the peasantry and the liberal bourgeoisie. This has been proved by the experience of October. But Lenin's old formula did not settle in advance what the mutual political relations between the proletariat and the peasantry within the revolutionary bloc would be.
>
> In other words, the formula was consciously given a certain algebraic character, which had to make way for more concrete arithmetical quantities in the process of historical experience. However, the latter has shown, under conditions that exclude any distorted interpretation, that, however great the revolutionary role of the peasantry may be, it can never be autonomous, and still less a leading one. The peasant follows either the worker or the bourgeois. This means that the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" is conceivable only as a dictatorship of the proletariat leading the peasant masses behind it.
>
> ["What is the Permanent Revolution? Basic Postulates". Leon Trotsky, 1930](https://www.marxists.org/espanol/trotsky/revperm/rp10.htm)

Trotsky's clarifications, obvious to anyone who has studied the Russian revolution, were of fundamental importance at the time. The International, taken over by [stalinism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Stalinism), had ordered the Chinese communists to dissolve the [soviets](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Soviet) and to avoid the formation of independent class organs. In fact, it had ordered the Chinese Communist Party to dissolve itself into the Kuomintang, presented by stalinism as a tool for building a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" distinct from a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Such a historical and political aberration was sustained by falsifying Lenin's formulation in order to set it against Marx's and Trotsky's idea of the permanent revolution. The policy of the stalinist Comintern led, as is well known, to the massacre of the Chinese proletariat in 1926-27 and to the ignominious persecution of the communist leaders, who would join the [communist left](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Communist%20left). It was the last battle of the left opposition within the Russian communist party before its savage repression.

> The democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, as a regime distinct in its class content from the dictatorship of the proletariat, would be realizable only if an independent revolutionary party were possible that expressed the interests of the peasant and petty-bourgeois democracy in general, a party capable, with the support of the proletariat, of conquering power and implementing its revolutionary program from it.
>
> As the experience of all modern history, and above all that of Russia over the last quarter of a century, testifies, an insurmountable obstacle on the road to the creation of a peasant party is the lack of economic and political independence of the petty bourgeoisie and its deep internal differentiation, as a result of which the upper layers of the petty bourgeoisie (of the peasantry) go with the big bourgeoisie in all decisive cases, above all in war and revolution, and the lower layers with the proletariat, thus forcing the intermediate layer to choose between the extreme poles.
>
> Between Kerenskyism and the Bolshevik power, between the Kuomintang and the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is not and cannot be any intermediate possibility, that is, any democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants.
>
> The tendency of the Communist International to impose today on the peoples of the East the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, long since definitively outlived by history, can only have a reactionary character.
>
> Insofar as this slogan is opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat, it contributes politically to the dissolution of the latter in the petty-bourgeois masses and thus creates the most favorable conditions for the hegemony of the national bourgeoisie, and consequently for the failure of the democratic revolution. The inclusion of this slogan in the Program of the Communist International is in itself a direct betrayal of Marxism and of the Bolshevik traditions of October.
>
> ["What is the Permanent Revolution? Basic Postulates"](https://www.marxists.org/espanol/trotsky/revperm/rp10.htm). Leon Trotsky, 1930

## Are permanent revolutions possible today?

The Chinese Revolution of 1926-27 was possibly the last historical window for a permanent revolution like the Russian one had been. Capitalism was entering [decadence](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Decadence), and the transformation this meant was felt rapidly and definitively in the social structure and political conditions all over the world. The national and agrarian program of the petty bourgeoisie shows itself to be openly reactionary, being opposed from the outset to the socialist revolution -the only one on the historical agenda.

The next great revolution, the Spanish one, will already be a socialist revolution from the first moment, not a permanent one. Its agrarian policy will be collectivization. In day-labourer districts like Llerena, production is immediately socialized on the basis of the workers' cooperative that had emerged from the struggles of previous years, and begins to produce and distribute according to the needs of each family in the very days following 19 July.

In Aragon it is the workers' militias who bring the "collectives" to the villages of small property based on subsistence agriculture and to those of tenant farmers, who, instead of simply taking over the properties, concentrate them in the collective.

Since then, under the conditions of the system's [decadence](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Decadence), the independent peasantry has practically disappeared all over the world and, where it exists, has no prospect in an impossible capitalist development of the countryside. The agrarian [petty bourgeoisie](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Petty%20bourgeoisie) has shrunk and become concentrated, exacerbating its antagonism with the agrarian [proletariat](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Proletariat), which it can only exploit mercilessly in order to survive.

In countries such as the USA the small family farmer with a highly mechanized holding still exists, under permanent threat of ruin. But today he has become an appendage of the big agri-food industry and the big capital funds. They set his inputs, his prices, his margins, what he will reinvest them in and even the financial costs he will bear. Today he is a functionary of capital who keeps a nominal ownership of the land but cannot decide what to do with it. His own demands do not even amount to a program: debt forgiveness or moratorium and state guarantees for the purchase of crops.

And what is more important, there are no ["democratic tasks"](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/National%20and%20democratic%20tasks%20of%20the%20bourgeois%20revolution) or bourgeois revolutions pending. There are no feudal regimes left, and even if there were "remnants" somewhere, they are so deeply interwoven with world capitalism that they have no way beyond them but the communist one.

> To the scale of capitalist social development corresponds the scale of the proletariat's capacity to impose communism and thus to drive forward a new mode of social development. However, the limits of this capitalist development were made evident by the possibility and the reality of a First World War, indicating that the domination of capital over the planet had been achieved. This complete domination means that even if we find survivors of earlier modes of exploitation, they are connected, integrated, totally absorbed into the global circuits of capitalist exploitation.
>
> From then on, global social development is not possible under the aegis of capital; the capitalist system is obsolete, decadent; growth and development, until then concomitant, become disconnected and even opposed to each other. **To this stage of development corresponds the capacity of the proletariat to affirm immediately, for the whole world, the revolutionary communist project**.
>
> This capacity means that even if one comes across exploited people of a kind different from proletarians, they can no longer have the slightest independence with respect to the objectives of the proletariat. In fact, they are connected to and subject to the same general mode of exploitation and oppression; they must be considered part of the world proletariat. **Struggles that do not directly and exclusively concern the working class not only do not benefit it, but are now irreducibly opposed to it**.
>
> ["Old Nations, New Struggles, Same Old Song"](https://marxismo.school/archivo/1990%20Viejas%20naciones,%20nuevas%20luchas,%20vieja%20cantinela), 1990