The Permanent Revolution

“Permanent Revolution” is a book by Leon Trotsky, in which he sought to confirm the correctness of the concept of permanent revolution through the experience of 1917 in Russia. Trotsky denied the completed socialist character of the October Revolution, viewing it only as the first stage on the path to socialist revolution in the West and throughout the world. He saw the possibility of the victory of socialism in Soviet Russia—because of the small number of the proletariat there, alongside the existence of a vast mass of petty-bourgeois peasants whose character was shaped accordingly—only if the socialist revolution became permanent, meaning it spread to the most important countries of Europe, when the victorious proletariat of the West would help the proletariat of Russia in its struggle against the classes confronting it. And then it would become possible to build socialism and communism on a world scale.