In the years before the Russian Revolution of 1917 there was a heated debate between the different tendencies of the Russian labor movement on what would be the character of the Russian Revolution, and the relation between the different classes in the revolution. Undoubtedly, the theory that brilliantly anticipated and explained what actually took place in 1917 was worked out by Trotsky. The theory of the Permanent Revolution was first developed by Trotsky as early as 1904. The permanent revolution, while accepting that the objective tasks facing the Russian workers were those of the bourgeois democratic revolution, nevertheless explained how in a backward country in the epoch of imperialism, the "national bourgeoisie" was inseparably linked to the remains of feudalism on the one hand and to imperialist capital on the other and was therefore completely unable to carry through any of its historical tasks. The situation is even clearer today, especially in the case of countries like Venezuela.

By Ted Grant, Alan Woods and Rob Sewell.

32 pages.