Other revolutionaries, including V.I. Lenin, agreed with Trotsky that Russia’s proletariat, the country’s small class of wage workers, could lead a movement to liberate the country from its "absolute monarch," Tsar Nicholas II. But Trotsky differed on what would happen next. A worker-led government, he argued, would be compelled to undermine the property rights of capitalists and take the first steps in creating a socialist society. It was "possible for workers to come to power in an economically backward country sooner than in an advanced country," he wrote, but victory could be made "permanent" only if two further developments followed without interruption–socialist measures by the workers’ government, and socialist revolutions in more advanced states.¹ Trotsky’s view became known as the theory of permanent (or uninterrupted) revolution.²

Trotsky’s analytic tool was Marxism, but no other Marxist saw things his way at the time. All, including Trotsky, agreed that the first task of a Russian revolt was to achieve "bourgeois" freedoms. Russian capitalism was still emerging out of a feudal society that was characterized by a police state and the despotic power of rural nobles over the mass of peasants. But Trotsky was the only one who thought that the movement could or should move directly from its democratic tasks to socialist ones, such as the conversion of factories to common property under a unified production plan.

Trotsky’s ideas didn’t come out of a vacuum. They were shaped by his participation in the Russian mass movement and by his connection to a living tradition of socialist activists. He was a social democrat, as revolutionary Marxists were called at the time. The debate over Russia’s revolutionary prospects was lively and international, including important contributions from the German Karl Kautsky, the Pole Rosa Luxemburg, as well as Russians such as Lenin, Georgi Plekhanov, and Parvus. The latter, a Russian Jew who collaborated with Trotsky during the 1905 Revolution, played a particularly important role in helping Trotsky develop his theory.

All of their views, including Trotsky’s, had their roots in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The "orthodox" view, which claimed that a revolution in backward Russia could not go beyond its democratic tasks, found support in some of Marx’s most general statements about history. One historical period leads organically to the next, says Marx, assisted by the "midwife" of revolution. The intimate connection between successive periods suggests that it’s impossible to skip a step–it is impossible, for example, to abolish feudalism, skip bourgeois rule, and move straight to socialism.

This is because the society of each period is built on a different economic base, a base that develops and prepares the way for the next. The available tools, materials, and productive know-how of any period determine what division of labor is possible. These work relations, in turn, are crystalized into stereotyped class positions of command and subordination–the exploitative relation between master and slave, noble and serf, or capitalist and wage worker. On top of each different economic framework, or "mode of production," as Marx calls it, is a distinctive "superstructure" of culture, politics, schooling, law, ideology, consciousness, etc.³

In these terms, Russia’s repressive autocracy was becoming an outmoded political form in relation to an increasingly capitalist economic base. As Trotsky later wrote, Russia faced "a revolution produced by the contradictions between the development of the productive forces of capitalist society and the outlived caste and state relationships of the period of serfdom and the Middle Ages."⁴ The major tasks of the struggle would be the democratic goals that were familiar from the French Revolution of 1789–freedom of speech, assembly, and press, a democratic parliament to replace the autocracy, and the abolition of the hereditary rights of nobles.

Even Lenin, who actually agreed with Trotsky about the proletariat’s leading role, thought that the movement would "unfetter" capitalism for a new phase of development. According to the 1905 program of Lenin’s Bolshevik faction of Russian socialists: "Under the present social and economic order this democratic revolution in Russia will not weaken but strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie."⁵ This would be particularly true in the countryside, where peasant seizure of the land would open the way for capitalist agriculture, not collective farming on a socialist model.

The Menshevik faction of Russian socialists went even further. They believed that since the revolution would be democratic, the bourgeoisie would have to lead it. The Mensheviks quoted statements from Marx such as, "the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future,"⁶ and extended his point to political development. Since the Russian economic base was relatively undeveloped, they reasoned, its political superstructure would have to re-enact the familiar scenes from Western Europe’s struggles for bourgeois supremacy–even if Russia’s bourgeoisie was reluctant to reprise the role of revolutionary leader.

Trotsky himself was a Menshevik in 1904 when the first defeats in Russia’s war with Japan led to stirrings of dissent back home, but the Mensheviks’ passive fawning over bourgeois "democracy banquets" led him to resign from the faction.⁷ When the revolutionary movement reached its climax a year later, Trotsky became the social democrats’ most prominent mass leader without being officially attached to either of the party’s two factions–or to their theories.

Although the step-by-step model of development is clearly evident in Marx’s most general presentations of historical materialism, Marx was well aware that he was starting with the simplest cases in order to lay out the theoretical basics–basics that could then be used to understand more complicated cases. In the same passage where he says that the more developed country shows the future of the less developed, Marx explains:

But only a few societies have ever developed capitalist relations even relatively "free from disturbing influence"–the ones that developed capitalism first. After capitalism took root in a few places, its proponents spread it by force around the world. In most places, capitalist economic relations thus arrived as a disturbing influence. In the opening pages of "Results and Prospects," Trotsky declares:

Marx and Engels’ own treatment of societies outside the "cutting edge" of capitalist development, including Germany, Ireland, Russia, and India, shows an awareness that the arrival of capitalist influences "from the outside" produces historically unique combinations of productive powers, classes, and ideas. They did not, however, generalize this idea to the point of giving it a name, as Trotsky did–the law of combined and uneven development.¹⁰

Even for Trotsky, the name didn’t come until the late 1920s, and the most general statement of the concept didn’t come until his History of the Russian Revolution in 1930:

Or, as Trotsky distills the point in "Results and Prospects," "History does not repeat itself."¹² In order to discover a society’s revolutionary possibilities, a general theory of history can only be a tool for the real work: direct investigation of the particular society’s development. That’s how "Results and Prospects" begins.

Capitalism first impinged most urgently on Russia as military pressure, not as market competition. Before the war with Japan, and long before the German challenge in the First World War, military pressure came from Russia’s more-advanced immediate neighbors–Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden.¹³ In response, the state intervened in the economy to speed up the development of industry, especially industries related to war:

To speed up growth, the tsar invited direct investment from the West, which, by 1917, made up about 40 percent of Russia’s stock capital.¹⁵ Other capital was borrowed, to be paid back by squeezing the peasantry:

By claiming a large portion of Russia’s surplus product for its own projects, the state "lived at the expense of the privileged classes," including the bourgeoisie. This retarded the capitalists’ independent class development at the same time that it created hothouse conditions for capitalist production to grow.

The tsar’s state thus reversed a relationship that had typified the absolute monarchies of the West, which had leaned on the rising bourgeoisie in rivalries with the clergy and nobility. "The bourgeoisie made use of this for its own political elevation," and by 1789 in France, "had the whole nation behind it" in the struggle against the monarchy. In contrast, the Russian capitalist class of 1905 leaned on the monarchy. The bourgeoisie was "very small in numbers, isolated from the ‘people,’ half-foreign, without historical traditions, and inspired only by the greed for gain."¹⁷

In fact, the bourgeoisie was frightened of the "people," especially of the working class. The same factors that created a weak bourgeoisie gave rise to a strong proletariat. Though small in number–in 1897, wage workers numbered only 9.3 million in a population of 128 million–the proletariat was concentrated in key parts of the economy. The 3.3 million industrial workers of 1897 accounted for "not less than half of the nation’s annual income." Railway, telegraph, and postal workers held a stranglehold over communication and transport.¹⁸

The "privilege" of Russia’s late development was that state-of-the-art factories were brought, "down to the last bolt and screw," from the world’s most advanced centers. The plants were often huge. The Putilov works in the capital, Petersburg, was the biggest factory in the world, with 12,000 workers.¹⁹

Strike waves before 1905 had shown that the proletariat’s power was colossal, so the bourgeoisie feared the release of this power in a popular movement. Even if the movement started with goals that the bourgeoisie shared–who could complain about winning freedom of the press, or representation in a parliament?–the capitalists feared that workers would begin to pose their own class demands against their bosses. Better to live with tsarist repression, they thought; at least the tsar can keep the workers down.

This point extended beyond the country’s borders. Trotsky agreed with other critics of Menshevism that the Russian bourgeoisie’s timidity, instead of being a remediable flaw, had become fixed as a feature of the entire world bourgeoisie. Following its initial ventures as a leader of popular revolutions more than 100 years before, the bourgeoisie’s own system had developed and their conflict with wage workers became more stark. Capitalists began to make peace with a hodge-podge of the world’s authoritarian forces as long as they promised protection from the revolts of the exploited:

But what about the peasantry, the biggest and most miserable section of Russia’s population? A decree from a previous tsar had nominally abolished serfdom in 1861, and peasants received allotments from the feudal "common" land, but the nobles were allowed to take the best parts. Taxation swallowed up farm profits, and millions of peasants sank into hunger and debt.²¹

These conditions made the peasantry into an explosive social force. In the second half of 1905, peasant revolts destroyed 2,000 noble estates.²² Nevertheless, peasants could not forge themselves into a political leadership for the revolution that they themselves needed. Trotsky asked:

The same atomized conditions of life that made the peasants a revolutionary force also ruled out their political cohesion. Their geographical scatter made it difficult to coordinate their revolts. Regional disparities and class divisions–among rich, middle, and landless peasants–also posed obstacles to political unity, and high levels of illiteracy put brakes on communications and political development.²⁴

Despite the peasants’ political incoherence, one goal united them all–expropriation of the nobles.

The stage was set for a revolt of workers and peasants in an alliance against the tsar and the nobles–with the bourgeoisie playing a rightward moving role as the movement became more radical. On this point, Lenin’s Bolsheviks agreed with Trotsky. But Lenin envisioned that the movement would establish the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry." Trotsky accepted this description of the new regime for the sake of argument, but insisted on asking, "Who is to exercise hegemony in the government, and through it, in the country?" As in any revolution, the leading role inside the government would go to the group that plays the key role in the struggle outside it.²⁵ Trotsky elaborated:

In practical terms, the peasantry would need a workers’ victory in the towns to underwrite its own seizure of the nobles’ land. Without workers’ leadership in the key points of the government and economy, even a massive peasant revolt would end as all others had for centuries–with a violent comeback of the landlords.²⁷ As Trotsky put it, "The proletariat will stand before the peasants as the class which has emancipated it."²⁸

The political domination of the proletariat is incompatible with its economic enslavement. No matter under what political flag the proletariat has come to power, it is obliged to take the path of socialist policy.… [The] social-economic consequences of proletarian dictatorship will reveal themselves very quickly, long before the democratization of the political system is completed.29

Trotsky invites us to see how even a reform movement, such as one demanding the eight-hour day–"which by no means contradicts capitalist relations"–takes on a revolutionary character with workers in charge of the government:

This measure…would meet…the organized and determined resistance of the capitalists in the form, let us say, of lockouts and the closing down of factories.

Likewise, a reform measure such as government support for the unemployed, including strikers, "would mean an immediate and quite substantial shift of economic power on the side of the proletariat." Bosses, who rely on the unemployed to bid wages down to a minimum, would lose much (if not all) ability to make profit, again setting up a scenario where lockouts would be followed by workers’ takeover of production. Measures such as the abolition of the right of inheritance also take on a special significance when workers control the government: "To act as the inheritor of land and industrial capital means that a workers’ state must be prepared to undertake the organizing of social production."³¹

To do anything less in circumstances like these would mean either the renunciation of power by the proletariat or the adoption, by a workers’ government, of a program that favors the bosses over the workers.

But could socialism thrive in backward Russia? Socialism requires a high degree of labor productivity–to produce both material abundance and free time. Until everybody’s basic material needs are met, a regime of equality can’t be stable. And until workers have time off from direct production, they can’t rule themselves.

As Trotsky summed up, Russian development had produced the "subjective" element of a socialist society–a working class ready to take power–but the "objective prerequisites" existed only "on a world scale," that is, in the advanced economies of Europe. The two matching pieces of the puzzle could only produce a socialist picture if they were combined–by a revolution that spread from Russia to countries such as Germany.³²

International assistance would be urgent because Russia’s backwardness would continue to be expressed most sharply as the unevenness between town and country, and thus as a conflict between the groups that began as revolutionary allies–the proletariat and peasantry. The conflict would come sooner rather than later:

While urban workers would demand socialist measures as a matter of self-defense, peasants would resist collectivization from the start. The common-sense program for the revolt against the nobles was the "black redistribution"–peasant seizure and division of noble estates.³⁴

But Trotsky pointed out that dividing the land into "tiny scraps" would not allow peasants to lift themselves out of poverty. He favored the conversion of noble lands to state or collective farms that could take advantage of large-scale production, including mechanization. The advanced farms could raise the standard of the whole countryside and provide an attractive model for further development. The scheme, of course, would require Western aid–"direct state support of the European proletariat":³⁵

But the situation of a worker-led state would be even more urgent than Trotsky imagined. As Lenin recognized, there was no way for workers to win the allegiance of the peasants by saying, in effect, "We support your movement to overthrow the nobles, but don’t take their land. We’ve got plans for it." The price of cementing a revolutionary alliance with the peasantry was to support "black redistribution" and to face the problems that went with it–low productivity and the postponement of collectivization. Socialist economics in the countryside would have to await the sharpening of class division among the peasants. A workers’ state would back the revolts of lower and middle peasants against the rural rich and would apply Western assistance, if available, to promote voluntary collectivization.³⁷

In the failure of the international revolution, the theory received its negative confirmation. The survival of Russia’s workers’ state was premised on eventual assistance from the West. When this did not materialize, Russia’s backwardness swallowed up hopes of abundance and therefore of social equality. The degeneration of the revolution opened the way to Stalin’s takeover and the return of autocracy in new forms. In the late 1920s, Trotsky extended the theory of permanent revolution beyond Russia to include other late-developing countries such as China. By then, however, Stalin’s control of the international movement prevented the world’s communist parties from adopting the perspective that had been so successful in Russia.

It’s significant that back in 1917, no Russian party started the year with Trotsky’s perspective, either. Lenin’s Bolsheviks eventually won leadership of the movement, but Lenin probably hadn’t read "Results and Prospects" by then, and it’s possible that he never read it.³⁸ But on the evening of October 25, as a nearly bloodless insurrection secured workers’ victory in Petersburg, Lenin opened his address to the new government–the All-Russia Congress of Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers’ Deputies–by saying, "We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order."³⁹

Just a few months before, in his famous "April Theses," Lenin had left some uncertainty about whether socialism was on the agenda in the near future. He declared, "it is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products under the control of the Soviets [councils] of Workers’ Deputies."⁴⁰ Evidently the experience of the revolution had made Lenin a "Trotskyist" in the belief that workers, once they have gained control of "social production and the distribution of products," must adopt socialist methods of organizing the economy if they are to maintain that control.

Lenin wasn’t the only one who became a Trotskyist in the course of mass struggle. The same was true of Trotsky himself. His position in the fall of 1904 was somewhat like Lenin’s–that the proletariat would lead the struggle for democratic freedoms but could not move on to socialism. "Only the free Russia of the future," wrote Trotsky, "in which we…will obviously be obliged to play the role of opposition party and not government, will enable the class struggle of the proletariat to develop to its full extent."⁴¹ But as the revolution unfolded, Trotsky adopted the full perspective of permanent revolution. The common starting point for Lenin and Trotsky was the political independence and leading role of the proletariat. The rest–the need for socialist measures, and the need for assistance from advanced states of the West–followed as the working class faced the consequences of its own success. Reality was the teacher. Or as Trotsky remarked in "Results and Prospects," "Marxism is above all a method of analysis–not analysis of texts, but analysis of social relations."⁴²

1 The quotation is from Leon Trotsky, "Results and Prospects," in The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1986), 63 (§4). The steps toward "permanence" are laid out explicitly in Permanent Revolution, 132—33 (Introduction). Chapter references will follow page citations for Trotsky’s works that are out of print; visit www.marxists.org for online texts.

2 The term appears only once in the pamphlet. For other uses of "permanent revolution" by Marx and others, see Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (London: Verso, 1981). For the way that Trotsky’s view differed from collaborators such as Parvus and Luxemburg who also used the phrase, see Tony Cliff, Trotsky: Towards October 1879—1917 (London: Bookmarks, 1989), 132—33. For Trotsky’s own 1931 generalization of the theory to other countries, see The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects. For the reference to permanent revolution in Results and Prospects, see 81 (§6).

3 Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Selected Works in One Volume (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 182—83.

4 Permanent Revolution, 126 (Introduction).

5 V.I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution," in V.I. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 9 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 23.

6 Karl Marx, "Preface to the First German Edition," in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 8—9.

7 Cliff, 52—53, 80.

8 Marx, Capital, 8.

9 "Results and Prospects," 38 (§1).

10 It’s tempting to say that a lock-step progression of social forms is Marx and Engels’ standard model for historical change, and that their treatments of combined and uneven development are, at best, refinements of the general theory, or, at worst, mere afterthoughts. But in reality, the concepts of combined and uneven development are crucial to the very first general exposition of Marxism–The German Ideology. In it, Marx and Engels lay out the materialist theory of history and use it to explain how the backwardness of Germany’s material production, in conjunction with the advanced position of nearby England and France, account for the advanced state of Germany’s philosophical production.

11 Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2003), 26—28.

12 "Results and Prospects," 52 (§3).

13 Ibid., 39 (§1).

14 Ibid., 42 (§1).

15 History of the Russian Revolution, 32.

16 "Results and Prospects," 49—50 (§2).

17 Ibid., 39 (§1) and 51 (§2).

18 Leon Trotsky, 1905 (New York: Random House, 1971). General figures for 1897, 43—44 (§4); on railway workers, 16 (§2).

19 1905, 14—19, 21 (§6). On Putilov, see Tony Cliff, "1905," Socialist Worker Review, January 1985, 15—17, available online at www.marxists.org.

20 "Results and Prospects," 108 (§9).

21 On rates of taxation and peasant debt, see Trotsky, 1905, 28—29 (§3).

22 1905, 190 (§17).

23 "Results and Prospects," 72—73, (§5).

24 Trotsky mentions regional and class divisions in "Results and Prospects," footnote on 72 (§5), and 103 (§8) and elaborates on these points in 1905, 24—35 (§3).

25 "Results and Prospects," 70 (§5).

26 Ibid., 93—94 (§7).

27 1905, 48 (§4).

28 "Results and Prospects," 71 (§5).

29 Ibid., 101—02 (§8).

30 "Results and Prospects," 78 (§6).

31 On support for the unemployed, see "Results and Prospects," 79—80 (§6). On inheritance, see 101 (§8).

32 "Results and Prospects," 88—100 (§7, §8).

33 Ibid., 104—05 (§8).

34 Ibid., 103 (§8).

35 For a statistical version of the argument that dividing the land would perpetuate rural poverty, see Trotsky, 1905, 33—34 (§3). On the need for socialization of big estates, see 1905, 34 (§3) and Trotsky, "Results and Prospects," 104 (§8). On support from Europe, see "Results and Prospects," 105 (§8).

36 "Results and Prospects," 115 (§9).

37 This represents a shift in Lenin’s position as he saw the peasant revolt take shape. See Tony Cliff, Building the Party: Lenin 1893—1914 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2002), 181—98.

38 Permanent Revolution, 166 (§1).

39 History of the Russian Revolution, 1170.

40 V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution," Lenin Collected Works, vol. 24, 24. The emphasis is Lenin’s.

41 Leon Trotsky, "Our Political Tasks," August 1904, quoted in Cliff, Trotsky: Towards October, 87, Available online at www.marxists.org, the quoted passage appears in "Part II: Tactical Tasks: The Content of Activity in the Proletariat."

42 "Results and Prospects," 64 (§4).