Permanent revolution succeeds only when grounded in a particular society’s concrete historical relations.

Evidence

The [Bolshevik] tendency which opposed it in this literary form, and indeed did not use it “on purpose”, applied it in fact in a form which adhered to actual, concrete, living history, adapted to the time and the place; as something that sprang from all the pores of the particular society which had to be transformed; as the alliance of two social groups [i.e. proletariat and peasantry] with the hegemony of the urban group. In one case, you had the Jacobin temperament without an adequate political content; in the second, a Jacobin temperament and content derived from the new historical relations, and not from a literary and intellectualistic label. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 488

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the proletarian-peasant alliance with urban hegemony from the Trotskyist ‘permanent revolution’ slogan — a key Gramscian concept.
• XREF: Connects forward to the ‘historical bloc’ and hegemony concepts the Islamophobia readings later build on; also contrasts literary/intellectual theory with lived politics.