Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory broke from both Menshevik and Bolshevik positions

Evidence

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was not really developed before his “Balances and Prospects” of 1906. However, in 1905 he had published a pamphlet called “The period up to 9 January” which was published with a preface by Parvus which stated that “The Revolutionary Provisional Government of Russia will be the government of a workers’ democracy … a coherent government with a social-democratic majority”. This position differed both from that of the Menshevilis, who believed that the revolution was necessarily bourgeois in character and that the social-democrats should adopt an abstentionist attitude, and from that of the Bolsheviks, who stood precisely for a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2173

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Distinguishes permanent revolution, Menshevik abstentionism, and Bolshevik worker-peasant dictatorship as three distinct strategic positions.

Related

• Russian revolutionary factions split over whether a workers’ or cross-class democracy should govern (similarity 0.88)
• Permanent revolution succeeds only when grounded in a particular society’s concrete historical relations. (similarity 0.80)
• Revolutionary theory is judged by analyzing internal forces, not predicting dates. (similarity 0.78)