Permanent Revolution (group) - Theory

Theory

Permanent Revolution claimed to stand in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky and for the revolutionary programme developed by the early Comintern and the early Fourth International. However, it differed from other Trotskyist organisations in three ways:

  1. Permanent Revolution believed that Trotskyism requires a "perspective": the most concrete assessment of the situation must be made in order to enable the application of revolutionary Marxist ideas to the real situation of the class struggle at any given moment. It emphasised Marx's view that it is necessary to understand the world in order to change it.
  2. Permanent Revolution considered the LRCI to have been a healthy period within Trotskyism and saw itself as following on from the LCRI which also argued that the Fourth International had degenerated after the Second World War because of a refusal to fundamentally reassess its perspectives. It felt that the L5I, through a similar refusal, suffered a similar process of disorientation and degeneration which culminated in the L5I abandoning the Trotskyist programme as a method of intervention into the actual class struggle.
  3. Permanent Revolution paid special interest to an analysis of how globalisation offsets the tendency of the rate of profit to decline and enables capitalism to escape the stagnation period which defined the world economy through the 1970s and 1980s.

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