this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Full lecture transcript

The Theory of Permanent Revolution and the Origins of Trotskyism

Christoph Vandreier

The following lecture was delivered by Christoph Vandreier, the national secretary of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Germany), at the SEP (US) International Summer School, held between August 2-9, 2025. It is the first part of a two-part lecture on the Origins of Trotskyism.

The WSWS will be publishing all the lectures at the school in the coming weeks. The introduction to the school by SEP National Chairman David North, “The place of Security and the Fourth International in the history of the Trotskyist movement” was published on August 13.

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[–] davel@lemmy.ml 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Arguably it wasn’t carried out in the USSR because it happened after Yeltsin’s coup dissolved it. One might argue that Gorbachev’s Perestroika would have inevitably led to that outcome, but we’ll never really know.

It hasn’t been carried out in China. China’s bourgeoisie don’t collaborate with the Chinese state so much as take orders from it. Previously:

If the state owns [the means of production], and the state also owns the money printer and also the banks (which are another form of money printing), then it’s not compelled to be run in the M-C-M' capitalist mode of production, because it doesn’t need to make a profit, or even break even.

Furthermore, the capitalists in China have virtually no political power. Just look at the number of rich people who’ve received the death sentence with reprieve, or the property developers who were left to flail and go bankrupt, or the sorry state of billionaire Jack Ma.

Also what “imperialism” was Stalin involved with, and who were the “hundreds of thousands of communist revolutionaries and Old Bolsheviks” that Stalin murdered?