LA RIVOLUZIONE PERMANENTE

STEFANO CAPRIO*

 

One of the watchwords of the communist movement in the twentieth century, the «short century» that was depleted by appalling wars and devastation, was that of the «permanent revolution». It is one of the main declensions of the same doctrine of Marx and Engels, even if the expression has historically been linked to the name of Lev Trotsky. Indeed, this idea, which provided for the natural extension of the socialist revolution to all the countries of the world, found a new application in the Russian revolution. After the illusions of the nineteenth century we are living a period of difficult transition, the post-modernity of which everyone gives a different definition, which today also becomes post-globalization, for the feeling of rejection increasingly widespread with respect to that world ideal «without boundaries» and without limits that had been defined precisely the «end of history», the realized paradise. We are beyond the end, at the «end of the end» of history, and everything is being challenged. Are we going to a new «Apocalypse in history», as the Russian intellectuals in the collection Iz glubiny feared a hundred years ago? The reinterpretation of those events and the reflections that followed, can help us today to understand the profound mutations, or the new revolutions, of the third millennium just begun.