Political upheaval

A political revolution, in the Trotskyist theory, is an upheaval in which the government is replaced, or the form of government altered, but in which property relations are predominantly left intact. The revolutions in France in 1830 and 1848 are often cited as political revolutions.

Political Revolutions are contrasted with social revolutions in which old property relations are overturned. Leon Trotsky's book, The Revolution Betrayed, is the most widely cited development of the theory.

The Trotskyist movement advocates political revolution, as opposed to capitalist counter-revolution, in the countries with deformed workers states. Such political revolutions are envisioned to overthrow undemocratic governments of bureaucratic privilege, replacing them with governments based on workers' democracy while maintaining state owned property relations.

While the Trotskyist movement does not recognize any political revolution to have occurred against the deformed workers states, it saw a strong possibility for that potential in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Czechoslovakian Prague Spring of 1968, both crushed by Soviet invasion. Another uprising seen to have the possibility of sweeping in political revolution was the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, crushed by the Communist Party of China.

Unlike the movements that led to capitalist counter-revolution such Boris Yeltsin's 1991 coup in the USSR and Lech Wałęsa's Solidarność in Poland, these previous movements were not seen as having stated capitalist goals and were not seen as hostile to socialism. As such the Trotskyist movement opposed the 1956 invasion of Hungary, the 1969 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Tiananmen Square massacre as the crimes of Stalinist governments.

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