As reblogged from the Journal of Australian Political Economy blogspot, I noted that some time ago Tony Cliff developed a theorisation of deflected permanent revolution to consider how state power, notably in post-colonial conditions of uneven and combined development, becomes the driver for capital accumulation. One result was the deflection of permanent revolution as the means of socialist transformation from bourgeois rule. This built on Leon Trotsky’s work ‘The Permanent Revolution’ where he wrote of ‘the inner connections’ linking the theory of permanent revolution, or the revolution in permanence, to states that experience ‘belated bourgeois development’, especially colonial and semi-colonial states.