“The Betrayed Revolution” as an example of Trotskyism
No. 5/93.V.2024
There is a lot of shine and noise in Trotsky’s phrases, but there is no content in them (Lenin)
In August it will be 88 years since the publication of L. Trotsky’s infamous book “The Revolution Betrayed: What is the USSR and where is it going?” Among some on the left, this book is revered as a serious analysis of the socialist state and a Marxist critique of the Soviet system. The authors of Trotsky’s four-volume work, Felshtinsky and Chernyavsky, expressed regret about Lev Davidich’s inability to “discard Marxist dogmas” and complained about his “communist utopianism” and “fanaticism.” However, the concerns of respected gentlemen. American historians were in vain, because in “The Revolution Betrayed” there is not even a shadow of Marxism; the former People's Commissar actually speaks from the position of left-liberalism, powdered, like the face of an aging prostitute, with r-revolutionary phrases.
“The Betrayed Revolution” is the brightest example of Trotskyism, the standard of Trotskyist thinking (Trotsky himself assessed it as “the main work of his life”). A solid Marxist, without much difficulty, is able to expose the countless manipulations, distortions and outright lies of Judas Trotsky, his empty pseudo-revolutionary phrase, behind which hides the same anti-communism that permeates all the writings of fascists and liberals against the USSR. But the quality of the current cadres of the communist movement is such that even some of the comrades who openly declare that they stand on the positions of Stalinism, that is, recognition of Stalin’s theoretical and practical contribution to Marxism, take a wavering position: they say, yes, Trotsky was a traitor and a saboteur, but in the end he turned out to be right. They say that “The Betrayed Revolution” may be odious and biased, but the main prediction turned out to be correct: the restoration of capitalism was actually carried out by the degenerated top of the party bureaucracy.
It should be recognized that Trotskyism today is one of the most effective means of combating the spread of Marxist science, especially among young people. How can this be explained?
Firstly , Trotskyism is very easily digestible, like glucose; if reading, for example, the main works of Stalin requires at least a minimum amount of knowledge, mastery of the basics of Marxism, then any pamphlet by Trotsky can be read without any knowledge and “understand” the text. Because, in essence, there is nothing to understand from Trotsky, he is superficial, but he writes very smartly and sharply, with biting phrases and juicy epithets. We must pay tribute to Lev Davidich - he is a brilliant publicist; he should write fantastic stories in the spirit of A. Belyaev, but - alas! — he preferred to write political fiction, passing it off as Marxism. Is it any wonder that young people, outraged by social injustice and the ugliness of capitalism, but putting aside the serious study of Marxism on the back burner, read Trotsky’s pamphlets, captivated by his image of an intellectual and “eternal revolutionary.”
Here it should be specially emphasized that Trotskyism as a phenomenon cannot in any case be narrowed to the activities of Trotsky himself and his associates. It was not Trotsky who gave birth to Trotskyism (for the “lion of the revolution” did not have any consistent and firm ideas and convictions, and he himself was a typical demagogue and adventurer), but “Trotskyism” gave birth to Trotsky, i.e. a new round of opportunist current that came to change of Menshevism. Lev Davidich led this new round, becoming his “brand”.
Secondly , Trotskyism is an extremely tenacious form of opportunism (adaptation to the conditions of bourgeois rule), which, like a virus, constantly mutates, actively penetrating communist organizations. For example, in the Russian Federation, against the background of the high authority of Stalin and the Stalin era, Trotskyism mutated into the so-called. “Shapinism” is an attempt to “reconcile” Trotskyism with Stalinism through objectivism and the statement that the contradictions between them have allegedly lost their relevance. No matter how Trotskyism is disguised, no matter what clothes it dresses up in, its political physiognomy remains unchanged - it is direct or indirect anti-Stalinism, denial or belittlement of Stalin’s role in Marxism, denial of communism in the USSR.
Thus, taking into account the growth of leftist sentiments of the masses and the absence of an authoritative communist center, the weak theoretical preparation of the left, Trotskyism is the leading edge of bourgeois ideology, a reactionary practice in the left movement.
In this article I am not going to examine in detail, under a microscope, Trotsky’s entire book - I will leave that to other researchers. My goal in analyzing a specific chapter is to show the methodological insignificance of the most famous left-wing critic of the USSR, to analyze his anti-Marxism using specific material.
Two cornerstones of “classical” Trotskyism
Before proceeding with the actual analysis, I will outline two cornerstones on which the “Revolution Betrayed” is based. Firstly , this is the famous “Soviet Thermidor”. And if you expect a strict definition of “Soviet Thermidor”, then... do not forget that you are dealing with Trotsky, with a man who “loves ringing and empty phrases” and “avoids facts and specific instructions” if they “mercilessly refute all his angry exclamations and pompous phrases” (characteristic from Lenin’s article “On the violation of unity, covered up by cries for unity”).
If we seriously analyze the theses about “Thermidor,” then the idea is promoted that the socialist revolution is naturally doomed to repeat the path of the French bourgeois revolution. Trotsky is not at all embarrassed by the question of how correct it is to draw parallels between the French Revolution and October, because they took place in completely different historical situations; that the nature of these revolutions is fundamentally different: in the first case, some exploiters overthrew others, and in the second case, the working class overthrew all the oppressors at once and took political power for the first time. He claims:
“The axiomatic assertion of Soviet literature that the laws of bourgeois revolutions are ‘inapplicable’ to proletarian revolutions is devoid of any scientific content.”
Deprived - and that's it. Trotsky, as usual, does not present any arguments.
The roots of “Thermidor” come from distorted historical materialism. Trotsky promotes a vulgar approach to history: he completely denies the subjective factor, the role of the individual. For him, all historical figures are just functions, puppets in the hands of classes, obediently playing out the roles assigned to them:
“The sequence of stages of the Great French Revolution, during its ascent as well as its descent, shows no less convincingly that the strength of the successive “leaders” and “heroes” consisted primarily in their correspondence to the character of those classes and strata that gave them support ; It was only this correspondence, and not any unrelated advantages, that allowed each of them to put the stamp of their personality on a certain historical period. In the alternation in power of Mirabeau, Brissot, Robespierre, Barras, Bonaparte, there is an objective pattern that is immeasurably more powerful than the special signs of the historical protagonists themselves.”
Accordingly, according to Trotsky, the Bolsheviks won in October 17 not because they were armed with scientific revolutionary theory and had in their caliber the brilliant leader Lenin, who was able to accurately grasp the moment when “today is too early, and tomorrow is too late,” but simply because “the proletariat finally managed to lead the dissatisfied peasantry against the bourgeoisie.” Apparently, it succeeded by itself, without the participation of the Bolsheviks...
Of course, such “historical mathematics” is a caricature of Marxism. In no case does Marxist theory deny the role of the individual in history, much less try to reduce it to a simple function. Stalin explained:
“Marxism does not at all deny the role of outstanding individuals or the fact that people make history. In Marx, in his “The Poverty of Philosophy” and other works, you can find words that it is people who make history. But, of course, people do not make history as some fantasy tells them, not as it comes to their minds. Each new generation encounters certain conditions that were already in place at the moment when this generation was born. And great people are worth something only insofar as they are able to correctly understand these conditions, understand how to change them. If they do not understand these conditions and want to change these conditions as their imagination tells them, then they, these people, find themselves in the position of Don Quixote. Thus, precisely according to Marx, people should not be opposed to conditions. It is people, but only insofar as they correctly understand the conditions that they found ready-made, and only insofar as they understand how to change these conditions, that make history” (“Conversation with the German writer Emil Ludwig”).
That is, the point is that each person acts in certain objective historical realities and cannot go against them. Take, for example, the story of Pharaoh Akhenaten and his religious reform: Egyptian society was not ready to accept the monotheistic model and after Akhenaten’s death, all his ideas, like his name itself, were consigned to oblivion. The opposite example is Tsar Peter the Great. Despite the radicalism of the reforms, as a result of which the beards of the boyars were chopped off, often along with their heads, Peter’s transformations after his death, unlike Akhenaten, remained in force and all subsequent kings and queens declared themselves as “successors of the work of Peter the Great.” Because Russian society as a whole was ready for Peter’s reforms; they were long overdue; all that was needed was a strong enough and decisive figure to implement them.
You can find many examples when at a critical historical moment there was no suitable person or leader, which led to disaster. For example, the kingdom of Congo in the 17th century had every chance of becoming a powerful African empire, successfully fought against the Portuguese slave traders, but when the Congolese king Pedro II died, there was no worthy heir, strife began, and as a result the state collapsed, turning into a colony of Europeans.
That is why the fantasies of the writers of the now popular genre of “misfits” are naive, when our contemporary miraculously finds himself, for example, in the era of Ivan the Terrible and begins to progress, introducing modern technologies and knowledge. Let's take, for example, a steam engine. There is evidence that the ancient Greeks figured out how to use the power of steam and built steam fountains. But the first steam locomotive appeared only at the beginning of the 19th century. Really, all these centuries, no one thought of attaching wheels to a steam engine and putting it on rails? The point is not that they didn’t guess, but that there was no objective economic need for it. If some Leonardo Da Vinci had guessed to build a steam locomotive, at best it would have become a toy for the rich, like the most complex “robot” dolls created by watchmakers in the 18th century. Actually, the locomotive was initially just an attraction for the wealthy public. The railway service is a product of capitalism, when it became necessary to transport large volumes of goods across the vastness of America and Europe.
This is the diamatic understanding of the role of personality and technology in history. Trotsky took only one side, distorting the relationship between the objective and the subjective in history.
Trotsky's second cornerstone is his demagoguery about the "bureaucratic class" that has usurped power and oppresses the working class. In Marxism, the issue of “bureaucracy” is resolved unambiguously: the bureaucracy does not form a separate class, but is in the service of the ruling class. The freedom of action of officials and rulers is limited by the will of the ruling class. When they abuse the will of their class, they are eliminated, sometimes physically. There is a well-known form of political power called “Bonapartism”, when the top of the state tries to maneuver between the interests of different classes according to the principle: both ours and yours. The freedom of action for the device is somewhat expanded. However, the Bonapartist regime does not distinguish bureaucrats as a separate class; it still remains within the framework of those social-production relations as before. Trotsky acts cunningly here: he endows the “Soviet bureaucracy” with all the attributes of a class, but does not recognize it as a full-fledged class (fairly recognizing that the Soviet official does not own or inherit state property) and prophesies that soon the “bureaucrats” will want to become “real” owners and restoring capitalism. Young inexperienced leftists, looking for the cause of the death of the USSR and getting acquainted with these theses of Trotsky, find them logical and convincing, based on the fact that the counter-revolution was carried out by the party elite.
Trotskyist demagoguery about the “bureaucratic class” clings to the fact that power cannot be exercised directly by them. And here it does not matter whether we are talking about the masses of proletarians or the “mass” of the small bourgeoisie. If we imagine a society where literally every entrepreneur is endowed with state power, then we get a gloomy “dystopia” in the spirit of Bradbury. This is pure fantasy; such a society cannot exist in reality without falling into anarchy.
The question of the bureaucracy as a class is essentially a question of the supra-class elite of power. The actions of any apparatus or state come down to the question of ways and means of achieving the goals of the ruling class. This is the ABC of Marxism. When it comes to bourgeois society, then, as a rule, there are no difficulties for the left, but when it comes to socialist society, about the Soviet past, difficulties arise here.
The fact is that communism, unlike capitalism, cannot come spontaneously and economically; if the bourgeois revolution is the final act of the formation of a capitalist formation, then for communism the taking of power by the working class is only the beginning of a long and difficult path of reformatting the entire society. If the bourgeoisie, when taking power, already has its own economic basis, then the working class and communists, having made a revolution, need to gradually build the basis of communism, and this is a very difficult task.
Before the revolution, among the party “lower classes” and revolutionary youth there was a naive thought that it was enough to overthrow the bourgeoisie and socialize the means of production - and communist production relations would come by themselves (after all, “the basis is primary, and the setting is secondary”). But then, when this did not happen, another idea appeared that it was necessary to surpass the technological level of the imperialist countries - and then communism would come. Trotsky, by the way, preaches precisely this vulgar point of view:
“Marxism proceeds from the development of technology as the main spring of progress, and builds the communist program on the dynamics of the productive forces.”
And further:
“If Marx called the society that was supposed to be formed on the basis of the socialization of the productive forces of the most advanced capitalism of its era the lowest stage of communism, then this definition clearly does not fit the Soviet Union, which even today is much poorer in technology, life goods and culture, than capitalist countries. It would be more correct, therefore, to call the current Soviet regime, in all its contradictions, not socialist, but preparatory or transitional from capitalism to socialism.”
Here you can conduct a test: if a person claiming to be a communist accepts this text as Marxist, then he has failed the test and he needs to better study the works of the classics.
So, communism cannot come spontaneously. Why is that? Because communism is built not on naked class interests, which are a socially formed instinct, but on the consciousness of the masses, on the scientific organization of society. The masses must mature to communism, get rid of the atavisms of class thinking and behavior. It is absolutely true that communism cannot be built without a developed material and technical base, but it is also impossible to organize communist relations in society by simply improving the means of production. No matter how many goods are produced, it will still not be enough for the townspeople, like the rajah from the fairy tale “The Golden Antelope.” Consumer products must cease to be a tool for designating “status” and a form of self-realization. This can only be achieved through culturalism, the gradual re-education of the masses on the basis of state property and a planned economy.
The objective factors of communism are long overdue and overripe: modern productive forces (especially with the development of robotics and neural networks) are already ready for communism, albeit a long one, which will require a change of several generations. People involved in production have everything they need to start living and working in a new way today. All that is missing is the subjective factor, the organizing force in the form of the dictatorship of the working class. Under communism, it is not the objective (economic) but the subjective factor that acquires decisive importance in the form of the political line of the party—the vanguard of the working class.
Let me quote a fragment from my article “ Remark on the problem of leftists studying the death of the USSR ”:
“In an exploitative formation, that is, in the synthesis of a base and a corresponding superstructure, the main and main preserving element is precisely the superstructure, and not the entire social consciousness, which contains both reactionary and progressive aspects. The prevailing relations of production are gradually becoming overripe and are themselves ready to move into a new state, to give way to new relations. The peculiarity of capitalism as the last exploitative formation, its difference from feudalism and slavery, is that more progressive and complex production relations (communism) do not spontaneously develop in its depths. Therefore, the socialist revolution cannot rely on any ready-made economic ties; it relies only on people - on the proletariat, who have realized the need for a revolutionary demolition of the “old world”.
Under communism, the superstructure presupposes the free and dynamic development of the base as an organic side of social production, and the base provides scope for the development of the superstructure. In this sense, the formation of “communism” is not the opposite of the formation of “capitalism,” but of all class formations together. This is why the arguments of various leftist theorists about the contradictions of socialist production with social relations are deeply erroneous. It is correct to talk about the struggle between the old exploitative ways of life and the new communist way of life.”
Why does it happen that at some point the party begins to lead the masses not towards the victory of communism, but in the opposite direction from communism? Trotskyism explains this by “bureaucratic degeneration,” and Marxism by the class struggle, which not only does not subside, but intensifies with the growing successes of communism due to the furious resistance of reactionary forces. The party turns into an arena of class struggle between Marxists and opportunists. In the 30s, opportunism in the CPSU(b) was organizationally defeated, but not uprooted, and after Stalin’s death it took revenge in the form of Khrushchev’s coup.
Regarding the fact that “the bureaucracy restored capitalism.” In general, there are only two possibilities for the restoration of capitalism in a socialist country: outside intervention or betrayal within the ruling party, its betrayal of the interests of the working class. Treason can occur in two forms: a coup at the top, as happened in Yugoslavia (Tito’s coup in 1949), or a gradual slide of the party into the swamp of opportunism, ideological degeneration and degeneration of the leadership, as happened with the CPSU and many other European communist parties.
Neither Lenin nor Stalin ever denied the possibility of degeneration and degeneration of the party. They understood perfectly well that careerists, money-grubbers and other bastards would immediately climb into the Bolshevik Party, which became the ruling party. Trotsky did not add anything new on this issue and only mechanically described this process, adding along the way nonsense about the “bureaucratic class,” presenting bourgeois remnants in Soviet society as “signs of degeneration” and proposing completely idiotic ways to overcome them.
Trotsky’s problem is not that he spoke about the possibility of bourgeois degeneration, but that he passed off the possibility as a fait accompli, unfoundedly and groundlessly attacked Stalin and the Stalinist party, accusing him of usurping power, a break with the class and the people, while none of this did not have. Moreover, the course of the disintegration of the CPSU and the degeneration of the party leadership showed how a break with the class and the people actually occurs. And it did not happen through the open usurpation of property, some kind of formalization of the “bureaucracy” into a class, etc., as Trotskyism depicted, but through the decomposition of the working class and people by anti-Marxist, liberal propaganda: “more democracy, more socialism,” etc. When the working class was completely disorganized, slogans were used: “we need an owner,” “the state is not effective,” “give us the market,” etc.
That is, according to Trotsky, the class struggle is depicted as a struggle of some supposedly organized pseudo-class of the bureaucracy and the working class, in the form of receiving some kind of privileges and so on, while in fact the class struggle took place, first of all, within the party leadership according to lines of scientific competence and opportunism, ignorance, stupidity. The dominance of opportunism and stupidity, coupled with democratic procedures and the “collective mind of the party,” paved the way into the leadership for open enemies, spies and saboteurs, who were not so much for capitalism as against Bolshevism, which they fiercely hated and longed to destroy, even if it meant the whole country along with its population will have to be wiped out into dust. They wanted to destroy the country and rule themselves in the newly formed “principalities.”
Thus, the viciousness of the demagoguery about the “bureaucratic class” lies not only in the slander against Stalin and the USSR, but also in the fact that it is a monstrous perversion of Marxist theory, which makes the dictatorship of the proletariat impossible in principle. The working class cannot exercise power all at once, even through the form of Soviets, much less can it successfully build communism, because it does not have the knowledge of Marxism. This is why the Party exists - the vanguard, that is, the headquarters, the brain of the class:
“The working class can act as a class only by organizing itself into a special political party opposing <...> the parties created by the propertied classes” (Engels “Congress in The Hague. Letter to Bignyami”).
To pit the working class against your own party is the worst kind of sabotage. To instill in the working people disbelief in their leaders means to disorganize the working class, to undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat, because without leaders, strictly speaking, the party cannot exist, and without the party there is no point in talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The strength and power of the communist state does not lie in the laws and system of violence, but in the quality of the connection between the party and the class, and this quality is dictated by the subjective factor, conviction, goals, correctly used means and conditions, etc.
"Bolshevism for the enlightened bourgeoisie"
This is what Trotsky called pro-Soviet Western literature in the preface of his book, which he characterized as follows: “Contemplative, optimistic, by no means destructive literature, which sees all troubles behind us, has a very calming effect on the reader’s nerves and therefore meets with a favorable reception.” Well, Trotsky’s book, therefore, is meaningless, pessimistic, very destructive and pushes all the unsightliness to the foreground, excitingly acting on the nerves. In principle, that’s all true.
The preface, or rather two prefaces, deserves special mention. The first preface (1936) states that previously capitalist countries pretended not to notice the economic successes of the USSR, but “the facts, however, do their job. Now the book market of all civilized countries is flooded with books about the Soviet Union.” The world's first proletarian state is gaining a number of sympathizers, supporters and enthusiasts who write their books about it. But Trotsky is not satisfied with these books - for him it is all nonsense, “amateurish journalism” and schematism. But he, Trotsky, finally gave the world a comprehensive scientific assessment of the Soviet system. Trotsky himself understood perfectly well that his “scientific assessment” could and would certainly provoke criticism, so he laid out a straw in advance:
“Well-meaning “leftist” philistines like to repeat that extreme caution is needed in criticizing the Soviet Union so as not to damage socialist construction. We, for our part, do not at all consider the Soviet state to be such a shaky structure. The enemies of the USSR are much better informed about it than its real friends, that is, the workers of all countries.”
This quote contains all of Trotsky! Firstly, he immediately labels his opponents, supporters of the USSR, “left-wing philistines.” Secondly, he, like a mosquito, injects an “anesthetic” poison: they say, the Soviet state is firmly on its feet and my, Trotsky’s, slander, in the sense of a critic, cannot harm it in any way, and if you think otherwise, then you yourself don’t believe in the power of the Union! And in general, I am, they say, fulfilling a very important mission: informing workers of all countries about the real state of affairs! - lies and pretense in every line! In fact, Trotsky was concerned not with the imaginary ignorance of the real friends of the Union, but with the fact that they DO NOT TRUST liberal-fascist slander, but trust Stalin and his party. And that is why Judushka took up his pen to, relying on the inflated authority of the “organizer of the October Revolution” and the “Leninist guardsman,” lie, lie and lie again about Stalin, about the Union, about socialism.
In the second preface (1937), Trotsky, embittered by the exposure of his accomplices at the Moscow trials, throws off the mask of an unbiased researcher. Trotsky depicts the horrors of Soviet Mordor:
“The extermination of the revolutionary generation and the merciless purge of youth testifies to the terrible tension of the contradiction between the bureaucracy and the people. In this book we have tried to give a social and political analysis of this contradiction before it burst out so violently. Those conclusions that might have seemed paradoxical just a year ago now stand before the eyes of humanity in all their tragic reality.”
And again, shameless manipulation and demagoguery. The trial of a collection of spies, murderers and saboteurs is declared to be a growing contradiction between the party (in Trotsky’s terminology, the “bureaucracy”) and the people! If the tension of contradictions between the party and the people grew, and even more frighteningly, then this should have resulted in numerous mass excesses. But nothing like that happens. And the defendants in the Moscow trials were accused precisely of CONSPIRACY activities, of attempting to carry out a military coup d'etat with the support of foreign intelligence services. If these scoundrels who betrayed the working class were actually representatives of the people's will, why then did they not appeal directly to the people? Why did they humbly repent of their mistakes before the Stalinist leadership and publicly renounce their views? What should the people, suffering under the yoke of the bureaucracy, as Trotsky assures us, think about such “fighters against the regime”? But precisely because the so-called. The “left opposition” was unable to win any serious support from the worker-peasant masses, since it lost in OPEN debates with the Stalinists, its leaders decided to go into the anti-Soviet underground, switch to the practice of conspiracies, terror and sabotage. But for Trotsky this is “evidence of the terrible tension of the contradiction between the bureaucracy and the people”!
At the end of the preface, Trotsky becomes infuriated:
“Some of the official “friends,” whose diligence is paid in full chervonets, as well as in the currency of other countries, had the shamelessness to reproach the author that his book helps fascism. As if bloody massacres and judicial forgeries were not known to the world reaction without this book! In fact, the Soviet bureaucracy is now one of the most malignant groups of world reaction... It [the book] is imbued with the spirit of irreconcilable hostility towards the new caste of rapists and exploiters. Thus, it serves the real interests of the working people and the cause of socialism.”
Again, everyone who disagrees with Trotsky and defends the Union from slander are paid agents of Moscow, how could it be otherwise! It is noteworthy that Trotsky does not deny that his book helps fascism. He simply makes a statement: even without my book, everything is clear to everyone! And in general, fascism is nonsense, the “Soviet bureaucracy” is the head of the hydra of world reaction, and not the imperialists who were openly preparing a second world massacre!
Guide to the "barnyard"
The lead backside of the bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution (Judas Trotsky)
The first three chapters of “The Revolution Betrayed” are “statistics”, where Trotsky happily cites selected data, from which the following picture emerges: the economy in the Union is entirely backward and inefficient, workers and peasants live poorly, and all the successes and achievements he reports government, inflated and fake, because “it is known that the organic need of any bureaucracy is to tint up reality.” In general, nothing that could not be read in the liberal-fascist press. The only point worth noting:
“The “complete victory” of socialism in the USSR has been announced several times in recent years, in a particularly categorical form - in connection with the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”... From the point of view of this perspective, the state should have finally died out at the same time, because Where the “last remnants” of capitalism have been eliminated, the state has nothing to do.”
Here Judushka makes a substitution of concepts typical of Trotskyism: he attributes to the lower phase of communism (known as socialism) the quality of the higher, mature phase of communism. The withering away of the state occurs under complete communism, when all the rudiments of an exploitative society are completely eliminated from the psyche of the masses. Only naive anarchism can demand the withering away of the state right here and now. Trotsky should be aware of this, but since his writings are aimed at a public not sophisticated in Marxism, he boldly puts the blame on simple-minded readers.
And here is how the ideologist of “permanent revolution” defines socialism:
“Socialism is a system of planned production in the name of the best satisfaction of human needs, otherwise it does not deserve this name at all.”
This is how it turns out, based on this logic, that socialism is not a period of fierce battle between the old exploitative and new communist order, but a kind of welfare society, where a planned economy provides all people with the “best satisfaction of needs”! In this cheating method, the focus moves from the class struggle to such a sweet topic for the bourgeoisie as meeting needs and not just any satisfaction - the best! What if a socialist state is not able to best satisfy all the needs of people for an objective reason, for example, an economic blockade and sabotage by world imperialism? Oh yes, the theorist of “permanent revolution” should have a revolution in the camp of imperialism, and if this does not happen, well, let’s part ways, comrades! We sit and wait until the proletarians of the imperialist countries are ripe for revolution! For some “also communists” this may be a revelation, but the successes of building communism, strictly speaking, are not related to the volume of the food basket, otherwise there would have been no victories during the period of war communism, the implementation of the GOELRO plan, or victory in the Great Patriotic War. These are populists and demagogues who are ready to promise that they will benefit everyone at once without the slightest effort on the part of the latter. The communists say honestly: there will be no bourgeois paradise.
But it’s time, finally, to move on to the key, ninth, chapter “What is the USSR?” It begins with official statistics, which say that the private sector of the economy in the Union has decreased significantly and contains no more than 10% of the population, and the share of socialist production will be 98.5%.
“These optimistic figures serve, at first glance, as irrefutable proof of the “final and irrevocable” victory of socialism,” writes Trotsky. “But woe to those who do not see the social reality behind the arithmetic!”
Trotsky calls not to trust Soviet figures, because they were “derived at a stretch.” In particular, he reports that, they say, the personal plots of collective farmers were assigned to the socialist sector. But that’s okay - “the center of the issue is not here.” What? The point is that bourgeois tendencies are emerging in the socialist sector itself. These trends are that
“The achieved increase in the material level of the country is significant enough to awaken increased needs in everyone, but is completely insufficient to satisfy them. Thus, the very dynamics of economic growth involve the awakening of petty-bourgeois appetites not only among peasants and representatives of “mental” labor, but also at the top of the proletariat. The naked opposition of individual farmers to collective farmers, handicraftsmen to state industry does not give the slightest idea of the explosive power of these appetites, which permeate the entire economy of the country and are expressed, generally speaking, in the desire of each and every one to give as little as possible to society and to receive as much as possible from it.” .
For Trotsky, the wind blows because the trees bend. Petty-bourgeois thinking (“give less, get more”) is the most enduring relic of private property relations, a complex of habits and “reflexes” formed over thousands of years, the vast majority of which consisted of hunger, cold and hard work. Strictly speaking, the essence of building communism lies precisely in eliminating the rudiments from the psyche of the masses. Trotsky tries to present the matter in such a way that the socialist sector of the economy itself gives rise to petty-bourgeois consciousness by allegedly not being able to satisfy the growing needs of the masses. It turns out that, on the one hand, socialism, according to Trotsky, is “the best satisfaction of human needs,” but, on the other hand, when the planned economy begins to gradually provide these needs, Trotsky screams about the growth of “petty-bourgeois tendencies”!
Trotsky gets on his favorite horse and talks about the evil Soviet “bureaucracy”, which is the source of all troubles:
“...“Socialist” bureaucracy is a blatant contradictio in adjecto, this monstrous and ever-growing social perversion, which in turn becomes the source of malignant diseases of society.”
Here comes the contrast I have already discussed above between the “bureaucracy” (i.e., the party and economic leadership) and the proletarian state and the working class. We will not dwell on this and will continue to skip such fragments.
“The new constitution,” Trotsky declares, “entirely built, as we will see, on the identification of the bureaucracy with the state, and the state with the people, says: “state property, that is, the property of the whole people.” This identification constitutes the fundamental sophistry of the official doctrine.”
They say that state property is not yet public property. One can agree with this, but not at all in the interpretation of Trotskyism:
“State property only becomes “national” to the extent that social privileges and differences disappear, and therefore the need for the state. In other words: state property turns into socialist property to the extent that it ceases to be state property. And vice versa: the higher the Soviet state rises above the people, the more fiercely it opposes itself, as the custodian of property, to the people, as its squanderer, the more clearly it itself testifies against the socialist character of state property.”
What is the Marxist view on this issue? Productive forces are tools of labor + people armed with these tools. Consequently, the question of building communist production relations must be considered from two sides:
1) Socialization of the means of production, which has a formal and real side. Real socialization, after the formal one, occurs as the system of scientific centralized planning develops and improves. If the planning system is poorly established and unscientific, then de jure national enterprises begin to function de facto as private capitalist enterprises, where the role of the capitalist is played by management or a collective of workers. A similar situation arose in the late Soviet Union, when, due to market reforms, the introduction of cost accounting and the weakening of the state, unified planning was disrupted, individual enterprises and entire industries worked not for the plan, but for the market, which gave rise to market anarchy of production.
2) Along with the real socialization of the means of production, there is the building of communist production relations through the narrowing and reduction of market mechanisms, on the one hand, and the growth of the consciousness of the working masses through cultural and political education and training, on the other hand.
Both of these processes are accompanied by fierce class struggle. Actually, the essence of the lower phase of communism is the struggle between old exploitative relations (selfishness, philistinism, ignorance, parasitism, parasitism) and new communist relations , which since primitive times have been fragmentarily contained in exploitative formations and, under the influence of science, acquire a new embodiment.
What about Trotsky? Under the brand of Marxism, he pushes virtually wretched anarcho-syndicalism, demanding that the state immediately wither away and transfer all property to the “people”!
Trotsky continues to fire off:
“The social distance between physical and mental labor has expanded rather than decreased in recent years, despite the replenishment of the scientific workforce by people from the lower classes. Thousand-year-old caste barriers that determine the life of every person from all sides - the polished city dweller and the uncouth peasant, the magician of science and the unskilled worker - have not just been preserved from the past, in a more or less softened form, but have been revived, to a large extent, anew and are taking on an increasingly defiant character".
This is how it turns out that the elimination of mass illiteracy, the organization of rural schools with free primary education, workers' schools, reading rooms, the publication of popular scientific literature, newspapers, the organization of lectures and demonstrations - all these measures of the Soviet government in no way contributed to overcoming the remnants of the old inequalities, did not reduce the gap between city and countryside! In Trotsky, the “caste” barriers were revived, taking on “an increasingly defiant character,” apparently more defiant than in tsarist bast shoes in Russia! However, Judushka wrote the book not for Soviet citizens, but for foreigners, so he did not restrain himself from lying!
Depicting the horrors of Soviet inequality for Western readers, Trotsky declares:
“If the ship is declared collective property, but the passengers are still shuffled between the first, second and third classes, then it is clear that the difference in conditions of existence will be of immeasurably greater importance for the third class passengers than the legal change of ownership. On the contrary, first class passengers will, between coffee and cigar, preach the idea that collective property is everything, and a comfortable cabin is nothing. The antagonisms that arise from this can explode an unstable team.”
Any anti-communist will gladly subscribe to these words of a “Bolshevik-Leninist”. Of course, it would be good if it were possible even during the lowest phase of communism to ensure abundance for the entire society, but this is difficult not so much for technical reasons as because of the dominance of philistinism, the grasping reflex and the hamster instinct to drag everything into a hole, which has found expression in popular rhymes:
Take every nail from the factory -
You are the host here, not the guest!
The Soviet state had to strictly ensure that the irresponsible part of the workers freed from exploitation did not tear apart their own factories. Regarding the “distribution of passengers of a collective ship by class.” Of course, this is a necessary measure, because the reverse principle of equalization is always pandering to lazy people and money-grabbers. Why work hard if you still get the same as your hard-working neighbor? And the hard worker, seeing how the lazy person is idle, but receives the same number of banknotes, thinks: “Why should I strain myself if my neighbor is netting?” Laziness is a contagious thing. Therefore, in the lowest phase of communism, the principle of distribution according to work + forced bribery of the most valuable technical personnel is inevitable.
Trotsky continues:
“The Soviet press was happy to tell how a boy in the Moscow Zoological Garden received an answer to his question: whose elephant is this? answer: state, immediately concluded: that means he’s a little bit mine too. However, if the elephant were actually divided, the precious tusks would fall to the select few, some would feast on elephant ham, while the majority would have to be content with offal or hooves. Deprived boys are unlikely to identify state property with their own. The homeless consider “theirs” only what they steal from the state. The little “socialist” in the zoo was probably the son of some prominent dignitary, accustomed to reasoning according to the formula: “I am the state!”
Here Judas reveals his own bourgeois psychology in all its glory: the first thing he wants to do with a public elephant is to cut it into pieces, and expresses concern that during the division, someone will get the tusks, and someone else will get the hooves! And Judas doesn’t care about the fact that in a “disassembled” form the elephant will no longer represent the value that it represents in its entirety, living in the zoological garden and delighting visitors with its appearance! And what impudent cynicism: Trotsky is indignant that poor “street boys” will not identify state property with their own, because... the evil Soviet state protects public property and does not allow “deprived boys” to steal it! And a boy who does not think about how to saw off a tusk from a common elephant and sell it to a pawnshop is declared a little baron! This is written by a man who, as People's Commissar, traveled to Civil on a personal armored train with all the amenities and servants with a special uniform and took these benefits for granted!
But these are flowers, berries await us ahead. Here I am forced to quote a lengthy fragment of text:
“If, for clarity, we translate socialist relations into stock exchange language, then citizens can be imagined as participants in a joint-stock enterprise that owns the country’s wealth. The public nature of ownership implies the distribution of “shares” equally and, therefore, the right to the same share of dividends for all “shareholders”. Citizens participate, however, in the national enterprise not only as “shareholders”, but also as producers. At the lowest level of communism, which we agreed to call socialism, remuneration is still made according to bourgeois standards, that is, depending on qualifications, intensity, etc. Theoretically, the income of each citizen is thus composed of two parts, a + b, t .e. dividend plus salary. The higher the technology, the more perfect the organization of the economy, the more place a occupies in comparison with b, the less influence individual differences in labor have on the standard of living. From the fact that in the USSR the differences in wages are not lower, but higher than in capitalist countries, one has to conclude that the shares of Soviet citizens are distributed unevenly, and that the income of citizens, along with unequal pay, includes an unequal share of dividends. While a laborer receives only b, the minimum wage that, other things being equal, he would receive in a capitalist enterprise, a Stakhanovite or official receives 2a + B or 3a + B, etc., and B may, in his own turn, equal to 2b, 3b, etc. Differences in income are determined, in other words, not only by differences in individual output, but also by the disguised appropriation of the products of other people's labor. The privileged minority of shareholders lives at the expense of the disadvantaged majority.
If we accept that the Soviet unskilled worker receives more than he would receive, given the same level of technology and culture, in a capitalist enterprise, i.e., that he is still a small shareholder, then his wages will have to be taken equal to a + b. Earnings of higher categories will be expressed by the formulas: 3a + 2b; 10a + 15b, etc., which means: a laborer has one share, a Stakhanovite - 3, a specialist - 10; Moreover, their wages in the proper sense are related as 1: 2: 15. The hymns of sacred socialist property sound, under these conditions, much more convincing for a director or Stakhanovite than for an ordinary worker or collective farmer.”
A circus with horses is the most decent expression that can be used regarding the flight of thought quoted above. All this would be funny, but since the leftist youth takes this nonsense seriously, there is no need to laugh. Anyone who has read this fragment (2/3 of the book) not for the sake of laughter and has not yet given up has definitely not read Marx, and if he has read it, it has been vertically.
Let me start with the fact that the very idea of translating communist relations “for clarity” into the language of the stock exchange, that is, the language of speculators and world-eaters, is complete nonsense. It’s like translating Goethe’s “Faust” into a prison “fenya”. Communist relations are the complete opposite of market relations, so it is simply impossible to equate the former with the latter “for clarity”; it will turn out to be nonsense. True, there is the concept of “market socialism”, numerous projects for crossing a snake with a hedgehog, i.e., a market and planned economy. But these studies have nothing to do with Marxist science. By the way, Trotsky himself actually agitates for the market:
“The plan cannot be based on speculative data alone. The game of supply and demand remains for him for a long period a necessary material basis and a saving correction.”
Soviet economists later wrote the same thing, to which Stalin was forced to respond with the work “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,” where, strictly speaking, the problems lay not in the economy as such, but in the total Marxist ignorance of economists.
So, Trotsky depicts communist relations in this way: all property is distributed in the form of equal shares, “shares”, to each citizen who, along with his salary, receives some “dividends” from his “shares” and, they say, with full communism “dividends” will completely replace wages. What exactly is meant by “dividends” in Trotskyist political economy is difficult to understand. By introducing this vague term, Trotsky claims that since there is a difference in the incomes of Soviet citizens (the statement that the difference in wages in the USSR is higher than in capitalist countries, we will leave it to Trotsky’s conscience, which, however, he never had) , this means that the size of their “dividends” is different, and if so, it means that the value of the “shares” of the unskilled worker is lower than that of the Stakhanovite, therefore, the Stakhanovite appropriates the labor of the unskilled worker, exploits him. Just think about it: a Stakhanovist exploits the unskilled worker... I once read the zealous liberal Hannah Arendt, who argued that the Stakhanovite movement was a “labor aristocracy” that the Bolsheviks created to undermine the solidarity of the workers, but even she did not think of writing that the Stakhanovites exploited “ ordinary" workers, but our "Leninist guardsman" thought of it!
Exploitation is a product of private property relations, direct (through slave labor or corvée) or veiled (through payment of “wages”) appropriation by the exploiter of the fruits of the worker’s labor. Is it possible to talk about the exploitation of Soviet workers by Soviet officials? No you can not. After all, they do not enter into market relations. The Soviet worker did not sell his labor power to the state, and the state did not buy the worker’s labor power. To understand this, you need to correctly understand the category “capital”:
“Capital is a word adopted to designate the form of relations between people regarding the established unequal exchange between the owners of the commodity “labor power” and the owners of the fixed means of production. In such an exchange, which is appropriate to call deception, all surpluses are produced by the owner of the commodity “labor power”, but are appropriated free of charge by the commodity owner of the main means of production. This permanently unequal system of exchange of goods between people is called capitalism. In short, capital is a form of relationship that arises between proletarians and entrepreneurs regarding the surplus product produced by the proletarians and appropriated free of charge by the capitalist. The more surplus value the proletarian creates for the capitalist for free, the faster the capitalist turns into an oligarch,” - V. Podguzov.
Consequently, wages are the exchange of the commodity “labor power” for a sum of banknotes approximately equal to the cost of restoring labor power. Simply put, a worker sells his ability to work to a capitalist in order to have the strength and opportunity to later work for him, and then some more... And also to raise at least one future worker who will later replace him.
Under communism there is no capital and no wages, although these words, out of old habit, continue to be used in everyday life, like the word “money,” although, strictly speaking, under the lowest phase of communism there is no longer money in the sense that it is deprived of its main property - to transform into capital, i.e. relations of exploitation. Millionaire Koreiko from “The Golden Calf” could hide a million Soviet rubles in a suitcase, but could not “put it into action.”
The difference between the principles of communist distribution of goods and market ones is that all spiritual and material goods are distributed so that they serve the development of all the inclinations of the personality of each individual and are available to everyone. But, unfortunately, due to the bourgeois habits of the masses and especially mental workers, who are offended that “some” hard worker will receive the same benefits as they do, go straight to the direct distribution of the total social product according to needs (for these needs still unbridled philistine) is impossible. So you have to distribute according to work, or rather, according to the share of time and effort spent on socially useful work. How does the distribution take place? The distribution is carried out by the proletarian state based on the current capabilities, goals and objectives of the development of the socialist economy and the construction of communism. Of course, the philistines may be offended by the fact that some bureaucratic body will decide who gets what “salary.” What can I say? Comrade Podguzov aptly notes:
“According to the logic of Mitrofanushki, it turns out that the distribution of the total social product under communism is shameful and not respectable, and the same action, but carried out by the Chubais, Khodorkovskys, Berezovskys and other Deripaskas is correct and elegant.
It is necessary to understand that mathematics has long ago developed techniques and rules that make it possible to calculate proportions of any scale and with any number of factors, unknowns and variable quantities. Spaceships fly to the outskirts of the Galaxy in calculated orbits, and there are no technical problems to accurately calculate any proportions in the economy in order to distribute the total social product among all types of productive and “non-productive” consumption. There have been no scientific problems in this area for a long time.
There is only one political economy problem. Entrepreneurs do not want to get off the throne and give up their hereditary grand-ducal power to society. They shout the loudest: “Stop the thief, shame on distribution!” But they themselves want to distribute all public wealth. And how they know how to do this can be understood by observing chronic inflation, bankruptcies, financial crises, environmental, energy, humanitarian disasters, large-scale acts of fraud, wars waged in the most sacrificial and destructive way precisely regarding the distribution and redistribution of social world wealth between entrepreneurs."
For Trotsky, everything is simple: since the state apparatus is preserved and is not going to die out in the coming years, since there is no direct product exchange and distribution is based on labor and not according to needs, since there is property stratification, then there is no communism and there cannot be. He confuses the first phase of communism with the second and presents it with obviously unrealizable demands. For Trotskyism, the society of the lowest phase of communism must be ideal, as in the textbook, and any deviations from the book ideal are immediately declared “signs of degeneration.” But in reality, immature communism cannot be perfect, which is precisely why it is immature.
But if there is no communism in the USSR, then what? In this matter, Judushka acts cunningly, denying communism in the Union; he does not give a clear answer to the question of what kind of society ultimately exists in it: “The question of the character of the USSR has not yet been resolved by history,” he meaningfully summarizes. There is no communism in the Union, but it cannot be called capitalist either; Judushka also does not consider the Soviet system to be transitional (though in some parts of the text he still recognizes the system as transitional, but it doesn’t matter), because this “means rejecting complete social categories like capitalism , so is socialism." In general, just like in a fairy tale: the queen gave birth to either a son or a daughter that night...
In this roguish way, Judushka is trying to sit on two chairs: to spit on and discredit the USSR, but at the same time to remain in the eyes of the public a communist, and not a greyhound writer who sold his honor, a servant of imperialist intelligence services.
“Doctrinaires will undoubtedly not be satisfied with such an optional definition. They would like a categorical formula: yes - yes, no - no. Sociological questions would undoubtedly be simpler if social phenomena always had a complete character,” such a thoughtful conclusion from Trotsky. It is ironic that the answer to the main question taken in the title of the book is “What is the USSR?” - never sounded like that.
(conclusion at link(Russian), it wouldn't fit.)
https://prorivists.org/93_antitrocky/
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