Discussion points for educationals on The Revolution Betrayed
Discussion points on Revolution Betrayed
1. Section 1 of chapter 1 gives a much rosier picture of progress in the USSR than the rest of the book. How do the remaining sections of chapter 1 qualify that? How does it all hold up with hindsight?
2. Why is socialism in one country impossible? If the USSR was making impressive economic progress, why could it not achieve socialism in one country just by continuing that progress?
3. In Revolution Betrayed Trotsky writes:
a) The transfer of the factories to the state changed the situation of the worker only juridically. In reality, he is compelled to live in want and work a definite number of hours for a definite wage... [Then] the workers lost all influence whatever upon the management of the factory. With piecework payment, hard conditions of material existence, lack of free movement, with terrible police repression penetrating the life of every factory, it is hard indeed for the worker to feel himself a "free workman.’’ In the bureaucracy he sees the manager, in the state, the employer".
b) "In the Soviet Union... the classic methods of exploitation, such as piecework payment, are applied in such naked and crude forms as would not be permitted even by reformist trade unions in bourgeois countries".
c) "Kremlin dialogues of the authorities with 'the people' [in fact of a factory boss with a worker]... testify that... the relations among men... have not only not yet risen to socialism, but in many respects are still lagging behind a cultured capitalism".
d) "The character of the economy as a whole... depends upon the character of the state power".
e) "The word 'sovbour'—soviet bourgeois—as applied to a privileged dignitary appeared very early in the workers’ vocabulary."
f) "The bureaucracy as a ruling stratum... possesses the specific consciousness of a ruling 'class' which, however, is still far from confident of its right to rule..."
g) Repeatedly, that the the bureaucracy has become totalitarian and removed from all control by the population.
Why then in chapter 9 does Trotsky argue that the bureaucracy is not a ruling class, and more specifically that the USSR is not state capitalist?
4. In 1921 the New Economic Policy was proposed within the Bolshevik Party as a temporary retreat. In chapter 4, does Trotsky still see NEP-type policies that way? What are the implications for assessment of the "socialistic" abolition of NEP by Stalin?