Trotsky - The Revolution Betrayed.pdf - Mehring Books

The Social Roots of Thermidor 97
convert inequality into a whip for the spurring on of the
majority. That is the first reason why the growth of
production has so far strengthened not the socialist, but the
bourgeois features of the state.
But that is not the sole reason. Alongside the economic
factor dictating capitalistic methods of payment at the
present stage, there operates a parallel political factor in the
person of the bureaucracy itself. In its very essence it is the
planter and protector of inequality. It arose in the beginning
as the bourgeois organ of a workers' state. In establishing and
defending the advantages of a minority, it of course draws off
the cream for its own use. Nobody who has wealth to
distribute ever omits himself. Thus out of a social necessity
there has developed an organ which has far outgrown its
socially necessary function, and become an independent
factor and therewith the source of great danger for the whole
social organism.
The social meaning of the Soviet Thermidor now begins to
take form before us. The poverty and cultural backwardness
of the masses has again become incarnate in the malignant
figure of the ruler with a great club in his hand. The deposed
and abused bureaucracy, from being a servant of society, has
again become its lord. On this road it has attained such a
degree of social and moral alienation from the popular masses
that it cannot now permit any control over either its activities
or its income.
The bureaucracy's seemingly mystic fear of "petty speculators,
grafters, and gossips" thus finds a wholly natural
explanation. Not yet able to satisfy the elementary needs of
the population, the Soviet economy creates and resurrects at
every step tendencies to graft and speculation. On the other
side, the privileges of the new aristocracy awaken in the
masses of the population a tendency to listen to anti-Soviet
"gossips," that is, to anyone who, albeit in a whisper,
criticizes the greedy and capricious bosses. It is a question,
therefore, not of specters of the past, not of the remnants of
what no longer exists, not, in short, of the snows of yesteryear,
but of new, mighty and continually reborn tendencies to
personal accumulation. The first still very meager wave of
prosperity in the country, just because of its meagerness, has