Trotsky - The Revolution Betrayed.pdf - Mehring Books

Introduction xvii
The prolongation of the political and economic isolation of
the Soviet Union was to have unforeseen and tragic
consequences. Though the state created by the first workers'
revolution did not collapse, it began to degenerate. While the
belated development of capitalism in Russia had made
possible the creation of the Soviet state, the unexpected delay
in the victorious development of the world socialist revolution
was the principal cause of its degeneration. The form assumed
by that degeneration was the massive growth of the
bureaucracy in the apparatus of the Soviet state and the
Bolshevik Party and the extraordinary concentration of power
in its hands.
Disdaining historical subjectivism, which replaces the
analysis of social processes with speculation about personal
and psychological motivations, Trotsky demonstrated that
the malignant growth of bureaucracy, culminating in the
totalitarian regime of Stalin, was rooted in material contradictions
specific to a workers' state established in a backward
country. From the standpoint of its property forms, the Soviet
state was socialist. But the full and equal satisfaction of the
material needs of all members of society could not even be
contemplated in the backward, impoverished and faminestricken
conditions of Soviet Russia. The distribution of goods,
under the supervision of the state, continued to be carried
out with a capitalist measure of value and therefore
unequally. That this inequality — or, what is the same thing,
privileges for a minority — was, at least initially, necessary
for the functioning of the state-controlled economy did not
alter the fact that this mode of distribution remained
bourgeois in character.
The Soviet regime expressed the tension between these two
antagonistic functions of the workers' state: defending social
property in the means of production while at the same time
supervising bourgeois methods of distribution and therefore
defending the privileges of a minority. The bureaucracy arose
on the basis of this contradiction: "If for the defense of
socialized property against bourgeois counterrevolution a
'state of armed workers' was fully adequate, it was a very
different matter to regulate inequalities in the sphere of
consumption. Those deprived of privileges are not inclined to