A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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What strikes one is the brilliant way in which Trotsky anticipated the main lines of what took place in Russia since 1989. However, in certain respects, events have unfolded differently to what he expected. In the 1930s Trotsky was convinced that a capitalist counterrevolution could only come about as a result of civil war. He wrote: "The October Revolution has been betrayed by the ruling stratum, but not yet overthrown. It has a great power of resistance, coinciding with the established property relations, with the living force of the proletariat, the consciousness of its best elements, the impasse of world capitalism, and the inevitability of world revolution." (Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 252.) Is it true, as the official authorities assert, that socialism is already realized in the Soviet Union? And if not, have the achieved successes at least made sure of its realization within the national boundaries, regardless of the course of events in the rest of the world? The preceding critical appraisal of the chief indices of the Soviet economy ought to give us the point of departure for a correct answer to this question, but we shall require also certain preliminary theoretical points of reference. The book is a wide-ranging critique of the USSR and its rulers, and advocates a new political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist dictatorship and bring about a socialist democracy. It opens by praising the positive economic advances of the USSR since the death of Lenin, citing growth in electrical power, agricultural output, industry, etc. It then proceeds to describe the limits on this economic advance, the nature of the new ruling elite, and predicts the ultimate downfall of the Soviet Union as a result of Stalinist rule. It places an emphasis on a Marxist method of analysis, and makes several key observations and predictions, some of which would only be borne out many decades later. This obvious underestimation of impending difficulties is explained by the fact that the program was based wholly upon an international perspective. “The October revolution in Russia has realized the dictatorship of the proletariat ... The era of world proletarian communist revolution has begun.” These were the introductory lines of the program. Their authors not only did not set themselves the aim of constructing “socialism in a single country”– this idea had not entered anybody’s head then, and least of all Stalin’s – but they also did not touch the question as to what character the Soviet state would assume, if compelled for as long as two decades to solve in isolation those economic and cultural problems which advanced capitalism had solved so long ago. Leon Trotsky: The Revolution Betrayed (3. Socialism and the State) Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed

Thus goes the central argument and complaint of this book. It sees the destruction of the emerging grammar school system as an unforgiveable and irreparable act of cultural vandalism, which cannot simply be remedied by an expansion of the last remaining grammar schools. They are, the narrative goes, a pale imitation of what could have been achieved. The Soviet power,” says the program of the Bolshevik party on this subject, “openly recognizes the inevitability of the class character of every state, so long as the division of society into classes, and therewith all state power, has not completely disappeared.”Hitchens never wanders into the bleary-eyed nostalgia the cultural right is routinely accused of. He mourns not for a pristine past, but a future that never was. Socialism is a structure of planned to the end of the best satisfaction of human needs; otherwise it does not deserve the name of socialism. If cows are socialized, but there are too few of them, or they have too meagre udders, then conflicts arise out of the inadequate supply of milk – conflicts between city and country, between collectives and individual peasants, between different state of the proletariat, between the whole toiling mass and bureaucracy. It was in fact the socialization of the cows which led to their mass extermination by the peasants. Social conflicts created by want can in their turn lead to a resurrection of “all the old crap.” Such was, in essence, our answer. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky provided a brilliant and profound analysis of Stalinism from the Marxist standpoint. His analysis has never been improved upon, let alone superseded. With a delay of 60 years, it has been completely vindicated by history. Trotsky warned that the Bureaucracy was placing the nationalised planned economy and the Soviet Union in danger. In reply, he was subjected to an unparalleled campaign of vilification by the "friends of the Soviet Union". A key factor in the bipartisan betrayal of the grammars was the Conservative s’ failure to expand them in advance of the wholly predictable strain they would come under as the “Baby bulge” reached schooling age in the 1950s. It is astounding how this fact is almost universally omitted from increasingly irregular rows over the issue in mainstream media.

Leon Trotsky: The Revolution Betrayed (11. Whither the Soviet Union?) Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed

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How and why is it, however, that the enormous economic successes of the recent period have led not to a mitigation, but on the contrary to a sharpening, of inequalities, and at the same time to a further growth of bureaucratism, such that from being a “distortion”, it has now become a system of administration? Before attempting to answer this question, let us hear how the authoritative leaders of the Soviet bureaucracy look upon their own regime. Translator’s Note: The reference here is to the January 1935 trial and not the August 1936 trial, the lines having been written prior to the latter.

Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1978; p. 381; fn. 39. When, together with class domination and the struggle for individual existence created by the present anarchy in production, those conflicts and excesses which result from this struggle disappear, from that time on there will be nothing to suppress, and there will be no need for a special instrument of suppression, the state.” The Revolution Betrayed is one of the most important Marxist texts of all time. It is the only serious Marxist analysis of what happened to the Russian Revolution after the death of Lenin. Without a thorough knowledge of this work, it is impossible to understand the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the events of the last ten years in Russia and on a world scale.

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As history testifies, Bonapartism gets along admirably with a universal, and even a secret, ballot. The democratic ritual of Bonapartism is the plebiscite. From time to time, the question is presented to the citizens: for or against the leader? And the voter feels the barrel of a revolver between his shoulders. Since the time of Napoleon III, who now seems a provincial dilettante, this technique has received an extraordinary development. The new Soviet constitution which establishes Bonapartism on a plebiscite basis is the veritable crown of the system. Caesarism arose upon the basis of a slave society shaken by inward strife. Bonapartism is one of the political weapons of the capitalist regime in its critical period. Stalinism is a variety of the same system, but upon the basis of a workers’ state torn by the antagonism between an organized and armed Soviet aristocracy and the unarmed toiling masses. The increasingly insistent deification of Stalin is, with all its elements of caricature, a necessary element of the regime. The bureaucracy has need of an inviolable superarbiter, a first consul if not an emperor, and it raises upon its shoulders him who best responds to its claim for lordship. That “strength of character” of the leader which so enraptures the literary dilettantes of the West, is in reality the sum total of the collective pressure of a caste which will stop at nothing in defense of its position. Each one of them at his post is thinking: l’etat c’est moi. In Stalin each one easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality. While I fundamentally disagree with the kind of education system argued for, the unapologetic way in which the book spells out its defence of selective education is illuminating. In this way, the book has some potential to stimulate much needed debate about the purposes, shape and structure of our educational system. The book offers a window into the world in which we might dwell if selective education had triumphed in the 1950s; a world viewed through rose-tinted spectacles with a very selective reading of the available evidence. It is an out of time world in which not every child is deserving of the best education. It is a world that, despite the undoubted challenges and inequalities of our current educational reality, I am deeply thankful not to inhabit. a b Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, "Trotsky", in Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (eds.), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1997; p. 190.