14
" The revolution in a precapitalist society, which nevertheless aspired to achieve socialism, produced a hybrid which in many respects looked like a parody of socialism. The western worker, however seemingly non-political, followed events very carefully and was quite aware of the famines, the hunger, and the deprivation that the people of Russia suffered after the revolution; he was aware of the terror and persecution they were subjected to. And, unsophisticated as he was, the British worker, the German worker, and even the French one, often wondered: Is this socialism? Have we perhaps in our century-old allegiance to socialism followed a dangerous will-o'-the- wisp? Workers have been asking themselves these questions. Uncertain, hesitant, the Western European worker has preferred to wait and see. The Russian Revolution has acted as a deterrent to revolution in the West. "
― Isaac Deutscher ,
15
" One section of the socialists, the Mensheviks, deduced that the leadership in the coming revolution should belong to the liberal bourgeoisie. Lenin and his followers realized that the liberal bourgeoisie was unable and unwilling to cope with such a task, and that Russia's young working class, supported by a rebellious peasantry, was the only force capable of waging the revolutionary struggle to a conclusion. But Lenin remained convinced, and emphatically asserted, that Russia, acting alone, could not go beyond a bourgeois revolution; and that only after capitalism had been overthrown in Western Europe would she too be able to embark on socialist revolution. For a decade and a half, from 1903 till 1917, Lenin wrestled with this problem: how could a revolution led, against bourgeois opposition, by a socialist working class result in the establishment of a capitalist order? Trotsky cut through this dogmatic tangle with the conclusion that the dynamic of the revolution could not be contained within any particular stage, and that once released it would overflow all barriers and sweep away not only tsardom but also Russia's weak capitalism, so that what had begun as a bourgeois revolution would end as a socialist one.
Here a fateful question posed itself. Socialism, as understood by Marxists, presupposed a highly developed modern economy and civilization, an abundance of material and cultural wealth, that alone could enable society to satisfy the needs of all its members and abolish class divisions. This was obviously beyond the reach of an underdeveloped and backward Russia. Trotsky, therefore argued that Russia could only begin the socialist revolution, but would find it extremely difficult to continue it, and impossible to complete it. The revolution would run into a dead end, unless it burst Russia's national boundaries and brought into motion the forces of revolution in the West. Trotsky assumed that just as the Russian Revolution could not be contained within the bourgeois stage, so it would not be brought to rest within its national boundaries: it would be the prelude, or the first act, of a global upheaval. Internationally as well as nationally, this would be permanent revolution. "
― Isaac Deutscher ,
17
" In their famous Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx and Engels speak about two phases of communism, the lower and the higher. In the lower one there still prevails the "narrow horizon of bourgeois rights" with its inequality and its wide differentials in individual incomes. Obviously, if in socialism society, according to Marx, still needs to secure the full development of its productive forces until a real economy of wealth and abundance is created, then it has to reward skill and offer incentives. The bureaucrat is in a sense the skilled worker, and there is no doubt that he will place himself on the privileged side of the scale...
In practice it proved impossible to establish and maintain the principle proclaimed by the Commune of Paris which served Marx as the guarantee against the rise of bureaucracy, the principle extolled again by Lenin on the eve of October, according to which the functionary should not earn more than the ordinary worker's wage. This principle implied a truly egalitarian society -- and here is part of an important contradiction in the thought of Marx and his disciples. Evidently the argument that no civil servant, no matter how high his function, must earn more than an ordinary worker cannot be reconciled with the other argument that in the lower phase of socialism, which still bears the stamp of "bourgeois rights," it would be utopian to expect "equality of distribution. "
― Isaac Deutscher ,
18
" Of course, even small privileges contribute to the tension between the worker and the bureaucrat, but we should not mistake that tension for a class antagonism, in spite of some similarities which on closer examination would prove to be only very superficial. What we observe here is rather the hostility between members of the same class, between, say, a skilled miner and an unskilled one, between the engine driver and a less expert railwayman. This hostility and this tension contain in themselves a tremendous political antagonism, but one that cannot be resolved by any upheaval in society. It can be resolved only by the growth of the national wealth in the first instance, a growth which would make it possible to satisfy the minimum needs of the broadest masses of the population and more than that. "
― Isaac Deutscher ,
