Chapter 01 - What Has Been Achieved

[kinetikos]

Trotsky starts off his "critique" (condemnation) by rightly pointing out that the October Revolution, even though it has now (1936) been utterly betrayed and ruined, has long since proven one very important and undeniable thing: that socialism beats hell out of capitalism.

With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earths surface—not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity. Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of leadership, were to collapse—which we firmly hope will not happen—there would remain an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than 10 years successes unexampled in history.

[mir]

As for the first chapter, Trotsky gives the problems in Soviet production quality and organization, but offers so far no answers.  I believe that the best way to solve the problem of in-effeciency in production and worker's organization and training is through education.  It is through education that the worker eliminates his ignorance of the new machine he is given to work with.  In the book, it appears as if the farmer is given a tractor but he does not know how to drive.  So in closing, I believe the best way to alleviate the problem is through education about the tools and machines the workers are operating.

[turnoviseous]

Originally posted by mir
As for the first chapter, Trotsky gives the problems in Soviet production quality and organization, but offers so far no answers.  I believe that the best way to solve the problem of in-effeciency in production and worker's organization and training is through education.  It is through education that the worker eliminates his ignorance of the new machine he is given to work with.  In the book, it appears as if the farmer is given a tractor but he does not know how to drive.  So in closing, I believe the best way to alleviate the problem is through education about the tools and machines the workers are operating.

One of the consequences of isolated revolution in a backward country. If the revolution spread at the time it wasn´t degenerated already, this would be overcome.