Chapter 1-revisited

[mir]

Hello everyone,

Since alot of people have expressed interest in re-reading the book again, we have decided to begin.  That was weeks ago, and since no one bothered to make the first post, I shall be the first.

Trotsky gives statistics later on on the per capita basis which is a more precise measurement of the advance of the Soviet Union, and the results are not very good.  When the book was written 19 years after October, the swift gains of the Soviet Union remain un-matched in history.  At this time, the Soviet Union was in the grips of Stalin and the bureaucracy, yet nevertheless it's a sign that even in a command economy, economic growth is still considerably more then in the capitalist countries.  

One of the problem of wastefullness and ineffectiveness is the lack of education in the workers.  These could have been easily avoidable by sufficiently teaching the workers about their machinery, yet this was ignored because the bureaucracy wanted to build up heavy industry.  It's almost like they wanted to build castles on water.  In the quest to catch-up with the West, the bureaucracy ignored many of the needs of the population.  And as turnoviseous pointed out before, the lack of revolutions in the West and other countries forced the Soviet Union to bare the burden of making a socialist society with no help.

[turnoviseous]

Chapter one, part one

On the start of the first part of teh first chapter, Trotsky explains the permanent revolution theory a little. He says that "liquidation of the monarchy and the semi-feudal slavery of the peasants could be achieved only through dictatorship of the proletariat". This Trotsky´s statement has been totally confirmed by historical events, we can see it all before our own eyes. The most countries that were in same or similar position in 1917 and haven´t got through experience of Stalinism, are still under total domination of foreign imperialism, the goverments in those countries are more like imperialism´s puppets than anything else.

However, in the next sentance Trotsky continues that proletariat, who is the only one who can actually achieve democratic tasks of bourgeois revolution and frees a backward imperialist dominated country from the grip of imperialism [I will refer to those countries as "backward" countries from now on], won´t stop and can´t stop at these tasks, since development of capitalism in backward countries has more or less already achieved its final stage. It can´t really improove things under the domination of foreign capital. Proletarian revolution is thus the only solution to bring the country out of backwardness and barbarism.

This is the main thing about the law of combined development, which creates backward countries on one hand and developed countries on the other. Some countries not only had the privilege to make bourgeois democratic revoluions in somewhat different manner (because of industrial revolution started there and were not under the domination of foreign capital), but are also more developed than the backward countries, thus such a country has to catch up with the developed capitalist nations. Already here Trotsky points out to the main general contradiction, because of tardiness of the world revolution, the revolution had to rely on its own sources. But even on the backward basis it achieved formidable results, never before achieved in history.

Then Trotsky says: "This book will be a historic and sociological interpretation of the process, not a piling up of statistical illustrations". So yeah, no statistics here, we have all already seen them 100 times. :D


Chapter one, part two


In the second part Trotsky first approaches the question of correlation of productive forces between Soviet Union and capitalist world. Although Soviet Union was then a country with planned economy, it started from a badly backward material basis. As regards economic growth, USSR was on better, but in objective sense capitalist countries had attained higher development of productive forces. Military intervention and intervention of cheap goods were threats which followed from poorly developed productive forces. So in essence, this correlation of forces was in fact a correlation between SU and world proletariat (world revolution) and SU and capitalists (reaction).

Trotsky then analyses productivity of labour and techinque. In agriculture SU laged far behind the west, in oil industry workers had at their disposal same equipment as the american workers, but organization of labour and productivity still lagged far behind, because workers weren´t sufficiently skilled, they couldn´t keep up with the fast developing industry.

Heavy industry was charaterised with poor qulity of products, Trotsky gives examples of arms and tractor production, of railroads, water transport, communications etc. Light industry lagged behind even further. There were a lot of products, but poverty of selection and quality of products was predominant.


Chapter one, part three

In this part, Trotsky analyses production per capita. Although soviet bureaucracy claimed that in 1936 SU will occupy 1st place in volume of industrial production, Trotsky shows that this was pure demagogy, because we have to consider size of the country and population. Trotsky shows that if we take these factors into consideration, we see that SU still laged far behind the west.

In the last three paragraphs Trotsky explains that Soviet Union has privileged commanding strata (bureaucracy), who appropriates the lion´s share of products of consumption, which produces still greater gap between consumption of things of prime necesssity between masses in USSR and masses in capitalist west. Trotsky explains that: The historic responsibility for this situation lies, of course, upon Russia's black and heavy past, her heritage of darkness and poverty.

The main conclusion is that USSR is still in preparatory stage, adopting technical and cultural conquests of developed capitalist states, but still lags behind them.