The Bolshevik coup of October 1917 was the most successful pseudo-revolutionary bait and switch job of the 20th century, if not ever. And not just on the national question that turned the revolution into civil wars in Finland, the Baltics and Ukraine. The 10000 Kronstadt sailors massacred by the Bolsheviks and the Ukrainian Makhnovchini learned this in 1921. Maurice Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Worker Control documents in detail how this mafia with a red flag regime stole a revolution.
"the Kronstadters were proclaiming. “We fight” the rebels proclaimed “for the genuine power of the working people while the bloody Trotsky and the glutted Zinoviev and their band of adherents fight for the power of the Party... “ “Kronstadt has raised for the first time the banner of the uprising of the Third Revolution of the toilers... The autocracy has fallen. The Constituent Assembly has been despatched to the region of the damned. Now the commissariocracy is crumbling... “
At the Congress Trotsky rounded on the Workers’ Opposition. “They have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers’ right to elect representatives above the Party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers’ democracy !” Trotsky spoke of the “revolutionary historical birthright of the Party”. “The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship ... regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class... The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers’ democracy... “
A sample of bait and switch:
"it was only a step from the employment of armed forces as labour battalions to the organisation of civilian labour into military units”. “The working class” Trotsky announced to the Congress “cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers”. “Compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism”. “Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps”. He advocated “incentive wages for efficient workers” “socialist emulation” and spoke of the “need to adopt the progressive essence of Taylorism”. In relation to industrial management Lenin and Trotsky’s main preoccupation’s were with ‘economic efficiency’. Like the bourgeoisie (both before and after them) they identified ‘efficiency’ with individual management, They realised however that this would be a bitter pill for the workers to swallow. They had to tread carefully..."
"Trotsky declared that “the militarisation of labour ... is; the indispensable basic method for the organisation of our labour forces” ... “Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? ... This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive”... “Compulsory slave labour ... was in its, time a progressive phenomenon”. “Labour ... obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker, is the basis of socialism”. “Wages ... must not be viewed from the angle of securing the personal existence of the individual worker” but should “measure the conscientiousness, and efficiency of the work of every labourer”.
