What is revolution ?

“It is precisely because dynamic states are suspended in the critical state that everything happens through revolutions and not gradually. (...) Large systems with a large number of components evolve toward an intermediate “critical” state, far from equilibrium, and for which minor perturbations can trigger events of all sizes, called “avalanches.” Most changes occur during these catastrophic events rather than following a gradual and regular path.”
Physicist Per Bak in “When Nature Organizes Itself”

Scientists themselves appeal to the idea of ​​a revolutionary, explosive situation, in connection with phase transitions that move reality from one state to another, qualitatively different one. Among the witnesses I call upon in defense of the notion of "revolution" in science, I would particularly like to point out Werner Heisenberg , a great and well-known physicist (author of the inequalities of quantum physics limiting the precision of any measurement on coupled quantities) and who is certainly not a political follower of revolutions. At the beginning of his work, "The Part and the Whole : The World of Atomic Physics," he recounts the genesis of his ideas and is keen to point out that he began to think about atoms when, as a high school student, he was one of the young volunteers enlisted as a fascist troop against the revolution of the Bavarian workers’ soviets in Munich. And yet, he warns : " If we want to talk about revolutions in science, it is important to look at these revolutions very closely." » And yet, the person who writes this is the very opposite of a revolutionary. The reality that appears to him in physics is indeed revolutionary : " Certainly, I do not know if one can draw a parallel between the revolutions of science and those of human society. (...) From the point of view of historical evolution - and this is true, it seems to me, equally for the arts and the sciences - long periods of standstill or in any case of very slow evolution. (...) However, at a given moment this slow process - during which, little by little, the content of the discipline considered undergoes a mutation - suddenly, and sometimes quite unexpectedly, comes to produce new possibilities and values." One might think that these considerations on sudden changes only concern ideas in science and not matter and its functioning. Quite the opposite is true. Heisenberg defends the idea that matter undergoes qualitative leaps, discontinuities : " As you know, Planck discovered that the energy of an atomic system varies discontinuously, that during the emission of energy by such a system, there exist, so to speak, stopping positions, corresponding to determined energies, this is what I later called stationary states." He cites a debate with Albert Einstein who told him : "You know that I tried to suggest the idea that the atom falls, so to speak suddenly, from one stationary energy state to another, emitting the difference in energy in the form of an energy packet or quantum of light. This would be a particularly striking example of this discontinuity of which I spoke earlier." He replies thus : " Perhaps we should imagine the transition from one stationary state to another much like the passage from one image to another in certain films. " And Einstein replied : ’If your theory is correct, you will have to tell me one day what the atom does when it passes from one state to another by emitting light.’ Heisenberg admits that he does not know the answer : ’ When the electron (of an atom) jumps - in the case of emission of radiation - from one orbit to another, we prefer to say nothing about this jump : is it a jump, is it a long jump, a high jump, or what else ?’ And, to underline the difficulty of the problem and, above all, both the necessity and the difficulty of admitting the discontinuity of nature, he quotes another great quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger who declared : ’If these damned quantum jumps were to persist, I would regret ever having dealt with quantum theory.’

Within dynamics, abrupt change—the revolutionary crisis—is not an accident, but a fundamental, constructive, and even constitutive element of the process. The overall conservation of the characteristics of a structure is achieved through jumps, which mark the elimination of the old structure and the birth of a new one. Examples of such phenomena are legion. To survive, the particle must abruptly emit one or more photons through a process comparable to a shock, by which the particle jumps from one state to another. Through the emission of certain bosons (interaction particles), those of the Higgs mechanism, the particle cedes its mass property to the neighboring virtual particle. The virtual becomes real and vice versa, through a procedure comparable to the same type of shock and which establishes a new structure. It is through this mechanism of abrupt change that the characteristics of the old particle are preserved. Structural conservation has taken place at the expense of the particle’s materiality. The latter has disappeared or, more precisely, it is no longer the same grain that carries it. It is at the price of this disappearance and this appearance that matter is preserved at the structural level (conservation of mass, charge, energy, etc.). The doubling of the living cell has the same characteristics (jump, brutality, unpredictability, probabilistic phenomenon). The maintenance of the properties of the cell has, here too, been done at the expense of the life of the old disappeared cell. Destruction is the basis of construction. The living needs to constantly make disappear a quantity of cells and molecules. Living cells are phenomena permanently on the edge of the crisis leading to death.

All these crises, in such diverse fields, have in common the same mode of operation, whether it concerns matter and life but also consciousness and society. These common characteristics are the interaction of scale, the large-scale discontinuity of matter, space and time linked to the rapid and unusual cohesion of individual elements on a small scale, the ratio of the duration of interaction and the time characteristic of the structure, the creation of a new organization of interactions, capable of building a new order called emergent, that is to say, one that is not present in the present elements taken individually. To this description, which lovers of formal propositions can choose as a definition of revolution, each specialist in one of these fields will say that he perfectly recognizes either superconductivity, or crystallization, or the economic crisis, or nuclear fusion, etc.

Understanding the mechanisms of matter sheds light on how human societies function (and vice versa). The capitalist economic crisis illustrates this type of dynamic. In a stock market crisis, we see the importance of the speed and size of shocks. If a large number of diverse stock market values ​​increase or decrease coherently in a short period of time, it is catastrophic. In normal times, there are constant small crises for this or that stock market value, but no general crisis. It is the coordination of movements, usually independent and incoherent, that causes the crisis. The disorder of purchases and sales is synonymous with conservation, and excessive order (brutal coherence of purchases and sales), achieved abruptly, causes a major shock capable of destroying the economic structure. Human society experiences the same type of phenomenon when hundreds of thousands of workers are, at the same time, affected by a large-scale social movement. A number of social and political struggles, previously separate, came together in a short period of time in a single movement, causing a qualitative change. In France, in 1789, the peasants’ aspiration for land, the bourgeoisie’s demand for a state at its service and for national unification, and the radical urban petty bourgeoisie’s demand for freedom, often contradictory, combined into a single movement. In Russia, in 1917, the workers’ revolution, the revolt against war, the aspiration for land, and the national demand of oppressed peoples did not simply add up : if they took place simultaneously over a short period of time, they provoked a new situation of a higher dimension and an additional level of scale.

Sociology, politics and history use the term revolution for this type of phenomenon. Biology, medicine, psychiatry, evolutionism and paleontology, like economics, use the notion of "crisis", from the heart attack to the Permian extinction crisis, from the epileptic seizure to the Cambrian biodiversity expansion crisis. Physico-chemistry calls these sudden changes "phase transitions", "critical phenomena", "emergence of structure", "breaks in symmetry", etc. These images do not simply describe one domain or another, but the same mode of existence of a dynamic process and thus extend to a wide category of phenomena. What characterizes large-scale discontinuities is that they are carried by quantities of random discontinuities, on a small scale, moving in all directions. During a crisis, "rupture" is indeed the correct descriptive term, because these elementary discontinuities suddenly become coherent, producing a large-scale discontinuity. The chemical bond breaks. The atomic nucleus fissions. Lightning breaks the symmetry of the air, structuring a space in which a favorable direction for electrical propagation was absent. Symmetry breaking is a very effective image for the establishment of a new order. The social order cracks, leading not only to chaos but also sometimes to a new type of power. The snow slope splits, destabilizing considerable masses of matter. The snow has changed structure, and a simple movement is enough to cause a major catastrophe. The Earth’s crust breaks. The planet experiences major earthquakes. While they are quite rare on a large scale, there are constantly myriads of small-scale tremors, of all kinds of sizes, with no fixed periodicity. In all these diverse phenomena, we observe multiple, apparently random agitations that coordinate in a very short time. The photons that have become coherent give rise to the laser beam. The excessive coherence of the vibrations in matter leads not only to the rupture of the structure but also to the formation of a new structure on a large scale.

Scientists have noted the role of revolutions, sometimes drawing parallels with what they observe in science. This is the case of biochemist Roger Lewin, in "Complexity," where he interviews archaeologists who note that the state is a precedent for a situation of "imminent collapse" in situations as diverse as the fall of the Roman Empire, the Mayan civilization, or Chaco Canyon. He adds : "These are turning points in the history of societies, rapid changes like those observed in biological and physical systems under the name of phase transitions."

In the concept of revolution, there is not only discontinuity, shock, the feedback of slow and fast, and scale interaction. Another notion is just as fundamental in physics, biology, and the history of societies : irreversibility. When a structure appeared, this turning point never went back. The universe remained marked by this change. This is the case for the appearance of various kinds of matter, interacting particles, structures associating them, large-scale structures, life, or society. A revolutionary change means that the transformation has produced an indelible mark. Thus, Leon Trotsky noted in his work "The Russian Revolution" that the 1917 revolution had not only produced transformations in Russia and the world. It had irreversibly transformed social relations, our perceptions, and even the words to describe them. The same is true in science. Irreversibility is everywhere present in matter. It is a fundamental characteristic of the process, as important as non-linearity, historicity, the hierarchization of structures, discontinuity, the qualitative character of the jump or emergence. Irreversibility is not only a product of the macroscopic level of structure of matter. It is also microscopic. Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji reports this in "Matter-Space-Time" : " Irreversibility remains at the heart of physical phenomena, even in relativistic quantum theory. " It is irreversibility that makes matter, life and society historical products.

In historical terms, the revolution is also erased from the works. Who remembers the victorious revolutions of Antiquity : the social revolution (against the rich and the religious) which overthrew the Ur-Nanshe dynasty in Sumer around 2400 BC, that of the regimes of the Levant in 2300 BC, like the social revolution against the pharaohs of Egypt in 2260 BC which suppressed the reign of the pharaohs lastingly producing the first "interregnum", the overthrow of the kingdoms of Greece around 2000 BC, the revolution which, in 1750 BC, overthrew the regime of Mesopotamia of the young king Samsoullouna, that against the State and the ruling class of the island of Crete (which destroyed all the official buildings and all the religious buildings of the regime of Knossos in 1425 BC), the revolution against the corvées in the kingdom of Judah and which engendered the kingdom of Israel in -933 BC, the revolution against the royal house of Israel in -842 BC, the successful revolt against the Chinese king Li-Wang in -841 BC, the initially victorious uprising of the peoples oppressed by the Assyrian regime in -701 suppressed in -689, the overthrow of the Mayan empire around -600, the revolt against the nobility and debts which forced the ruling classes to appeal to Solon, the revolt against the dictatorship in Athens in -510 which led to the liberation of a large number of slaves, the fall of the tyranny in Agrigento in -470, the fall of the tyranny in Syracuse in -466, the victorious revolt of the people against the nobility of Corfu in -427 or the general insurrection of convicts and peasants under the leadership of a peasant Poor Cheng Cheng who put an end to the Chinese imperial dynasty of the Ts’in ? Who remembers that these revolutions, even sometimes defeated, have marked all of history ?

The currently ruling bourgeoisie fears the workers’ revolution so much that it has even erased the bourgeois revolution from its history books !

excerpt from "Stalin" by Leon Trotsky :

"The revolution breaks and demolishes the apparatus of the old state. This is its first task. The masses take possession of the political arena. They decide, they act, they legislate in their own way, which has no precedent ; they judge, they order. The essence of the revolution is that the masses become their own executive organ. But when the men who animated it leave the scene, withdraw to their districts, retire to their homes, worried, disillusioned, tired, the arena falls into abandonment, and its desolation only increases as the new bureaucratic machine occupies it. Naturally, the new leaders, unsure of themselves and of the masses, are full of apprehension. This is why, in periods of victorious reaction, the military-police machine plays a much greater role than under the ancien régime. In its curve, from the Revolution to Thermidor, the specific nature of the The Russian Thermidor was determined by the role the Party played in it. The French Revolution had nothing of this kind at its disposal. The Jacobin dictatorship, as personified by the Committee of Public Safety, lasted only a year. This dictatorship had real support in the Convention, which was far stronger than the revolutionary clubs and sections. Herein lies the classic contradiction between the dynamism of the revolution and its parliamentary reflection. The most active elements of the classes participate in the revolutionary struggle that openly pits the antagonistic forces against each other. The others—the neutral, the passive, the unconscious—seem to put themselves out of the game. At election time, participation broadens ; it includes a considerable portion of those who are only semi-passive or semi-indifferent. In times of revolution, parliamentary representatives are infinitely more moderate and level-headed than the revolutionary groups they represent. In order to dominate the Convention, the Montagnards left it, rather than the revolutionary elements, of the people, the government of the nation.

Despite the incomparably deeper character of the October Revolution, the Soviet Thermidor army was recruited mainly from among the remnants of the old ruling parties and their ideological representatives. The former large landowners, capitalists, lawyers, and their sons—that is, those of them who had not fled abroad—were incorporated into the state machine, and even a significant portion into the Party, but the largest number of those admitted to the state and Party apparatuses were former members of the petty-bourgeois formations—Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. To these must be added an enormous number of pure and simple philistines who had taken shelter during the tumultuous periods of the Revolution and the Civil War, and who, finally convinced of the stability of the Soviet government, devoted themselves with a singular passion to the noble task of securing pleasant and permanent employment, if not in the center, at least in the provinces. This enormous rabble of various colors was the natural support of the Thermidor.

His feelings ranged from pale pink to pure whiteness. The Socialist-Revolutionaries were, naturally, ready at any time, and in any way, to defend the interests of the peasants against the threats of these bandit "industrialists," while the Mensheviks, by and large, believed that more freedom and more land should be given to the peasant bourgeoisie, whose political spokesmen they had become. The survivors of the big bourgeoisie and landlords, who had found their way to government jobs, naturally saw in the peasants their lifeline. As champions of their own class interests, they could not expect any success for the present time and understood perfectly well that they had to go through a period of defense of the peasantry. None of these groups could openly raise their heads. They all needed the protective coloring of the ruling Party and traditional Bolshevism. The struggle against permanent revolution became for them the struggle against the consecration of the annihilation of their former privileges. It is natural that they should have gladly accepted as their leaders those Bolsheviks who had stood against the permanent revolution.

The economy had taken on a new lease of life : a certain surplus appeared. Naturally, it was concentrated in the cities and entirely at the disposal of the ruling classes. It brought with it theaters, restaurants, and cabarets. Hundreds of thousands of men of various professions who had spent the burning years of the Civil War in a kind of coma were now reviving, stretching out, and beginning to take part in the restoration of normal life. They were all on the side of the opponents of the permanent revolution. All wanted peace, the growth and strengthening of the peasantry, and also the increased prosperity of the pleasure establishments in the cities ; it was this permanence rather than that of the revolution that they sought. Professor Ustryalov wondered whether the NEP (New Political Economy) of 1921 was a “tactic” or an “evolution.” This question greatly troubled Lenin. The subsequent course of events showed that “tactics,” thanks to a special configuration of historical conditions, became a source of “evolution.” The strategic retreat of the revolutionary party was used as the starting point for its degeneration.

Counterrevolution sets in when the skein of social conquests begins to unwind ; it then seems that the unwinding will never stop. However, some portion of the conquests of the revolution is always preserved. Thus, despite monstrous bureaucratic deformations, the class base of the USSR remains proletarian. But let us not forget that this process of unwinding has not yet been completed, and that the future of Europe and the world during the coming decades has not yet been decided. The Russian Thermidor would certainly have opened a new era of bourgeois rule if this rule had not become obsolete throughout the world. In any case, the struggle against equality and the establishment of very deep social differentiations have not so far been able to eliminate the socialist consciousness of the masses, nor the nationalization of the means of production and of the land, which are the fundamental socialist conquests of the Revolution. Although it has seriously undermined these achievements, the bureaucracy has not yet been able to venture to resort to the restoration of private appropriation of the means of production. At the end of the eighteenth century, private ownership of the means of production was a progressive factor of great significance : it still had Europe and the world to conquer. But today private property is the greatest obstacle to the normal development of the forces of production. Although by the nature of its new way of life, its conservatism, its political sympathies, the vast majority of the bureaucracy is inclined towards the petty bourgeoisie, its economic roots lie largely in the new conditions of property. The growth of bourgeois relations threatened not only the socialist basis of property, but also the social foundation of the bureaucracy ; it may have wanted to repudiate the socialist perspective of development in favor of the petty bourgeoisie ; but she was in no way prepared to repudiate her own rights and privileges in favor of this same petty bourgeoisie. It was this contradiction that led to the extremely sharp conflict that broke out between the bureaucracy and the kulaks.

This is where the Soviet Thermidor differed radically from its French prototype. The Jacobin dictatorship had been necessary to uproot feudal society and defend the new social order against attacks from the external enemy. Once this had been accomplished, the task of the Thermidorian regime was to create the necessary conditions for the development of this new society, which was bourgeois, that is, based on private property and free trade free from most of its previous constraints. The restoration of limited free trade by the NEP in 1921 was a retreat from bourgeois demands. But in fact this free trade was so restricted that it could not undermine the foundations of the regime (the nationalization of the means of production), and the reins of government remained in the hands of the Russian Jacobins who had led the October Revolution. Even the subsequent extension of this free trade in 1925 did not alter the basis of the regime, although the threat then became greater. The struggle against Trotskyism was waged in the name of the peasant, behind whom hid the voracious nepman and the greedy bureaucrat. As soon as Trotskyism was defeated, land leasing was legalized, and along the entire line the shift of power from left to right became manifest, despite occasional swings to the left, for these were always followed by even more pronounced swings back to the right. To the extent that the bureaucracy used its swings to the left to acquire an acceleration of movement for each subsequent leap to the right, the zigzag developed steadily at the expense of the working masses and in the interests of a privileged minority, its Thermidorian character is undeniable.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau taught us that political democracy was incompatible with too great inequality. The Jacobins, representatives of the petty-bourgeois masses, were imbued with this teaching. The legislation of the Jacobin dictatorship, especially the laws of the maximum, was based on this conception. So was Soviet legislation, which banished inequality even from the army. Under Stalin, all this changed, and today inequality is not only social, but economic. It has been promoted by the bureaucracy, cynically and brazenly, in the name of the revolutionary doctrine of Bolshevism. In its campaign against Trotskyist critiques of the system of inequality, in its agitation for differential wage rates, the bureaucracy invoked the shadows of Marx and Lenin, and sought a justification for its privileges under the cover of the hard-working "average" peasant and the skilled worker. She claimed that the Left Opposition was trying to deprive skilled labor of the higher wages to which they were fully entitled. This was the same kind of demagogic camouflage practiced by the capitalist and the landowner shedding crocodile tears in the name of the skilled mechanic, the enterprising small tradesman, and the ever-martyred farmer. It was a clever maneuver on Stalin’s part, and it naturally found immediate support among the privileged officials, who, for the first time, saw in him their elected leader. With boundless cynicism, equality was denounced as a petty-bourgeois prejudice ; the opposition was stigmatized as the chief enemy of Marxism and the great sinner against the gospels of Lenin. Sprawled in cars, technically the property of the proletariat, on their journey to the spa towns, also the property of the proletariat, the bureaucrats laughed madly, exclaiming, "What did we fight for ?" This ironic phrase was very popular at the time. The bureaucracy had respected Lenin, but it had always found his puritanical hand rather irritating. A common epigram in 1926-1927 characterized its attitude toward the United Opposition : "Kamenev is tolerated, but not respected. Trotsky is respected, but not tolerated. Zinoviev is neither tolerated nor respected." The bureaucracy was looking for a leader who was first among equals. Stalin’s firmness of character and narrow-mindedness inspired confidence. "We do not fear Stalin," Lenukidze told Serebryakov. "As soon as he wants to put on airs, we will eliminate him." But, in the end, it was Stalin who "eliminated" them.

The French Thermidor, triggered by left-wing Jacobins, ultimately turned into a reaction against all Jacobins. “Terrorists,” “Montagnards,” “Jacobins” became terms of abuse. In the provinces, the trees of liberty were being cut down and the tricolor cockade trampled underfoot. Such practices were inconceivable in the Soviet Republic. The totalitarian party contained within itself all the indispensable elements of reaction, which it mobilized under the official banner of the October Revolution. The Party tolerated no competition, not even in the struggle against its enemies. The struggle against the Trotskyists did not turn into a struggle against the Bolsheviks because the Party had absorbed this struggle in its entirety, set certain limits to it, and waged it in the name of Bolshevism.

To the naive, the theory and practice of the third period seem to refute the theory of the Thermidorian period of the Russian Revolution. In fact, they only confirm it. The substance of Thermidor was, is, and could not fail to be social in character. It represented the crystallization of a new privileged stratum, the creation of a new substratum for the economically dominant class. Two contenders aspired to this role : the petty bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy itself. They had to fight shoulder to shoulder in the battle to break the resistance of the proletarian vanguard. When this task had been accomplished, a savage struggle broke out between them. The bureaucracy became afraid of its isolation, of its divorce from the proletariat. It alone was incapable of crushing the kulak, and neither was the petty bourgeoisie, which had grown and continued to grow on the basis of the NEP ; it needed the help of the proletariat. Hence his concerted efforts to present his struggle against the petty bourgeoisie for surpluses and for power as the struggle of the proletariat against attempts at capitalist restoration.

The analogy with the French Thermidor ends here. The new social basis of the Soviet Union became dominant. Maintaining the nationalization of the means of production and the land was a law of life and death for the bureaucracy, for it was the social source of its dominant position. This was the reason for its struggle against the kulak. The bureaucracy could carry it out, and carry it through to the end, only with the support of the proletariat. That it succeeded in obtaining this support is proven better by the avalanche of capitulations by representatives of the new opposition. The struggle against the kulak, the struggle against the right wing—these were the official slogans of that period—appeared to the workers and many Left Oppositionists as a revival of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist revolution. We warned them at the time : it is not only a question of what is done, but also of who does it. Under the conditions of Soviet democracy, that is, under the workers’ government, the struggle against the kulaks could not have assumed a form similar to that which it then took : convulsive, panicky, and bestial, and it should have led to a general rise in the economic and cultural level of the masses on the basis of industrialization. But the struggle of the bureaucracy against the kulak was only a fight waged on the backs of the workers ; and since neither fighter had confidence in the masses, since both feared them, the struggle assumed a disorderly and murderous character. Thanks to the support of the proletariat, it ended in a victory for the bureaucracy, but a victory that could not increase the specific weight of the proletariat in the political life of the country.

To understand the Russian Thermidor, it is essential to have an accurate idea of ​​the role of the Party as a political factor. There was nothing even remotely resembling the Bolshevik Party in the French Revolution. During the Thermidorian period, there were various social groups in France under various political labels that opposed each other in the name of specific social interests. The Thermidorians attacked the Jacobins, calling them terrorists. The gilded youth supported the Thermidorians on the right, threatening them at the same time. In Russia, these various processes, conflicts, and unions were cloaked in the name of the single party.

Outwardly, this same single party celebrated the milestones of its existence at the beginning of the Soviet government and twenty years later, resorting to the same methods in the name of the same goals : the preservation of its political purity and unity. In fact, the role of the Party and the role of the purges had been radically changed. In the early days of Soviet power, the old revolutionary party got rid of its careerists ; at the same time, the committees were composed of revolutionary workers. Adventurers, or careerists, or simple scoundrels who tried to obtain government posts were thrown overboard. But the purges of recent years were, on the contrary, entirely directed against the old revolutionaries. The organizers of these purges were the worst bureaucrats and the most mediocre functionaries of the Party. The victims of the purges were the most loyal men, those most devoted to revolutionary traditions, and, above all, the generation of revolutionary elders, the truly proletarian elements. The social significance of the purges has changed essentially, but this change is masked by the fact that the purges were carried out by the same Party. In France, we see, in corresponding circumstances, the late movement of the petty-bourgeois and working-class districts against the summits of the petty and middle bourgeoisie, represented by the Thermidorians, and aided by the bands of the gilded youth.

Today, these very bands of the gilded youth are in the Party and in the Young Communists. They constitute the fighting detachments, recruited from among the sons of the bourgeoisie, privileged young people determined to defend their privileged position and that of their families. It will suffice to point out the fact that, at the head of the Young Communists for many years, was Kossarev, known to all as a moral degenerate, who abused his high position to achieve his personal aims ; his entire apparatus was composed of men of the same type. Such was the gilded youth of the Russian Thermidor. Its direct incorporation into the Party masked its social function as a fighting detachment of the privileged against the workers and the oppressed. The Soviet gilded youth shouted : “Down with Trotskyism ! Long live the Leninist Central Committee !” just as the gilded youth of the French Thermidor shouted : “Down with the Jacobins ! Long live the Convention !”

The Jacobins maintained themselves mainly through pressure from the streets on the Convention. The Thermidorians, that is, the deserting Jacobins, attempted to employ the same method, but for opposite ends. They began to organize well-dressed sons of the bourgeoisie, former sans-culottes. These members of the golden youth, or simply the "young," as the conservative press indulgently called them, became such an important factor in national politics that, as the Jacobins were expelled from their administrative posts, these "young people" took their place. An identical process continues to this day in the Soviet Union. In fact, it developed considerably under Stalin.

The Thermidorian bourgeoisie was characterized by a profound hatred of the Montagnards, for its own leaders had been taken from among the men who had led the sans-culottes. The bourgeoisie, and with it the Thermidorians, feared above all a new popular uprising. It was precisely during this period that class consciousness was fully formed in the French bourgeoisie ; it hated the Jacobins and semi-Jacobins with a rabid hatred—as traitors to its most sacred interests, as deserters who had gone over to the enemy, as renegades. The source of the Soviet bureaucracy’s hatred for the Trotskyists has the same social character. Here we see members of the same stratum, the same ruling group, the same privileged bureaucracy, who renounce their positions in order to link their destiny with that of the sans-culottes, the dispossessed, the proletarians, the poor peasants. The difference, however, lies in the fact that the French bourgeoisie was already established before the great revolution ; it broke its political shell in the Constituent Assembly ; but it had to go through the period of the Convention and the Jacobin dictatorship in order to be able to coexist with its enemies, whereas during the Thermidorian period it restored its historical tradition. The Soviet ruling caste, on the other hand, consisted entirely of Thermidorian bureaucrats, recruited not only from the Bolshevik ranks, but also from the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois parties, and the latter had old scores to settle with the "fanatics" of Bolshevism.

Thermidor rested on a social foundation. It was a question of bread, meat, housing, and, if possible, luxury. Bourgeois Jacobin equality, which took the form of regulating the maximum, restricted the development of the bourgeois economy and the extension of bourgeois well-being. On this point, the Thermidorians knew perfectly well what they wanted ; in the Declaration of Rights, they excluded the essential paragraph, "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights." To those who demanded the reinstatement of this important Jacobin paragraph, the Thermidorians replied that it was equivocal and therefore dangerous ; naturally, men were equal in rights, but not in their abilities and in their property. Thermidor was a direct protest against the Spartan character and against the effort toward equality.

The same social motivation can be found in the Soviet Thermidor. The primary issue was to put an end to the Spartan limitations of the first period of the Revolution. But it was also a matter of consecrating the growing privileges of the bureaucracy. It was not at all a matter of establishing a liberal economic regime ; concessions in this direction were temporary and lasted much less long than had been anticipated. A liberal regime based on private property means the concentration of wealth in the hands of the bourgeoisie, especially its upper classes. The privileges of the bureaucracy have a different origin. The bureaucracy appropriates that part of the national income which it can secure either by the exercise of its force or authority, or by direct intervention in economic relations. As regards the surplus of national production, the bureaucracy and the petty bourgeoisie, from allies, very quickly became enemies. Control of the surplus opened the road to power for the bureaucracy."
Excerpts from "Europe and America" ​​by Leon Trotsky :

What are the postulates of the social revolution, under what conditions can it arise, develop, and win ? These postulates are very numerous. But they can be grouped into three or even two groups : objective postulates and subjective postulates : The objective postulates are based on a definite level of development of the forces of production. (This is an elementary matter, but it is not useless to return from time to time to the "alpha-beta," to the foundations of Marxism, in order to arrive, with the help of the old method, at the new conclusions imposed by the current situation.) Thus, the capital postulate of the social revolution is a definite level of development of the productive forces, a level where socialism and then communism, as a mode of production and distribution of goods, offer material advantages. It is impossible to build communism or even socialism in the countryside, where the harrow still reigns. A certain development of technology is necessary.

Now, has this level of development been reached throughout the capitalist world ? Yes, undoubtedly. What proves it ? It is that large capitalist enterprises, trusts, and unions are triumphing over small and medium-sized enterprises throughout the world. Thus, a social economic organization based solely on the technology of large enterprises, built on the model of trusts and unions, but on the foundations of solidarity, and extended to a nation, a state, and then to the entire world, would offer enormous material advantages. This postulate has existed for a long time.

Second objective postulate : society must be dissociated in such a way that there is a class interested in the socialist revolution and that this class is large enough and influential enough from the point of view of production to carry out this revolution itself. But this is not enough. It is also necessary that this class—and here we pass to the subjective postulate—understand the situation, that it consciously desires the change of the old order of things, that it has at its head a party capable of directing it at the moment of the coup de force and of assuring its victory. Now this presupposes a certain state of the ruling bourgeois class which must have lost its influence over the popular masses, be shaken in its own ranks, have lost its self-confidence. This state of society precisely represents a revolutionary situation. It is only on definite social bases of production that the psychological, political and organic premises for the realization of the insurrection and its victory can arise.

The second postulate : class dissociation, in other words, the role and importance of the proletariat in society, does it exist ? Yes, it has existed for decades. This is proven, better than anything, by the role of the Russian proletariat, which is nevertheless relatively recently formed. What has been lacking until now ? The last subjective postulate, the awareness by the proletariat of Europe of its position in society, appropriate organization and education, a party capable of leading the proletariat. This is what has been lacking. We Marxists have often said that, despite all idealistic theories, the consciousness of society lags behind its development, and we have striking proof of this in the fate of the world proletariat. The forces of production have long been ripe for socialism. The proletariat, at least in the most important capitalist countries, has long played a decisive economic role. The whole mechanism of production and, consequently, of society depends on it. What is lacking is the last subjective factor : consciousness lags behind life.

The imperialist war was the historical punishment for this backwardness in life, but, on the other hand, it gave the proletariat a powerful impulse. It took place because the proletariat was not in a position to prevent it, because it had not yet come to know itself in society, to understand its role, its historical mission, to organize itself, to assign itself the task of seizing power and to fulfill it. At the same time, the imperialist war, which was a punishment not for a fault but for a misfortune of the proletariat, had to be and was a powerful revolutionary factor.

The war demonstrated the profound, urgent need for a change in the social system. Long before the war, the transition to a socialist economy offered considerable social advantages ; in other words, the forces of production would have developed much more on a socialist basis than on a capitalist basis. But even on a capitalist basis, the forces of production before the war were growing rapidly, not only in America but also in Europe. This was the relative "justification" for the existence of capitalism itself. Since the imperialist war, the picture is quite different : the forces of production, far from growing, are diminishing. And now it can only be a question of repairing the destruction, but not of continuing to develop the forces of production. The latter, even more than before, are cramped within the framework of individual property and within the framework of the states created by the Peace of Versailles. The fact that the progress of humanity is now irreconcilable with the existence of capitalism has been incontestably proven by the events of the last ten years. In this sense, the war was a revolutionary factor. But it was not only revolutionary in this sense. Mercilessly disrupting the entire organization of society, it pulled the consciousness of the working masses out of the rut of conservatism and tradition. We have entered the epoch of revolution.