Leon
Trotsky: For Equalization of Wages
July
11, 1926
[Leon
Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926-1927), New York
1980, p. 93 f.]
Just
before NEP was introduced, the Central Committee, under Lenin's
leadership, emphasized the “necessity, again and again, of
directing the attention of the party toward the struggle to
introduce greater equality:
first, within the party; second, within the proletariat and among the
masses of working people as a whole; and third and last, among
various government offices and groups of personnel, especially
‘spetses’ [specialists] and top personnel, as compared with the
masses’’.
Of
course the introduction of NEP brought big changes not only in the
economy but in everyday life, and gave rise to conditions that run
counter to equality. This does not mean, however, that the party can
bow in silence before the bourgeois tendencies of NEP, either in this
area or in others.
It
is a highly alarming symptom, therefore, that in late 1925 — five
years after the introduction of NEP — when an attempt was made to
place the question of greater equality on the agenda, it was met by
quite a hostile attitude on the part of a number of leading party
functionaries. Meanwhile, among the mass of the people, in the heart
of the working class, and within the party itself, the question of
greater equality has not been abandoned as a topic of discussion and
cannot be removed from the agenda.
An
inattentive and even hostile attitude toward the unskilled or
semiskilled sections of the working class, as some “gray mass”
which has not come up to the “high” level of our bureaucrats and
therefore dreams of equality, has become more and more widespread
(especially incorrect on this point have been the speeches of Comrade
Uglanov). Such an I attitude toward the poorly paid sections of the
working class is a typical sign of opportunism and of a retreat hum
the masses — and so, too, is the reluctance to take up in a
practical way the question of systematically introducing greater
equality despite the circumstances of NEP.