“In a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” Source: Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Chapter 11.
Pictured: The original three rulers of Russian socialism. Lenin (left) died in 1924. Stalin (right) won the ensuing power struggle. Trotsky (middle) was exiled in 1929 and wrote the above, bitter words a few years before Stalin had him assassinated in 1940.
Related: “The Crisis of Socialism,” tracing socialism’s devolution from classical Marxism to the New Left scattering.
