the revolutionary political power of urban workers, and instituted a system that would slowly crush any remaining revolutionary industrial power they possessed.  The NEP reintroduced wage labour, alienation, value circulation, and profit within what returned to being a "firm."  From the perspective of the revolutionary working class this was a nightmare, and some fought, and they died.  From the perspective of the mass of the working class, they got to eat.  From the perspective of international capitalism, in the form of their local representatives in the majority line of the Bolshevik Party and some Left SRs (etc.) this was a triumph.
The NEP produced a long term problem in goods pricing in the Soviet Union due to the strength of the peasantry.  The peasantrywas not alienated from the means of production, unlike the English rural working class in 1789.  The peasantry would effectively go on strike using market signals until the early 1930s when they were liquidated as a class through mass dispossession and systematic starvation.  (And even then, they kept striking).
From the perspective of the rural proletariat, such as in the Ukraine where even Lenin recognised the signs of rural capitalism, the NEP was a nightmare.  However, many of these workers could benefit from moving to the cities under the NEP, and from the graft networks of the Bolshevik state.  It would be the newly created rural proletarian, the NEP rural proletariat, who would suffer most under the NEP economically.
Given that the NEP was effectively forced