In the oldest capitalist country, Britain, May Day reflects in equal measure the national-possibilist nature of the class struggle of the British proletariat and the sectarian-propagandist nature of British socialism. Adopted by the trade unions, May Day has been assimilated as a conservative ritual of trade unionism, serving the cause of the propaganda of its immediate class tasks and scarcely rising to social-revolutionary generalizations. As a holiday of militant internationalism, May Day in Britain has remained not the act of a revolutionary working class but a demonstration by the numerically small revolutionary groups in the working class.
From May Day 1890-1915, Nashe Slovo, 1st May 1915
There is unrest in Britain too. Lloyd George [1] displayed great dexterity when it was a question of sticking a knife into his chief, Asquith. [2] Idlers and simpletons had expected that as a result Lloyd George would smash the Germans at the earliest moment; but the unfrocked-priest minister who turned chieftain of the bandits of British imperialism proved incapable of performing the miracle. The population of Britain, like that of Germany, is becoming increasingly convinced that the war has got into a desperate blind alley. The agitation by opponents of the war is encountering an ever greater response. The jails are overflowing with socialists.
The Irish are ever more insistently demanding the implementation of Home Rule from a government which replies with arrests of Irish revolutionaries.
From Unrest in Europe, Novy Mir (New York), 15th March 1917
At present the situation is not very different in Britain. Admittedly Britain is accustomed to stand aside from Europe. The bourgeoisie has brought the British people up to think of the continent as one thing and Britain another. The government of Great Britain used to intervene in the old European wars by supporting the weaker side with money, and sometimes part of the Navy, against the stronger, only until the moment that an equilibrium was established on the continent. The entire world policy of Britain has for centuries, comrades, consisted in this: dividing Europe into two camps but not allowing one camp to grow strong at the expense of the other. Ruling class Britain supports its allies like a rope supports a hanging man: that is, by drawing a noose around their necks as tight as possible in the form of all sorts of obligations, so as thereby to exhaust the strength not only of her enemies but also of her “allies”. But this time it did not turn out that way. Germany had developed far too powerfully and showed herself to be too mighty a country, and so Britain had herself to get mixed up and deeply involved no longer just with money but with meat and human blood. But it is said that “blood is a special juice”. This intervention the British bourgeoisie will have to pay for ... The privileged position of Britain, once fundamentally undermined by Germany’s competition, has disappeared forever. The British trade unionist used to say: “Here we don’t have militarism , I’m a free citizen on our island which is defended by the Navy. Here we have only a few dozen thousand volunteer sailors in the Navy and that’s it.”
Now, this “free” proletarian of Britain has been seized by the scruff of his neck and thrown on to the territory of Europe while the war has caused a fearful increase in taxation and fearfully high prices. All this has undermined the old “privileged” economic position, even of the upper layer of the British working class, to the very roots.
The more privileged that the British proletariat had earlier felt itself to be and the more haughtily it regarded itself, the more terrible the awareness of the catastrophe will be for it. Great Britain’s economy is devastated, ruined. A gigantic number of cripples and invalids – all these are consequences of the war. To think that after her victory over Germany Britain would be able to abandon her militarism or strictly limit it would be a grave mistake. Tomorrow Britain’s most powerful enemy will be the United States. There is already today a deep private antagonism between them. For the British proletariat there remain today only two possibilities: the degeneration of the economy and the working class or – social revolution.
To be sure, there exists a prejudice that the British working class supposedly lacks a revolutionary temperament. There is a subjectively nationalistic theory that the history of a nation is to be explained by national temperament. This is rubbish. That is what the superficial gossip-mongers of bourgeois origin who have only observed British people in the smart restaurants of Switzerland and France believe and write: they observe the so-called cream of British society, whose representatives have become corrupt and emaciated over the generations and lack both the energy and will to live, and set them up as representatives of the British nation.
But whoever knows the history of the British people and the British working class, the history of the English Revolution of the 17th century and then British Chartism of the 19th century, will know that the Englishman too has a “devil inside him”. There have been repeated occasions when the Englishman has taken up the cudgel against his oppressor. And there is no doubt that the time is near when he will take up his cudgel against the King, against Lloyd George, against his lords and against the cruel, cunning, clever and perfidious British bourgeoisie. And the first thunderclaps of the great storm can already be heard from the island of Great Britain.
From a speech to the Voronezh Soviet, 18th November 1918
(On Guard Over the World Revolution)
1. Herbert Asquith (1852-1927), British Liberal politician and lawyer; Home Secretary 1892-95, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1905-08 and prime minister 1908-1916.
2. David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Welsh Liberal politician, responsible as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) for the introduction of old age pensions, unemployment benefit and sickness benefits; prime minister from 1916 to 1922.
Last updated on: 1.7.2007