MIA > Archive > M. Philips Price
From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 96, 7 November 1922, pp. 744–745.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2021). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Once again the annual celebration can be held of he foundation of the first proletarian state that has yet risen in the comity of nations. Once again our thoughts go back to the bitter struggles that characterized the birth pangs of the Russian Soviet Republic, as we survey the long series of events which led the Russian workers and peasants through the civil war the fight against internal economic disruption, the fight against famine to the new economic policy, and the slow but steady commencement of economic reconstruction on a Socialist basis of society.
When we consider the influence which this great revolution has had on the people of the Anglo-Saxon lands, particularly of England, we shall find that two important aspects must be borne in mind. First, the effect of the Revolution on the ruling classes, and secondly the effect on labor. As regards the first it may be said that the first effect of the revolution was one of fear. It was expected that the actions of the Russian revolutionaries, particularly the nationalization of the key industries and the annulling of the war loans, would give an example to Labor in England. As England, however, was not interested to the same extent in the debts of the Tsarist government, this actual fear of heavy financial losses did not play so great a role, as it did with France. Nevertheless the fear was great enough to cause the British government to submit to the desire of the French militarists and to sanction the armed intervention of the Allies in Russia in the summer of 1918.
With the defeat of Denikin and Koltchak a new period in the relations between England and Russia began. The ruling classes of England, seeing that they could not overcome the Russian revolution by force, tried to come to terms with it for the purpose of weakening it from within. This was considered desirable partly in order to secure a “peaceful liquidation of Communism”, whereby the British investors in Russian industrial securities hoped to be able to continue their exploitation of the natural resources of Russia, and partly in order to prevent a strong Russia from acquiring too much influence over the suppressed peoples of Asia. The old anti-Russian policy of Lord Beaconsfield has been for some some time past the keystone of the policy of certain of the English statesmen, particularly of those of the Anglo-Indian school. At the same time the motive for the fear of Russia with these people is different from what is was in the days of Beaconsfield whereas then the Anglo-Indians feared, or pretended to fear the extension of the Empire of the Tsar in Asia at the expense of the territories which they ruled, today the fear is that the example of Russia, in throwing off her semi-feudal, agrarian aristocracy, is likely to be followed by the peoples of India, Egypt, Persia and Mesopotamia and that the latter will receive diplomatic support from Russia in attaining their ends.
When we come now to consider the effect of the Russian Revolution on British labor, we find considerable lack of clear understanding. The actual revolution without doubt created widespread sympathy, for the most part inarticulate, among the broad masses of the workers. British labor through the special Trade Union Conferences in the autumn of 1919, summoned to decide on action against the Allied intervention in Russia, showed that it was ready for direct action to defend the first Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic. Again in the summer 1920 it formed the Councils of Action to stop England entering the Russo-Polish war on the side of Poland.
But this action was not followed to its logical consequences. The leaders of the Labor movement in England took care to prevent the movement from going beyond the bounds of a purely pacifist, anti-war action. What they failed to do on August 4th, 1914 they decided to do six years later and again in this last month, when they threatened to act against participation in the Greco-Turkish war on the side of the Greeks. Thus it comes about that the movements among the British labour masses in support of Soviet Russia have always taken the form of anti-war demonstrations. They have prevented the ruling classes of England from using the British army and navy to defend the interests of the British concession hunters in Russia and the East but they have never gone so far as to declare war on these concession-hunters in their own country. For this reason the British labour movement tends to be pacifist and its leaders are a prey to all the dangerous illusions and fallacies of people who set half the truth but are frightened of looking at the whole truth. Hence the support which the British Labour party through the Second International has given to the campaign tor “poor little Georgia, suppressed under the tyranny of Bolshevik bayonets”. These people, who demonstrate against war, fail to see how they are being used as tools of British Imperial policy in the East, when they follow the illusions of “an independent Georgia”. They fail to see in that Georgia what Trotsky so well described as “an area of the Russian civil war”. The process of educating the British labor movement in the principles of Communism and the class struggle will take some time but it will undoubtedly be accelerated by the breakdown of the economy of the British Empire, the heavy taxation and before all by the creeping paralysis of unemployment.
Last updated on 3 January 2021