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From International Socialism, No. 63, Mid-October 1973, p. 30.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Leon Trotsky on Britain
Introduction by George Novack
Monad Press, £1.45
ALTHOUGH most of Trotsky’s writings in this collection, which covers the 1925–8 period, have been published before, they are now accessible in one handy volume. Much of it is devoted to Where Is Britain Going?, its British reviewers and Trotsky’s reply to them. Apart from giving more power to the elbow of the fledgling Communist Party in Britain, the book was aimed ‘essentially at the official conception of the [Russian] Politbureau, with its hope of an evolution to the left by the British General Council, and the gradual painless penetration of communism into the ranks of the British Labour Party and trades unions.’ (Trotsky in My Life)
The Soviet leaders were desperately attempting to break the imperialist stranglehold that threatened to extinguish the gains of the Russian revolution. A revolution in Britain – one of the major imperialist heartlands – would give them a breathing space. The Politbureau, which was increasingly coming under Stalin’s influence, thought it could short-circuit the process of aiding a revolution in Britain by influencing the existing trade-union apparatus and leadership, instead of relying on and building up the British Communist Party. In short, it hoped to enter the ‘broad gateway of the trade unions’ rather than the ‘narrow path of the Communist Party’. To this end it took advantage of the TUC’s left turn to form an Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee in May 1925.
The attitude to be adopted towards this committee became a major bone of contention in the Trotsky-Stalin conflict. Despite the TUC’s sell-out of the general strike in the following year, its help in breaking the miners’ strike and its support for British intervention in China, the Politbureau’s sweetheart relationship with the TUC continued.
The underlying but central theme in this book is the question of reform or revolution. What Trotsky set out to prove was that to rely on such leftist trade-union leaders, as Hicks and Purcell and their Labour Party allies in the ILP, Lansbury, Kirkwood, Wheatley and even MacDonald, was utterly mistaken. To the marrow they were vacillating, hypocritical reformists. A revolutionary party had to be built. Revolution in Britain was both a necessity and a possibility.
Trotsky had to tackle the problem of ‘the greatest peculiarity in British polities’ – ‘the glaring contradiction between the revolutionary maturity of the objective economic factors and the exceptional backwardness of the ideological forms, particularly in the ranks of the working class’ (p. 206). Thus whilst the British Empire was in as rapid decline as the US was in the ascendant, compelling the British ruling class to reorganise its internal economic relationships especially in the mines, the existing labour leadership with all its ideological peculiarities would not even fight back, let alone lead a revolution. This had to be exposed.
Though neither the wit nor the brilliance of Trotsky’s pen could cut out the warts in the labour movement, the book is of more than mere historical interest. Most relevant today are his objections to: the Fabian notion of gradualism (historical development is both evolutionary and revolutionary); pacifism (the ruling class will always resort to force when it has to); and the parliamentary road to socialism (workers create their own ruling institutions when engaged in revolutionary struggle). Trotsky points out how the labour leaders’ ideas, then as now, are socialist in name but liberal in content. And his descriptions of them as obsequious, hypocritical, careerist, corrupt and nationalistic still have their relevance. Casts may change, but the play still goes on. Trotsky also has incisive things to say about workers’ participation (p. 133), ‘resolutionary’ socialism (p. 164), the belief that the main battle within the labour movement is solely ‘left v. right’ (p. 178), and on the question of united front work and strategic blocs (p. 260).
This book in addition contains reviews of Where is Britain Going? by some of the very people he criticises – MacDonald, Lansbury, Robert Williams and Brailsford. Their comments proved the point he was trying to make. And of ironic interest is Palme Dutt’s spirited and cogent defence of Trotsky’s revolutionary position in the face of their criticisms.
We can say with hindsight that although Trotsky was right in predicting the general strike, the war he forecast between Britain and America did not occur. He was also over-optimistic about the possibility of revolution in Britain at the time. Not only were the British Communist Party’s tactics during the general strike wrong owing to Russian advice, but Trotsky underestimated the strength of the ‘exceptional backwardness of the ideological forms’. But, for an understanding of how the labour movement was, is and may be, this book is a must.
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Last updated on 14.9.2013