Labour Bureaucracy and the Post-War Class Struggle
From the preface (dated 29 May 1920) to
Terrorism and Communism (1920).
… In that country [Great Britain], the ruling class of which is oppressing and plundering the whole world more than ever before, the formulae of democracy have lost their meaning even as weapons of parliamentary swindling. The specialist best qualified in this sphere, Lloyd George, appeals now not to democracy, but to a union of Conservative and Liberal property holders against the working class. In his arguments, no trace remains of the vague democracy of the ‘Marxist’ Kautsky. Lloyd George stands on the ground of class realities, and for this very reason speaks in the language of civil war. The British working class, with that ponderous learning by experience which is its distinguishing feature, is approaching that stage of its struggle before which the most heroic pages of Chartism will fade, just as the Paris Commune will grow pale before the coming victorious revolt of the French proletariat.
Precisely because historical events have, in these last months, been developing their revolutionary logic with stern energy, the author of this present work asks himself: Does it still require to be published? Is it still necessary to confute Kautsky theoretically? Is there still a theoretical necessity to justify revolutionary terrorism?
Unfortunately, yes. Ideology, by its very essence, plays an enormous part in the socialist movement. Even for practical Britain the period has arrived when the working class must exhibit an ever-increasing demand for a theoretical statement of its experiences and its problems. On the other hand, even the proletarian psychology includes a terrible inertia of conservatism in itself – all the more so since in the present case, it is a question of nothing less than the traditional ideology of the parties of the Second International which first roused the proletariat, and recently were so powerful. After the collapse of official social-patriotism (Scheidemann, Victor Adler, Renaudel, Vandervelde, Henderson, Plekhanov, etc.), international Kautskyism (the staff of the German Independents, Friedrich Adler, Longuet, a considerable section of the Italians, the British Independent Labour Party, the Martov group, etc.) has become the chief political factor on which the unstable equilibrium of capitalist society depends.
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From The Manifesto of the Second World Congress
drafted by Trotsky and adopted at the Second World Congress
of the Communist International, 7 August 1920.
Routinism among the summits of the labour movement in Britain is so ingrained that they have yet even to feel the need of rearming themselves. The leaders of the British Labour Party are stubbornly bent upon remaining within the framework of the Second International.
At a time when the march of events during recent years has undermined the stability of economic life in conservative Britain and has made her toiling masses most receptive to a revolutionary programme – at such a time, the official machinery of the bourgeois nation – the Royal House of Windsor, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the Church, the trade unions, the Labour Party, George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Henderson – remains intact as a mighty automatic brake upon progress. Only the Communist Party – a party free from routine and sectarianism, and closely bound up with the mass organisations – will be able to counterpose the proletarian rank and file to this official aristocracy.
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From On the Policy of the KAPD (dated 5 November 1920)
Kommunisticheskii Internatsional, 7 June 1921.
It is quite probable that Britain will enter the epoch of proletarian revolution with a Communist Party still comparatively small. One can do nothing about it, because the propaganda of communist ideas is not the sole factor in history. The only conclusion that flows from this is: that the working class of Britain – if, through the criss-crossing of major historical causes, it finds itself in the near future already drawn into an unfolding proletarian revolution – will have to create, expand, and consolidate its mass party in the very course of the struggle for power, and in the period immediately following the conquest of power; while, during the initial phase of the revolution, the numerically small Communist Party will – without tearing itself away from the mainstream of the movement, and by taking into account the existing organisational level of the proletariat and its degree of class consciousness – seek to introduce the maximum of communist consciousness into the actually unfolding revolution.
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The mighty strike movement in Britain was shattered again and again during the last year by the ruthless application of military force, which intimidated the trade union leaders. Had these leaders remained faithful to the cause of the working class, the machinery of the trade unions despite all its defects could have been used for revolutionary battles. The recent crisis of the Triple Alliance furnished the possibility of a revolutionary collision with the bourgeoisie, but this was frustrated by the conservatism, cowardice, and treachery of the trade union leaders.[1] Were the machinery of the British trade unions to develop today half the amount of energy in the interests of socialism it has been expending in the interests of capitalism, the British proletariat could conquer power with a minimum of sacrifice and could start a systematic reconstruction of the country’s economic system.
Endnotes
[1] The Triple Alliance of the Miners’ Federation, the Transport Workers’ Federation and the National Union of Railwaymen had been formed in 1914, but collapsed in April 1921 when the leaders of the transport workers and the railwaymen refused to call their members out in sympathy with the miners’ strike against the coal owners’ wage cuts.