Replies to Critics
On the Tempo and Timescale of the Revolution
Events over the year which has passed since my book Where is Britain Going? was written have in no way developed according to the scheme of either Baldwin or MacDonald. The starry-eyed idealism of the Conservative minister has faded away very rapidly. The communists who had been expelled from the Labour Party by MacDonald have been put in jail by King George’s judges, thus putting the party on an illegal basis. These same judges pat young fascist thugs encouragingly on the back and recommend the violators of the law to join the police who are charged with safeguarding the law. The judges thereby bear witness to the fact that the difference between violation of the law by fascists and safeguarding the law by the police merely relates to the form and in no way to the essence. The fascists are good citizens but too impatient: their methods are premature. The class struggle has not yet reached civil war. MacDonald and Lansbury are still performing their functions restraining the proletariat with the fictions of democracy and the myths of religion. Fascism remains in reserve. But the capitalist politicians understand that matters do not end with the methods of democracy and in private Mr. Joynson-Hicks is trying on Mussolini’s mask.
The tough repressiveness of the Baldwin government complements, out of necessity, its wretched confusion on economic problems. Faced with the new economic facts, the protectionism of the Conservative Party is just as feeble as the free trade of the Liberals was. It was clear from the very start that the vain attempts at protectionism would run into the conflicts of interests of the basic branches of the British economy. But a year ago we still did not think that a protectionist programme would degenerate into such a farce. In the period since then, duties have been imposed on lace, gloves, musical instruments, gas mantles, penknives, and toilet paper. No more than 10,000 workers are employed in these branches of industry. Yet there are 1,231,900 miners. And the registered unemployed number 1,215,900. Isn’t Mr. Baldwin abusing ‘gradualness’ just too much?
The Liberal Party, whose downfall continues to remain one of the sharpest political expressions of the decline of Britain, has for the most part abandoned any hopes of independent power, and while the right wing dreams of a role as a left brake on the Conservatives its left wing would like to support MacDonald from the right who, in turn, will have increasing need of such support as time goes on. When old Asquith commented ironically upon the speech of Snowden and Churchill, of whom the former urged the Liberals to enter the Labour Party and the latter to enter the Conservative Party, then Mr. Asquith was right in his way: between dying in the capacity of yes-men of old political adversaries and dying on the principles of independence, the difference is not so great.
The role of the MacDonald clique over this period can be adequately characterised by a simple juxtaposition of facts. In 1924 the MacDonald government convicted communists under the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797 (of the era of the French revolution!). At the end of 1925 MacDonald carried out the expulsion of communists from the Labour Party. The ultra-reactionary Home Secretary in the Conservative government, the already mentioned Benito Hicks, has convicted communists under the same Act of 1797 and has placed the leaders of the party in jail. The working masses protest. The MacDonald clique too is compelled to issue inarticulate sounds of protest. Against what? It is quite evident that it is against the rival Hicks taking the bread out of its mouth.
Neither the economics nor the politics of Britain over the last year provide any reason whatsoever to make alterations to the conclusions drawn in our book. There is no cause to react to the gnashing of teeth in the bourgeois press, of Britain and especially of America. “Behind the mask of a new book”, howls one of the New York papers, “the author teaches Americans and Englishmen how to conduct an uprising”. The paper then demands tough measures against the book on account of the geographical distance of the author. All this is in the order of things. There is no occasion to reply. Events will reply. The only thing that I have learnt from the criticisms in the British bourgeois press is that Mr. Winston Churchill is not yet a lord as I had mistakenly or at least prematurely supposed.
The official Menshevik Press says essentially the same thing; only the appeal to the bourgeois police against the “sermon of violence” has a somewhat more masked form. But here, neither, is there any place for polemics. For us at the present stage of development the British opposition on the left is far more interesting. From its literary representatives we will however hear little. “If the crazy Moscow tendencies are able to find roots here then it will be simply thanks to the greed of our bourgeoisie and the compliance of the leaders of the Labour Party” and so on and so forth. This is the gist of the articles of Lansbury, Brailsford, and others. The complete centrist stamp of thoughts and arguments could be predicted in advance. To hope for a positive attempt at an analysis of facts and reasoning on the part of these gentlemen is about equivalent to expecting milk from a billy-goat.
Fortunately we do have in our hands a document which is distinguished by a considerably greater spontaneity and, as it were, naturalness. A Russian comrade who maintains a correspondence with figures in the British labour movement has sent me two letters from a ‘left’ member of the Independent Labour Party directed against my book Where is Britain Going? These letters seemed to me more interesting than the articles by British and other ‘leaders’, some of whom have lost the ability to think and others of whom had never acquired it. I do not at all mean to say by this that the writer of the letters argues correctly. On the contrary, it would be hard to conceive of a greater chaos than that which reigns in his thoughts, which, by the way, he himself regards to be his principal advantage over the finished compromisers of the MacDonald variety and over the “dogmatists of revolution”, that is ourselves. Through our Russian and international experience we are pretty well familiar with confusionists of this type. If we nevertheless consider the critical letters of the ‘left’, which had not been intended for publication, more instructive than the glossy articles of the specialists of centrism then it is just because, in the honest-to-goodness eclectic mish-mash of the letters, the political shifts in the masses are more directly reflected. It goes without saying that we are using the letters with the kind permission of both the English and the Russian correspondents.
The ideological groupings in the British labour movement and particularly in its leading layer can be divided along three basic lines. The leading position in the Labour Party is occupied by the rights, as the Liverpool Conference once again showed. The official ideology of these gentlemen, who will stop at nothing in the defence of the foundations of bourgeois society, consists of the left-overs of bourgeois theories of the nineteenth century and primarily of its first half. At the other pole stands the small minority of communists. The British working class will achieve victory only under the leadership of the Bolshevik party. Today it is still walking in toddler’s shoes. But it is growing and can grow up rapidly.
Between these two extreme groupings there stretches, as between two shores, an innumerable quantity of shades and tendencies which, though having no future in themselves, do prepare it. The ‘theoreticians’ and ‘politicians’ of this broad middle tendency are recruited from eclectics, sentimentalists, hysterical philanthropists, and, generally, muddlers of every type. For some, eclecticism is a complete life’s vocation, while for others, a stage of development. The opposition movement headed by the lefts, semi-lefts and the extreme lefts reflects a profound social shift in the masses. The woolliness of the British ‘lefts’ together with their theoretical formlessness, and their political indecision, not to say cowardice, makes the clique of MacDonald, Webb, and Snowden master of the situation, which in turn is impossible without Thomas. If the bosses of the British Labour Party form a bridle placed upon the working class then Thomas is the buckle into which the bourgeoisie inserts the reins.
The present stage in the development of the British proletariat, where its overwhelming majority responds sympathetically to the speeches of the ‘lefts’ and supports MacDonald and Thomas in power is not of course accidental. And it is impossible to leap over this stage. The path of the Communist Party, as the future great party of the masses, lies not only through an irreconcilable struggle against capital’s special agency in the shape of the Thomas-MacDonald clique but also through the systematic unmasking of the left muddleheads by means of whom alone MacDonald and Thomas can maintain their positions. This is our justification for paying attention to the ‘left’ critic.
It goes without saying that our critic accuses our pamphlet of rectilinearity, a mechanical posing of the question, a simplification of reality, and so on and so forth. “Running through his [i.e., my] book is the conviction that the decline of Britain will proceed for another four to five years [?!] before it will bring on serious internal complications.” While in the opinion of the critic the next twelve months will form the peak of the crisis after which “subsequent development over the coming decade [?!] will take place without major difficulties”. In this way, our critic first ascribes to me a firm prediction with regard to the sharpening of the crisis over four to five years, and then counterposes to this an even more firm prediction which divides the coming period of British history into two periods: twelve months of sharpening crisis and ten years of peaceful prosperity.
In the letter there are not, unfortunately, any economic arguments. In order to give the prophecy concerning a year of crisis and a secure decade any economic weight, it has to be allowed that the writer is linking his prognosis with the present acute financial difficulties which flow from the return to the gold standard and the regulation of the debt question. The economic crisis is apparently reduced by the writer to a deflationary crisis, and for this reason he assigns to it such a brief period. It is quite probable that after the most grave financial and credit difficulties have been overcome a certain relaxation of the money market will in fact ensue, and consequently likewise in commercial and industrial activity. But a general prognosis cannot be based upon fluctuations of this sort which have essentially a secondary nature. And in any case the prediction of a prosperous decade is derived from absolutely nothing. Britain’s fundamental difficulties are rooted in, on the one hand, the regrouping and relative movement of world economic and political forces, and on the other in the inner conservatism of British industry.
The immeasurable industrial and financial preponderance of the United States of America over Britain is a fact whose importance in the future can only grow. There are not nor cannot be any circumstances which can mitigate the mortal consequences which arise for Britain from the unparalleled superiority of America.
The development of modern technology, and in particular the growing importance of electrification, is aimed directly against the coal industry and obliquely against all of the generally extremely conservative British industry which is based largely upon coal.
The growth of the industrial and political self-sufficiency of Canada, Australia, and South America, which revealed its full proportions after the war, is inflicting continually fresh blows upon the metropolis. The dominions are, for Britain, turning from sources of enrichment into sources of economic deficit.
The national movement in India, Egypt, and in all the East is directed first and foremost against British imperialism. There are hardly any grounds to expect that this movement will begin to weaken “in twelve months”.
The existence of the Soviet Union – and in this one can agree with British Conservative and Liberal politicians – contains within itself considerable economic and political difficulties for Great Britain. There are here once again no grounds for thinking that these difficulties will diminish in twelve months.
If the so-called pacification of Europe continues it will entail the rebirth and strengthening of German competition. And if pacification is succeeded by a military or a revolutionary crisis this too will strike at the economy of Great Britain.
The coming period will therefore create even more severe conditions for British capital and thereby the question of power will stand out before the proletariat with still greater sharpness. I did not set any time scale. The only remark in my book in this regard stated that the revolutionary development of the British working class will be measured in quinquennia rather than decades. It is clear that by this I did not mean that a social overturn would take place “in four years” (although I do not consider even this excluded). My point was that the prospects of revolutionary development should be reckoned not over a number of decades, not on sons and grandsons, but on the generation living now.
At this point I am obliged to include an extensive quotation from the ‘left’ critic’s letter:
Trotsky speaks nearly all the time about decades. But can you speak of decades when applied to the economic or even to the political situation? I think not in any instance. It is impossible, as Trotsky himself has previously pointed out, to assign and fix an exact date when the explosion of the revolution will begin, and although he had in mind more the impossibility of indicating the day [?] I consider it to be impossible to predict even the year [?]. A revolution depends above all upon economic factors and at the present time there are an endless number of economic factors which may prove to favour or oppose a revolution in Britain. A revolution could have flared up on 1 August 1925 as a result of the crisis in the coal industry. A revolution may break out with the renewal of the crisis next May. A revolution may be accelerated by the Far Eastern crisis, war, the economic collapse of other countries, the short-sightedness of a few industrialists at home, the inability of the government to solve the unemployment problem, a crisis in other branches of industry besides coal, and also by socialist propaganda among workers which elevates their demands and hopes. Each of these possibilities is highly probable in the conditions of the present day and not a single one of them can be predicted even to the month. The present day is characterised by extreme economic and consequently political instability; one move can ruin the whole game but on the other hand the existing system can be artificially maintained for many years more. Thus the British revolution, if you understand a political revolution by that, is marked by uncertainty…
The confusion in these lines is absolutely unimaginable, and yet it is not a personal confusion, but on the contrary it is deeply typical. It is the confusion of the people who ‘speaking generally’ recognise the revolution, but who fear it to the marrow of their bones and who are ready to adopt any theoretical justification for their political fear.
Indeed, let us take a closer look at the writer’s line of argument. He is knocking at an open door when he proves that the tempo of development of the revolution and consequently its date depend on the interaction of numerous factors and circumstances of both an accelerating and a retarding effect. Hence he draws the conclusion indisputable in itself of the impossibility of predicting the timing of the revolution. But he contrives to formulate this most elementary thought thus:
Trotsky considers it impossible to predict the day of the revolution but he, the sage critic, considers it impossible to predict even the year. This contraposition appears to be completely implausible by its childishness. It may even seem that it does not deserve an answer at all. But as a matter of fact how many ‘extreme lefts’ are there who have not thought over, even in the rough, the most elementary problems of the revolution and for whom the very fact of reflections about its day and year represent a huge step forward, similar for example to the transition from total illiteracy to the muddled reading of individual syllables?
If indeed I had considered it impossible to determine in advance the day (?!) of the revolution then I would have probably attempted to determine the week, month, or the year. But you see I did not make such an attempt. I merely indicated that the social development of Britain had entered a revolutionary phase. At the end of the last century one could speak of a revolution in Britain only within the context of the most general foresight. In the years immediately preceding the imperialist war one could already point with certainty to a number of symptoms which evidenced the approach of a turning point. After the war this turn, and in the event a sharp one, set in. In the past the British bourgeoisie had, by oppressing the toilers and plundering the colonies, led the nation on the path of material growth and thus guaranteed its rule. Today the bourgeois regime is not only incapable of leading the British nation forward but neither can it maintain for it the level already achieved. The British working class is beating against the contradictions of capitalist decline. There is not a single question of economic life: the nationalisation of the mines, and the railways, the fight against unemployment, free trade or protectionism, housing, and so on which does not lead directly to the question of power. Here is the social-historical foundation of a revolutionary situation. Of course, it is a question of the struggle of living historical forces and not of an automatic accumulation of arithmetical quantities. And this alone makes impossible a passive prediction of the stages of the process and timing of the denouement. A finger must be kept on the pulse of the British economy and politics, and, while not omitting overall perspectives for a moment, one must attentively follow all the partial fluctuations, the flows and the ebbs, and determine their place in the process of the capitalist decline. Only upon the basis of such a general orientation can the revolutionary party conduct its policy, the flexibility of which is expressed by the fact that it does take partial fluctuations into account but in no way loses sight of the basic line of development.
My ‘left’ critic has evidently heard something – in quite another connection – about the determination of the “day” of the revolution, and has not grasped that then we were referring to the moment of armed insurrection placed on the order of the day by the revolution. Here are two questions which, although interlinked, are quite distinct.
In the one case it is a question of a historically based prognosis and the general strategic line flowing from this; in the other, of a tactical plan which presupposes a more or less exact determination of a place and time. It would not enter anyone’s head – except perhaps that of the British Attorney-General – to say that in Britain at the present moment armed uprising is on the order of the day, and that fixing its plan and thus its date is a practical task. And yet only in this connection could we speak of the day or of days. In Germany in the autumn of 1923 matters stood in just this way. Today in Britain the question is not one of assigning a ‘day’ for the revolution – we are a long way from this! – but in clearly understanding that the whole objective situation is bringing this ‘day’ closer and into the ambit of the educational and preparatory work of the party of the proletariat, and at the same time creating conditions for its rapid revolutionary formation.
In his second letter, the same critic brings to the aid of his scepticism about dates (in fact scepticism about revolution) still more unexpected arguments. “The domain of economics”, he argues, “is, practically sneaking, limitless […] new inventions, regrouping of capitalist forces […] the other side also recognises the danger. […] America too may take measures against an impending collapse of Britain. In a word”, the critic concludes, “the possibilities are very many and Trotsky has by no means exhausted them all.” Our ‘left’ has need of all possibilities except one: that of revolution. While playing hide-and-seek with reality he is ready to seize hold of any fantasy. In what sense for example can “new inventions” alter the social conditions of the development of Great Britain? Since the time of Marx there have been plenty of inventions through which the effect of Marx’s law of the concentration of capital and the sharpening of class contradictions has not weakened, but on the contrary has become stronger. New inventions will in the future also provide advantages to the more powerful, i.e., not to Great Britain but to the United States. That the “other side”, that is the bourgeoisie, is aware of the danger and will fight against it by all means is beyond question. But just this is the most important prerequisite for revolution. To hope for a saving hand from America is in the end completely preposterous. It is more than probable that, in the event of a civil war in Britain, America will attempt to assist the bourgeoisie, but this merely signifies that the British proletariat will have to seek allies beyond its frontiers too. We think that it will find them. Hence it follows that a British revolution will inevitably acquire an international scale. We least of all intend to dispute this. But our critic means something else. He expresses the hope that America will so relieve the existence of the British bourgeoisie that it can assist it to avoid revolution altogether. It is hard to think of a better one than that! Each new day testifies that American capital forms a historical battering ram which intentionally or unintentionally is dealing the most crushing blows to Britain’s world position and internal stability. This however does not in the least prevent our ‘left’ from hoping that American capital will kindly squeeze up to help British capital. For a start he must evidently expect that America will relinquish the discharge of the British debt; that she will hand over to the British Treasury the $300 million which form her reserve of British currency without compensation; that she will support Great Britain’s policy in China; that perhaps she will also hand over to the British Navy a few new cruisers and sell back her Canadian shares to British firms at a discount of 50 per cent. He must, in a word, expect that the Washington government will put the management of the affairs of state into the hands of the ARA[1] having picked for this the most philanthropic Quakers.
People who are capable of consoling themselves with nonsense of this sort must not lay claim to the leadership of the British proletariat!
* * *
From Pravda, No. 60, 14 March 1926.
Brailsford and Marxism[2]
The London edition of Where is Britain Going? has appeared with an unexpected foreword by Brailsford, the former bourgeois radical who after the war joined the Independent Labour Party and now edits its organ. Mr. Brailsford despite his socialist sympathies has not ceased to be a radical. And as moderate liberals stand at the head of the Independent Labour Party, Brailsford has ended up on the left wing.
The fact that it is not in backward China, nor even in Japan, where radical bourgeois publishers consider it still useful to issue books by Russian communists, but in Britain, with her crying social contradictions, that the appearance of a book by a communist with a patronising foreword by a member of MacDonald’s party is possible, serves in the eyes of any Marxist as evidence of the inconceivable backwardness of British political ideology as compared with her material relations. In this judgement which needs no proof there is at once a condemnation of this sort of unexpected literary bloc. We do need a unity of front with the working masses. But the unity or a semi-unity of a literary front with Brailsford signifies but an aggravation of that ideological chaos in which the British labour movement is rich enough as it is.
There is however no mistake here on Brailsford’s part. His historical mission consists in ‘correcting’ Thomas and MacDonald, in creating a safety valve for the discontent of the masses, in blurring the edges, and in dissolving cogent thought into a formless ‘leftism’. It is of political advantage to Brailsford, whose intentions we do not in the least suspect (though we do bear firmly in mind that it is from reformist intentions that highways to hell are built), to appear within the same covers as us. The working masses of Britain are immeasurably more to the left than Brailsford. By ‘fraternising’ with Moscow communists, Brailsford camouflages his adherence to a party which expels British communists.
But we have different tasks. We do not want masks. Our first obligation is that of destroying ideological masks. The British working masses are immeasurably more to the left than Brailsford but they have not yet found the appropriate language for their own inclinations. The rubbish of the past still separates the leftward moving masses from the programme of communism with a thick layer. So much more impermissible is it then to add even a shred to this garbage. In fighting for the interests of the miners, the communists are prepared to take several steps alongside Mr. Brailsford in this struggle. But with no ideological blocs, and no united front in the field of theory and programme! And this very Brailsford himself puts it thus with regard to the American edition of our book: “We are separated from these people by a gulf.” Correct, correct, and three times correct! But from the standpoint of Marxism there is nothing more criminal than to throw literary olive branches across this political gulf: the worker who is deceived by the camouflage will set his foot down and fall through.
For Mr. Brailsford camouflage is necessary. He makes use of a revolutionary book in order to fight against revolution. Brailsford, a defender of democratic illusions and parliamentary fetishes, is saying in his foreword: “Just look, in our British democracy we can publish a Bolshevik book without fear, thereby demonstrating the breadth and power of democracy.” Moreover, by his little demonstration Brailsford would like to gloss over the, for him, inconvenient outcome of the recent trial of the communists. Brailsford himself openly admits this. The sentencing of the British communists now, when the revolution is taking shape only at a remote distance, is an immeasurably sharper and more convincing refutation of democratic illusions than all our books and pamphlets. Brailsford understands this. In fighting for the preservation of democratic illusions he “greets” the appearance of our book in these words: “If it may come freely from the Press in public, if it may be discussed […] then the nightmare of this trial is dissipated.” By sparing democratic illusions at such a cheap price Brailsford wants to give the British proletariat the idea that once a revolutionary book accompanied by an appropriate dose of antidote in the shape of a pacifist foreword appears on the British book market, it is thereby proven that the British bourgeoisie will tamely bow its head when the banks, land, mines, factories, and shipyards start to be taken ‘democratically’ away from them. In other words, Brailsford unceremoniously admonishes our book with concepts directly contrary to its aim, sense, spirit, and letter.
It is not surprising if Brailsford reproachfully describes the “Russian methods” of polemic as ruthless and hopes that they will produce in the British reader quite a different impression from that intended. Let us wait for the “impressions”. Readers vary. Methods of polemic flow from the essence of the politics. “Ruthlessness” is caused by the necessity to reveal the reality behind a deliberate falsehood. Nowhere in Europe does canonised hypocrisy – ‘cant’ – play such a role as in Great Britain. Different political groupings, and even the most ‘extreme’ of them, are, when fighting against each other, accustomed not to touch upon certain questions or to call certain things by their proper names. The reason is that from time immemorial the political struggle has been waged inside the ranks of the possessing classes who have never forgotten that a third party is listening in. The system of conventions, implications, and reservations has over the ages worked itself downwards and today finds its most reactionary expression in the liberal Labour Party, including its radical opposition wing. Here it is not a question of literary style but of politics. Our polemic repels Brailsford because it lays the class contradictions absolutely bare. It is quite true that in those enlightened readers who have been brought up in the parliamentary tradition of political cant this polemic will produce not sympathy but annoyance. But Brailsford notwithstanding this is just the effect that the author, rightly, intends. It is also quite true that politicians with such an education still form a dense stratum between the working class and the programme of communism. Nevertheless, in Britain too, class realities are more powerful than traditional hypocrisy. Once aroused, British workers, blazing themselves a trail through the thicket of inherited prejudices – both those of Baldwin and Brailsford – will find in our polemic a particle of their own struggle. And this again will be the effect that we intend.
Brailsford’s foreword represents an intermixture of immoderate praise and moderate censure. The praise relates to what is secondary, the form of the book. The censure is directed against the essence. The immoderate nature on the praise is to lend extra weight to the careful attacks on Bolshevism. Brailsford operates expediently. He fulfils his assignment. He is interested in camouflage. But we need complete clarity. That is why we reject equally both Brailsford’s praises and his censure.
Brailsford operates expediently but is utterly impotent all the same. But then this is not his fault. He cannot leap out of the historical task of centrism: blurring realities in order to sustain illusions. We have seen how ridiculously Brailsford dealt with the lessons of the trial of the communists. This same impotence lies at the root of the whole of his appraisal of our book. On the one hand, for him it emerges that the book is based on the knowledge of facts and an understanding of the logic of their development. On the other, it turns out that the author of the book is “a man of another world” who is incapable of comprehending either the nature of British Protestantism or the force of parliamentary traditions. It is not only in parliament, but also in the Church, trade unions, and even clubs, Brailsford tries to convince us, that respect for the majority has been instilled into generations of British people. “What does a Russian know about this and how can he assess the force of traditions in our ancient civilisation?” Brailsford’s arrogant helplessness lies in his method: he does not understand the material basis of social development as the decisive factor. He halts before traditions, before the ideological residue of old struggles and thinks that this crust is an eternal one. He does not know the simplest laws of the dependence of ideology upon class foundations. Arguing with him on these matters is as good as trying to convince the inventor of perpetuum mobile who denies the law of the conservation of energy. It is plain to any literate Marxist that the more firmly the conservative forms of British society have ossified, the more catastrophically new eruptions of the social volcano will explode the crust of the old traditions and institutions.
The ideas and prejudices which have been handed down from generation to generation become a factor of great historical force. This ‘independent’ force of prejudices condensed by history is only too evident in Brailsford himself. But material facts are nevertheless stronger than their reflection in ideas and traditions. And of this it is not hard to be convinced at the present day, faced with the most instructive picture that we have of British liberalism in its death throes. Can one find another tradition more powerful than this? At its source, liberalism was connected with the first Protestant movements and consequently with the revolution of the seventeenth century, which opened the history of the new England. And yet this mighty liberalism is before our eyes warping and crumbling like a sheet of parchment tossed on to a hot hearth. Living facts are more powerful than dead ideas. The decline of the middle classes in Britain and the decline of British capitalism in the world are material facts which are mercilessly settling the fate of British liberalism. The figure of the agrarian reformer Gracchus Lloyd George who in the evening denies what he said in the morning in itself forms a marvellous mockery of liberal traditions.
We heard from Brailsford that for “a man of another world” an understanding of “how deeply the instinct of submission to the will of the majority is stamped in the consciousness of the British people” is unattainable. But it is a remarkable thing that when Brailsford descends from the heights of doctrinairism into the sphere of living political facts he himself unexpectedly reveals at times the mystery of “submission to the will of the majority”. Thus in tracing the course of the last Liberal conference which against all its “traditions”, and more important, against its own wishes, adopted (in half-measure) Lloyd George’s charlatan programme of land nationalisation, Brailsford wrote in the New Leader of 26 February: “The payment of expenses from a central fund (in Lloyd George’s hands) and the provision of a gratuitous luncheon apparently created the right sort of majority.” Luncheons created a majority! From these realistic words it is evident that the democratic instinct of submission to the majority instilled by a number of British generations and unattainable to men “of another world” every so often requires in addition free roast beef and other auxiliary resources to display its omnipotence. Brailsford could scarcely write better words than these. Our idealist has here collided with the thing that usually spoils metaphysical schema: a slice of reality. It has been long known that German Kantian professors in the course of devising an eternal morality stumbled on such obstacles as inadequate wages, intrigues of their colleagues, or a cantankerous aunt. The democratic socialist Brailsford has slipped up, far more dangerously than he might imagine, on roast beef. Of course, we people of another world are incapable of appreciating the noble worship by all British people of parliamentary methods. But then why embarrass us with the report that inside the Liberal Party, the creator of parliamentarism, a majority is achieved by means of hand outs and a series of lunches, free, but we must suppose, quite copious. A majority achieved in this way is very like a fraudulent or falsified majority. But here of course at the moment, only the struggle for parliamentary seats and portfolios is at stake. What will happen when the issue is posed point blank: who should have state power: the bourgeoisie or the proletariat? And who shall have the property: the capitalist or the people? If through considerations of parliamentary careerism the leaders of the Liberal Party successfully set bribery and falsification into motion, then at what violent means and at what crimes would the ruling classes stop when the whole of their historical fate is on the order of the day? I very much fear that if, out of the two of us, one is a man of another world who does not understand the most important thing about British politics, then it is Mr. Brailsford. He is a man of another era. The new era is ours.
—
In his foreword Brailsford does not miss the opportunity to take up a defence of religion. It is curious that in doing so he calls himself an agnostic. In Britain this word tends to be used as a polite, drawing-room, emasculated name for an atheist. More often it characterises a semi-atheism which is unsure of itself, i.e., the variety of idealism which on the question of God abstains from voting, to put it in parliamentary language. And so we see here once again the force of cant, convention, the half-truth, the half-lie, and philosophical hypocrisy. Implying his atheism and calling himself an agnostic, Brailsford here takes on the defence of religion. These are the ambiguous customs which British revolutionaries will have to expel from the ranks of the labour movement. Enough of hide-and-seek, call things by their names!
Brailsford defends religion by denying its class character. Not a single Russian is able, don’t you see, to understand what British religion is, with its “traditions of free discussion, its democratic form, and its relative freedom from any other-worldliness”, and so on and so forth. There is not a single democratic priest who could pronounce a more apologetic speech in defence of religious dope than does our “agnostic”. His evidence in support of the Church must acquire the greater weight since he declares himself to be an unbeliever. Here is duplicity and falsehood at every step. While attempting to refute the bourgeois character of Protestantism, Brailsford accusingly asks whether Trotsky has ever been to a Non-Conformist chapel in a mining area, whether he has read Bunyan, and whether he has ever taken a look at the revolutionary history of the Anabaptists and the men of the Fifth Monarchy. I must admit that I have not been in a miners’ Non-Conformist chapel and that I am very insufficiently familiar with the historical facts of which Brailsford speaks. I promise to visit a mining area and its chapel as soon as Brailsford’s party takes power and permits me, in accordance with the principles of democracy, unimpeded passage through the possessions of His Majesty. I will attempt to acquaint myself with Bunyan and the history of the Anabaptists in the Fifth Monarchy before that date. But Brailsford is cruelly mistaken if he thinks that the facts and circumstances he has enumerated can alter a general evaluation of religion, and in particular of Protestantism. I once visited, together with Lenin and Krupskaya a ‘free church’ in London where we heard socialist speeches interspersed with psalms. The preacher was a printer who had just returned from Australia. He spoke about the social revolution. The congregation begged God in the psalms that he establish such an order where there would be neither poor nor rich. Such was my first practical acquaintance with the British labour movement nearly a quarter of a century ago (1902). What role, I asked myself at the time, does a psalm play in connection with a revolutionary speech? That of a safety-valve. Concentrated vapours of discontent issued forth beneath the dome of the Church and rose into the sky. This is the basic function of the Church in class society.
To be sure, different Churches fulfil this task in different ways. The Orthodox Church, while not having overcome primitive peasant mythology as time went on, turned into an external bureaucratic apparatus existing alongside the apparatus of tsarism. The priest walked hand in hand with the constable and any development of dissent was met with repression. It was for this reason that the roots of the Orthodox Church proved to be so weak in the popular consciousness, and especially in the industrial centres. In shaking off the bureaucratic ecclesiastical apparatus, the Russian worker in his overwhelming mass and the peasant milkmaid together with him, shook off religious thinking altogether. Protestantism is quite another matter: it came to its feet as the banner of the bourgeoisie and the small people of the towns and the countryside against the crowns of the privileged and courtly, and against the cavaliers and the bishops. The genesis and development of Protestantism is so closely bound up with the development of urban culture and the struggle of the bourgeoisie for a firmer and more stable position in society that there is really no need to prove it. The bourgeoisie could not of course fight successfully for, and then retain power if it had not made its banner to some degree or other the banner of lower social layers, that is, the artisans, peasants, and workers. In its struggle against the nobility the bourgeoisie tied the lower layers very firmly to itself using the Protestant religion. Of course, the Scottish woodcutter would not put into his psalms the same subjective content as the respectable Mr. Dombey, or his honourable grandson sitting in the House of Commons either to the right or to the left of Mr. MacDonald. And just the same applies to liberalism too. The liberal workers, not the trade union bureaucrats but the proletariat, understood the liberal programme completely differently from Gladstone. They introduced a class instinct into their liberalism, but a helpless one. But will Brailsford dispute on these grounds that liberalism was the programme of the middle and small merchant, the industrial bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois intelligentsia socially rising upwards?
It is true, and this is what Brailsford wants to adduce, that many petty-bourgeois radicals and opponents of the class struggle were inclined towards atheism while the pioneers of trade unionism stood in equal measure for Christianity and for the class struggle. But there is no contradiction here with what has been said above. Marxism in no way teaches that every man receives his share of religious and philosophical convictions depending upon the scale of his income or his wages. The question is more complex. Religious, as indeed any other, ideas being born out of the soil of the material conditions of life and above all the soil of class contradictions, only gradually clear themselves a way and then live on by force of conservatism longer than the needs which gave birth to them, and disappear completely only under the effect of serious social shocks and crises. The petty-bourgeois British radicals from the utilitarian and Owenite schools could be militant atheists only as long as they seriously believed that they possessed the painless means of solving all social problems. But in proportion as class contradictions sharpened, militant radicalism disappeared or moved over into the Labour Party bringing into it its threadbare idealistic arrogance and its political impotence. The organisers of the trade unions who had been thrown up by workers’ strikes could not renounce the basis of their activity and the source of their influence, that is the class struggle. But they at the same time remained within the narrow limits of trade unionism, not leading the struggle to the necessary revolutionary conclusions, and this allowed and still does allow them to reconcile trade unionism with Christianity, i.e., with a discipline which imposes upon the proletariat the faith and morality of another class.
It is completely indisputable that the revolution will find a good share of the Welsh miners still in the grip of religious prejudices. It cannot be doubted that despite this the miners will do their job. From some prejudices they will free themselves in the heat of the struggle while from others only after victory. But we categorically deny that the Welsh miners and the British proletariat in general can be shown the correct path by people who have not separated themselves from infantile nonsense, do not understand the structure of human society, do not grasp its dynamics, do not understand the role of religion in it, and to one degree or another are ready to subordinate their actions to the precepts of ecclesiastical morality which unites oppressors with oppressed. Such leaders are unreliable. For their part the working class can expect capitulation or direct treachery – justified by the Sermon on the Mount – at the most crucial hour.
The traditional force of British Protestantism is clear to us. Brailsford depicts the matter in vain, as if he were judging Protestantism by orthodoxy. Nonsense. We Marxists are accustomed to taking historical phenomena in their social context, in their concrete aspect, and to judge them not by their names but by that content which living, that is class-divided, society imparts to them. The traditional power of Protestantism is great but not limitless. In its very essence, that is as a religious and not political teaching, Protestantism is more elastic than liberalism, which represents its younger brother. But the elasticity of Protestantism has its limits. The profound turn in the fate of Britain predetermines them. All her national traditions will undergo a test. What was shaped by centuries will be destroyed in the course of years. The revolution will bring a process of verification based on inexorable facts which will reach into those last refuges of consciousness where the inherited religious prejudices are concealed. Our task is to assist this cleansing operation and not to block its way, as the ambiguous agnostics do by implying their atheism only to defend religion.
We can see in this way that on the most important questions on which the historical life and death of the proletariat depend, we and Brailsford stand on different sides of the ideological barricade. That is why our appearance before the British reader within the same covers forms the crudest misunderstanding. With the present article I am correcting this misunderstanding as well as I can.
* * *
Once More on Pacifism and Revolution –
A Reply to Bertrand Russell[3]
The majority of British critics of my book see its chief failing in that the author is not British and that consequently he is incapable of understanding British psychology, British traditions, and so on. It must however be said that the more the British Fabians clutch at this argument the less they appear to be British: in the final analysis they add very little to the arguments which we have heard more than enough of from the Russian Mensheviks and before that, from the populists.
Today, when we are victorious, British and European socialists in general are inclined to permit us to be left alone in view of the peculiarities of our country and its national culture. They want in this way to erect an essentially ideological barrier along the same frontiers where Lloyd George, Churchill, Clemenceau, and others attempted to set up a material barbed wire blockade. “It may be all right for Russians” – so the ‘lefts’ say to all intents, “but just let the Russians dare to cross the Russian frontiers with their experience and their conclusions.” The peculiarities of the British character are introduced as a philosophical justification for the theory of Bolshevik ‘non-intervention’.
Fabian and other critics do not know that we have been well tempered by all our past against arguments of this brand. But the irony in it is that while the Fabians are agreed nowadays, that is after our victory, to recognise Bolshevism, that is Marxism in action, as corresponding to the national peculiarities of Russia, the old traditional Russian ideology, and not just that of the government but that of the opposition, invariably regarded Marxism as a creature of western culture and would proclaim its total incompatibility with the peculiarities of Russian national development.
My generation can still remember how the overwhelming majority of the Russian press declared the Russian Marxists to be ideological aliens who were trying in vain to transplant Britain’s historical experience on to Russian soil. On every pretext we were reminded that Marx created his theory of economic development in the British Museum and through observing British capitalism and its contradictions. How could the lessons of British capitalism have any relevance to Russia with its enormous ‘peculiarities’, its predominantly peasant population, its patriarchal traditions, its village commune, and its Orthodox Church? Thus spoke the Russian reactionaries and the Russian populists with the appropriate right and left variations. And it was not only before and during the war but even after the February revolution of 1917, when Mr. Henderson came over to Russia to try to persuade the Russian workers to continue the war against Germany, that there was scarcely a single ‘socialist’ in the world, right or left, who considered that Bolshevism suited the national peculiarities of Russia. No, at that time we were regarded at best as maniacs. Our own Fabians, the Russian Mensheviks and the so-called Social-Revolutionaries, brought against us all the same arguments which today we hear from Lansbury, Brailsford, Russell, and their more right-wing colleagues, presented as the conquests of a pure British philosophy. In the final count, resorting to the question of national peculiarities forms the last tool of any ideological reaction in shielding itself from the revolutionary demands of the time. By this we do not at all mean that there do not exist national peculiarities or that they are of no substance. The residue of the past represents in institutions and customs a great conservative force. But in the final analysis the living forces of the present decide. The position of the British coal industry on the world market cannot be rectified by any recourse to national traditions. At the same time, the role of the coal industry in the fate of Great Britain is immeasurably more important than all the devices and ceremonies of parliamentarism. The House of Commons rests upon coal and not the converse. The conservatism of British forms of property and the means of production comprise just that national ‘peculiarity’ which is capable only of deepening the social crisis together with all the revolutionary contradictions which flow from it.
Mr. Bertrand Russell, a philosopher of mathematicians, a mathematician of philosophers, an aristocrat of democracy, and a dilettante of socialism, has considered it his duty to set his hand also, and not for the first time, to the destruction of those pernicious ideas which emanate from Moscow and are inimical to the Anglo-Saxon spirit.
On the question of religion, Russell takes a step forward from Brailsford. He admits that in present conditions any organised religion must become a reactionary force (this does not stop Russell from leaving a loop-hole on this point: personal religion, well that’s another matter). Russell approves of our arguments concerning the fact that even the most economic king cannot become a component part of a socialist society. Russell refuses to regard the parliamentary road as a guaranteed road to socialism. But all these admissions as well as certain others are made by Russell only in order to reveal more sharply the anti-revolutionary character of his thinking on the question of the future road of the British working class. Russell declares the proletarian revolution in Britain not only to be dangerous but also disastrous. Britain is too dependent upon overseas countries and above all upon the United States of America. If cut off by a blockade from the outside world, the British Isles would not be able to feed a population of more than 20 million. “While [such a reduction of] the population was being effected by starvation”, Russell taunts us, “Trotsky’s sympathy would be a great comfort. But until Soviet Russia can place a fleet in the Atlantic stronger than that of America it is not clear what we should gain by sympathy, however enthusiastic.” These strategic considerations are most interesting from the lips of a pacifist. We find that in the first place the fate of British pacifism, as far as it attempts to link itself to the working class, depends upon the strength of the American Navy. We find in the second place that it would not be at all a bad thing if British pacifism could be protected from its enemies by a Soviet navy of the necessary strength. Our worthy idealist disdainfully tosses aside an ideological sympathy which is not reinforced by sufficient quantities of shells and mines. But for us, however, it evidently more than suffices.
Russell’s own sympathies for the October Revolution (which are however very much like antipathies) have not over the last few years provided us with any “comfort”. But the sympathies of the British and European workers in general saved us. Of course Churchill caused us as much trouble as he could. Chamberlain is doing everything he can. But we would have been crushed long ago if the ruling classes of Great Britain and Europe had not been afraid to send their armed forces against us. Of course this safeguard is not an absolute one. But along with the antagonisms between the capitalist states it proved sufficient to protect us from intervention on a major scale during the most critical first years. And yet both before October and after October, our own Russells would assure us that we would be crushed by either the armies of Hohenzollern or the armies of the Entente.
They told us that the Russian proletariat, as the most backward and numerically small one, could take power into its hands only in the event of a victory of the world revolution. To make reference to the international revolution as a preliminary condition for the overthrow of the bourgeois state in one’s own country represents a masked denial of revolution. For what is the international revolution? It is a chain – and not an even one either – of national revolutions within which each one feeds the others with its successes and, in turn, loses from the failures of the others. In 1923 when the revolutionary situation reached its sharpest point in Germany, the left Social-Democrats in their struggle against the communists argued the danger of military intervention by France and Poland. The German left Mensheviks were totally prepared, at least in words, to seize power in Germany under the condition of a preliminary victory of the proletariat in France. This Menshevik agitation was one of the factors which paralysed the revolutionary initiative of the German working class. In the event of a decisive sharpening of the political situation in France – and this is the way things are going – the French socialists will doubtless intimidate the French workers with the danger of a German revanche on the one hand and with that of a British blockade on the other. But who would have the slightest doubt that Leon Blum, Jean Longuet, and other heroes would agree to the conquest of power under the condition of a preliminary, and what is more, a complete victory of the working class of Great Britain and Germany? And the socialists of small states consider it to be doubly impossible to start a revolution at home as long as the bourgeoisie maintains power in the large states. The Mensheviks of the different countries toss the right to revolutionary initiative back and forth with about as much skill as performing seals at the circus toss burning torches from one to another.
Russell the pacifist considers it impossible to embark upon a revolution in Britain as long as the United States retains its powerful navy. It would of course be pretty good if the American proletariat seized power in its hands in the near future and with it the navy. But then wouldn’t the American Russells tell us that proletarian power in the United States would inevitably be threatened by the combined navies of Great Britain and Japan? True, this argument could be ignored if the proletarian revolution really was on the immediate agenda in the United States. Unfortunately it is not yet. Great Britain from every point of view is immeasurably closer to revolution than North America. Consequently, we have to reckon with the fact that the struggle of the proletariat for power in Britain will take place in the face of the still unshaken rule of the American bourgeoisie. So what can we do? Russell indicates, more in irony it is true, a solution to the problem: he proposes to the Soviet Union that it creates a navy capable of guaranteeing free access to proletarian Britain. Unfortunately, the poverty and technological backwardness of our country do not permit us at the moment to fulfil such a programme. Of course, it would be more advantageous, economical, and simpler if the proletarian revolution commenced in the United States and extended through Britain, and from the West eastwards across Europe and Asia. But the actual course of development is not like this: the chain of capitalist rule like any other chain breaks at its weakest link. After tsarist Russia, Austro-Hungary, Germany and Italy came closest of all to the proletarian revolution. For France and Britain the day of reckoning for the war is merely still to come. Europe as a whole is immeasurably closer to the revolutionary overthrow than the United States. And this has to be taken into account.
Of course, the situation of a blockaded Britain would, in view of its vital dependence upon imports and exports, be more grave than the situation of any other European country. However the resources of a revolutionary Britain in its struggle against hardships would also be extremely great.
While referring to the American Navy, Russell for some reason forgets about the British Navy. In whose hands would it be? If it remained in the hands of the bourgeoisie then the closer and more acute danger to threaten the proletarian revolution would be not from the American Navy but from the British Navy. But if the latter ended up in the hands of the proletariat then the position would at once become immeasurably more favourable than Russell depicts it. From our critic there is not a word on this question of no little importance. But we must dwell on it in somewhat more detail.
The major peculiarities of British development have been determined by its island position. The role of the British Navy in the fate of the country has formed the sharpest expression of these peculiarities. At the same time, the British socialists who reproach us for ignorance or incomprehension of the hidden and imponderable peculiarities of the British spirit forget without exception when discussing the question of the proletarian revolution such an extremely ponderable quantity as the British Navy. Russell, while ironically appealing for assistance from the Soviet navy, says nothing about the navy which continued to be reinforced with light cruisers when the party of MacDonald, Brailsford, and Lansbury was in power.
Here we have a question of conquering power in a country where the proletariat constitutes the preponderant majority of the population. The political prerequisite for success must only be the aspiration of the proletariat itself to master power at any cost, that is, at the price of any sacrifice. Only a revolutionary party is capable of uniting the working masses in this aspiration. The second prerequisite of success is a clear understanding of the paths and methods of struggle. Only a workers’ party freed from pacifist cataracts in its eyes can see itself and explain to the proletariat that the real transfer of power from the hands of one class into the hands of another depends in immeasurably greater degree upon the British army and the British Navy than upon parliament. The struggle of the proletariat for power must therefore be its struggle for the navy. Sailors, not of course the admirals but the stokers, electricians and ratings, must be schooled to understand the tasks and aims of the working class. A road to them must be found across all obstacles. Only systematic, stubborn, and insistent preparatory work can create a situation where the bourgeoisie cannot rely upon the navy in the struggle against the proletariat. And without this condition it is senseless to talk about victory.
It is of course impossible to conceive the question as though in the first period of the revolution the navy will en bloc and in full combat order go over to the side of the proletariat. Matters will not proceed without deep internal unrest inside the navy itself. The history of all revolutions bears witness to this. Unrest in the navy connected with an overall renewal of the officer corps inevitably signifies a general weakening of a navy over a fairly long period. Once again, one cannot close one’s eyes to this. But a period of crisis and an internal weakening of the navy will proceed more rapidly the more decisive the leading party of the proletariat, the more contacts it has in the navy during the preparatory period, the bolder it is during the period of the struggle, and the more clearly it shows to all oppressed people that it is capable of seizing power and retaining it. Pacifism only to a very insignificant extent affects the military machine of the ruling class. The best evidence of this is provided by Russell’s own courageous but generally futile experience during the war. It resulted merely in a few thousand young people being put in prison on account of their ‘conscience’. In the old tsarist army, members of sects and especially followers of Tolstoy frequently suffered persecution for this kind of passive anti-militarism. But they did not solve the problem of the overthrow of tsarism. And in Britain they did not and could not prevent the war being carried on until the end. Pacifism turns its face not so much towards the military organisation of the bourgeois state, as towards the working masses. Here its influence is absolutely pernicious. It paralyses the will of those who as it is suffer no shortage of it. It preaches the harmfulness of armaments to those who are, as it is, disarmed and represent the victims of class violence. Under the present conditions of British life when the problem is posed point-blank, Russell’s pacifism is reactionary through and through.
Not so long ago, Lansbury, according to the newspapers, invoked British soldiers not to fire on strikers. Thousands of those present at the meeting of working men and women raised their hands to show their solidarity with this appeal which, it is true, hardly reconciles itself with MacDonald’s policy and yet represents a certain step forward on the road to revolution. One must be very naive to think that Lansbury’s appeal opens up the possibility of a peaceful, bloodless, pacifist solution to the problem of power. On the contrary, this appeal, inasmuch as it makes any headway, in practice will inevitably bring on the sharpest military conflicts. It cannot be imagined that all soldiers and all sailors will simultaneously refuse to fire on workers. In actual fact the revolution will drive a wedge into the army and navy; a rift will pass through every company and through the crew of every warship. One soldier will have firmly made his mind up not to fire even though it may cost him his life. A second will waver. A third will be prepared to fire on the one who refuses to fire. And in the early stage most numerous are those who waver. How was it with us in 1905 and 1917? The soldier or sailor who showed in practice his solidarity with the workers fell under the fire of an officer. In the next stage an officer would fall under the fire of soldiers inspired by the heroic example of their more advanced comrades. Such conflicts spread. A regiment in which revolutionary elements hold control stands against a regiment where the command of the old officer corps is maintained. At the same time the workers, finding support in the revolutionary regiments, arm themselves. In the navy it was no different. We would very much advise Russell and his sympathisers to see the Soviet film The Battleship Potemkin which shows quite graphically the mechanism of the revolution inside an armed mass of people. Even more important it would be to show this film to British workers and sailors. Let us hope that the Labour Party will do so when it comes to power.
The congenital bourgeois bigots and the civilised cannibals will of course speak with the greatest vexation of how we are striving to set brother against brother, soldier against officer, and so forth. The pacifists will echo them. They will once again not fail to remind us that we see everything in a bloody light because we do not know the peculiarities of Great Britain, and because we underestimate the beneficial influence of Christian morality upon the naval officers, the policemen, and Joynson-Hicks. But this cannot stop us. A revolutionary policy requires above all that we look facts openly in the face so as to foretell the course of their subsequent development. A revolutionary policy appears fantastic to philistines only because it is able to predict the day after next, while they do not dare to give a thought to the next day.
In conditions where the national organism as a whole can be saved not by conservative therapy but only by surgical intervention and amputating the malignant organ – that is, the class which has outlived itself – the pacifist sermons flow in essence from an attitude of complacent indifference. The highest degree of ‘mercy’ in such conditions demands the greatest firmness so as to reduce the time-span and minimise the pain. The more decisively the British proletariat sets its hand upon all means and implements of the British bourgeoisie, the less temptation the American bourgeoisie will have to intervene in the struggle. The more speedily and fully the proletarian power dominates the British Navy, the less opportunity the American Navy will have to destroy that power in Britain. We do not mean by this that military intervention by the transatlantic republic is excluded. On the contrary, it is very probable and within certain limits entirely inevitable. But the results of such an intervention will depend in enormous measure upon our own policy before and during the revolution.
To impose a total blockade of the British Isles, and above all their isolation from the European continent, the behaviour of the French navy will be of no little significance. Will the French bourgeoisie send its warships against the proletarian revolution in Britain? On this score we have had certain experiences. In 1918 Millerand sent French warships to the Black Sea against Soviet ports. The result is well known. The cruiser Waldeck-Rousseau raised the banner of mutiny. Neither did everything go well with the British in the Russian North. Revolution is highly infectious. And sailors are, more than anyone else, susceptible to revolutionary infection. At the time when the French sailors Marty[4] and Badin[5] mounted the uprising because they did not wish to go into action against the proletarian revolution in Russia, France seemed to be at the summit of her power. But today the period of reckoning for the war has begun for her too, no less than for Britain. To think that even in the event where in Britain the monarchy, landlords, bankers and industrialists have been thrown overboard the French bourgeoisie will retain the possibility of playing the part of the gendarme in the Atlantic Ocean or even just in the English Channel is to display a monstrous optimism on behalf of the bourgeoisie, and a shameful pessimism as regards the proletariat. Britain, that is her bourgeoisie, was not for nothing the ruler of the waves. The British revolution will set ripples in motion throughout the oceans. Its first result will be to upset the discipline of all navies. Who knows whether in these conditions the American naval commanders will have to abandon the idea of a tight naval blockade and to withdraw their vessels away from the European infection?
But in the end, even in America itself the navy is not the final decisive factor. The capitalist regime is more powerful in America than anywhere else. We know as well as Russell does the counter-revolutionary character of the American Federation of Labour[6] of which he reminds us. Just as the bourgeoisie of the United States has raised the power of capital to an unprecedented height, so the American Federation of Labour has brought the methods of conciliation to the lowest limit. But this does not at all mean that the American bourgeoisie is all-powerful. It is immeasurably more powerful against the European bourgeoisie than against the European proletariat. Under the lid of the American labour aristocracy, the most privileged of all the world’s labour aristocracies, there slumber and ferment the revolutionary instincts and moods of the multi-racial working masses of North America. A revolution in the Anglo-Saxon country on the other side of the Atlantic will affect the proletariat of the United States more strongly than any other revolution previously. This still does not mean that the rule of the American bourgeoisie will be toppled the day after the conquest of power by the British proletariat. A series of serious economic, military, and political crises will be required before the kingdom of the dollar is toppled. The American bourgeoisie is itself today preparing these crises by investing its capital throughout the world and thereby tying its rule to the European chaos and to the powder magazines of the East. But the revolution in Britain will inevitably evoke a powerful reaction on the other side of the ‘great water’, both on the New York Stock Exchange and in the workers’ ghettoes of Chicago. A change will immediately take place in the self-awareness of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat of the United States: the bourgeoisie will feel weaker and the working class stronger. And the self-awareness of classes is a major component element of the so-called balance of forces. Again, this does not mean that the American bankers and tycoons will be unable to make attempts with their navy to choke economically the revolution of the British proletariat. But such an attempt will in itself mean a further crisis in the internal regime of the United States. In the final count, in the very heart of every American warship, in the engine room, not only the revolutionary events in Great Britain but also the new moods produced by them in the proletariat of the United States will take their effect. Taken together all this does not signify that the proletarian revolution in Britain is not fraught with hardships and dangers. On the contrary, both the former and the latter are colossal. But they exist on both sides. And this is in fact what the essence of revolution consists of. The greater the place occupied by a given nation in the world, the more sweeping will be the forces of action and counteraction that the revolution awakens and releases. Our “sympathies” can in these conditions prove to be of some use.
Revolutions are not made in the order of the most advantageous sequence. Revolutions are not generally made at will. If one could rationally map out a revolutionary itinerary then it would probably avoid revolution altogether. But this is just the point, for revolution forms the expression of the impossibility of reconstructing class society by rational methods. Logical arguments, even if elevated by Russell to the status of mathematical formulae, are impotent against material interests. The ruling classes will sooner condemn all civilisation, including mathematics, to ruin rather than renounce their privileges. In the struggle between the miners and the coal owners of Great Britain, the coming revolution already wholly exists in embryo just as in the grain of corn the future stalk and ear exists in embryo. The irrational factors of human history operate most brutally of all through class contradictions. Over these irrational factors one cannot leap. Just as mathematics by working with irrational quantities arrives at completely realistic conclusions, so in politics one can rationalise, that is bring a social system into a reasonable order, only by clearly taking into account the irrational contradictions of society so as to overcome them finally – not by avoiding revolution, but through its agency.
We could essentially finish at this point. Russell’s objections have given us an opportunity to examine additionally those sides of the question which our pamphlet left in the shade. But perhaps it would not be superfluous to touch upon the last and most powerful argument of the pacifist critic. Russell declares that our attitude towards the British revolution is dictated by… our Russian patriotism. He says:
I am afraid that like the rest of us Trotsky is a patriot when it comes to the pinch: a communist revolution in England would be advantageous to Russia; and therefore he advises it without considering impartially whether it would be advantageous to us.
This argument has everything in its favour except novelty. Chamberlain’s and Joynson-Hicks’ Press – the Morning Post[7] takes this up with the greatest fervour – long ago proved that the international communist movement serves the aims of Soviet imperialism which in turn continues the traditions of tsarist policy. This sort of accusation started at the time when the bourgeoisie became convinced that our party had taken power in earnest and was not about to give up. In the period preceding the seizure of power and directly following it the accusations had, as is well known, a directly converse nature. The Bolsheviks were accused of being alien to national feelings and patriotic considerations and of carrying out Hohenzollern policy in relation to Russia. And this was not at all so long ago. Arthur Henderson, Emil Vandervelde, Albert Thomas, and others made visits to Russia to convince the Russian workers that the Bolsheviks were prepared to betray the basic interests of Russia in favour of their international chimera (or according to another version for the German Kaiser’s gold). Again it was the Morning Post which developed this theme with the most sharpness and vigour. In exactly the same way as Russell now accuses us of being ready to reduce the population of Great Britain to 20 million for the benefit of Soviet imperialism, nine years ago we were accused of a heartless readiness to reduce the population of Russia two- and three-fold in the name of our international aims. Our party, as is well known, took the point of view that the defeat of tsarist Russia in the war would be advantageous as much for the Russian as for the international working class. The socialist lackeys of the Entente could not shift us from this position. In the period of the Brest-Litovsk peace, accusations of an anti-national policy (in the other version – of collaboration with Hohenzollern) reached fever pitch. Nevertheless, our party did not allow itself to be drawn into the war in the interests of American capital. The Hohenzollern regime fell and in its downfall the October revolution played no less a role than did the arms of the Entente. The antagonism between the Soviet Republic and the governments of the victorious Entente moved into the foreground. The most reactionary world role is played by the ruling class of Great Britain: in Europe, in Egypt, in Turkey, in Persia, in India, and in China. Any changes in the world situation, either economically or politically, are directed against the ruling class of Great Britain. Hence the obsolete British bourgeoisie in its struggle for its dwindling power furiously fights against changes. The American bourgeoisie is more powerful. Its struggle against the revolution will be on a larger scale. But America stands for the moment in the second line. The most active and vicious enemy of the revolutionary movement in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa is the dominant class of Great Britain. It would appear that for a socialist this fact is more than sufficient to explain the antagonism between the Soviet Union and the British Empire. Are we “patriots”? To the same degree as we were “anti-patriots” during the imperialist war. By the methods of state power we are defending the same interests for which we fought by the methods of insurrection: the interests of the world proletariat.
When Russell says that we are prepared in the interests of the Soviet state to make a sacrifice of the interests of the British working class then this is not only false but absurd. Any weakening of the British proletariat and even more so its defeat in open struggle must inevitably inflict a heavy blow both to the international and to the internal position of the Soviet Union. When in March 1921 the German communists made an attempt artificially to force the proletarian revolution they were subjected to sharp criticism at the Third World Congress of the Communist International. They justified themselves by referring to the difficult position of the Soviet Republic and to the necessity of assisting it. Lenin and ourselves said to them: neither heroic outbursts nor even less revolutionary adventures can help the Soviet Republic; we need the same thing that the German proletariat needs: that is a victorious revolution; it would be fundamentally wrong to think that the proletariat of any country must, in the interests of the Soviet state, undertake any steps which do not flow from its own interests as a class fighting for its complete liberation. This standpoint which has entered our flesh and blood is alien to socialists who, if not always then at least at the decisive moment, invariably end up on the side of their own bourgeoisie. And Russell does not form an exception. To be sure, during the war he displayed brave, though politically quite hopeless, resistance to his government: this was an individual demonstration, the tribute of conscience – the fate of the regime was not in slightest degree placed in jeopardy. But when it comes to the revolution of the proletariat, Russell cannot find in his intellectual arsenal any other arguments beyond those which make him kindred to the Morning Post and all the Churchills of his country.
The principal peculiarity of British politics, and its past history, is summed up in the blatant disparity between the revolutionary maturity of the objective economic factors and the extreme backwardness of ideological forms, particularly in the ranks of the working class. Least of all is this basic peculiarity understood by the very people who most sharply demonstrate it: the bourgeois humanists and the latter-day enlighteners and pacifists. Along with the reactionary petty-bourgeois reformists they consider themselves to be the anointed leaders of the proletariat. Bertrand Russell is not the worst among them. But his writings on social and political topics, his outcry against war, his polemic with Scott Nearing regarding the Soviet regime, characterise his unmistakable superficial dilettantism, his political blindness, and his complete lack of comprehension of the basic mechanism of historical development; that is, the struggle of living classes which grow out of the basis of production. To history he counterposes the propaganda of a few pacifist slogans which he formulates quite wretchedly. And in the process he forgets to explain to us why pacifist enlightenment has not saved us from wars and revolutions despite the fact that such eminent people as Robert Owen in the first half of the nineteenth century, the French enlighteners of the eighteenth century, the Quakers beginning in the seventeenth century and many, many, others concerned themselves with this question. Russell is a latter-day enlightener who has inherited from the old enlightenment not so much its enthusiasm as its idealistic prejudices. Russell is a sceptic through and through. He counterposes the peaceful and gradual methods of science and technology to the violent methods of revolution. But he believes just as little in the salutary force of scientific thought as he does in the force of revolutionary action. In his polemic with Nearing, he attempts under the cover of pseudo-socialist phrases to belittle, discredit, and compromise the revolutionary initiative of the Russian proletariat. In his polemic against the biologist Holden he makes a mockery of scientific-technical optimism. In his pamphlet Icarus, he openly expresses his conviction that the best outcome would be the destruction of all our civilisation. And this man, worm-eaten through and through with scepticism, egoistic, reclusive and aristocratic, considers himself called upon to give advice to the British proletariat and to warn it against our communist intrigues! The British working class is entering a period when it requires the greatest belief in its mission and its strength. To gain this there is no need for any stimulants like religion or idealist morality. It is necessary and sufficient that the British proletariat understands the position of its country in relation to the position of the whole world, that it has become clear about the rottenness of the ruling classes, and that it has thrown out of its way the careerists, quacks, and those bourgeois sceptics who imagine themselves to be socialists only because they from time-to-time vomit in the atmosphere of rotting bourgeois society.
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P. S. – These lines were being written during the days when the question of the miners’ strike and the General Strike hung on a thin thread. Today a final solution has still not come about or at least news of it has not reached us. But whatever direction events in Britain take in the coming days and weeks the questions to which the present article in particular is devoted can no longer be taken off the agenda of British political life.
Endnotes
[1] The American Relief Administration, which as an official body ostensibly provided medical aid and civilian supplies for areas under famine and epidemic primarily in central and eastern Europe at the end of the First World War. It also sent aid to White-held areas of Russia if not to the White armies themselves.
[3] See Russell’s article.
[4] André Marty (1886-1956) – French sailor who led the mutiny in the Black Sea fleet on 16 April 1919 when French units were operating in support of the Whites in Russia. Became a leading member of the French Communist Party.
[5] A lesser-known associate of Marty in the leadership of the French sailors’ uprising.
[6] Founded in 1881 as the Federation of Organised Trades and Labour Unions, in 1886 it became the American Federation of Labour. Led by Samuel Gompers, the federation linked craft unions which preserved a wide degree of independence. The leaders were extremely patriotic and anti-revolutionary, basing themselves on the most skilled and conservative sections of American workers.
[7] The Morning Post was a conservative daily paper published in London from 1772 to 1937 when it was purchased by the Daily Telegraph.