Britain and the uneven development of capitalism¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: Britain and the uneven development of capitalism¶
This chapter is a polemical rebuttal of criticisms levelled by the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) against the Workers’ International League (WIL) document Preparing for Power. The core argument is that the RSL’s critique is not only dishonest but theoretically bankrupt, misrepresenting the WIL’s position by ignoring its explicit reliance on the Marxist law of uneven development. The RSL had accused the WIL of offering no real explanation for Britain’s imperial decline, claiming the WIL substituted subjective factors—such as the incompetence of “old school tie blimps” and the general senility of the ruling class—for objective economic analysis. The WIL retorts that this is a wilful distortion. The very passages the RSL quotes, the chapter insists, are grounded in the law of uneven development: Britain’s accumulated imperial booty had become disproportionate to its relative economic and military strength, particularly compared to Germany and America. The WIL’s own text explicitly states that British industries became archaic and outdated because super-exploitation of the colonies allowed concessions to a privileged stratum of workers, stunting technical modernisation. This, the chapter argues, is precisely an application of uneven development, not an omission of it.
The chapter draws on the theoretical context of Trotsky’s analysis of imperialism and the general crisis of capitalism. It notes that the RSL’s invocation of uneven development is itself a stale Stalinist trope, used for two decades against Marxists. The polemic sharpens when the WIL accuses the RSL of abandoning dialectical materialism: while world capitalism as a whole is in decay, the WIL was analysing Britain’s specific position within that general decline. To argue that all bourgeois systems are decaying does not negate the fact that Britain’s decay is qualitatively sharper, driven by its unique parasitic relationship to its empire. The chapter also invokes Trotsky’s assessment of France’s defeat, where he blamed Blum and Thorez for saving French capitalism in 1936, thereby fostering its sluggishness—a parallel to Britain’s own dynamic.
The RSL’s criticism is thus dismissed as “eclectic and hair-splitting,” a product of a “bankrupt leadership” that seizes on points without thinking through their implications. The chapter concludes by noting that while Britain’s military position improved after the document was written—thanks to the Soviet Union’s defence and American preparations—this does not alter the fundamental analysis: Britain remains a base for the mightier imperialism of America. The objective process of decline must have subjective effects on the masses, and it is to this that Marxists must attend.