The Seventeenth-Century Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
In this composite chapter, drawn from several of Trotsky’s works, the English Revolution of the seventeenth century is presented not as a quaint precursor to modern democracy but as a violent, class-driven upheaval that prefigures the mechanics of the Russian Revolution. The core argument is that the English Revolution, precisely because it was a genuine social revolution, exhibited the same pattern of “dual power” that Trotsky identifies as central to 1917: two rival centres of authority, each rooted in a different class, coexist and clash until one is smashed by force.
The narrative traces this process through distinct phases. First, the royal power, resting on the aristocracy and bishops, is opposed by the Presbyterian bourgeoisie, backed by the City of London. This produces a territorial dual power—London versus Oxford—resolved by civil war. But victory over the king does not consolidate bourgeois rule. Instead, the parliamentary army, composed of the petty bourgeoisie, craftsmen, and farmers, becomes an independent political force. It creates its own state organ: a council of soldiers’ and officers’ deputies, or “agitators.” A new dual power emerges between the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents’ army. The bourgeoisie, lacking its own armed force, is helpless against Cromwell’s “model army” of armed plebeians. Parliament is purged by the sword; the dictatorship of Cromwell follows. Finally, the Levellers, the extreme left, attempt to oppose the army’s patricians with a plebeian regime, but this third dual power cannot develop because the lowest depths of the petty bourgeoisie have no independent historic path. Cromwell crushes them.
Trotsky draws on Augustin Thierry to make a sharp polemical point: the British bourgeoisie honours the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, where the people were silent, and denigrates the “Great Rebellion” of the 1640s, where the people were active. The court historians of the exploiters are offended by clubs, fire, and rope, but the great event of bourgeois history is the Rebellion, not the bloodless settlement. This is a direct attack on liberal and reformist historiography, which presents parliamentarism as the fruit of peaceful evolution. Trotsky insists that parliamentarism was deposited by a struggle lasting ages, in which one king left his head at the crossroads.
The chapter also draws a striking psychological parallel between Charles I, Louis XVI, and Nicholas II: all three combined passivity, stubbornness, and a domineering foreign wife accused of plotting with Rome or foreign courts. But the crucial difference is that England had centuries to develop. As the pioneer of bourgeois civilisation, she exploited the whole world, softened internal contradictions, and accumulated fatty deposits of conservatism—a squirearchy, monarchy, House of Lords, state church. This conservatism, combined with elasticity, became the object of ecstasy for philistines like Milyukov and Otto Bauer. Trotsky’s polemic here is devastating: Britain is now squandering her privileged position, her conservatism is losing its elasticity, and the Labourite MacDonald is preparing revolutionary earthquake shocks as blindly as Nicholas II did. The English Revolution is thus not a museum piece but a living warning: the same class dynamics, the same dual power, the same violent resolution await a Britain headed for gigantic shocks.