The British Proletariat and the War¶
Core Argument¶
Here, Trotsky presents a layered analysis of the British working class, its historical development, and its likely trajectory under the pressures of imperialist war. The core argument is that the war has shattered the material and ideological foundations of British labour’s exceptionalism, forcing a revolutionary reckoning. Trotsky begins by dissecting the pre-war character of the British labour movement, describing it as a fusion of “national-possibilist” trade unionism and “sectarian-propagandist” socialism. May Day, he argues, was not a revolutionary internationalist act but a conservative ritual absorbed by the unions, serving immediate class tasks rather than social-revolutionary generalisations. The revolutionary impulse remained confined to small groups, not the class as a whole.
The war, however, has destroyed the conditions that sustained this conservatism. Trotsky draws on the historical pattern of British foreign policy—intervening in European wars to maintain a continental equilibrium, supporting allies “like a rope supports a hanging man”—to show that this time Britain could not avoid deep entanglement. Germany’s power forced Britain to commit not just money but “meat and human blood”. This intervention, Trotsky warns, will have to be paid for. The privileged position of the British proletariat, founded on imperial super-profits and naval security, has been “undermined to the very roots”. The “free” trade unionist who boasted of the absence of militarism has been conscripted and thrown onto the European continent. Taxation and prices have soared, destroying the economic basis of the labour aristocracy’s complacency.
Trotsky then turns to a polemic against the “subjectively nationalistic theory” that the British working class lacks a revolutionary temperament. He dismisses this as “rubbish” peddled by bourgeois observers who mistake the decadence of the ruling class for the character of the nation. He invokes the history of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and the Chartist movement of the nineteenth to prove that the Englishman has a “devil inside him”. The war, by devastating Britain’s economy and creating a mass of cripples and invalids, has left only two possibilities: “the degeneration of the economy and the working class or – social revolution”. Trotsky concludes by asserting that the first thunderclaps of the coming storm can already be heard, and that the British worker will soon take up his cudgel against the King, Lloyd George, and the “cruel, cunning, clever and perfidious British bourgeoisie”. The chapter thus functions as both a materialist analysis of the war’s impact on British class relations and a sharp rebuke to those who deny the revolutionary potential of the British proletariat.