Labour Bureaucracy and the Post-War Class Struggle¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter assembles three key documents from the early Communist International (1920–21) to advance a single polemical argument: the labour bureaucracy, not the bourgeoisie alone, constitutes the principal obstacle to proletarian revolution in Britain. Trotsky opens with the preface to Terrorism and Communism (May 1920), where he observes that Lloyd George has abandoned democratic formulae entirely, appealing instead to a union of propertied classes against workers—speaking, as Trotsky puts it, "the language of civil war." Yet despite this clarification of class realities at the bourgeois summit, the working class remains trapped by ideological conservatism. The Second International's collapse into social-patriotism (Scheidemann, Henderson, Plekhanov) has been succeeded by "international Kautskyism"—the German Independents, Longuet, the ILP, the Martov group—which now functions as "the chief political factor on which the unstable equilibrium of capitalist society depends." Trotsky insists theoretical refutation remains necessary precisely because ideology retains its grip even on proletarian psychology.
The Second World Congress Manifesto (August 1920) sharpens this indictment of British labour's official machinery. The entire apparatus—the Crown, Lords, Commons, Church, trade unions, and Labour Party, personified by "George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Henderson"—operates as "a mighty automatic brake upon progress." Only a Communist Party free from both routine and sectarianism can counterpose the rank and file to this "official aristocracy."
The November 1920 piece on the KAPD confronts a strategic difficulty: Britain may enter revolution with a numerically small Communist Party. This is not a failure of propaganda but a consequence of "major historical causes." The party must therefore grow within the struggle for power, injecting maximum communist consciousness into an unfolding revolution without detaching itself from the existing organisational level of the proletariat.
Finally, the Third Congress Theses (July 1921) examine the shattered strike wave of the preceding year. The Triple Alliance crisis of April 1921—when transport and railway leaders refused solidarity with striking miners—is presented as decisive evidence. The trade union machinery, despite its defects, could have served revolutionary battles; its betrayal was not structural incapacity but "conservatism, cowardice, and treachery." The chapter's central polemic is thus directed against the labour aristocracy and its political representatives, who are accused of expending their organisational energy in capitalism's interests rather than socialism's.