Preface to the American Edition¶
Core Argument¶
In this preface to the American edition of his study on Britain’s future, Trotsky advances a polemical argument that the United States, not the Soviet Union, is the primary driver of revolutionary upheaval in Europe. He opens by asserting that Britain is heading at full speed toward an era of great revolutionary convulsions, and anticipates the inevitable accusation from British secret policemen and their American disciples that he is engaging in propaganda for proletarian revolution. He dismisses this charge with a sharp analogy: to accuse a revolutionary analyst of causing the events he forecasts is like accusing an astronomer of causing a solar eclipse. Social phenomena occur through human agency, he concedes, but they are not determined by pamphlets; ideas take effect only when rooted in material conditions.
The core claim is that Britain’s revolutionary trajectory is determined not by Moscow but by New York. The United States, driven by its own need to expand on the world market to prevent excess from choking its industry, can only expand at Britain’s expense. Trotsky invokes the Dawes Plan of 1924—a scheme for German reparations drawn up by the American financier and general Charles G. Dawes—as the mechanism by which American dominance is squeezing British economic life in a steel vice. He cites Julius Barnes of the Washington Department of Commerce, who proposed allocating world market sectors to European debtor countries in ways that would not hinder American expansion. The United States, by restoring European monetary systems, is merely translating European poverty and dependence into the language of hard currency. Trotsky’s polemic reaches its crescendo when he declares that the Communist International is almost a conservative institution compared with the New York Stock Exchange; Morgan, Dawes, and Barnes are the busy artificers of the approaching European revolutions.
Britain’s collaboration with the United States, Trotsky argues, is merely the form of a growing dependence—Britain ushers America in only for her to take possession. Beneath the cloak of pacification and recovery, the deepest world-wide antagonism between the two powers is preparing fearful conflicts. Trotsky concludes by addressing America’s own destiny: American capital feels secure, but it is not a self-sufficient whole; its dependence on the world market means that the wars and revolutions it prepares in Europe will strike back with a terrible rebound. America occupies only the second place in the line of revolutionary development, but its hour will come. The magnates of the trusts are unconsciously fulfilling their revolutionary function, and the American proletariat will ultimately fulfil theirs.