2. Mr. Baldwin and… Gradualness¶
Core Argument¶
On 12 March 1925, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin addressed a Conservative audience at Leeds, expressing anxiety over socialism’s advance and the Labour Party’s growth. He dismissed socialism as impracticable, claiming children are born neither free, equal, nor brothers. The author counters that socialism demands equal material conditions, not anatomical or psychological uniformity. Baldwin distinguished two Labour tendencies: Sidney Webb’s “inevitability of gradualness” and the more militant approach of leaders like Cook and Wheatley. Citing Trotsky, Baldwin argued that revolution leads only to harder work, claiming Trotsky had discovered the “inevitability of gradualness” for himself.
The author rejects this universal gradualness, insisting that gradual development coexists with catastrophic leaps: wars (Germany’s unification, the World War), strikes (including the closure of Baldwin’s own factory), and revolutions (France 1789, Germany 1918). Britain’s own history contradicts the myth of peaceful evolution. The seventeenth-century civil war forged its national character; colonial violence in India, Ireland, South Africa, and the Opium Wars enriched Britain, enabling domestic “peaceful development” through niggardly concessions. Britain’s gradualness thus depended on external shocks and violence, not natural law. Revolutions grow organically from social conditions, as inevitable as wars between nations.
Revolution, not gradual reform, has driven Britain’s political development. The Puritan revolution destroyed royal absolutism and enabled later parliamentary gradualness. The French Revolution spurred British trade unionism; the 1830 July Revolution prompted the 1831 Reform Bill; Chartism won the ten-hour day and Corn Law repeal; the US Civil War forced the 1867 Reform Act; the 1905 Russian Revolution strengthened the Labour Party; and the 1917 Russian Revolution spurred the 1918 electoral reform. Britain exploited other nations’ revolutions to cut its own political costs. The ease of the Russian proletariat’s seizure of power (due to weak bourgeois traditions) made socialist construction harder, but the converse holds for Britain: harder to take power, but faster construction thereafter. Revolution transformed the Russian people’s psychology from passivity to initiative, refuting any notion of an unalterable “Russian nature.” Britain’s fragmented, privately-owned industry requires a political revolution to expropriate the bourgeoisie before socialist economic reorganisation can begin.
The 1791 partition of Canada created Lower Canada (French) and Upper Canada (British). In 1837, Louis Papineau led a revolt in Lower Canada for an independent French state, while a simultaneous revolt in Upper Canada targeted ruling officialdom. After suppression, the Earl of Durham’s report underpinned the 1840 Act of Union, which unified both Canadas under stricter imperial rule. The Tories, led by Lord Derby and Benjamin Disraeli, passed the Second Reform Act in an unsuccessful bid to defeat the Whigs amid rising franchise pressure and large Hyde Park demonstrations, extending the vote to prosperous urban workers and increasing urban representation. Trotsky refrains from examining how forged documents attributed to a foreign state and used for electoral gain can be considered a tool of “gradualness” in developing Christian morality, but recalls Napoleon’s observation that British diplomacy most widely practised falsification of diplomatic documents, a technique since considerably advanced.