5. The Question of Revolutionary Force¶
Core Argument¶
Trotsky’s polemic against Lansbury’s pacifism is a systematic demolition of the notion that social progress can be achieved without the application of force. He demonstrates that all social life rests on force; to renounce liberating force is merely to endorse the oppressor’s. Lansbury himself relies on the British Navy and police to protect his property, and admits that the 1920 Unemployed Insurance Act was passed from fear of revolutionary force, thereby proving its practical utility. Trotsky presses him with concrete scenarios: would he use a revolver to save children from a robber? Would he deny strikers the right to use sticks, stones, or bombs against fascist strike-breakers? He insists that a general strike against a fascist regime inevitably leads to armed clashes; to renounce armed self-defence is to guarantee defeat. Lansbury, he concludes, accepts “retail” force (police, naval power, laws won by past struggle) but rejects “wholesale” force (revolutionary seizure of power).
The argument then expands to the nature of British democracy. Parliament is not genuinely democratic: women can vote only from thirty, men from twenty-one, and constituency boundaries are gerrymandered so that a Labour member needs twice as many votes as a Conservative. The high age qualification excludes active youth, while the cynical geometry of constituencies gives a Conservative vote twice the weight of a Labour one. Even if a more democratic parliament abolished the monarchy and House of Lords, the possessing classes would not submit; they control the police, judiciary, and military. Civil war would be unavoidable, as in the 1640s and Ulster. A workers’ government would have to smash the old state apparatus and create workers’ councils. Furthermore, British democracy rests on colonial despotism: parliament legislates for 300 million Indians who have no representation. The social-reformists’ denial of the right to use force is a rejection of democracy and a support for imperialist dictatorship.
Trotsky then examines the unstable parliamentary position. If Labour wins a stable majority, the Conservatives would sabotage all its measures using the Civil Service, judiciary, military, House of Lords, and courts. The possessing classes would deploy the press, banks, credit system, transport, and food supply to paralyse a Labour government, create financial panic, and provoke splits. A Labour government would face a choice: capitulate or crush opposition, but it would lack the necessary material force and state apparatus. Breaking up the administrative machinery and replacing reactionaries would sharpen opposition, leading to civil war. Even a cautious MacDonald government would be caught between a revolutionary onslaught by workers and fierce bourgeois resistance, inevitably surrendering power either to a fascist-inclined Conservative government or a revolutionary government. Revolutionary force is indispensable and unavoidable; the masses must be ideologically, organisationally, and materially prepared for civil war. The first condition is an intransigent struggle against MacDonaldism.
Finally, Trotsky counters the claim that Bolshevism arrived at dictatorship only by circumstance. He cites Lafargue (1887) as evidence that Marx’s close pupil explicitly rejected formal democracy for the revolutionary period: the working class must seize power in industrial cities, arm workers, imprison big capitalists as hostages, and only later introduce universal suffrage—with the bourgeoisie disenfranchised until the revolutionary party triumphs. Central power would be built from delegations of local revolutionary organs. Trotsky insists this conception came from frequent conversations with Marx, and that Marx’s writings on 1848 and the Paris Commune confirm it. He adds that this idea of class dictatorship over democracy was already present in Chartism: The Poor Man’s Guardian demanded that only those who make the goods should make the laws. Chartism summarised the future class struggle in advance; the movement will return to its ideas on a higher basis.