6. Two Traditions: The Seventeenth-Century Revolution and Chartism¶
Core Argument¶
In the sixth chapter of his history, Trotsky confronts the British labour movement’s impoverished understanding of its own revolutionary heritage. He opens by dissecting a question from the Daily Herald’s editor: could Oliver Cromwell be considered a “pioneer of the labour movement”? Trotsky’s answer is a categorical negative, but his reasoning is layered. Cromwell was no pioneer of socialism; he was the ruthless standard-bearer of the bourgeois revolution, a man who crushed the Levellers because he understood that universal suffrage was a mortal threat to private property. The Labour Party’s historical thinking, exemplified by the Webbs’ conclusion that capitalism and democracy are incompatible, is fundamentally mistaken. Capitalism, Trotsky insists, has proven perfectly capable of absorbing universal suffrage and turning it to its own ends. Yet British workers have far more to learn from Cromwell than from Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, or Sidney Webb. Cromwell was a great revolutionary, and his dictatorship expressed a historically progressive bourgeois tendency.
This leads Trotsky into a sharp polemic against the Labour leaders’ habit of counterposing “democracy” to all dictatorships without examining their social content. He insists on a class analysis: Cromwell and Robespierre drove history forward; Mussolini drags it backward; Lenin’s dictatorship expresses the pressure of a rising class. Lenin belongs in the company of Cromwell and Robespierre, not Mussolini. The British bourgeoisie, Trotsky argues, has systematically erased the memory of the seventeenth-century revolution; it falls to the advanced workers to rediscover it.
Alongside this bourgeois revolutionary tradition, the British proletariat possesses its own great national tradition in Chartism. Chartism condensed a decade of struggle—from parliamentary petitions to armed insurrection—into diagrammatic form, crystallising principled answers to the fundamental problems of the movement: the relation between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary activity, universal suffrage, trade unions, cooperation, the general strike, and the relation of the proletariat to the peasantry. Though theoretically immature, Chartism’s revolutionary slogans and methods stand infinitely higher than the eclecticism of the MacDonalds and the obtuseness of the Webbs. Chartism is a prelude containing the musical theme of the whole opera; the British working class must see in it not only its past but its future. It failed not because its methods were incorrect but because it appeared too soon—it was an historical anticipation. Its tradition, like that of 1905 in Russia, lives on. History is liquidating Liberalism and pseudo-Labour pacifism to give Chartism a second birth on broader foundations. This, Trotsky concludes, is the real national tradition of the British labour movement.