Replies to Critics¶
Core Argument¶
Events since the publication of Where is Britain Going? have vindicated Trotsky’s analysis rather than the schemes of Baldwin or MacDonald. The Baldwin government combines repression with economic confusion, its protectionist programme degenerating into farce while over a million miners remain unemployed. The Liberal Party is in terminal decline, and the MacDonald clique has convicted communists under archaic legislation, performing the same function as the Conservative Home Secretary. The British working class can achieve victory only under a Bolshevik party.
The principal peculiarity of British politics is the glaring disparity between the revolutionary maturity of objective economic factors and the extreme backwardness of ideological forms within the working class. This is least understood by bourgeois humanists, latter-day enlighteners, and pacifists who consider themselves the proletariat’s anointed leaders. Trotsky’s critics within the Independent Labour Party display theoretical chaos, confusing the general strategic prognosis of a revolutionary phase with the tactical question of fixing the day of insurrection. Britain’s fundamental difficulties stem from US preponderance, electrification undermining coal-based industry, growing dominion self-sufficiency, national movements in India and the East, the existence of the Soviet Union, and resurgent German competition. Revolutionary development should be measured in quinquennia, not decades.
Trotsky rejects the argument that new inventions, capitalist regrouping, or American intervention could avert revolution. Inventions intensify capitalist concentration and class contradictions; American capital is a battering ram destroying Britain’s stability. Brailsford’s foreword to Where is Britain Going? uses the book to camouflage reformism and sustain democratic illusions. Trotsky defends his ruthless polemic as necessary to strip away British political cant and expose class contradictions. Material facts, such as the collapse of liberalism, are stronger than inherited prejudices. On religion, Trotsky argues that Protestantism arose as the bourgeoisie’s banner against the privileged; Marxism does not teach that religious convictions are mechanically determined by income. The revolution will find Welsh miners still in religious prejudice, but they will free themselves in struggle.
In revolution, the navy will not go over to the proletariat en bloc; deep internal unrest is inevitable. Pacifism paralyses the will of the working masses and, under present British conditions, is reactionary. The more decisively the British proletariat seizes the bourgeoisie’s means, the less temptation for American intervention. Bertrand Russell exemplifies the superficial dilettantism and political blindness of those who counterpose pacifist propaganda to history, failing to explain why pacifist enlightenment has never prevented wars and revolutions. The British working class needs belief in its mission and strength, which requires discarding careerists, quacks, and bourgeois sceptics who imagine themselves socialists only because they vomit in rotting bourgeois society.