The Struggle in Retrospect¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter dissects the catastrophic policy of the Anglo-Russian Committee, a strategic blunder born from an impatient urge to bypass the weak British Communist Party. The Bolshevik leadership, frustrated by the party’s marginal influence, sought to use the trade union apparatus as a shortcut to revolution. This false perspective replaced the necessary struggle to win the trade union masses through the party with the illusory hope of accelerating history through friendship with reformists like Purcell and Cook. The Committee was treated not as a temporary, episodic bloc to be broken at the first serious test, but as an inviolable principle of long-term “co-partnership.”
Trotsky had foreseen the trajectory. In Where Is Britain Going? (1925), written against the Politburo’s official line, he argued that Britain’s post-war decline would inevitably produce severe internal conflicts, predicting a general strike from the coal industry dispute. British reformists dismissed the book as a foreign fantasy; months later, the miners’ strike became a general strike, confirming his prognosis. Yet the General Council’s behaviour during the strike dashed any remaining hopes. The General Council betrayed the general strike, then actively undermined the miners’ prolonged struggle. Maintaining the bloc with the General Council while supporting the isolated miners allowed the bureaucracy to use the Committee as a political screen. The Russian trade unions’ financial support served the General Council, not the miners. The policy provided aid to the enemy: the trade union bureaucracy is the backbone of British imperialism, and stabilisation is Purcellism.
Stalin’s claim that the Committee could organise against war and intervention is refuted: the more acute the international situation, the more it becomes a weapon of imperialism. The strategy was one of imaginary sums and false calculations. On returning to Moscow, Trotsky demanded breaking the bloc; Zinoviev supported him, Radek opposed, and Stalin clung to the Committee until British union leaders eventually expelled their ally. The disaster rested on effacing the British Communist Party’s independence, dissolving it into the Minority Movement. Stalin, Bukharin, and Zinoviev sought to replace the weak party with a ‘broader current’ of ‘friends,’ avoiding criticism to keep them onside. The Left Opposition demanded the party’s complete independence, open criticism, and correct slogans. The result: the Minority Movement’s leaders betrayed the proletariat, revolutionary workers became apathetic, the Communist Party was reduced to a negligible sect, and the General Strike reinforced the reactionary bureaucracy while compromising communism in Britain for years.