The First British Trotskyists¶
Core Argument¶
The First British Trotskyists
This chapter presents two letters from Leon Trotsky, dated November 1931 and May 1933, addressed to the nascent British Left Opposition. Their core argument is a devastating indictment of the Communist International’s (Comintern) policy in Britain, which Trotsky holds directly responsible for the stunted growth of British communism despite objectively revolutionary conditions. The letters constitute both a strategic orientation for the fledgling Trotskyist grouping and a polemic against the Stalinist leadership of the Comintern and the British Communist Party.
Trotsky’s central claim is that the Comintern’s bureaucratic leadership, men he dismisses as “apparatus men” devoid of Marxist training or mass control, has systematically demoralised and misdirected the British working class. He identifies two ruinous phases. First, the period of the Anglo-Russian Committee (1925-1927), during which the Comintern “slave-like” assimilated and idealised the treacherous trade union bureaucracy (Purcell, Cook, Hicks, Citrine), attaching the authority of the October Revolution to the most conservative and servile elements of the British proletariat. Second, the mechanical ultra-left lurch of the ‘Third Period’, where the slogan ‘Class against Class’ was perverted into a struggle of a “handful of Communists against the ‘social fascist’ proletariat.” The result, Trotsky argues, is that workers who were once presented as allies were suddenly branded class enemies, destroying communist prestige.
As evidence, Trotsky points to the 1931 general election results. Despite the world crisis and the collapse of the Labour vote, the Communist Party gained a paltry 20,000 votes, a “horrible condemnation” of its policies. He argues that without the Comintern’s interference from 1925 onwards, Britain would possess an “incomparably more important revolutionary party.” The chapter draws heavily on the theoretical concept of the British working class possessing “two souls”: one servile, conservative, and feudal, expressed by the Labour and trade union bureaucrats; the other capable of grand revolutionary insurrections (Chartism, 1926 General Strike). The Communist Party’s task was to cultivate the latter, but instead it reinforced the former.
The polemic is sharp and direct. Trotsky excoriates the Stalinist leadership (Kuusinen, Manuilsky, Lozovsky) for a “chancery” politics of abrupt leaps, lies, and circulars that break the “threads” of revolutionary consciousness. He mocks the claim that the bloc with Purcell was necessary to defend the USSR, noting that this policy has yielded a mere 70,000 votes for that defence, concluding that “nobody has given such service to the expiring British imperialism as the Stalin school.” For the British Left Opposition, Trotsky prescribes systematic, modest work: establishing a centre, a publication, and above all, a rigorous critical examination of the British Communist Party’s record. He insists that the “mole of the British revolution” continues to burrow, and that the 1931 election was the “last gigantic rise” of British capitalism’s dying lamp, promising future revolutionary explosions.