... In that country [Great Britain], the ruling class of which is oppressing and plundering the whole world more than ever before, the formulae of democracy have lost their meaning even as weapons of parliamentary swindling. The specialist best qualified in this sphere, Lloyd George [1], appeals now not to democracy, but to a union of Conservative and Liberal property holders against the working class. In his arguments no trace remains of the vague democracy of the “Marxist” Kautsky. [2] Lloyd George stands on the ground of class realities, and for this very reason speaks in the language of civil war. The British working class, with that ponderous learning by experience which is its distinguishing feature, is approaching that stage of its struggle before which the most heroic pages of Chartism will fade, just as the Paris Commune will grow pale before the coming victorious revolt of the French proletariat.
Precisely because historical events have, in these last months, been developing their revolutionary logic with stern energy, the author of this present work asks himself: Does it still require to be published? Is it still necessary to confute Kautsky theoretically? Is there still a theoretical necessity to justify revolutionary terrorism?
Unfortunately, yes. Ideology, by its very essence, plays an enormous part in the socialist movement. Even for practical Britain the period has arrived when the working class must exhibit an ever increasing demand for a theoretical statement of its experiences and its problems. On the other hand, even the proletarian psychology includes a terrible inertia of conservatism in itself – all the more so since in the present case, it is a question of nothing less than the traditional ideology of the parties of the Second International which first roused the proletariat, and recently were so powerful. After the collapse of official social-patriotism (Scheidemann, Victor Adler, Renaudel, Vandervelde, Henderson, Plekhanov, [3] etc.), international Kautskyism (the staff of the German Independents, Friedrich Adler, Longuet, a considerable section of the Italians, the British Independent Labour Party, the Martov group [4], etc.) has become the chief political factor on which the unstable equilibrium of capitalist society depends.
From The Preface (dated 29th May 1920) to Terrorism and Communism (1920).
Routinism among the summits of the labour movement in Britain is so ingrained that they have yet even to feel the need of rearming themselves: the leaders of the British Labour Party are stubbornly bent upon remaining within the framework of the Second International.
At a time when the march of events during recent years has undermined the stability of economic life in conservative Britain and has made her toiling masses most receptive to a revolutionary programme – at such a time, the official machinery of the bourgeois nation: the Royal House of Windsor, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the Church, the trade unions, the Labour Party, George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Henderson – remains intact as a mighty automatic brake upon progress. Only the Communist Party – a party free from routine and sectarianism, and closely bound up with the mass organizations – will be able to counterpose the proletarian rank and file to this official aristocracy.
From The Manifesto of the Second World Congress
drafted by Trotsky and adopted at the Second World Congress
of the Communist International, 7th August 1920.
It is quite probable that Britain will enter the epoch of proletarian revolution with a Communist Party still comparatively small. One can do nothing about it, because the propaganda of communist ideas is not “the sole factor in history. The only conclusion that flows from this is: that the working class of Britain – if through the criss-crossing of major historical causes it finds itself in the near future already drawn into an unfolding proletarian revolution – will have to create, expand and consolidate its mass party in the very course of the struggle for power and in the period immediately following the conquest of power; while, during the initial phase of the revolution, the numerically small Communist Party will – without tearing itself away from the mainstream of the movement, and by taking into account the existing organizational level of the proletariat and its degree of classconsciousness – seek to introduce the maximum of communist consciousness into the actually unfolding revolution.
From On the Policy of the KAPD (dated 5th November 1920)
Kommunisticheskii Internatsional, 7th June 1921
The mighty strike movement in Britain was shattered again and again during the last year by the ruthless application of military force, which intimidated the trade union leaders. Had these leaders remained faithful to the cause of the working class, the machinery of the trade unions despite all its defects could have been used for revolutionary battles. The recent crisis of the Triple Alliance furnished the possibility of a revolutionary collision with the bourgeoisie, but this was frustrated by the conservatism, cowardice and treachery of the trade union leaders. [5] Were the machinery of the British trade unions to develop today half the amount of energy in the interests of socialism it has been expending in the interests of capitalism, the British proletariat could conquer power with a minimum of sacrifice and could start a systematic reconstruction of the country’s economic system.
From Theses on the International Situation and the Tasks of
the Communist International, drafted by Trotsky and adopted by
the Third World Congress of the Communist International, 4th July 1921.
1. David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Welsh Liberal politician, responsible as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) for the introduction of old age pensions, unemployment benefit and sickness benefits; prime minister from 1916 to 1922.
2. Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) was one of the leading theoreticians of the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International. By the outbreak of the First World War he had abandoned revolutionary Marxism and took up an indecisive position between revolutionary opposition to the war and patriotic support for the German bourgeoisie. As such he became the theorist of “centrism” in the socialist movement and strongly opposed the Russian Revolution.
3. Philipp Scheidemann (1865-1939), German journalist and Social Democratic politician; during World War I he was a leader of the Majority Social Democrats, who continued to vote for war credits; entered government of Prince Max von Baden in October 1918; after the abdication of the kaiser in November he proclaimed the Republic from a balcony of the Reichstag; a leader of the provisional government that emerged from the November Revolution; became Chancellor after the convening of the national Assembloy in Weimar in February 1919 but resigned in June 1919 owing to his disagreement with the Versailles Treaty; never served in government again but remained influential in tha SPD. – Victor Adler (1852-1918), founder of Austrian social Democracy; At outbreqak of World War I he supported the government’s decision to go to war despite personal misgivings; served as Austrian Foreign Minister in the interim government of Karl Renner after the collapse fof the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918. – Pierre Renaudel (1871-1935), French reformist socialist, associate of Jean Jaurès, editor of l’Humanité during World War I. – Emil Vandervelde (1866-1938), Belgian right-wing social democrat and one of the leaders of the Second International. During the First World War he was one of the most extreme social-chauvinists, becoming Prime Minister, and was extremely hostile to Soviet Russia, acting in 1919 as Belgium’s signatory to the Versailles Treaty. Made a special visit to Moscow in 1922 to act as a defence witness in the trial of the Right Social-Revolutionaries. – Arthur Henderson (1863-1935), a leader of the British Labour Party, who rallied the party to support World War I and became a government minister. He later served as Home Secretary in the first Labour government (1924) and Foreign Secretary in the second Labour government (1929-1931). – Georgii Plekhanov (1856-1918) founder of Russian Marxism but opponent of the October Revolution. He started political activity as a Narodnik terrorist, and later the educated the generation of Lenin and Trotsky in the fight for Marxism against Narodnism and Populism. In 1883 he organized the “Emancipation of Labour” group as first cell of Russian Marxism. In Our Differences (1885) he opened the struggle against Narodnism, and in The Development of the Monist View of History (1895) set out the basic principles of Marxist philosophy in Russian for the first time. He worked with Lenin on Iskra for a period; they were in agreement on programmatic questions at the Second Congress of Russian Social Democracy (1903), but not on the principled organizational steps necessary for the development of the Bolshevik Party. Plekhanov degenerated into social patriotism on the outbreak of war, and was bitterly hostile to the Bolshevik revolution. After his death he was nonetheless honoured as a pioneer of Marxism (see Trotsky’s Political Profiles).
4. Friedrich Adler (1879-1960), Austrian Social Democratic politician, son of Victor Adler; from 1907 editor of the theoretical journal Der Kampf; opposed SPÖ’s pro-war stance; in October 1916 he assassinate the Austrian prime minister von Stürgkh as a protest against the war; sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted to 18 years’ imprisonment; released from prison by the revolution in 1918 he played a leading role in the workers’ council movement; from the mid-1920s he was secretary general of the reconstituted Socialist International. – Jean Longuet (1876-1938) was a French lawyer and socialist who held a pacifist position in the First World War but invariably voted for war credits. Founder and editor of the newspaper Le Populaire. At the Strasbourg Congress in 1918 the majority of the French Socialist Party adopted Longuet’s policy. After the Tours Congress in 1920 where the communists gained the majority he supported the minority and joined the centrist Two-and-a-half International which returned later to the Second International. [He was also a grandson of Karl Marx. – Ted Crawford] – Julius Martov (1873-1923), Russian Social Democrat, leader of the Mensheviks; worked closely with lenin dring the 1890s and also around the paper Iskra; the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks arose initially from the different proposals defining membership of the party proposed by Martov and Lenin; Martov became a leading Menshevik, although he was always to be on the extreme left of the faction; opposed World War I on a similar internationalist basis to Trotsky and Lenin; after his return to Russia on the same sealed train as Lenin he opposed the policy of the Social Democratic members of the provisional government, while recognising that the October Revolution was a genuine expression of the proletariat he withdrew from the Congress of Soviets with the rest of the Mensheviks; thereafter his political influence was marginal; he supported the Reds against the Whites in the Civil War but continued to criticise the Bolhevik government; went into exile in 1922 to receive medical treatment for ill health but died shortly afterwards.
5. The Triple Alliance of the Miners’ Federation, the Transport Workers’ Federation and the National Union of Railwaymen had been formed in 1914 but collapsed in April 1921 when the leaders of the transport workers and the railwaymen refused to call their members out in sympathy with the miners’ strike against the coal owners’ wage cuts.
Last updated on: 2.7.2007