In Britain the stormy era of Chartism, of the revolutionary awakening of the British proletariat had entirely exhausted itself a full ten years before the emergence of the First International. The repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), the industrial flowering of the country consequent upon this which turned Britain into the workshop of the world, the introduction of the ten-hour working day (1847), the increase in emigration from Ireland to America and finally the extension of suffrage to the urban workers (1867) were all conditions which significantly improved the position of the upper layers of the proletariat and led its class movement along the peaceful course of trade unionism and to the liberal-labour politics that complemented it. The era of possibilism, that is of the conscious and steady adaptation to the economic, judicial and state forms of national capitalism, had for the British working class, as the oldest of its kind, already opened up before the rise Of the International, two decades earlier than for the continental proletariat. If more British trade unionists joined the International in the beginning, then it was purely because they considered that in this way they would have a possibility of defending themselves better against the import of continental blacklegs during strike struggles.
From War and the International,
Golos, 20th and 21st November and 13th December 1914.
Britain had far earlier based her capitalist development upon the imperialist plunder. She gave the upper layer of the proletariat an economic interest in her dominion over the world. In upholding its interests the British working class confined itself to pressure upon the bourgeois parties which had in turn accustomed it to the idea of the capitalist exploitation of the backward countries. It began to start upon the path of an independent policy only as Britain began to lose her positions on the World market, being squeezed out in the process by her main rival, Germany.
From War and the International,
Golos, 20th and 21st November and 13th December 1914.
The oldest capitalist country in Europe and the world is Britain. Britain, especially during the last half-century, has been from the standpoint of the proletarian revolution the most conservative country. The consistent social-reformists, i.e., those who try to make both ends meet, hence drew all the conclusions they needed, asserting that it was precisely Britain that indicated to other countries the possible paths of political development and that in the future the entire European proletariat would renounce the programme of social revolution. For the Marxists, however, the “incongruity” between Britain’s capitalist development and her socialist movement, as conditioned by a temporary combination of historical forces, did not contain anything disheartening. It was Britain’s early entry onto the path of capitalist development and world robbery that created a privileged position not only for her bourgeoisie but also for a section of her working class. Britain’s insular position spared her the direct burden of maintaining militarism on land. Her mighty naval militarism, although requiring huge expenditures, rested nevertheless on numerically small cadres of hirelings and did not require a transition to universal military service. The British bourgeoisie skilfully utilized these conditions in order to separate the top labour layer from the bottom strata, creating an aristocracy of “skilled” labour and instilling into it a trade union caste spirit. Flexible despite all its conservatism, the parliamentary machinery of Great Britain, the incessant rivalry between two historical parties – the Liberals and the Tories – a rivalry which at times assumed rather tense form although remaining quite hollow in content, invariably created when the need arose an artificial political safety-valve for the discontent of the working masses. This was supplemented by the fiendish dexterity of the ruling bourgeois clique in the business of spiritually crippling and bribing, quite “exquisitely” at times, the leaders of the working class. Thus thanks to Britain’s early capitalist development her bourgeoisie disposed of resources that enabled them systematically to counteract the proletarian revolution. Within the proletariat itself, or more correctly, within its upper layer, the same conditions gave shape to the most extreme conservative tendencies which manifested themselves in the course of decades prior to the World War … While Marxism teaches that class relations arise in the process of production and that these relations correspond to a certain level of productive forces; while Marxism further teaches that all forms of ideology and, first and foremost, politics correspond to class relations, this does not at all mean that between politics, class groupings and production there exist simple mechanical relations, calculable by the four rules of arithmetic. On the contrary, the reciprocal relations are extremely complex. It is possible to interpret dialectically the course of a country’s development, including its revolutionary development, only by proceeding from the action, reaction and interaction of all the material and superstructural factors, national and world-wide alike, and not through superficial juxtapositions, nor through formal analogies.
Thoughts on the Progress of the Proletarian Revolution: En Route,
Izvestia, 29th April and 1st May 1919.
History on the whole knows of no revolution that was accomplished in a democratic way. For revolution is a very serious contest, which is always settled, not according to form, but according to substance. It happens quite frequently that individuals lose their fortunes and even their “honour” when playing cards according to the rules of the game; but classes never consent to lose possessions, power and “honour” by observing the rules of the game of “democratic” parliamentarism. They always decide this question in grim earnest, i.e., in accordance with the real correlation of the material forces, and not with the phantom shadows of these forces.
No doubt even in countries like Britain with an absolute majority of proletarians, the representative institution called into being by a working class revolution will reflect, not only the first needs of the revolution, but also the monstrous conservative traditions of this country. The mentality of a present-day British trade union leader is a mixture of the religious and social prejudices of the period of the restoration of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the practical skill of a trade union official at the height of capitalist development, the snobbishness of a petty bourgeois fighting to be respectable, and the uneasy conscience of a labour politician who has repeatedly betrayed the workers. To this must be added the influences of intellectuals, of professors and Fabians [1]; of the Socialist moralizings of Sunday preachers, the rationalist schemes of pacifists, the dilettantism of “Guild Socialists” [2], and the stubborn and haughty Fabian narrow-mindedness. Although the present social relations in Britain are quite revolutionary, her mighty historical past has deposited a conservative crust on the consciousness of not only the labour bureaucracy but also the upper strata of the more skilled mechanics. The obstacles to social revolution in Russia are objective: the predominance of petty peasant farming, and technical backwardness in industry; in England these obstacles are subjective: the ossified consciousness of a collective Henderson [3] and a hydra-headed Mrs. Snowden. [4] The proletarian revolution will dispose of these obstacles by methods of elimination and self-purification. But it cannot hope to dispose of them in a democratic way. Mr. MacDonald [5] himself will prevent such a consummation, not; by his programme but by the mere fact of his conservative existence.
From Chapter 8 of Between Red and White (1921)
The whole present-day political and cultural movement rests upon capitalism, out of which it is growing, has grown and has outgrown. But capitalism has schematically speaking, two different facets: the capitalism of the metropolis and the capitalism of the colonies. The classic model of a metropolis is Britain. At the present time it is crowned by the so-called “Labour” government of MacDonald. As for crowned by the so the colonies I would hesitate to say which one of them is most typical as a colony: this would either be India, a colony in the normal sense, or China, which preserves the semblance of independence yet in her world position and the course of her development belongs to the colonial type. Classic capitalism is in Britain. Marx wrote his Capital in London by directly observing the development of the most advanced country – you will know this, though I do not remember which year you cover this in ... In the colonies capitalism develops not out of its own fragments but as an intrusion of foreign capital. This is what creates the two different types. Why is MacDonald, to put it not very scientifically but in quite precise terms just the same, why is MacDonald so conservative, so limited and so stupid?
Because Britain is the classic land of capitalism, because capitalism there organically developed from handicrafts through manufacture into modern industry step by step, by an “evolutionary” road so that yesterday’s prejudices and those of the day before, the prejudices of the past and the previous centuries, all the ideological garbage of the ages can be discovered under MacDonald’s skull [applause]. At first glance there is here some historical contradiction: why did Marx appear in backward Germany, in the most backward of the great countries of Europe in the first half of the 19th century, not counting Russia of course? Why did Marx appear in Germany and why did Lenin appear in Russia on the borders of the 19th and 20th centuries? A clear contradiction! But what is its nature? One that can be explained by the so-called dialectic of historical development. In the shape of British machinery and in the shape of British cotton cloth, history created the most revolutionary factor of development. But this machinery and this cloth were processed and created by way of a prolonged and slow historical transition, one step at a time, while human consciousness remained in general frightfully conservative.
When economic development proceeds slowly and systematically it tends to find it hard to break through human skulls. Subjectivists and idealists in general say that human consciousness, critical thought and so on and so forth draw history forward like a tug towing a barge behind it. This is untrue. You and I are Marxists and we know that the motive power of history consists of the productive forces which have up till now taken shape behind man’s back and with which it tends to be very difficult to smash through man’s conservative skull in order to produce there the spark of a new political idea, and especially, let me repeat, if the development takes place slowly, organically and imperceptibly. But when the productive forces of a metropolis, of a classic land of capitalism, like Britain, encroach upon a more backward country, as with Germany in the first half of the 19th century, and with ourselves on the watershed of the 19th and the 20th centuries, and at the present time with Asia; when economic factors intrude in a revolutionary way cracking the old regime, when development takes place not gradually, not “organically” but by means of terrible shocks, and abrupt shifts in the old social layers, then critical thought finds its revolutionary expression incomparably more easily and rapidly, providing there is of course the necessary theoretical prerequisite for this. That is why Marx appeared in Germany in the first half of the 19th century and that is why Lenin appeared here and that is why we can observe at first sight the paradoxical fact that in the land of the highest, oldest and most revered European capitalism, Britain, we have the most conservative “Labour” party. While on the other hand in our Soviet Union, an extremely backward country economically and culturally speaking, we have – and I say this unashamedly for it is a fact – the best communist party in the world [applause].
From a speech to the Communist University for Toilers of the East, 21st April 1924
(Perspectives and Tasks in the East)
... What in reality explains the fact that in such a powerful, cultured, educated, civilized, etc., country as Britain, the Communist Party still exists as a mere propagandist society, not yet possessing the power to play an active part in politics? [6] In order to answer in a radical way the explanation – at first glance so simple and fitting – that Communism is directly proportionate to backwardness and barbarism, an explanation which expresses the whole wisdom of Menshevism, I will recall a few other phenomena and institutions in the life of Great Britain. In Britain, there is – and I ask you not to forget it – a monarchy, whereas there is none here or in France or in Germany. Now a monarchy cannot be depicted from any point of view as an expression of the highest culture, as one of the highest attainments of mankind – even MacDonald doesn’t do that, he keeps quiet about it, politely and diplomatically holds his tongue, and doesn’t say that a sign of the high cultural level of Britain is that there, in contrast to barbarous Russia, they have a monarchy. In Britain there is still to this day an aristocracy enjoying distinctions of rank. There is a House of Lords. In Britain, finally, the church, or rather the churches, wield tremendous influence in all spheres of life. There is no country in Europe where church influence in political, social and family life is so great as in Great Britain. Over there, for a man to say that he does not belong to a church, does not go to church, and even more, that he does not believe in God, requires quite exceptional personal courage. So it is difficult there, in each separate case, to break through the old, dense web of hypocrisy and clerical prejudices and the worldly customs which are based on this hypocrisy and these prejudices. None of you will say, I hope, that the influence of the church or of the churches on social consciousness is an expression of human progress. Thus it turns out that in Britain, alongside of the fact that the Communist Party is exceptionally weak, there are to be found such other facts, not matters of indifference for us, as the existence of a monarchy, an aristocracy, a House of Lords and a tremendous influence of religion in politics, in social life, and in everyday affairs. And if you approach Britain one-sidedly from this aspect, that is, from the aspect of the monarchy, the House of Lords, the aristocracy, landlordism and church influence, then you would doubtless say that the most barbarous and backward country in Europe is Britain. That would be as true as the statement of the Mensheviks that communism is a product of backwardness; that is to say, it would be as untrue, as one-sided, as false. Can one really agree that Britain is the most backward country in Europe? No, this idea cannot at all be fitted into the framework of our general picture of Britain. In Britain technique is at a very high level, and technique is decisive in human life. America, true, has outstripped Britain in the field of technique: the daughter of British culture has raced ahead of her mother along the line of technique. Before the war Germany was rivalling Britain more and more sharply, threatening to outstrip and in certain branches of industry actually outstripping Britain. But today, after the defeat of Germany, Britain leads Europe economically, British science, literature and art have played and are playing a role of the first order in the development of human thought and human creative achievement. How can one find one’s way out of this contradiction? For a contradiction stares us in the face: on the one hand, high technique, science, etc.; on the other, monarchy, aristocracy, House of Lords, power of religious prejudices over people’s minds. What conclusion can be drawn? This conclusion. that there is no single yardstick with which one can measure the development of a country in every sphere, and on the basis of that measurement make a uniform evaluation covering all aspects of social life. Development is contradictory. In certain spheres a country achieves tremendous successes, but it happens quite often that by these very successes that country holds back its own development in other spheres. Let me speak concretely about this matter. Britain was the first country to take the road of capitalist development and won, thanks to that fact, the hegemony of the world market in the nineteenth century. The British bourgeoisie became, again thanks to this fact, the richest, strongest, and most enlightened of the bourgeoisies. These conditions enabled it, as we know, to create a privileged position for the upper strata of the British working class and thereby to blunt class antagonisms. The British working class is becoming conscious of itself as an independent class hostile to the bourgeoisie much more slowly than the working class of other countries with less powerful bourgeoisies. Thus it turns out that the growth of the British bourgeoisie, the most advanced bourgeoisie in Europe, having taken place in exceptionally favourable conditions, has for a long time held back the development of the British proletariat. The slow and “organic” growth of technique in England, and the fact that the Reformation and the bourgeois revolution happened close together in time, held back the work of critical thought in relation to the church. The British bourgeoisie developed under the protection of ancient institutions, on the one hand adapting itself to them and on the other subjecting them to itself, gradually, organically, “in an evolutionary way”. The revolutionary upheavals of the 17th century were profoundly forgotten. In this consists what is called the British tradition. Its basic feature is conservatism. More than anything else the British bourgeoisie is proud that it has not destroyed old buildings and old beliefs, but has gradually adapted the old royal and noble castle to the requirements of the business firm. In this castle, in the corners of it, there were its. icons, its symbols, its fetishes, and the bourgeoisie did not remove them. It made use of them to consecrate its own rule. And it laid down from above upon its proletariat the heavy lid of cultural conservatism.
The British working class has developed quite differently from ours. Our young proletariat was formed in a period of some 50 years, mainly from peasants and handicraftsmen who had lived in the countryside, along with their fathers and grandfathers, in ancient surroundings, in economic backwardness, amid ignorance and religious prejudices. Capital ruthlessly seized the peasant lad or youth by the scruff of the neck and at once flung him into the cauldron of factory life. The change in his conditions took place catastrophically. When the young peasant felt the blast of the factory’s steam he at once began to think about who he was and where he was. At that stage the revolutionary party caught up with him and began to explain to him what and where he was. It gained ascendancy over him all the more easily because he had no conservative ideas: the old village notions did not fit at all; he needed a complete and radical change in his whole outlook on the world.
With the British worker things went quite differently. His father and his grandfather were workers, and his great-grandfathers and remoter ancestors were small artisans. The British worker has a family tree, he knows who his ancestors were, he has a family tradition. This is also a kind of “culture”, but it is expressed in the fact that in his consciousness he drags around with him many of the prejudices of his ancestors. For him, the British worker, there was not this sudden, sharp, catastrophic transition from the closed little world of the village to modern industry; he has developed organically from his remote ancestors into gradually changing conditions of factory life and urban culture. In his mind there still to this day sit old, medieval craft ideas and prejudices, only modified in form and adapted to the conditions of capitalism. The life of the crafts and the craft festivals – celebration of the birth of a son, his entry into apprenticeship, graduation to the independent position of master-craftsman, and so on – were shot through and through with religiosity, and this religiosity passed over into trade unionism, which has a heavy conservative tail stretching back into the Middle Ages ...
British technique is a fundamentally capitalist technique. It was not brought in from outside, destroying national economic forms, but has developed on the basis of these national forms. The consciousness of the working class reflects this “organic” growth of technique, while lagging very much behind it. It must not be forgotten that human consciousness, taken on the scale of society, is fearfully conservative and slow-moving. Only idealists imagine that the world is moved forward through the free initiative of human thought. In actual fact the thought of society or of a class does not take a single step forward except when there is extreme need to do so. Where it is at all possible, old familiar ideas are adapted to new facts. We speak frankly if we say that classes and peoples have hitherto not shown decisive initiative except when history has thrashed them with its heavy crop. Had things been different, would people have allowed the imperialist war to happen? After all, the war drew nearer under the eyes of everyone, like two trains hurtling towards each other along a single track. But the peoples remained silent, watched, waited and went on living their familiar, everyday, conservative lives. The fearful upheavals of the imperialist war were needed for certain changes to be introduced into consciousness and into social life. The working people of Russia overthrew Romanov, drove out the bourgeoisie and took power. In Germany they got rid of Hohenzollern but stopped half-way ... The war was needed for these changes to take place, the war with its tens of millions of dead, wounded and maimed ... What a clear proof this is of how conservative and slow to move is human thought, how stubbornly it clings to the past, to everything that is known, familiar, ancestral – until the next blow of the scourge.
Such blows have occurred in Britain too, of course. Thus, after the rapid industrialization there developed in the second third of last century the stormy movement of the working class which is known as Chartism. But bourgeois society stood sufficiently firm and the Chartist movement came to nothing. The strength of the British bourgeoisie lay in its maturity, its wealth, its world power, the crumbs which it shared with the upper strata of the working class, thereby demoralizing also the weakened masses.
Think over this process to the extent necessary to understand the profound difference from our development, which was extremely delayed and therefore extremely contradictory. Take our metalworking and coal-mining South: boundless expanses of steppe, thinly populated, steppe settlements with deep mud around them in spring and autumn ... and suddenly huge metal-working enterprises arise in these steppes. They did not, of course, develop out of our own economy but broke in upon us thanks to foreign capital. From the backward and scattered villages European (and sometimes American) capital assembled fresh cadres of workers, tearing them from the conditions which Marx once called “the idiocy of rural life”. And there you had these fresh proletarians of the Donets Basin, of Krivoi Rog and so on, not bringing with them into the pits and the factories any hereditary traditions, any craft conservativism, any fixed and firm beliefs. On the contrary, it was in these new, unfamiliar and stem conditions that they only for the first time properly felt the need for firm beliefs, which would give them moral support. To their aid came Social-Democracy, which taught them to break with all their old prejudices and so gave a revolutionary consciousness to this class which had been born in a revolutionary way. This, in broad outline, is the answer to the question which was put to me and which 1, in my turn, have set before you.
It is possible to put the matter like this: the richer, stronger, mightier, cleverer, firmer a bourgeoisie has proved to be, the more it has succeeded in holding back the ideological and consequently the revolutionary development of the proletariat. Here is another expression of the same idea. The British bourgeoisie has got used to the servility of the so-called workers’ leaders whom it has educated. Let me interrupt myself to introduce a very interesting quotation from the British newspaper, the Sunday Times. The newspaper complains because in Britain today, under the MacDonald Government, stormy strikes are taking place, and it says: “We have in Great Britain the finest body of Labour leaders in the world, men of experience and patriotism, with a real sense of responsibility and a wide knowledge of economics. But they are rapidly being thrust aside by the avowed revolutionaries, whose influence is increased every time the Government capitulates to them.” [7] That’s what it says, word for word. As to the statement that they are being “thrust aside by the avowed revolutionaries”, that, alas, is as yet an exaggeration. Of course, revolutionaries are increasing in number in Britain too, but unfortunately they have still far from sufficiently “thrust aside” those leaders whom the Sunday Times calls wise politicians, filled to the brim with wisdom and patriotism.
How has this come about? In our country there have never been leaders who won such praise from the bourgeoisie, even if we bear in mind that at a certain period the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks played a considerable role, because our bourgeoisie – discounting the sharpest and most decisive moments, when things were at their most critical – was dissatisfied even with the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. What is the cause of such satisfaction with the workers’ leaders on the part of the bourgeoisie over there in Britain? It is due to the fact that the British bourgeoisie themselves have trained these leaders. How did they get the opportunity of training “labour” leaders? This was due to the circumstance that they were powerful and cultured, being the ruling class of an advanced capitalist country. As fast as the working class advanced young leaders from its ranks, all sorts of political “specialists” in the service of the British bourgeoisie at once settled on them, won them over, brought to bear on them all that could be imagined by a powerful bourgeois culture. Among us the average petty-bourgeois, the philistine, the member of the intelligentsia of liberal and even radical views, has considered from time immemorial that since Britain is a highly civilized country therefore everything which exists in Britain or which comes from Britain is superior, good, progressive, and so on. In this we see expressed the petty-bourgeois incapacity for thinking dialectically, analysing phenomena, grasping a problem in its historical concreteness. There is something which is really good, British technique, and that we are trying to transfer to our country in exchange for grain, timber and other valuable commodities. The British monarchy, hypocritical British conservatism, religiosity, servility, sanctimoniousness – all this is old rags, rubbish, the refuse of centuries which we have no need for whatsoever [applause].
If British culture has affected our average philistine in this way from afar off, by correspondence, so to speak, evoking in him a blind infatuation, how much more strongly, directly and concretely does it affect the British petty-bourgeois and the semi-petty bourgeois representative of the British working class. What the British bourgeoisie has been able to achieve is a sort of hypnotic fascination for its culture, its world-historical importance. By means of this skilfully organized hypnosis it has influenced the workers’ leaders, whom it has known how to keep always surrounded by its reporters, photographers, sportsmen, clergymen, lecturers and so forth, all cunningly turned on to each newcomer among the workers’ leaders. The newcomer in this way finds himself in a bourgeois milieu. They praise him to the skies if he nibbles at the bait, and they give him a good brushing the wrong way if he takes the slightest step against the bourgeoisie. And this does not just happen once, but day by day, week by week, and year in and year out. And the young leader going out into society begins to feel ashamed because his Sunday suit is not sufficiently well-cut; he dreams of a top-hat to wear when he goes out on a Sunday, so as not to be any different from a real. gentleman. These may seem trifles but, after all, they make up a man’s life. And in this hypnosis of a way of life lies the art of a ruling class, a powerful, cultured, hypocritical, base, greedy class – an art which consists in exercising an everyday influence whereby to work upon and subject to itself everyone who comes forward from among the working class, everyone who stands a head taller than the others in every factory, in every ward and borough, in every town and throughout the country.
Probably a lot of you have seen The Times. It comes out every day in dozens of pages of splendid fine print, with a variety of illustrations and an endless range of sections, so that everything has its place in the paper, from questions of high politics to all kinds of sport, and including the affairs of the churches and of the world of fashion. And from what point of view is everything presented? Naturally, from the point of view of the interests of the bourgeoisie.
Other British bourgeois newspapers are not so solid as The Times, but they are built on the same model, so as to capture the reader’s attention from every direction and lead him to genuflect before the British national tradition, that is, before the bourgeoisie. And the workers’ press is very weak; besides which, with the exception of the Communist publications, it is permeated through and through with the same hypnosis of bourgeois culture. This hypnosis is supplemented by direct terrorism. To belong to a church is in Britain the same as covering your nakedness with clothes, or paying what you owe in a shop. May one walk down the street naked? May one not belong to a church? To declare that one does not belong to a church, and still more than one does not believe in God, requires in Britain the same sort of extraordinary courage as to go naked in public. The so-called Labour government headed by MacDonald is also a product of the age-long education of the workers’ leaders in this way. That is the reason, in the last analysis, why British Menshevism is so strong and communism weak.
Now let us repeat our question: is the weakness of communism in Britain a symptom of the country’s high level of civilization, or is it a symptom of backwardness? After our analysis we have no grounds for failing into the trap of such a mechanical presentation of the question. We say: it is at one and the same time a symptom of very early development and of great backwardness, because history operates not mechanically, but dialectically: it combines during long periods advanced tendencies in one sphere with monstrous backwardness in another. If we compare, from the standpoint of world-historical development, the “Labour” government of MacDonald and the bourgeois-nationalist government of Turkey (about which I spoke in my speech at Tbilisi) the conclusion we draw is not in MacDonald’s favour. You recall that the “great” Liberal leader Gladstone [8] – in reality he was a liberal philistine, and Marx had a most highly concentrated hatred of him – the “great” Gladstone once delivered a tremendous speech against the bloodstained Sultan, the representative of fanatical, barbarous Islam, and so on. If you take the average philistine and say to him: Britain and Turkey – well, of course, Britain means civilization and progress, Turkey means backwardness and barbarism. But see what is happening. There is now in Britain a government of Mensheviks and in Turkey a bourgeois-nationalist government. And this bourgeois-nationalist government of Turkey has found it necessary to abolish the Caliphate. The Caliphate is the central institution of Pan-Islamism, that is, one of the most reactionary trends in the entire world. But the Menshevik government of Britain has re-established the Caliphate of Hejaz, in order to uphold the rule of the bourgeoisie over its Moslem slaves. [9] History’s conclusion is that the Menshevik government of Britain, in spite of British civilization, etc., is playing in this conjuncture of forces a reactionary role, whereas the bourgeois-nationalist government of backward Turkey, as of a nationally oppressed country, is playing a progressive role. Such is the dialectic of history! Of course, from the standpoint of the development of technique, science and art, Britain is immeasurably superior to Turkey. The accumulated wealth of Britain is beyond comparison with what Turkey possesses in this respect. But we see that it turns out that, precisely in order to protect this wealth and its whole national “civilization” in general, the British bourgeoisie has been obliged to follow an ultra-conservative policy, so that a Labour government becomes in its hands an instrument for re-establishing the Caliphate. There is no abstract yardstick applicable to all spheres of life. It is necessary to take living facts in their living, historical interaction. If we master this dialectical approach to the question, the latter becomes much clearer to us. Germany, for example, is placed not by accident, as regards this question of the relationship between the forces of the Communist Party and of Social-Democracy, between Russia and Britain. This is to be understood by the course of development of capitalism in Germany. It is necessary, of course, to investigate concretely the history of each separate country, in order to discover more exactly the causes of the delayed or hastened growth of the Communist Party. In a general way, however, we can draw the following conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat in countries which have entered the path of capitalism very late in the day, like our country, is easier than in countries with an extensive previous bourgeois history and a higher level of culture. But this is only one side of the matter. A second conclusion, no less important, states: socialist construction after the conquest of power will be easier in countries with a higher capitalist civilization than in countries which are economically backward like ours. This means that for the British working class to break through to real proletarian power, to dictatorship, will be incomparably harder than it was for us. But once having broken through to power, it will advance to socialism much quicker and much more easily than ourselves. And it is even uncertain, history has spoken with a double tongue on this question, who will build socialism earlier, we or the British. If the British working class takes power in the next ten years – I speak approximately, and give this figure not in order to prophesy but merely as an arithmetical example – it will then within another ten years have a real socialist economy, very highly developed, while we in 20 years’ time will probably still have, not only somewhere in Yakutia [10] but also nearer here, very many survivals of peasant backwardness …
Decades will be needed to transform our North and our South into a centralized socialist economy, based on a high level of technique, with our great expanses of territory still only thinly populated. And I think that in 20 or 25 years’ time the British worker, turning to us, will say: “Don’t be annoyed, but I’ve got a bit ahead of you.” Naturally, we shan’t be annoyed – those of us, that is, who survive till then. Get ahead, comrade British workers, do us the favour of getting ahead, please, we beg you, we’ve been waiting a long time for this [laughter]. Such is the dialectic of history. Politics has held the British worker back, has for a long time, so to speak, hobbled him, and he is advancing with such timid, pitiful, MacDonaldite little steps. But when he frees himself from his political trammels, the British racehorse will outstrip our peasant nag.
To generalize theoretically what I have said, in the Marxist terminology which is familiar to us, I should say that the question itself boils down to the inter-relation between the basis and the superstructure and to the inter-relation of bases and superstructures of different countries one with another. We know that superstructures – state, law, politics, parties and so on – arise on an economic basis, are nourished and determined by this basis. Consequently, basis and superstructure have to correspond. And this happens in fact, only not simply but in a very complicated way. A powerful development of one superstructure (the bourgeois state, bourgeois parties, bourgeois culture) sometimes holds back for a long time the development of other superstructures (the revolutionary proletarian party), but in the last analysis – in the last analysis, not immediately – the basis reveals itself nevertheless as the decisive force. We have shown this by the example of Britain. If we approach the problem in a formal way, it may appear that the weakness of the British Communist Party contradicts the Marxist law of the relationship between basis and superstructure. But this is certainly not the case. Dialectically, the basis, as we have seen, will, in spite of everything, secure its victory. In other words: a high level of technique, even through the barrier of ultraconservative politics, will nevertheless manifest its preponderance and will lead to socialism sooner than in countries with a low level of technique.
That, comrades, is what I conceive the fundamental answer to be to the question which was put to me at Sokolniki.
From a speech to the 5th All-Russian Congress of Medical and Veterinary Workers,
21st June 1924 (Through What Stage Are We Passing?)
1. Fabians: members of the reformist Fabian Society set up to pursue an explicitly gradualist transition to socialism as opposed to a revolutionary one. Leading members included, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
2. Guild Socialism: political movement advocating workers’ control of industry through trade-related guilds; its most prominent exponent was G.D.H. Cole.
3. 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).
4. Ethel Snowden (1880-1951), British socialist and feminist campaigner, member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), wife of Philip Snowden.
5. Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), Scottish Labour politician, member of Independent Labour Party (ILP), adopted pacifist position during World War I, prime minister in the first (1924) and second (1929-1931) Labour governments, defected in 1931 with Philip Snowden and Jimmy Thomas to form National Government with the Conservatives after the Labour government split on the question of cutting unemployment benefits, served as prime minister until 1935.
6. At a meeting of educational workers at Sokolniki (Moscow) on 10th June 1924, Trotsky had been asked to explain “why the most advanced capitalist countries have the weakest communist parties (USA & Britain are farthest from the social revolution)?” This extract is his reply.
7. The Sunday Times, 8th June 1924.
8. William Gladstone (1809-1898), originally a Conservative, he later became became leader of the Liberal Party and served as prime minister four times (1868-1874, 1880-1885, 1886 and 1892-1894).
9. The Caliphate was the name of the Empire established after the death of the prophet Muhammed in 632 AD. By the twentieth century the title of “Caliph” originally applying to a religious leader, had been taken over by the Sultans of Turkey. It was abolished on 3rd March 1924 by the bourgeois revolutionary government of Kemal Ataturk. Under British influence the “revived” Caliphate was set up in the Hejaz, whose ruler was then a British puppet, a member of the same Hashemite family whom the British installed as kings of Jordan and Iraq. However not long after this the Hejaz was conquered by Ibn Saud who put an end to the “revived” Caliphate.
10. A region of North-East Siberia.
Last updated on: 2.7.2007