measurement make a uniform evaluation covering all aspects of social life.
In certain spheres a country achieves tremenbut it happens quite often that by these very successes that country holds back its own developLet me speak concretely about this matter. Britain was the first country to take the road of capitalist development to that fact, the hegemony of the world market in the century. The British became, again thanks to ine nicnest, strongest most enlightened of the bourgeoisies.
These conditions enabled it, as we 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 forward through the free initiative of human thought.
We speak frankly if we say that classes and peoples have hitherto not shown decisive initiative except when nistory llas thrashed them with heavy crop. Had things been different, would people have allowed the imperialist war to happen? After all, the war drew neare under the eves of everyone, like two trains 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 imperlanst war were necoco lor certall: changes to be introduced into consciousness and into social lite. working people of Russia overthrew Romanov, drove out the bourgeoisie and took power. In Germany they got rid of Hohenzollern but stopped halfway Think over this process tahe extent necessary to understand the profound difference •III development which was extremely delayed therefore extremely contradictory.
Take our metal-working mining south: boundless expanses of steppe, thinly populated steppe settlements with deep mud around them in and autumn....and huge metal-working enterprises arise in these steppes. its They did not of course develop out of our own economy upon us thanks ic From the backward villages, Huroneat hurtling American) capital 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 hereditary traditions, any craft conservatism, any fixed and firm beliefs. On the contrary, it was in these new, unfamiliar and stern 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 revolutionary coal class which had been born in a revolutionary way.
ge are we passing? backward working class movements in Europe with fewer workers voting for the Labour Party than for virtually any other mass workers' parties in the major countries of Europe.
But, contrary to the claims of Professor Hobsbawm, this does not represent a 'forward march' that has been "halted'. It is the basic character of a labour movement created in what was the richest, powerful imperialist power As Engels wrote to Marx in 1858: The British working class is actually becoming more and more bourgeois so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie.
this is justifiable in a country ploiting the whole world.' In creating the SDP the ruling class were simply exploiting whilst the majority of the working class is anti-Tory this does not at all mean it is permanently attached to the Labour politicians, filled to the brim with wisdom and patriotism.
How has this come about? In our country there have never been leaders bourgeoisie, even if we bear in mind that at a certain period the Socialist Revolutionaries ana lne played a considerable role because our bourgeoisie - discounting the sharpest MOSL decisive molncils.
things were at their most critical — was dissatisfied even WILO the Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. is of nations Party and still less socialism.
politically demands of MUSL minority in the Benn, Scargill and Livingstone.
traditions they are based upon. and bourgeois Of long struggle extent obstacles it is necessary which is exthat movements. on them, What the Mensheviks Switch has influenced Socialist surrounded that it supports The second fact revealed in recent months is the creation of a minority within the British working class which advancing, becoming more pro-Labour, more committed to defending the cities, more in solidarity with the miners, more in support of the WULCH. against nuclear weapons and so on. It is this gives is support to The past eleven months of struggle have revealed both the power of this current and the obstacles it confronts in the form of the majority Labour Party and TUC leaderships and the political In order to arms ourselves in the to overcome these to grasp the true historical character of the British labour movement. It is to help in that objective that we reprint the following article of Leon Trotsky dealing with precisely this question by comparing the Russian and British working class BrITISH before of OU! young leaders from its ranks, all sorts falling of political 'specialists' in the service of the British bourgeoisie at once settled won them over, brought to bear on them all that could be imagined by a powerful bourgeois culture...
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-organised hypnosis it the workers' leaders whom it has known how to keep always by its reporters, Other British 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 national traalhon, that the bourgeoisie. 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...
Ine so-called Labour government headed by MacDonald is also a product the age-long education of workers' leaders in this way. That is the reason, in the last analysis, why British Menshevism is so strong Now let us repeat munism so weak. our question: is the weakness of communism in Britain a symptom of the country's high level of civilisation or is it a symptom of backwardness? After analysis we have no grounds for into the trap of such mechanical presentation of the question. We say it is at one and the same time a symptom of very early develop For greal ' backwaraness because history operates mechanically but dialectically: it combines during long periods advanced tendencies in sphere monstrous backwardness in another.
If we compare, from the standpoint of world-historical development, the government of MacDonald and the bourgeois-nationalist government of Turkey, the conclusion we draw is not in MacDonald's favour...
History's conclusion
Menshevik government of Britain, in spite of the British civilization, etc, is playing in this conjuncture of forces a reactionary role, bourgeois-nationalist government the backward Turkey, as of a nationallyoppressed country, gressive role. Such history!...
There is no abstract yardstick applicable to all spheres 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 com- not by accident, as regards this question of the relationship forces of the Communist Party and of social democracy, between Russia and This is to be understood by the course of development of capitalism in Germany. It is necessary, of course, to investigate concretely the history each separate country, discover more exactly the causes of the delayed or not Communist Party. In a however, conclusion: the conquest of power by with the proletariat in countries which have entered the path of capitalism very late in the day, than in countries previous bourgeois history and a higher level of culture.
But this is only one side of the matSocialist Action 8 February 1985 is that the whereas the of his Is playing a pro is the dialectic of It is example, is placed between the to correspond.
of in order to hastened growth of the general way, tures we can draw the following last analysis, decisive force like our country, is easier with an Such is the dialectic of history. Politics has held the British 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 trammels, 40 e racehorse will outstrip our peasant nag To generalise 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 interrelation between the basis and the superstructure and to the interrelation of. bases and superstructures of different countries with one and 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 And this happens in fact, only no simply but in a very complicated way.
powerful development of superstructure (the bourgeois state bourgeois parties, bourgeois culture) sometimes holds back for a long tim the development of other superstruc (the revolutionary proletarian party, but in the last analysis - in the not immediately - the basis reveals itself nevertheless as the 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 basis