WHEN SPOKE recently Sokolniki, at the jubilee gathering of educational workers, I was asked a question of great importance in relation to principles, a question closely connected both with the international situation, in the widest sense of the word, Fifth Congress of the Communist International, which is now taking place.
instead of making hundred-and-first and-first attempt to describe comprehensively the so-called 'international situation', I am give, even though only outline, an answer to that question of principle which was put to me at Sokolniki and which I will now tell you about.
The note I received is in my pocket - here it is: 'Comrade Trotsky, please explain the most capitalist countries have the weakest Communist Parties (USA, Britain) and are furthest from the social revolution. This problem worries me very much and I request you to explain it. the question.
The answer to it is the key to the international question, that is, standpoint of the relations between the various states and the relations between the capitalist states Republic and from the standpoint of the development ot tne throughout the world....
How then can it be explained that the most advanced and cultured coun tries have weak Communist Parties, while, on the contrary, which cannot. untortunately, be called the most cultured in Europe, strong Communist Party, the state?....
We know that international Menshevism, starting with our own Russian Mensheviks, builds tradiction its chief 'accusation' against international communism and against the Soviet Republic. contradiction be taken in a simple way.
so speak mechanically, vou are not tar from the conclusion that communism is an expression of backwardness barbarism.
backward a country is, deduce from your first glance at the problem, the stronger is communism in that country, wilercas countries nke nilamn and Amenca nave very weak Communist Parties, in proportion, as it were, to the small amount of survivals of barbarism in those countries.
At the congress of the Communist International one of the weakest of the European parties is certainly the British Communist Party. The American party is even weaker, true, but we are talking the moment only about europe The strongest party is our party. Then Food convoy, 1926 General Strike and with the In Britain there is -forget it thousandgoing to in broad in all spheres of life..
alongside of the munist Parti not matters of indifference tremendous intluence affairs.
That is barous broadly Europe is Britain. both from the the Soviet one-sided, as false.
revolution our country, human life. has a very which rules contradiction?
other, monarchy, this conover people's minds.
You see, if this then sphere, The Development is contradictory.
dous successes, super-civilised ment in other spheres wull. thanks nineteenth bourgeoisie Inis fact, possessing the power. to play an active part in politics? In order to answer...l will recall a few other phenomena and institutions in the life of Great Britain.
— I ask you not to • a monarchy, whereas there is none here or in France or in Germany...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 Thus it turns out that in Britain, fact that the Comis exceptionally weak, there are to be found such other facts, IoT Us, as the existence of a monarchy, an artistocracy, a House of Lords and a religion in politics, in social life, and in everyday Ana 1 you approacn brilall one-sidely from this aspect,... then you would doubtless say that the most barbackward country in cient 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 Can one really agree that Britain is the most backward country in Europe? BONS 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 How can one find a way out of this For contradiction stares us in the face: on the one hand, high technique, science, etc; on the aristocracy, House of Lords, power of religious prejudices What conclusions can be drawn? WaN This conclusion, that there is no single yardstick with which one can measure the development of a country in every on the basis of that 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 Britis: proletariat.
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, evolutionary way'. The revolutionary upheavals of the seventeenth century were profoundly forgotten. In this consists what is called the British tradition. Its basic feature is conservatism...
The British working 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 ansurroundings, economic backwardness, amid ignorance 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 conditook 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. 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.
For him, the British worker, there not this sudden, catastrophic transition from the closed little world of the village to modern industry;...
TODAY IN the eleventh month of the miners' contestable that the British labour movement is undergoing found transformation. One aspect of this has received the greedy attention of a host of university professors, Neil cabinet. That Labour's vote following the creation of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, 'in an to only general election.
On this basis an unholy alliance of extreme right wing trade union bureaucrats like has professors like Eric Hobsbawn and the majority faction of the British Communist forces to campaign for Labour to turn sharply to the right in order to create a popular Thatcher with the Of course these forces have, at best, sharp, been deeply inmered out by new realists kitchen the decline memory.
per cent in the last shown Frank Chapple, have joined for jobs front against SDP-Liberal trary suddenly to be, foreign capital scattered cand assembled fresh Il nas caucalcu Let because in MacDonald and the factories any 'we nave in gave consciousness IO this It is possible to put the matter like embarrassed, at worst viciously hostile, to the titanic struggle of the miners and to the forces that are leading it. Because what has been hamthe sheer scale of this struggle is a class struggle wing of the labour movement prepared to break the law and to forge the most advanced of the oppressed with the noveltell in living Not only have the young miners of the NUM not been 'bought off by mortgages and cars, but they have politically advanced mass force that the labour movement has created since the 1920s. Hobsbawm's Forward March o)
Halted looks somewhal ridiculous when you see the NUM com ing forward not ony as militant fighters but as champions. the demands of women, of blacks and of gay people in the labour movement What has been revealed over th past 12 months is two facts about the British labour movement. First it is noi particularly advanced but on the con the • most politically this: the richer, STOLSC mightier, cleverer, firmer a bourgoisie has proved the more it has succeeded in holding back the ideological and conse.
quently the revolutionary development of the proletariat. Here is another ex pression of the same idea. The British bourgeoisie has got used to the servility of the so-called workers' leaders whom me interrupt myself to introduce a very interesting quotation from the British newspaper the Sunday The complains Britain today, under the strikes are taking place, and it says:
Great Britain the fines 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 uncil.
Of course, revolutionaries are increasing in number in Britain too, but unfortunately they have still far from sufficiently "thrust aside' those leaders the Sunday Times calls wise