Leon Trotsky on Britain; Introduced by George Novack. (Pathfinder Press, £1.45)/Tony Southall The publication of this book is an important event for working class militants in this country.
Written in the years leading up to and immediately following the greatest struggle of the British working class movement thus far in the 20th century - the General Strike of 1926 - these writings are full of the brilliant insights and perceptive Marxist analysis for which Trotsky was famous.
This collection contains the great 1925 work Where is Britain Going' (which, at the time of its publication in Britain in February 1926, was greeted with praise from the leadership of the British Communist Party), and a collection of articles published immediately after the General Strike under the title 'Where is Britain Going, Part II.' Much of this material appears here for the first time in English, and it includes a number of replies to English critics of Where is Britain Going.' The third part of the collection consists of a series of items written between 1926 and 1928, never published in the Soviet Union, attacking the then leaders of the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist International - Tomsky, Bukharin and Stalin - for their policy during the General Strike.
GLOBAL VIEW By taking a global view of the world capitalist economy Trotsky was able to analyse with great accuracy the decline of British imperialism compared with its competitors in Europe, Japan and, in particular, the USA. Long before any of the theorists of the social-democratic wing of the British labour movement, he saw this as the fundamental factor shaping political developments in Britain. Already by the 1920s the relative backwardness of British heavy industry was producing chronic unemployment. The outdated equipment and organisation of the coal industry was the cause of the continual crises in mining which played such an important part in the events leading up to the General Strike. There is no doubt that the desperate attempts of government after government to shackle the trade union movement resulted from the growing economic crisis which the decline of British imperialism produced. POLITICAL TRENDS Trotsky always insisted on the necessity for British revolutionaries to be absolutely clear about the nature of the various political trends within the labour movement. Much to the indignation of his social-democratic critics -Poverty and Equality in Britain by J. C. Kincaid (Penguin Books 60p.)/Phil Lee This book is a goldmine of information. It reveals how certain crucial aspects of the British 'welfare state' actually operate at the expense of the working class and in the interests of the capitalist class.
For example, the author traces the history of the Supplementary Benefits Commission's "subsistence level and shows how inadequate this is as a means of drawing the 'poverty line". He then documents cases in which families below even this inadequate level are still subject to tax on their meagre incomes.
Much interesting material is brought together on the 'poverty trap' - where increased wages can result in such drastic cut backs in social benefits that families suffer a net loss in income. For example, a man with four children earning £20 a week who gets a wage rise of £l a week will end up 30p a week worse off after his social benefits have been reduced to take account of his wage rise!
MYTHS Much of this information is already well-known, but it is available here in a handy form. However the book's major aim is to attack the pro-capitalist myths that surround the operation of the "welfare state.
The most common of these argues that the welfare system operates like a giant funnel Red Weekly 14 September Page 6 like H.N. Brailsford and George Lansbury -Trotsky exposed all the fallacies and hypocrisy which marked the pacifism and 'Christian Socialism' of Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald and his followers. Nor did he water down his criticisms of the trade union "lefts' - men like miners' leader A.J. Cook and A.A. Purcell - whose left-wing stance on certain questions he saw as simply a mask hiding the fact that they would never be prepared for a head-on confrontation with the ruling class and the capitalist state. What Trotsky had to say then about the trade union 'left' could be said equally well of their present-day counterparts, the Joneses, Scanlons and Heffers of the labour movement. The left criticises the government within such limits as do not interfere with its role as exploiter and robber. The left gives expression to the dissatisfaction of the masses within these limits, so as to restrain them from revolutionary action.' ANGLO-RUSSIAN TRADE UNION COMMITTEE Immediately after the betrayal of the 1926 General Strike by the TUC leadership, the question of Britain became a central issue in the debate between the Stalinist leadership of the Soviet Communist Party and the emerging Left Opposition. The Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee - on which the class traitors Mounted police disperse strikers at the Elaphant & Castle during the General Strike of 1926 of the TUC sat alongside the leaders of the Russian trade union movement - was kept going by the Stalinists all during the General Strike. It was not until September 1927 that this body collapsed - and then only because the British members, having got.what they wanted, now found the Committee an embarrassment and walked out.
Trotsky conducted an insistent campaign against the Anglo-Russian Committee after May 1926 because, like the Stalinist policy of forcing the Chinese Communist Party to collaborate with the capitalist Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek, he saw it as a case of placing the supposed diplomatic needs of the Russian state before the cause of the international revolutionary movement. Ultimately this policy was to produce disaster after disaster both for the Soviet Union itself and for the world proletariat.
In the British case Trotsky argued that this policy politically disarmed a relatively weak British Communist Party striving to gain ground inside the most reformist labour movement in Europe. With complete accuracy he predicted that this collaborationist line would hamstring the work of the Communist Party inside the mass rank-and-file trade union organisation, the Minority Movement (which at that time had one million affiliated members) and lead to the collapse of that body.
TEST OF TIME The reviewers whose writings are reprinted in this book complained loudly of Trotsky's ignorance of British conditions and of the peculiarities of the British labour movement. While it is possible to find certain factual inaccuracies in his writings, and even one or two errors of prediction, it is clear that Trotsky's mastery of the Marxist method enabled him to make analyses which were far superior and more accurate than anything which came from the pens of his critics. His writings have stood the test of time. Despire many important differences, the problems facing the working class movement today have much in common with those of the period in which Trotsky was writing. For that reason we have much to learn from his analyses, and his writings are essential reading for all those concerned with the struggle of the working class in present day Britain.