Mike Cooley on No ideological current can guide the working class of any country unless it serves the workers of every country. This bitter truth has been fought by every bourgeois and petty bourgeois "friend' of the British workers as Trotsky demonstrates in this brilliant collection of articles.
In the 1920s, the extreme left wing of British labourism was full of praise for the Russian Bolsheviks, was prepared to support everything they did, with only one little proviso: that what was good for the Russian working class was not necessarily good for the British; that Lenin's and Trotsky's tendency was excellent for Russia, but thefe is absolutely no need to build a movement on their line in other countries, and above all in Britain, whose working class is so peculiar that it needs its own special ideology. Thus argued Brailsford, an archetypal representative of this trend in the British Labour movement. He was a shrewd enough operator actually to write a foreword to Trotsky's book, Where Is Britain Going? As Trotsky points out, "Brailsford's foreword represents an intermixture of immoderate praise and moderate censure. The praise relates to what is secondary, the form of the book. The notions that "the instinct of submission to the will of the majority is stamped in the consciousness of the British people": that British religion is in essence progressive with its "traditions of free discussion, its democratic form, and its relative freedom from any other worldliness" and so on and *so forth; and that "naturally" Trotsky's Russian training and experience would not equip him to deal with these crucial and peculiarly British features of the working class movement. Revolutionary Marxism is fine for crude Russian peasants, but useless for the modern democratic and moral British workers.
In fact, of course, the Bolsheviks were only too well schooled in the "National Peculiarities' school of petty-bourgeois socialism.
And as Trotsky shows, the Russian friends of Brailsford used exactly the same trick Mike Cooley (far right) at C.A. Parsons demonstration high tempo equipment, as a result of which some workers have lost up to E15 a week.
On the shopfloor, numerical control tapes are eliminating some of the most highly skilled jobs, such as machine setting and jig boring, which are being transferred to white collar workers in the drawing office, while the operation of the machines is handed over to semi-skilled workers. Here the link between TASS and the AUEW is of crucial significance, while unions such as ASTMS can be expected to turn against the manual But as Cooley points out, in one respec at least workers can turn the effects of technological change to their own advantage.
"One of the contradictions for the employer is that the more capital he accumulates the more vulnerable it becomes.. In the past.
when a draughtsman went on strike he simply put down his 6H pencil and his rubber, and there was unfortunately a considerable length of time before an effect was felt upon production. With the new kind of equipment the effects of a strike will in many instances be immediate."
"Computer-aided design— Its nature and implications, "by Mike Cooley. Available free from TASS, Onslow Hall. Little Green, Richmond, Surrey. against the Bolsheviks as he did: only for them, Bolshevism was an excellent thing, just right for the German or the British masses, but unfortunately simply out of touch with the peculiar features of Russian development: the profoundly democratic spirit of the village commune and the religious radicalism of the Russian peasant!
In other words, the more British Mr Brailsford felt himself to be the more he represented an international current: the petty-bourgeois chauvinism which fights the revolutionary workers' movement in every country. But in another article Trotsky demonstrates a more subtle variety of the petty-bourgeois rejection of revolutionary Marxism: when chauvinism fails, even 'internationalism" can be utilised agsinst the international workers movement. In the twenties, Bertrand Russell turned his quick mind to this line of argument in order to attack Trotsky's analysis of the British revolution. Russell agrees that both religion and Parliamentary democracy are useless in the struggle for socialism. But, argues Russell, Britain is too dependent on the rest of the world to be able to make a socialist revolution alone: an economic blockade would starve the revolution to defeat and the American fleet seal off international support. Trotsky replies: "To make reference to the international revolution as a preliminary • condition for the overthrow of the bourgeois state in one's own country represents a masked denial of revolution. For what is the international revolution? It is a chain -and not an even one either - of national revolutions within which each one feeds the others with its successes and, in turn, loses from the failures of the others". Trotsky then applies the acid test to Russell's theories: its political consequences in other countries. It was used in exactly the same way by the Russian Mensheviks to stifle the revolutionary movement in Russia: we cannot seize power till the German workers mov. Russell says the British workers cannot move till the American revolution takes place. "But then wouldn't the American Russells tell us that proletarian TEACH-IN on THE NATURE OF RACISM AND REPRESSION IN BRITAIN Speakers include: Rudy Narayan John La Rose Terry Leander A. Sivananda and Tony Soares on The Case Against Grass Roots Sunday, 10 September, between 5 and 10 p.m.
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IMG Publications. 182 Pentonville Road. London N.1. (please add for postage) power in the United States would inevitably be threatened by the combined navies of Great Britain and Japan?" The essence of Russell's position is this: "The mensheviks of the different countries toss the right to revolutionary initiative back and forth with about as much skill as performing seals at the circus toss burning torches from one to another".
The Labour movement is still infested with Brailsfords and Russells, although they parade under different names. Take, for example, the Communist Parties in different countries: the Chilean Communist Party declares its support for the tactics of Lenin in the Russian revolution but insists that the peculiar conditions of Chile allow for the new "Chilean Road to Socialism'. There are, you see, the same peculiar democratic traditions of which Brailsford was so proud, etc. Meanwhile its friends abroad proclaim that Chile shows the way for their countries and that there is nothing peculiar about it. We shall see: when the Allende road in Chile is defeated, the Chilean CP will denounce the 'ultra-lefts' for sabotaging it by maintaining the line of revolutionary Marxism, and the British Communist Party will find new bogus arguments for its petty bourgeois line for the British workers.
This new pamphlet of Trotsky's is an invaluable example of revolutionary Marxist criticism of the false friends of the proletariat. In addition it contains a very important collection of notes on the situation in Britain during the months before the General Strike in 1926. Every militant should buy this pamphlet and study it.
*Problems of the British Revolution, by Leon Trotsky (New Park Publications, 3Sp)
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censure is directed against the essence". Trotsky proceeds to destroy Brailsford's
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