Theses on English class society [This article is a section of the essay 'Origins of the Present Crisis', which originally appeared in New Left Review no. 42. It is reprinted by kind permission of New Left Review.] History and Class Structure: Trajectory
Capitalist hegemony in England has been the most powerful, the most durable and the most continuous anywhere in the world. The reasons for this lie in the cumulative constellation of the fundamental moments of modern English history. 1. England had the first, most mediated, and least pure bourgeois revolution of any major European country. The Civil War of 1640-49 remains the most obscure and controversial of the great upheavals which led to the creation of a modern, capitalist Europe. Never was the ultimate effect of revolution more transparent, and its immediate agents more enigmatic. The view that the conflict of the 1640s was a simple struggle between a rising bourgeoisie and a declining aristocracy is clearly untenable. The current alternatives - that the Civil War was the work of a fronde of discontented squires or that it was a sudden, transcendent condensation of "faith and freedom' (puritan and constitutional) in the cicar air of Stuart England — are still less convincing; the one is trivial, the other naive. Who made the Revolution? What kind of a Revolution was it? It can, perhaps, be said that it was a clash between two segments of a land owning class, neither of which were direct crystallizations of opposed economic interests, but rather were partially contingent but predominantly intelligible lenses into which wider, more radically antagonistic social forces came into temporary and distorted focus. Furthermore, the ideological terms in which the struggle was conducted were largely religious, and hence still more dissociated from economic aspirations than political idioms normally are. Thus, although its outcome was a typically bourgeois rationalization of state and economy, and its major direct beneficiary was a truc bourgeoisie, it was a 'bourgeois revolution" only by proxy. The main protagonists on both sides were a rural, not an urban class. The conflict between them revolved round the economic, political and religious role of the monarchy. It is clear that the inefficient, would-be feudal Stuart monarchy was threatening by its economic exactions to cripple the expansion of the rationalized agrarian and commercial capitalism which had been maturing in England for a century before 1640. It is probable, but not proved that a majority of those landowners who were dynamic and investment-oriented sided with Parliament, and that a majority of routine and rentier landlords sided with the King; it is, however, certain that the most
economically progressive regions of England were Parliamentarian, and the most backward Royalist. At the same time, the nature of the allies flanking each side magnified ard
clarified the logic of the division between them. Taking extremes — on the one side, the archaic clan society of northern Scotland, on the other mercantile capital, particularly in the City of London; this last formed a crucial component in the bloc which finally won the Civil War, providing the indispensable financial reserves for the Revolution, once under way, followed a classic course of radicalization. When military victory was won, the artisans and yeomen recruited to the New Model Army increasingly intervened to inflect the Army to the left, thus effectively severing it from the Parliamentary Right; but when their pressure began to threaten the franchise privileges of the landowning class itself, the landed officer clite crushed them The military apparatus was thereafter alone in a void. The Revolution had overshot the political intentions of its agrarian initiators (execution of the King, ctc.) but had been halted immediately it threatened their economic interests. It was in this ambiguous vacuum that mercantile capital, the only truly bourgeois kernel of the Revolution, inherited the fruits of victory. The economic policy of the Commonwealth did more for its interests than for that of any other group. This anomalous outcome was the culminating
complexly refracted and mediated character of the Revolution. Because it was primarily fought within and not between classes, while it could and did destroy the numerous institutional and juridical obstacles of feudalism to economic development, it could not alter the basic property statute in England. (There was not even a serious attempt at "political' confiscation of Royalist estates.) But it could do so - decisively -abroad. The immense, rationalizing "charge of the Revoultion was detonated overseas. The decisive economic legacy of the Commonwealth was imperialism (Navigation Acts, Dutch and Spanish Wars, seizure of Jamaica, etc.). Mercantile capital was its beneficiary. When political anarchy threatened after Cromwell's death, it was the City that triggered the Restoration — and a genicral settlement that confirmed it in its enhanced position.
The six decades from 1640 through 1688 to the end of the century saw the stabilization and progressive consolidation of the gains of the Revolution: essentially, the development of a dynamic capitalist agriculture and the rise of a mercantie imperialism, in a period of great economic boom. Thus the three crucial idiosyncrasies of the English
which have determined the whole of our Revolution,
subsequent history, can be summed up as follows. First, the Revolution shattered the juridical and constitutional obstacles to rationalized capitalist development in town and country: monopolies, arbitrary taxation.
restraints on enclosure, etc. The immediate effect of this was a dramatic quickening of the whole economy, from 1650 onwards. In this sense, it was a supremely successful capitalist
victory.
The
product of the
purveyance, wardships,
the condition of its appearance in England was the prior revolution. At the same time, however, it left almost the entire
existence of a class which was also capitalist in its mode of social structure intact.
exploitation. There was thus from the start no fundamental. Second, it achieved this by profoundly transforming the roles
antagonistic contrudiction between the old aristocrucy and the but not the personnel of the ruling class. No social group was
new bourgeoisie. English capitalism embraced and included evicted or displaced by the Revolution:' rather one section of a
both. The most important single key to modern English history class fought another and by its victory converted the whole class
lies in this fact.
A period of intense political conflier between the nascent to a new type of production. For the next hundred years the British aristocracy proceeded to perfect the ruthless and richly
industrial bourgeoisie and the agrarian clite was. of course,
inevitable once the manufacturers began to aspire towards rewarding triad system of capitalist landlord, tenant farmer and landless agricultural labourer, which destroyed the English
political representation and power. But this clash itself was peasantry and made Britain the most agriculturally efficient
profoundly affected, and attenuated, by the context in which it country in the world. But no carcer open to talents, no enlarged
occurred. The French Revolution and Napoleonic expansion franchise, no weakening of the principles of heredity and
froze propertied Europe with terror. For twenty panic-stricken hierarchy, followed this. Landed aristocrats, large and small,
years the new English manufacturing class rallied to the continued to rule England."
aristocracy: in that time it developed habits and attitudes it has At the same time, mercantile capital expanded on a new.
never lost. A whole era of war against the French abroad and imperial hasis. It had not been the main military or political
repression against the working cless at home marked the years force in the Revolution; it was its main cconomic inheritor. But
of its maturation. Two decades after the fall of the Bastille, it it was never subsequently able to constitute itself as an
celebrated its entry into history by cutting down working class internally compact and autarchic political force. Despite their
demonstrators at Peterico.
When the fear of the carly years of the nineteenth century rapidly increasing wealth, bankers and merchants remained a subaltern group within the ruling system, an 'interest" and not a
finally receded, the industrial bourgeoisic at last began to mass class. There was a constant haemorrhage of its profit and
its strength to socure incorporation into the political system. It pioneers towards the countryside, as successful merchants
was almost overtaken by a radicalized working class which had abandoned their background, investing in estates and
developed in isolation from it during the pitiless years of
class.
landed
Conversely,
of the
members
becoming
reaction. But with considerable belated skill, if forced an landowners had from the outset of the Revolution (and earlier)
extension of the franchise which nakedly demarcated the new participated in colonial and trading ventures (Pym, Hampden).
ruling bloc, including itself and excluding the proletariat. By
the same stroke, the Reform Bill of 1832 secured precisely that There was thus a permanent partial interpenetration of the
and
"landed"
"moneyed"
change which the merchants and bankers of the seventeenth maintained the political and social subordination of merchant
and eighteenth centuries had never managed — or needed - to
effect. The traditional mercuntile bourgeoisie had never capital, and gave the City the aristocratic coloration it has retained to this day.
achieved direct political representation in Parliament; because
of its peculiar situation and composition it had always been Finally, the ideological legacy of the Revolution was almost nil. Its most militant creed, radical Puritanism, was the great
content to delegate its "interest" to a section of the (Whig) loser from the Restoration Settlement. Henceforth it went into
aristocracy, It now entered Parliament for the first time, behind
its industrial successor, in the breach the latter had made. activism and becoming the repressed private creed of a
The next — and last — victory of the new middle class was the dis-established minority. The religious belief's which had seen
Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Convinced that cereal divine intervention justifying Rebellion when it was successful,
protection favoured landowners ar its expense by contracting saw it also - and irrevocably - condemning it when the
both internal and external markets for manufacturers, the Revolution collapsed and the monarchy was restored. Hecause
industrial bourgeoisie mounted a second triumphant campaign of its "primitive
, pre-Enlightenment character, the ideology of
for its abolition. This sectional conflict was the last moment at the Revolution founded no universal tradition in Britain. Never
which the industrial middle class played an independent role in was a major revolutionary ideology neutralized and absorbed
British history. It was its — brief and inglorious — high-water so completely. Politically, Puritanism was a uscless passion.
mark. The aftermath was illuminating. Fired by the success of
forward into an era of
the Anti-Corn Law League, its greatest spokesman, Cobden,
The eighteenth century sailed
launched a campaign against 'the eleventh commandment". unparalleled stability. The landed aristocracy had, after a bitter
become its own capitalist class. The
internecine struggle,
primogeniture, the basic device securing aristocratic control of mercantile bourgeoisie was contained and decanted into an
the land. The call for "free trade not only in corn but in land"
aimed directly at the root power position of the aristocracy. The honourable ancillary status, No ferment of ideas or memories remained. By a classic process of psychological suppression.
bourgeoisic refused to follow it. Its courage had gone.
Henceforth it was bent exclusively on integrating itself into the the Civil War was forgorten and its decorous epilogue, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, became the official, radiant myth
aristocracy, not collectively as a class, but by individual vertical
ascent.
of creation in the collective memory of the propertied class.
Even after 1832, it was noticeable that the new middle-class 2. England experienced the first industrial revolution, in a
used its vote to elect members of Parliament not from among its
own ranks, but from those of the aristocracy, thus reproducing period of international counter-revolutionary war, producing the earliest proletariat when socialist theory was least formed
the exact relationship between its predecessor and the landed and available, and an industrial bourgeoisie polarized from the
elite even after it had won the power to do otherwise: as late as start towards the aristocracy. The Revolution of 1640 had made
1865, over 50 percent of the House of Commons formed a possible the transformation of the body of landowners into a
single, intricately extended kinship group. Thus for a period basically capitalist class with powerful mercantile auxiliaries. It
one can speak of a delegation of power by one distinct social
class to another. But this phase was relatively short. It was was precisely this "mix" which, after a hundred years of
followed by a deliberate, systematized symbiosis of the two maturation, set off the industrial revolution: agrarian
classes. This unique fusion was effected, above all, by creating capitalism provided the economic and human surplus for industrialization, depopulating the countryside to provide
a common educational institution, the new public schools, investment and labour for the towns. Mercantile imperialism, dominating Asia, Africa and Latin America, provided the
I. A section of the smaller Royalist landowners, who did not regain markets and raw materials. The cotton industry, based squarely
their estates after the Restoration, forms the only exception. on control of the world market, from India (calico) to West
2. Throughout this essay, the term aristocracy is used to designaic. Africa (slaves) to the Caribbean (raw cotton), launched the
not the nobility, but the landowning class as a whole. This use blurs the take-off. The colossal industrial concatenation which followed
Its
the
new bourgeoisie
important distinction between the large agrarian magnates and the
owll,
inevitably produced
gentry, but space precludes discussion of this secondary division here. manufacturing middle class of Manchester and the North. Yer
which were designed to socialize the sons of the — new or old —
self-conscious and belligerent phase of British imperialism; but rich in a distinctive, uniform pattern, which henceforth became
it was not the most profoundly formative for British society.
The mercantile imperialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth the fetishized criterion of the 'gentleman'. The reforms of the universities, and more particularly, of the Civil Service (1854),
centuries, which provided the pre-conditions for the economic instituting a rationalized but rigidly hierarchic recruitment
take-off of the carly nineteenth century, and the diplomaticindustrial imperialism of the mid-nineteenth century, whose based on prior induction into the public schools, complemented
enforcement of international Free Trade had created British this central mechanism of assimilation. Meanwhile, as indusworld economic supremacy, were both more decisive. The trial accumulation proceeded and the relative weight of the
lasting contours of British society were already visible before agrarian sector declined, an increasing horizontal imbrication
the rise of the military-industrial imperialism of the 1880s.* Yet
place,
of landed, commercial and industrial capital took
it was this apparent apotheosis of British capitalism which gave Agrarian magnates opened up mines and invested in railways,
its characteristic style to a whole sociely, consecrating and manufacturing tycoons purchased estates and formed special relationships with merchant bankers. The end result of these
fossilizing to this day its interior space, its ideological horizons.
its diffused and intimate sensibility. It is, above all, from this convergent mutations was the eventual creation of e hegemonic
period that the suffocating "traditionalism' of English life
wriwal
distinguished by a perpetually recreated class,
dates.
homogeneity and actual — determinate - porousness." The
The multiform impact of militant imperialism on the second generation of any parvent bourgeois family could
economy and society of Britain can only be suggested here. It is henceforward automatically enter the upper class' via the
clear that the existerice, maintenance and constant celebration regulating institutions of assimilation. Thus it was that by a
of the Empire affected all classes and institutions in Britain; it unique paradox, in the supremely capitalist society of Victorian
could not have done otherwise. Equally obviously, its effects
the aristocracy became — and remained — the England,
varied enormously in kind from group to group. The main vanguard of the bourgeoisie.
single effect of the new imperialism in the period from For the first five decades of the century — the heroic age of
1880-1914 was probably the definitive consolidation of the the English proletariat — the working class evolved in a
practernaturally hierarchical character of the total social order diametrically opposite direction to that of the middle class.
and in particular of its typical model of leadership. It has been Counter-revolutionary war abroad was accompanied by social
argued that the imperialist expansion of this epoch (scramble siege at home (more troops mobilized to suppress the Luddites
for Africa, partition
than to fight the concurrent Peninsular War, etc.). Repression
phenomenon, the product of "pre-capitalist", aristocratic, circumscribed the working class and cut it off from the rest of
agrarian and military residues in the industrinlized states of society. Plunged in its own racked and famished world, it
Europe. This view is manifestly inadequate; imperialism was, fought bitterly for an alternative human order for itself. It was
of course, the inevitable climax of pre-Keynesian capitalism, the first proletariat ever to suffer industrialization: it had to
the product of a massive investment surplus and a limited invent
tactics,
strategy, ideas, values.
everything
internal market. But Schumpeter's imaginary cause was a true organization - from the start. It achieved no victories, but its
effect. The reflux of imperialism at home not merely preserved defeats were astonishing. In 1819 it organized the first national
but reinforced and sanctified the already pronounced personpolitical campaign of the post-war period, so scaring both the
ality type of the governing class: aristocratic, amateur, and bourgeoisie and aristocracy that it provoked a massacre and
"normatively agrarian.
exceptional legislation. In 1831-2 it formed the great heaving
naturally secreted by an agrarian aristocratic class. But by the swell of the Reform Movement, constantly threatening to
second half of the nineteenth century the English aristocracy capsize the bourgeois groupings adroitly navigating on its
was rapidly becoming as factually "bourgeois" as the English surface. From 1829-34 it produced in Owenism the first, mass
bourgeoisie was becoming 'aristocratic'. Moreover, with the socialist movement of the century. When this was crushed by
agrarian depression of the 1870s, the traditional economic base 1836, it rose again in an independent working-class movement
of the landowning class collapsed. Thus, just at the moment for Reform: Chartism, its final, supreme effort, lasted for a
when the 'atavistic" values of the landed aristocracy appeared decade. Wrecked by its pitifully weak leadership and strategy.
mortally threatened, imperialism rescued and reinforced them. in the end it collapsed without a fight. With it disappeared for
In doing so, it bequeathed to twentieth-century England the thirty years the élan and combativity of the class. A profound
governing class which has at length found its final, surreal caesura in English working-class history supervened.
embodiment in the fourteenth Earl of Home.
The tragedy of the first proletariat was not, as has so often
The major impact of imperialism was almost certainly on the been said, that it was immature; it was rather that it was in a
character and ethos of the ruling bloc. But its feed-back was not crucial sense premature. Its maximum ardour and insurgency
limited to this. A general internalization of the prestations coincided with the minimum availability of socialism as a
and motifs of Empire undoubtedly occurred. Its most structured ideology. Consequently it paid the price of the forerunner. For simple technical-educational reasons, the
3.
Le. exactly what Sartre calls a "detotalized totality. The development of socialist thought in the nineteenth century had
dominant bloc in England can be envisaged as a narrow, highlythe
to be
overwhelmingly
work of non-working-class
structured hegemonic class, with, beneath it, a large, diffuse, polyintellectuals. (The utopian socialism of Owen was, of course,
morphous reservoir - the entrepreneurial, professional and salaried just this). Thus, everywhere, it came to the proletariat from
"middle classes'. The rigorous structure of the one radically de
But it took fifty years of the experience of outside.
structures the other, as access is always open to the select few from the industrialization over a whole continent for it properly to form,
"middle' to the "upper" class: thus the middle classes in England have and the timing of its impact has been crucial. It is no accident
never produced institutions and culture of anything like a comparable
distinctiveness and density to those of the upper" or for that matter. that the youngest proletariats, of Italy and Japan, have been the
working class. The device of the two-party system has, of course, also most thoroughly won to Marxism; or that the oldest, those of
powerfully acted to inhibit the emergence of a clear, corporate identity England and Belgium, have rather similar political parties and
in the middle class, by denying it expression at the political level. It is consciousness. In England, in contrast to countries that
striking that England has never known an independent political
the
industrialized afterwards, Marxism came too late:
movement of the peity-bourgeoisie of any serious dimensions, in Communist Manifesto was written just two months before the
contrastto all other major West European countries. The special nature collapse of Chartism.
of the dominant bloc in England has undoubtedly contributed to
preventing this.
4. By 'diplomatic-industrial Imperialism' is meant the economic 3. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain had seized the
subjugation of other nations, usually secured by the threat of force, largest empire in history, an empire qualitatively distinet in its
rather than by outright annexation. "Military-industrial imperialism immensity from all its rivals, which saturated and 'ser" British
proceeded by straight conquest; it was a product of the fear of rival society in a matrix it has retained to this day. Late
European Imperialisms, in particularly of Germany, whose shadow
haunted the extreme patriots of the period. It thus marks the moment at nineteenth-century imperialism was the intoxicated climax of
which British world supremacy was no longer unquestioned. three centuries of plunder and annexation. It was the most
Britain 17
of China, ctc.) was an 'atavistic"
Originally this metaphysic was
prominent maniféstation was, of course, the new supercharged religion of monarchy which marked the late Victorian era inaugurated, Inevitably, by the creation for the Queen of the title of Empress of India. The Durbar, and its domestic derivative the Jubilee, became the symbol of a whole society preseht to itself, celebrating its own plenitude. The 'manifest' function of the monarchy was (by assertion) to unify the nation; its "latent" function was (by example) to stratify it The two were equally important: Probably at no period in peacetime history was English society so suffused with chauvinism and so glutted with rank.
orThese implicit normative patterns were probably the lasting imprint of imperialism on English life. Its explicit ideological expressions, although extremely virulent at the time, were ultimately more transient. Their omnipresence in this period merely serves to suggest how deeply acclimatized English culture became to the ambience of empire. All political groups - Conservatives, Liberals and Fabians — were militantly imperialist in aims; each differed only in its programme of implementation. The nascent socialist movement shared in the general jingoism. Webb, Hyndman, and Blatchford - Fabian,
and L.P. supporter respectively the most "Marxist"
influential, the most advanced" and the most popular spokesmen ofithe Left, were all in their different ways vocal imperialists. This did not necessarily mean that the working class became in any direct sense committed to imperialism. To start with itis very doubtful whether the working class of this period benefitted materially from colonial exploitation, although it did indirectly, of coursel from the difference in productivity between the British economy and its overseas possessions: Politically colonial emigration, which drained off many of the most vigorous and independent members of the working class and forestalled an explosive population pressure, was probably a more important safety-valve for English capitalism than its colonial super-profits. However, the primary impact of imperialism on the working class as throughout English society - was at the level of consciousness. The British working class was not in any profound sense mobilized for imperialism; to this extent, the options of many of its leaders were ineffective and insignificant. But it was. undeniably, deflected from undistracted confrontition with the relass exploiting it. This was the real a negative achievement of social-imperialismoilt created nao powerful "national framework for social contradictions which at normal periods insensibly mitigated them and at moments of crisis transcended them altogether. The enthusiastic participation of mostof the Left in the holocaust of the First World Warwas
spectacular product of decades.
only theo: most n
national-imperial mystification, dinasiuo 20l a non However, for the working class 1oo, the zenith of imperialism saw in essence only a consolidation of morphological changes Which had occurred long before it.
The shattering fiasco of Charism finally broke the morale df the carly proletariat; a period of intense shock and followed, For-thirty years the English working-class movement went through a kind of prolonged catatonic withdrawal. The most insurgent working class in Europe became the most numbed and docile: Ambitious attempts to create single national unions, audacious schemes for an autarkic cooperative economy, mass campaigns for universal suffrage *gave way to cautious, bien-pensant insurance, clubs and wavering support for the Liberal Party. The formal goal of Chartism, votes for the working man, was partially granted by a Conservative Government in 1867. But far from being an autonomous victory of the working class, this tactical manoeuvre of Disraeli's in a sense only revealed its absorption and defeat. The vote was granted to the working class precisely because there was no longer any danger that it would use it as some of the Chartists had threatened to - for the transformation of the entire social system. The Conseryative Government's attention was almost purely devoted to outflanking the Liberal opposition; it cared so little about the substance of its bill that it let it be amended indefinitely by a handful of radicals in Parliament.
No significant change followed the 1867 Reform Bill. The working class continued for well over another decade to play an
innocuous and subordinate role in the British political system Artisans and homé-industry workers increasingly gave way to a
The rapidly increasing surplus of the
Tactory proletariat
economy. after the Tirst period of capital accumulation, allowed substantial increases in wage-levels to be granted by employers this provided theleconomic basis of the tellormism of the period! te was not unit the 1880s that the working class really began to rocover from the traumatie defeat of the 1840s. By then the world had moved on. In consciousness and combativity, the English working class frad been overtaken by almost all its continental opposites: Marxism had missed it. Mature sociat theory was developed in precisely the years of the British prolecariat's amnesia and withdrawal. In France, In Germany, in Italy, Marxism took root in the working class; In England, everything was against it: the wounds of the past, the diffidence of the present, the mational culture of past and present. In 1869 the German Social Democratic Party was founded; in 1876 the Parti Ouvrier in France: in 1884 the Socialist Party in Italy; in 1889 the Social: Democratic Party in Sweden. In England, the first socialist sect, the Social Democratic Federation, was only formed in 1884 — and the first working-class party, the Labour Representation Committee. only, in 1900; over twenty years later than in France or Germany, The S.D.F. did not succeed in making a major lasting ideological irpact on the labour movement. Labour Party, itself created primarily as a defensive measure to reverse the effects of the Taff Vale decision, included no major Marxist component/ from its early years onwards. The remarkable lateness of its formation was a striking index al the degree of subordination of the working-class movement within British capitalist society. It was, then, in this sense that the crescendo of imperialism which coincided with the rise of the modern labour movement only confirmed changes which had preceded it-le an be
4. Alone of mujor European nations,
undefeated and unoccupied from Two World Wars, is social structure uniquely shouched by external shocks or discontinuities. The victories of 1918 and 1945 were the last of the special graces granted by history to English bourgeois society. War and invasion have been perhaps the greatest single catalysts of change in modern Europe to even the only armed revolution modern England has ever known was precipitated by the Scottish invasion of 1640, Collapse on the Eastern Front in 1917 set in motion the Russian Revolution, defeat and invasion in 1918 produced: the Spartakist rising in Germany: the Bavarian Communist Government, and Social-Democratic dominance in the Weimar Republic; the occupation of France rin: 1940 and the military campaigns in Italy from 1943-5 produced politicized resistance movements (of a mass character in Italy) with pronounced-socialist-communist majorities. In each case the advance of the Left-was checked or reversed by Fascism after 1930, and by Anti-Communism after 1947. But at some point the whole social order had been radically fissured and challenged, -and the restabilization which followed, brought about by the world cataclysms of the Depression and the Cold War rather than by internal changes, was qualitatively different from the siatus quo ante.
No comparable crisis of disruption, or transformation disturbed the placid waters of British social history, Even won, however, the two World Wars were the only serious forcing period of social change in English history in the twentieth century, The outbreak of the 1914-18 war providently aborted e potentially explosive situation in Britain, when the propertied class was deeply split (on an imperial issue, Ireland) and working-class militancy threatened to escape the control of a faltering and reactionary trade-union leadership. The long term effect of the war, however, was to increase the weight and strength of working-class organizations. Between 1914 and 1919 T.U.C. membership doubled and the Labour vote quintupled. The Labour Party, previously a small pressure group on the flank of the Liberal Party, emerged after the war as the main opposition party and five years later as a (minority) government. Simultaneously, the classical political formations of'amalgamated ruling bloe underwent a permanent mutation. The vortex of the war smashed the fimsy barriers between
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the execution of Charles I.
Britain
19
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Conservative and Liberal Parties, temporarily producing a actuating disorder, out of which eventually emerged the unified political organization of the Right — the Conservative Party. The survival of the Conservative rather than the Liberal Party was conditioned both by factional divisions within the Liberal Party and by the obvious desuetude of Free Trade doctrines in the Depression years. But in a more important sense, it revealed the continuing ascendancy of the aristocratic segment within the dominant social bloc. It was in the logic of the previous fifty years. Neither party had ever been a simple crystallization of distinct strata within this bloc — precisely because its nature precluded sharply differentiated levels or layers within it. But the Liberal Party had always tended towards a greater proportionate bourgeois, and the Conservative Party a greater proportionate aristocratic, admixture. The ideologies of the two parties had usually, although not always, over-expressed this difference. The eclipse of the one and the triumph of the other signified the final 'feudalization" of the ideology and internal protocol of the dominant bloc.! The Liberal Party, despite the initial advantage of a greater proximity to the centre of gravity of future parliamentary politics, lost because its identity was finally so much weaker. Necessarily so: when real danger threatened and a single party of the Right became imperative, proto-reformist velleities were no match for centuries of aureoled tradition. By the twenties, the parliamentary system had for the first time in its long and trompe l'oeil history become the arena of a genuine class confrontation. Under post-war conditions the Labour Party swiftly rose in strength and attractive power. Its seats in the House of Commons increased from 60 in 1919 to 191 in 1924, when it formed its short-lived first minority government, and then - after losses in the election of that year — to 287 in 1929, when it formed its second government, also a minority but this time as the strongest party. Within two years this Labour Government collapsed - more completely and ignominiously than any other Social Democratic government has ever done. Vast Conservative majorities dominated the whole of the next decade. The first cycle of the Labour Party's history was brought to an end by the outbreak of the Second The 1939-45 War opened the second cycle, which reproduced with remarkable similarity the timing and movement of the first. Again the tremendous pressures of the war effected a sudden, qualitative leap forward in British history. For the first
and only time in this century, an appreciable redistribution of income took place, secondary education was generalized, and the foundations of the Welfare State were Inid. The 1945 election confirmed these changes, when the Labour Party won a large absolute majority. This time, both its clectoral strength and its legislative achievements (creation of the National Health Service, socialization of fuel and transport, etc.) were much greater than those of its ephemeral governments after the First World War. Its development was thus more accurately spiral, rather than truly cyclical. But at a higher level, almost exactly the same sequence was repeated. The period of upsurge was brief and rapidly dissipated. The Labour Government fell in 1951, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster of 1931, in analogous circumstances of economic crisis, political division and ideological demoralizntion. The result was, once again, an uninterrupted decade of Conservative rule. In fifly years, such was the total change since the advent of political democracy, in a country where the manual working class constitutes an overwhelming sociological majority of the population. The distinetive facets of English class structure, evolved over three centuries, can thus be summed up as follows After a bitter, cathartic revolution, which transformed the structure but not the superstructures of English society, a landed aristocracy, underpinned by a powerful mercantile
became the first dominant capitalist class in affinal group,
Britain. This dynamie agrarian capitalism expelled the English peasantry from history. Its success was economically the floor' and sociologically the 'ceiling' of the rise of the inchestral
Undisturbed by a feudal state, terrified of the bourgeoisie.
French Revolution and its own proletarial, mesmerized by the prestige and authority of the landed class, the bourgeoisie won Two modest victories, lost its nerve and ended by losing its
The late Victorian era and the high noon of imperialism welded aristocracy and bourgeoisie together in a single social bloc. The working class fought pussionately and unaided aguinst the advent of industrial capitalism; its extreme exhaustion after successive defeats was the measure of its efforts. Henceforward it evolved, separate bur subordinale, within the apparenily unshukeable structure of British capitalism, unable, despite its great numerical superiority, to transform the fundamental nature of British society
5. "Feudal" only metaphorically, of course.
Britain
LEON TROTSKY
Britain and Russia
it were, to the small amount of survivals of barbarism in those | The article below is part of a speech entitled Through What
countries. On this idea is built up the entire philosophy of Stage Are We Passing', delivered by Trotsky on 21 June 1924
international Menshevism. Allow me to deal, even though only and reprinted in the collection Zapad i Vostok (West and Fast),
in very general terms, with this question, which is of the highest Moscow, 1924. The translation, by Brian Pearce, first appeared
importance
in Fourth International, summer 1964. It is reprinted by kind
At the congress of the Communist International one of the permission of the translator.]
weakest of the European parties is certainly the British
Communist Party, The American party is even weaker, truc
but we are talking for the moment only about Europe. The The Strength of the Communist Party and the Level of Culture
strongest party is our party. Then comes the German party, and in a Country
then the French. What in reality explains the fact that in such a
powerful, cultured, educated, civilized, etc. When I spoke recently ar Sokolniki, at the jubilee gathering of
Britain, the Communist party still exists as a mere propagandist educational workers, I was asked a question of great
society, not yet possessing the power to play an active part in importance in relation to principles, a question closely
politics? In order to answer in a radical way the explanation connected both with the international situation, in the widest
at first glance so simple and fitting — that Communism is sense of the word, and with the Fifth Congress of the
directly proportionate to backwardness and barbarism, Communist International which is now taking place. And
explanation which expresses the whole wisdom of Menshevism, instead of making a hundred-and-first or thousand-and-first
the
describe
so-called
comprehensively
attempt
I will recall a few other phenomena and institutions in the life of
Great Britain. In Britain, there is — T ask you not to forget it — 'international situation", I am going to give, even though only
a monarchy, whereas there is none here or in France or in in broad outline, an answer to that question of principle which
Germany. Now, a monarchy cannot be depicted from any point was put to me at Sokolniki and which I will now tell you abour.
of view as an expression of the highest culture, as one of the The note I received is in my pocket — here it is: 'Comrade
highest attainments of mankind — even MacDonald doesn't do Trotsky, please explain why the most advanced capitalist countries have the weakest Communist parties (USA. Britain)
thai, he keeps quiet about it, politely and diplomatically holds
his tongue, and doesn't say that a sign of the high cultural level and are furthest from the social revolution. This problem
of Britain is that there, in contrast to barbarous Russia, they worries me very much and 1 request you to explain it.! That is the question.
have a monarchy. In Britain there is still to this day an The answer to it is the key to the international question,
aristocracy enjaying distinctions of rank. There is a House of
Lords. In Britain, finally, the church, or rather the churches, broadly understood, that is, both from the standpoint of the
wield tremendous influence in all spheres of life. There is no relations betwcen the various states and the relations between
country in Europe where church influence in political, social the capitalist states and the Soviet Republic and from the
and family life is so great as in Great Britain. Over there, for a standpoint of the development of the revolution throughout the
man to say that he does not belong to a church, does not go to world. In the last analysis these are, after all, two aspects of one
church, and even more, that he does not believe in God, and the same problem...
requires quite exceptional personai courage.
How then can it be explained that the most advanced and
So it is difficult there, in each separate case, to break through cultured countries have weak Communist parties, while, on
the old, dense web of hypocrisy and clerical prejudices and the the contrary, our country, which cannot, unfortunately, be
worldly customs which are based on this hypocrisy and these called the most cultured in Europe, has a very strong
prejudices. None of you will say, I hope, that the influence of Communist party, which rules the state? The writer of the note
the church or of the churches on social consciousness is an says that this problem worries him. And that is quite
expression of human progress. Thus it turns out that in Britain, understandable. We know that international Menshevism.
alongside of the fact that the Communist party is exceptionally starting with our own Russian Mensheviks, builds upon this
weak, there are to be found such other facts, not matters of contradiction its chief "accusation'
against international
indifference for us. as the existence of a monarchy, an communism and against the Soviet Republic. You see, if this
aristocracy, a House of Lords and a tremendous influence of contradiction be taken in a simple way, so to speak logically. mechanically, then you are not far from the conclusion that
religion in politics, in social life, and in everyday affairs. And if
and
Communism
15
of... backwardness
expression
you approach Britain one-sidedly from this aspect, that is, from
the aspect of the monarchy, the House of Lords, the barbarism. The more backward a country is, you deduce from your first glance at the problem, the stronger is Communism in
aristocracy, landlordism and church influence, then you would
doubtless say that the most barbarous and backward country in that country, whereas super-civilized countries like Britain and
Europe is Britain. That would be as true as the statement of the America have very weak Communist parties, in proportion, as
21
country as