For many, 2025 is a year of worrying uncertainty, with inter-capitalist rivalry provoking trade wars - and actual wars – and oppression, poverty, and the threats of both climate catastrophe and right-wing populism all on the rise.
With former mass workers’ parties - like the Labour Party in Britain - having long since abandoned even any pretence of socialist ideology, workers and youth looking for answers to this capitalist chaos can find them hard to find.
But one place to look - especially for those of us in Britan – and, as I’ll explain, for workers in the USA confronted with a Trump presidency too - is the short book that Leon Trotsky, one of the key leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, wrote 100 years ago, called: "Where Is Britain Going?"
Now that’s not to say, of course, that a now century-old book can provide instant answers. 1925 was not 2025 - then, the Russian Revolution still offered fresh hope to millions worldwide. The Stalinist counter-revolution in the Soviet Union was only just starting to take hold. Sadly, by the 1990s, that bureaucratic degeneration eventually led to capitalist restoration of these previously nationalised – although far from genuinely socialist – economies.
With capitalism appearing to be unchallenged as the only way to run the world, the leaders of former workers’ parties – like Blair in Britain - rocketed to the right and socialist consciousness was thrown backwards – and that damage has still not been completely overcome.
Contrast that to 1925 when even the right-wing Labour and Trade Union leaders had to refer, at least in words, to the need for socialism and Clause 4, printed on every Labour Party membership card, stated its aim as being “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. (Sadly, however, workers had already by then had the experience of the first ever Labour Government of 1924, and those fine words not being matched by actions!)
Certainly, amongst important layers of British workers and the left-wing of its political and trade union leadership, socialist ideas were far more boldly expressed than now – although – as Trotsky warns – often in a confused and contradictory way that needed to be challenged and exposed – especially by the young workers joining the newly formed Communist Party in Britain.
Sadly, Trotsky’s warnings against a policy of just ‘cuddling-up’ to the trade union left leaders, without also being firm in criticism of their weaknesses when necessary, were left unheeded. Instead, the British CP - under the influence of the Stalinists - adopted an increasingly opportunist and uncritical approach. That left the best trade union militants completely unprepared for the inevitable retreats that these lefts made during and after the General Strike that took place just a year later – in May 1926 – and was one of the factors that led to its defeat.
That’s important advice that still holds true 100 years later – especially when some parties on the left are happy to give platforms to some of today’s left celebrities – without also being firm in their criticisms of these lefts often unclear and inconsistent ideas about what needs to be done.
Yes, we need to engage in a friendly way with left trade union leaders and politicians – but not uncritically – it’s important to make clear demands on them about how they should use their positions to build both trade union and community struggles and the urgently needed new mass workers’ party.
While there are important differences, there are also some striking similarities between 1925 – when Trotsky was writing - and now, not least the inter-capitalist global rivalry that was accelerating after World War One. Back then, like today in 2025, a previously dominant capitalist power was being threatened by new competitors. Except while now it’s the USA coming under threat from other trading blocs, not least from the strength of Chinese manufacturing, in 1925 it was Britain, faced first with the threat of German industry – a threat which had led to WW1 in the first place – and then the post-first world war strength of the US economy.
In 2025, it’s the threat of China’s challenge to previous US domination that lies behind the protectionist moves by Trump and the jettisoning of Zelensky to cosy up to Putin instead.
Then - as now – the vital development that could take place on the basis of a global plan in the common interests of the workers of the world – and its environment – is being blocked by the capitalism’s need to pursue private profit, and the barriers erected by competing capitalist nation states.
But we have to take confidence that there is another side of the coin to the fear, division and insecurity created by Trump, Musk and their ilk – and that is that it will also provoke a reaction – not just from those immediately under threat but also from US workers themselves once Trump’s promises of better living standards turn out to be empty.
In the Preface to the American Edition of “Where is Britain Going”, Trotsky writes a few words of encouragement for us 100 years later (!) “For all its might, American capitalism is not a self-sufficient whole but a part of the world economy. … While driving Europe more and more into a blind alley, American capital is preparing wars and revolutionary upheavals which will then strike back at the economy of the United States with a terrible rebound. … The magnates of the American trusts, … oil tycoons and exporters, the billionaires of New York, Chicago and San Francisco are irreversibly, if unconsciously, fulfilling their revolutionary function. And the American proletariat - [the US working-class] - will ultimately fulfil theirs” (p.5)
People of my generation, brought up in the post WW2 boom, are coming to realise that we weren’t living in a ‘normal’ phase of capitalist development. During that period, world trade expanded massively (at the expense of the colonial world of course) and the profits generated meant that major capitalist powers could afford to grant concessions to hold back the threat from their own labour movements.
But this was also forced on the capitalist powers by the threat of their common enemy - the planned economies of the Stalinist bloc which had emerged strengthened from World War 2 – however distorted by the undemocratic bureaucratic rule which eventually led to their downfall.
Now, of course, all those gains – like the NHS, council services and homes, free education, decent pensions and so on - are all under threat. It’s not by accident that Starmer ‘joked’ with Trump that, while a chainsaw wasn’t quite his style, New Labour too were cutting “red tape and bureaucracy” and were “open for business”. Britain’s government is also planning a new wave of cuts to public services, on the grounds that there is ‘no money’ – except of course for weapons of war.
But the world known by the generation that grew up following the collapse of Stalinism in the 1990s can now also be seen to be only a brief period of capitalist triumphalism. For a decade or so, the US seemed to be the only dominant power in a unipolar world - but that period has now been decisively replaced by today’s unstable multipolar world of competing and fluctuating capitalist trading blocs. Instead of globalisation, each nation state is now fighting it out for itself.
But the US capitalists are going to face the same splits that took hold of the British ruling class at the end of the nineteenth century - splits that Trotsky discusses in the first chapter of his book. Dominant British capitalism had adopted "free trade” as its guiding principle – the watchword of the Liberal Party in its prime - in order to prevent any barriers to further exploitation and the ability of British manufacturing, trading & financial might to amass private profit. The wealth generated by a global Empire had allowed it to grant reforms to stave off opposition at home – like extended voting and trade union rights, and increased wages – reforms firmly denied to those living in its colonial conquests of course – whether in India or Ireland, South Africa or the Middle East.
But faced with competition from new rivals like Germany, who had invested in superior technique and industrial organisation, a protectionist trend emerged amongst the British ruling-class – just as it has in the US around Trump. The Liberals declined to be replaced by the Conservatives as the main party of British imperialism. In turn, that opened the door to the growth of the Labour Party as workers and their trade unions, instead of hanging on to the coat-tails of the Liberal Party, set about building their own working class representation instead. That of course is the history that we now need to repeat once more – to break the unions from what is now an entirely pro-capitalist Labour Party.
And here’s another Trotsky quote from 1925 that’s also relevant today. He explains how, before, “By rocking the parliamentary swing from right to left and from left to right, the bourgeoisie found a vent for the opposition feelings of the working masses”. (p.13) In 1925 the swing was between the Tories and Liberals – in 2025 between Tories and Labour - but, then as now, the lack of any firm social base for these capitalist parties opens a vacuum to be filled by new forces – yes, possibly from the populist right like Reform but, as long as the opportunity is taken, certainly from the left by the workers’ movement. Trotsky explains how (p.8), after a massive strike wave immediately following the First World War had been defeated “paralysed in the sphere of economic action, the energy of the masses was directed onto the political plane. The Labour Party grew as if out of the earth itself” – and, in the present situation, such a new mass party can grow quickly again!
The main parties’ lack of any firm social base stems from the fact that ailing capitalism – the system which those parties represent – is no longer able to deliver even mild reforms for working people - only cuts and attacks on living standards. And if British capitalism was being elbowed out by other capitalist powers in 1925, by 2025 its decline is even greater, its ability to withstand capitalist crisis even less. Rather than invest to compete with its new rivals, the British capitalists, perhaps more than any other, turned instead to the short-term gains of speculation on the money markets – leaving it even more vulnerable in a time of trade wars.
But we have to explain that the solution to that crisis is neither a return to “free trade” ‘globalising’ capitalism nor its "protectionist” trade war version – but only through collective ownership and a democratic socialist plan of the world economy. That’s a conclusion that the world’s working class and poor need to reach – and act upon – and its leading layers – those coming together, even for now in small numbers, in parties like the Socialist Party – need to assist them in doing so.
Of course, the Labour Party was always a living contradiction – it was a capitalist workers’ party - with leaders wedded to capitalism - as that first 1924 Government had shown - but with democratic structures that allowed the working class to press that party to act in its interests from below. But, 100 years on, those structures no longer exist – and the avenues that allowed Jeremy Corbyn to become its leader firmly shut off. Starmer’s Labour Party is an openly pro-capitalist party – even though memories of the role it once played are still clung on to by trade union leaders who, instead, should be building a new party to provide workers with their own representation and organisation.
While some of the specific Labour and trade union leaders Trotsky comments on might now be long forgotten, there’s lots to pick up from reading Trotsky’s 1925 book for yourself.
Trotsky warns how “throughout the whole history of the British Labour movement there has been pressure by the [capitalists] upon the [working-class] through the agency of intellectuals … and drawing-room socialists … who reject the class struggle and preach collaboration with the [bosses] … but that “those British labour organisations that are the most unalloyed [most solid] in class composition, namely the trade unions, have lifted the Labour Party directly upon their own shoulders. The [working-class] needs a class party, it is striving by every means to create it, it puts pressure on the trade unions, it pays political levies. But this mounting pressure from below, from the plants and the factories, from the docks and the mines, is opposed by a counter-pressure from above, from the sphere of official British politics”. (p.48/9).
And that’s worth thinking about in our struggle to build a new workers’ party – those pressures – from below and above – will continue to apply. As Trotsky notes that “the working class will in all probability have to renew its leadership several times before it creates a party really answering the historical situation and the tasks of the British proletariat” (p.42)
Trotsky has plenty to say in answer to those who claimed then – as we also hear from them now - that 'British workers won’t ever be ready for socialist change’ and that reforms can only ever be secured in Britain a little at a time, leaving fundamental socialist change - revolutionary change – as some distant aspiration. Trotsky points out that similar things were said about the supposedly submissive masses of Russia but how their outlook had been transformed by events to one of “criticism, initiative and collective creativity”. (p.31).
He acknowledges that the sudden development of a fresh Russian working-class from the village to the modern factories of Moscow and Petrograd, and the lack of any ‘parliamentary tradition’ had made it easier for them to overthrow capitalist rule in Russia in 1917 – but points out that the flip side of this economic backwardness was that it then made it harder to build a socialist economy after the revolution – and, indeed, as Trotsky later explained elsewhere, it was the isolation of economically weak Russia that led to the Stalinist counter-revolution.
In contrast, he explains that “the richer and more cultured a country and the older its parliamentary-democratic tradition, the harder it is for the communist party to take power; but the faster and the more successfully will the work of socialist construction proceed after the conquest of power. Put more concretely, the overturn of the British bourgeoisie is no easy task; it does require a necessary “gradualness”, i.e. serious preparation; but once having taken control of state power, the land, the industrial, commercial and banking apparatus, the proletariat of Britain will be able to carry out the re-organization of the capitalist economy into a socialist one with far less sacrifices, far more success and at a much quicker pace”. (p.27)
‘Where is Britain Going’ also provides numerous reminders of the concealed revolutionary history of Britain – not least the English Revolution of the seventeenth century that, under Cromwell’s dictatorship, provided the political foundation for the development of British capitalism. Even though its ideals may have been expressed through the religious language of Puritanism, it had boldly cleared the remains of feudalism and the idle rule of the court aristocracy aside, enabling the new capitalist class to lead the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of a global empire. And, to carry through this capitalist bourgeois revolution fully, the old state machine had to be completely broken, including by making a public spectacle of the execution of the King.
Trotsky discusses the revolutionary Chartist movement of the nineteenth century - described by Lenin (1919) as the world’s “first broad, truly mass and politically organised proletarian revolutionary movement”.
He also points out how the avowed belief in only “gradual” change by Tory leaders like Baldwin was soon put aside once the “gradual” emergence of Germany onto the world arena became great enough for it to become a significant rival to Britan’s global dominance. “From 1914 to 1918 Mr. Baldwin … categorically rejected the applicability of gradualness to Anglo-German relations and endeavoured to settle the matter by means of vast quantities of high explosive (!)” (p.19).
Trotsky points out that a Marxist view of history recognises that periods where the pace of change seem slow and drawn-out – perhaps like the one we’ve been through in recent years – can, as Trotsky puts it “go hand in hand with catastrophes, breaks and upward and downward leaps. The long process of competition between the two states gradually prepares the war, the discontent of exploited workers gradually prepares a strike.
Trotsky also astutely looks ahead to WW2, analysing how (p.10) “The development of military technique .. is reducing the tremendous historical advantages of [Britain’s] island position to zero. America, that gigantic “island” walled off on both sides by oceans, remains invulnerable. But Britain’s greatest centres of population, and London above all, can face a murderous air attack from the continent of Europe in the course of a few hours”.
It also discusses the role that a socialist majority in a British Parliament could play – pointing out that genuine Marxism has nothing in common with ultra-lefts who refuse to take the opportunities provided by putting forward a socialist program as election candidates and using the platform of Parliament or Local Council meetings to stand up for working people.
However, Trotsky also explains why, without workers’ action outside Parliament to overcome the opposition of a capitalist class under threat, no parliamentary vote alone will ever be sufficient to bring about socialist change – and that the bosss will use every means at their disposal to try to “put a brake on the activity of a [genuinely] Labour government, paralyze its efforts, intimidate it, introduce a split in its parliamentary majority and finally to create a financial panic, dislocation of the food supply, lock-outs, to terrorize the top layers of the labour organisations and render the proletariat powerless. Only an utter fool can fail to understand that”. (p.76) - and, sadly, those where exactly the lessons of the coup against Allende’s government in Chile in 1973.
He puts it like this: “If a truly workers’ government came to power in Britain even in an ultra-democratic way, the workers’ government would be forced to [defeat] the resistance of the privileged classes …. On the basis of a direct struggle, the trade unions would actively draw closer together not only in their top layers but at the bottom levels as well, and would arrive at the necessity of creating local delegate meetings, i.e. councils (Soviets) of workers’ deputies. A truly Labour government, would find itself in this way compelled to [replace] the old state apparatus … of the possessing classes and oppose it with workers’ councils” (p68/9). And, he adds, that it will be from the ranks of the trade unions that the new workers’ state will find its public servants, its administrators and managers of democratically nationalised industry.
But let me finish with the conclusion that Trotsky gives at the end of the First Chapter (p.16):
“The contradictions undermining British society will inevitably intensify. We do not intend to predict the exact tempo of this process, but it will be measurable in terms of years … not in decades. This general prospect requires us to ask above all the question: will a Party be built in Britain in time with the strength and the links with the masses to be able to thaw out at the right moment all the necessary practical conclusions from the sharpening crisis? It is in this question that Great Britain’s fate is today contained”.
And that’s the critical question for us too – can we build a Party that is up to the task?
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