The following is an introduction, written by HANNAH SELL, for a forthcoming centenary reprint of Leon Trotsky’s important book, Where is Britain Going?, which has as much relevance today as when it was first published in 1925.
Leon Trotsky, along with Vladimir Lenin the key leader of the Russian revolution, wrote Where is Britain Going? to try and prepare the young British Communist Party for the epic class battles which he could see ahead. It has many lessons for a new generation drawing Marxist conclusions today in an era of increasingly stormy events.
As Trotsky says in his autobiography, My Life, when he wrote Where is Britain Going? it was clear that “the fight in the coal industry would lead to a general strike”. Yet the book, Trotsky reported, was treated by the “official leaders of British socialism” as “the fantasy of a foreigner who did not know British conditions”. Just a year later, sooner even than Trotsky expected, the 1926 general strike erupted – the highest peak reached by the class struggle in Britain to date.
At every stage of struggle in the hundred years since it was written this book has had huge value for Marxists. Nonetheless, it is more relevant in 2025 than at any time since the era in which it first appeared. The ailing character of capitalism worldwide and in Britain, and the increasing bitterness of the class struggle, have far more in common with the early 1920s than any period since 1945.
It was in the post-second world war era that the working class in Britain won the establishment of the NHS, mass council housebuilding, and other gains. This was possible as a result of a changed class balance of forces which left the capitalist class compelled to make concessions in order to maintain their rule. Central to that was the strengthening of the Soviet Union at the end of the war – then based on a very distorted planned economy, with no elements of workers’ democracy, but still a counterweight to the capitalist powers. In those decades, however, illusions that capitalism could be gradually reformed into a just system were enormously strengthened.
That period is now long gone. At the end of the post-war economic upswing the capitalists worldwide launched a sustained offensive to restore their profits by wresting back past concessions and lowering the share of wealth taken by the working class. When the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe collapsed at the start of the 1990s, the offensive against the working class accelerated massively. Intertwined with the economic assault on workers’ living conditions, the collapse of Stalinism had huge political consequences. The capitalist classes worldwide, above all US imperialism, were triumphant – confident that their system was the only possible way of running the world and socialism was dead and buried, while the workers’ movement was pushed back and disorientated.
Multipolar world
But today we are no longer in that immediate post-Stalinist era. Far from being triumphant, the capitalists worldwide are looking on in despair at the mess their system is in. The US’s status as the sole world hyperpower is gone, to be replaced by an increasingly chaotic multipolar world. At the same time, while the consequences of the collapse of Stalinism on consciousness and workers’ organisation have not yet been fully surmounted, the working class is nonetheless beginning to re-enter the scene of history.
The points made by Trotsky in the first chapter of the book ‘the decline of Britain’ could have been written about the US today. He describes how by the end of the nineteenth century Britain, then the most powerful imperialist country on the planet, “was being elbowed out of her position of world domination and by the beginning of this century this had produced internal uncertainty and ferment among the upper classes, and a deep molecular process of an essentially revolutionary character in the working class”. The decline of British imperialism and the strengthening of its rivals – particularly the US and Germany – led to growing conflict within the British ruling class between ‘free trade’ and protectionism, with the ‘free trade’ Liberals increasingly marginalised as “free trade ran up against the superiority of German productive technique and organisation”.
By 1925 US imperialism had already pushed Britain into second place, and it has been the world’s foremost capitalist power ever since. Only after the second world war, however, did it clearly set the framework for the capitalist West, while locked in a global struggle with the Stalinist USSR. The period in which Trotsky is writing was ‘a multipolar’ one, with the different powers all jostling for their position.
Now we are back there again, with the US in relative decline, and therefore being compelled to turn away from globalisation towards increasing protectionist measures. With no way of overcoming its internal limitations, conflict on the way forward – “internal uncertainty and ferment among the upper classes” – is writ large within the US elite. So too is the ‘deep molecular process’ in the working class.
Trotsky’s preface to the US edition of the book concludes that while “nowhere today does capital feel itself so secure” as in the US, “the inescapable hour will strike for American capitalism too. The magnates of the American trusts, the great plantation owners, 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 will ultimately fulfil theirs”. Today it is very clear that the US capitalist class, above all in its most brutal ‘Trumpist’ face, is acting to radicalise US working class. It is far from impossible that, in an echo of Where is Britain Going?, Trump’s attacks could in the next period provoke general strike action on a scale never seen in the US before.
International backdrop
This wonderful book is rich in lessons, far more than can be covered in an introduction. When it was written, it was not only aimed at the Communist Party in Britain and the other sections of the Communist International. It was also part of the struggle being fought in the Soviet Union. The mass participation in running society that had characterised the first period of the revolution, always under constant pressure given its isolation and economic backwardness, was increasingly being replaced by the dictates of an administrating officialdom.
When the book was first published the Soviet bureaucracy, which was emerging as a caste around the figure of Joseph Stalin, had not fully consolidated its grip on power, and Where is Britain Going? was printed in a four-part series in the official Russian Communist Party newspaper Pravda. It was the last major work by Trotsky published by the official presses of the Soviet Union. In 1926 he was removed from the Politburo and in 1927 was expelled from the Russian Communist Party before being exiled from the Soviet Union at the start of 1928. Stalin’s policy ‘of socialism in one country’ was officially adopted in January 1926. This was a complete overturn of the approach of Lenin and the Bolsheviks who had seen the Russian revolution only as the first step in the necessary global struggle for socialism.
Even if the growing bureaucracy did not fully recognise it, Where is Britain Going? was taking up their mistakes. As Trotsky explained in his autobiography, My Life, “the book was aimed essentially at the official conception of the Politburo, with its hope of an evolution to the left by the British General Council [of the Trade Union Congress – TUC], and of a gradual and painless penetration of communism into the ranks of the British Labour Party and trade unions”.
Unprincipled shortcuts
This conception was manifested in the Anglo-Russian Committee. Officially established in April 1925, it was a bloc between the Russian trade unions and the TUC general council. Impatient at the slow development of the young and fragile British Communist Party, the Communist International under the influence of Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev (although the latter broke from them later in the year) looked to a shortcut of courting the labour movement’s lefts via the Anglo-Russian committee.
The result – as with all unprincipled shortcuts – was not favourable. The Anglo-Russian committee was described as a united front but the Communist Party, following the lead they were being given internationally, did not apply the united front method of ‘march separately – strike together’. That would have required consistently and clearly criticising the weaknesses of the left trade union leaders and pointing the way forward for the working class at each stage.
Trotsky warned that the middle-class left leaders could be radical about events in ‘far-off foreign lands’, yet for them revolution in Britain was utterly unimaginable. Instead, however, of systematic criticism of the mistakes and weaknesses of the left trade union leaders – vital in order to prepare the working class for what was to come – the Communist Party’s criticisms of the left leaders became increasingly muted for fear of upsetting the Anglo-Russian Committee. In the run up to the general strike this was summed up in the Communist Party’s completely mistaken slogan ‘all power to the General Council’, the same TUC general council that preceded – inevitably – to betray the strike.
Neither Where is Britain Going? nor any other of Trotsky’s writings – despite their brilliance – prevented the degeneration of the Soviet Union. As Trotsky repeatedly explained, “a political struggle is in its essence a struggle of interests and forces, not of arguments”. Ultimately, only the working class coming to power in another country could have reversed the objective conditions underpinning the growing stranglehold of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Achieving that in any country would have required the successful building of a party of the ‘Bolshevik’ type, with roots in the working class, and an ability to put forward a programme to take the struggle forward at each stage. Where is Britain Going? did not succeed in its aim of helping the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to become the “correct and resolute revolutionary leadership” that the working class required. Instead, many of the genuine working-class fighters in its ranks became part of a Communist Party that was among the most obedient to the zigzags emanating from Moscow’s Stalinist leadership.
Britain’s lack of room for manoeuvre
However, grasping the method that Trotsky was trying to inculcate into the CPGB is vital for Marxists working in Britain today. Some aspects of the book are even more relevant now than in 1925. Trotsky for example, talks about how, historically, the British capitalist class had given reforms as long as “through their world position” they “retained in their hands gigantic resources for manoeuvre”. By the time he was writing declining British capitalism’s ‘gigantic resources’ had lessened. But Britain was still the second most powerful power on the planet, with an empire that ruled a quarter of the world.
Today it has fallen to sixth place. The deep rot of decrepit British capitalism is summed up in its woeful productivity figures. In the first twelve years since the Great Recession of 2007-2009 labour productivity grew by only 0.4% a year in the UK, less than half the average among the 25 richest OECD countries. The weakness of British capitalism is reflected in the lack of confidence shown in the bond markets, which tend to punish Britain whenever global turmoil steps up. So, while the capitalist class can still make temporary concessions, even beyond what it can afford, in the face of movements that threaten its rule, nonetheless, the general picture is of increasingly brutal attacks on the working class, with serious battles needed for the working class to win even small concessions.
The long, inglorious decline of British capitalism has already affected the outlook of its working class. Many of the features Trotsky describes still have relevance, such as the empiricism of the British working class. Remnants of the deeply imbedded belief in British ‘superiority’ are of course still present in consciousness. However, when he describes how the “deepest passions” of the working class “have been so skilfully restrained and supressed by social conventions, the church and the press”, he is describing a different world, although the end of that sentence describing those passions being “diverted along artificial channels with the aid of boxing, football, racing and other forms of sport” remain more applicable! Nonetheless, when socialists today get frustrated by the effects, for example, of social media, it is worth remembering that, of those born in 1900 only 11% were ‘non-religious’ while more than 80% were ‘Christian’, with the big majority identifying as Church of England. By 2016 53% said they were ‘non-religious’ with only a tiny minority attending church even occasionally. Confidence in all the institutions of British capitalism – including the monarchy – is far lower today than in the 1920s.
Decline of establishment parties
The greatest fall, however, is in confidence in the establishment political parties. Trotsky talks about how, in Britain at an earlier stage, the stability of the capitalist regime was secured by “rocking the parliamentary cradle from side to side” via a division of “labour and responsibility between Conservatism and Liberalism”. By 1925 that had already become far more difficult for the capitalist class. Liberalism had declined and the Labour Party had grown “as if out of the earth itself”.
Today in Britain the ruling class has enormous problems rocking the increasingly dilapidated ‘parliamentary cradle’, with its two sides of recent decades – the Tories and Labour – both in deep crisis. The Tory Party is a hollow shell, hovering on the verge of extinction. Labour is now, unlike in 1925, a clearly capitalist party, and a reliable representative of the interests of British capitalism. It was elected, however, by the votes of only 20.1% of the electorate, the lowest share for any incoming government since 1918, when universal (male) suffrage was first conceded under the impact of the Russian revolution. Both the Tories and, especially, Labour have become more unpopular since the general election. Decades of squeezed or declining living standards and cuts to public services have created enormous anger against all of the establishment parties.
At this stage the main electoral beneficiaries of that anger are the right-wing populists of Reform and, to a lesser extent, the Green Party. The need for the trade union movement, which Trotsky describes as “the most unalloyed working-class organisations” in Britain, to repeat what was done at the start of the twentieth century, to lift a new workers’ party “directly upon their shoulders”, could not be clearer. Across the trade union movement that idea is being taken up by growing sections of workers.
However, there will undoubtedly be those that argue that trade unions are less central today than in 1925, and an allegedly broader ‘left party’ would be better than one based on the workers’ movement. As Trotsky makes clear, what is needed is not a ‘left party’ per se, but a party fighting for the interests of the working class. The trade unions remain the most ‘unalloyed’ working-class organisations in Britain, involving more than six million workers. Trade union density in 2025, at around 23%, is not of a fundamentally different order from the just less than 30% it peaked at in the 1920s, on the eve of the general strike.
Today, in many ways, the potential power of the working class is even greater than in the 1920s. Many sections of the ‘middle layers’ of society in the 1920s – including civil servants, doctors and others – were then overwhelmingly hostile to the trade union movement. This century their working conditions have driven them to increasingly adopt working-class methods of struggle, as the 2022/23 strike wave showed.
The attacks on workers’ rights over recent decades have also led to a much greater number of low-paid insecure workers who, at this stage, are often not trade union members. But this, in reality, is another indication of the similarities between today and 1925 when precarious working was the norm. Then too there were many sections of the working class who were inherently difficult to organise. The number of domestic servants had fallen from the 1.5 million – 4% of the population – there had been in 1901, but they still made up a significant section of the working class and, despite the isolated character of their work, could have been enthused by a Labour Party that determinedly fought in their interests.
Role of the trade union leaders
When Trotsky lacerates trade union leaders for defending the monarchy and bowing and scraping before the institutions of the British capitalist state, it shows how little has changed. Of the last nine TUC general secretaries, only two have not been knighted. In reality they have been ‘honoured’ for their services in holding back workers’ struggle.
No surprise then that, up until now, the trade union tops have managed to prevent steps towards a new party. The possibility of a new party was demonstrated even before the 2024 general election when half a million people signed up to ‘Enough is Enough’ during the 2022/23 strike wave, a campaign initiated by the union leaders Rail and Maritime Union (RMT) general secretary Mick Lynch and the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) general secretary Dave Ward. Those that joined overwhelmingly hoped it would lead to a new party, but its leadership were unwilling to take that step and the campaign dissipated. Had he been at the head of a new mass workers’ party it is unlikely that Dave Ward would have been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) as he was in this year’s honours. Of course it is still possible – as CWU members’ anger with Starmer’s Labour grows – that Dave Ward may be pushed to play a role in the formation of a workers’ party. Perhaps he will also follow the lead of Jack Jones – the left leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in the 1970s – and return his honour!
With anger at Starmer’s Labour government growing, the demand for a new party is reaching new heights. In the decades before Trotsky was writing a similar process had taken place, with trade union leaders remaining tied to the Liberal Party, or veering between them and the nascent Labour Party in a prolonged phase of ‘Lib/Labism’. “The ‘leaders’ of the British working class imagined for decades that an independent workers’ party was the gloomy privilege of continental Europe” yet, Trotsky explains, the pressure from below, “from the plants and the factories, the docks and the mines”, nonetheless forced the development of a new party, pushing aside the obstacles.
New workers’ party lessons for today
Trotsky was writing when the Labour Party was already in existence and had been in government for the first time the previous year. It was then what Marxists would term a capitalist workers’ party, with its leadership ultimately defending the interests of the capitalist class, but subject to pressure from its working-class base via its democratic structures. Nonetheless, Trotsky gives a firm answer to those abstract ‘revolutionary’ sectarians who today stand aside from the struggle for a workers’ party because they do not want a ‘Labour Party Mark II’. In raising the demand for a new workers’ party in Britain today we are not fighting for a ‘Labour Party Mark II’ but for a mass party rooted in the working class, which we will campaign to win to our socialist programme. Nonetheless, it is absolutely clear a Labour Party of the type that existed in 1925 would be a huge step forward in the development of working-class consciousness in comparison to the current situation, where the working class has no mass political voice. This was the approach that had been taken by Marx, and particularly by Engels after Marx’s death, who keenly assessed every step towards independent working-class political representation in Britian.
It was also the approach that Trotsky took in other circumstances where no mass political organisations of the working class were yet in existence. In the US, in 1938 for example, he explained how the need for the working class to have its own party was, “an objective fact in the sense that the new trade unions created by the workers came to an impasse – a blind alley – and the only way for workers already organised in the trade unions is to join their forces in order to influence legislation, to influence the class struggle”. And furthermore, in answering those that opposed the Trotskyists call for a ‘party of labor’, he explained that to fight against opportunism by “blocking a progressive step which can produce opportunism is a very reactionary policy, and sectarianism is often reactionary because it opposes the necessary action of the working class”.
In Where is Britain Going? Trotsky states the rotten role of the Labour leaders in 1925 with absolute clarity, concluding that, “if one takes the Labour Party only on the level” of its leaders “then it has to be said that they have come to complete the uncompleted task of totally enslaving the working class within bourgeois society”. Objectively, he describes the Labour leaders and trade union bureaucrats as representing “the most counter-revolutionary force in Great Britain, and possibly in the present stage of development, in the whole world”.
Does this mean that he dismisses the importance of the Labour Party? Absolutely not, because, “there is no other country in the world where the class nature of socialism has been so objectively, plainly, incontestably and empirically revealed by history as in Britain, for there the Labour Party has grown out of the parliamentary representation of the trade unions, ie purely class organisations of wage labour”.
The approach needed by the Communist Party
Both Lenin and Trotsky had argued that the young CPGB had to have an orientation towards the Labour Party. That was not accepted by all the forces involved who were themselves, especially initially, tainted with abstract ‘revolutionary’ sectarianism. The Communist Party had been founded in 1920 with around 4,000 members. It was a coming together of various smaller Marxist groupings that, inspired by the successful Russian revolution, wanted to join the Communist International. As Lenin put it, they were all “very weak, and some of them very, very weak”. A chapter of Lenin’s short book Left Wing Communism – an Infantile Disorder dealt with the arguments of some of the founding organisations, which were opposed to participating in elections, and of any orientation to the Labour Party.
On the latter issue, Lenin explained that – with the majority of the working class seeing the election of a Labour government as a step forward for their class interests – this approach would cut off the Communist Party from any hope of taking steps towards being, “the party of the revolutionary class, and not merely a revolutionary group”. To start to win bigger layers of the working class he argued that the Communist Party should approach the Labour Party with a proposal for a “compromise” election agreement to share parliamentary seats based on the number of workers who supported each in a special ballot, but with the Communist Party having complete freedom to criticise and expose the Labour leaders. A Labour government would clearly not break with capitalism, and there was no question of Communists joining the government, but by demonstrating their willingness to help “the Labour Party to establish its government sooner” and at the same time “helping the masses sooner to understand the Communist propaganda” against the pro-capitalist position of the Labour leaders, the Communist Party would make gains.
The first minority Labour government had been elected in January 1924 and evicted from office just over ten months later. At the time Trotsky wrote several articles brilliantly demonstrating the method the young Communist Party needed. In April 1924, for example, he wrote on the difficulties Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald faced without a majority in parliament, opposed by the Tories and the Liberals – with the capitalist class behind them, desperate to block any attempts to introduce a pro-working class programme. Trotsky “advanced the suggestion” that if MacDonald “were to appear in the House of Commons, or in the House of Lords, and say: honourable members, we need to make economies in the budget to provide the unemployed with necessary means and therefore the House of Lords is to be abolished, nine-tenths of the people would be behind him”. In another article the same month Trotsky imagined the Labour prime minister, “MacDonald walked into parliament, laid his programme on the table, rapped lightly with his knuckles, and said ‘accept it or I’ll drive you all out’”. If he did this, Trotsky concluded, “MacDonald would receive an overwhelming majority in any election”.
Instead, of course, MacDonald’s first government bowed down before the capitalist class, including using Tory strike-breaking measures against the industrial action that developed on the railways, docks and mines. MacDonald had demonstrated in practise what his Fabian ‘Christian socialism’ meant. He had proved himself “a benevolent bourgeois, a left Liberal who ‘serves’ the people by coming in from outside, or rather – from above”, who inevitably served the interests of the capitalist class in government, as he was to show even more decisively when in 1931 he split the second Labour government to form a national government with Tories and Liberals in order to defend the interests of British capitalism.
In 1924, when the Communist Party’s paper published an appeal to soldiers not to act as strike breakers, its editor, John Campbell, was charged with ‘incitement to mutiny’. Then, under pressure from below, the prosecution was suspended. This, along with the forged ‘Zinoviev’ letter – purporting to be instructions from the Chair of the Comintern to ferment ‘sedition’– was used to mount a red scare in the general election. Nonetheless, Labour’s vote actually increased by over a million to 5.2 million and, as Trotsky points out in Where is Britain Going?, the class composition of that vote was very solid: “As yet by no means all workers vote for their party. But it is almost solely workers who do vote for the Labour Party”.
By time Where is Britain Going? was written the Communist Party had attempted to apply the method of the united front to their approach to the Labour Party as advised by Lenin and Trotsky. In 1922 two Communist Party members were elected to parliament, Shapurji Saklatvala in Battersea North and Walton Newbold in Motherwell, both supported by local Labour Parties. Five times between 1920 and 1924 the Communist Party applied to affiliate to the Labour Party and was rejected. Following the collapse of the first Labour government, in 1925 individual Communist Party members were also banned from having dual membership. However, this faced major opposition from the rank and file of Labour. In 1927, for example, there was a conference representing 150,000 Labour Party members demanding the right of Communist Party members to join.
Say what needs to be said
However, such an orientation is only fully effective if it is combined with a clear programme for what needs to be done at each stage, and a preparedness to criticise the leaders for failing to take the necessary steps. This does not only apply to the right-wing leaders. In a sense it is even more important to point out the mistakes and limits of the left leaders, who generally have greater authority in the working class. The pressure from the increasingly Stalinised Comintern meant that the Communist Party did not clearly do this either in regard to the Labour lefts or the left trade union leaders.
Trotsky makes absolutely clear that this is not a question of abstract ultra-left denunciations of reformism, or a refusal to participate in ‘capitalist parliaments’, but rather a concrete programme for what is needed at each stage. In Where is Britain Going? he systematically annihilates the arguments of the Labour lefts in the Independent Labour Party (which was a Labour affiliate whose members included Ramsay MacDonald, but also others who mildly criticised the government from the left). Trotsky explains how, as the working class conquering power becomes more clearly posed, these lefts attempt to “evade an answer” and “substitute for the fundamental problem of revolution every kind of bureaucratic construction regarding the best parliamentary and financial methods of nationalising industry”.
His criticism is not, however, of their raising nationalisation in parliament. He even points out that “there are no grounds to reject in principle the purchase of the land, factories and plants”, rather than nationalising with compensation only on the basis of proven need, as we put forward today. His argument with them is the fundamental question that “this is a matter of life and death for the bourgeoisie”, which “will never let itself be strangled by a Fabian banking transaction”. The Fabian plan for a gradual, painless transition to socialism is, therefore, completely utopian because “to every really bold, even if partial, attempt at nationalisation the bourgeoisie will respond as a class. Other industries will resort to lock-outs, sabotage and the boycott of nationalised industries, that is to say, they will wage a life and death struggle”. That is why, Trotsky explains, the working class needs to seize decisive control of the main levers of power, including the major corporations and banks, in order to successfully begin to build a new socialist order.
Today’s task
The class struggle in Britain today is not yet at the pitch it was in 1925. The working class, as yet, has no mass political voice. The process that Trotsky describes of the working class “in all probability” having to “renew its leadership several times before creating a party really answering the historical situation”, has, in that sense, not even begun. Nonetheless, the foundations of British capitalism are massively weaker a century on, and the working class – today making up the overwhelming majority of the population – is potentially even more powerful.
Trotsky predicted that Britain’s revolutionary traditions – both from the English revolution which brought the capitalist class to power, and from the mighty working-class Chartist movement – would be reborn. In the stormy events of the following period, above all the 1926 general strike, he was shown to be correct. The Communist Party doubled its membership in 1926, but with a correct orientation it could have made far greater gains, as Peter Taaffe explains in his book, 1926 General Strike – Workers Taste Power, and prepared the ground for leading a successful struggle for socialism. That was not the course history took. However, the task we face in the coming period will fundamentally be the same as that posed by Trotsky to the CPGB, to build a Marxist party “with the strength and the links to the masses to be able to draw all the necessary conclusions”. Just as then it is on this, ultimately, that Britain’s fate will be determined.