A while back a friend of mine lamented how the US Left had a much more robust tradition of radicalism when compared with her country, Britain. There’s a long history of violent/armed struggle by socialists and other leftist factions in the USA that the UK never seems to have had.
Black Panthers, Venceremos, Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, even the old school labor revolts like the Battle of Blair Mountain. To my knowledge the British Left has nothing remotely similar to these things and what I’ve heard of the CPGB hasn’t been very flattering as far as their activity and messaging goes.
Are we both just missing this history of violent/armed labor struggle in Britain or is there really a dearth of radical activity from the British Left and why is that if so?
Not trying to smear my British comrades, to be clear. Just looking for clarification. I don’t know much about the history of British Labor.
This may be a result of Britain having the first labor aristocracy. Britain had the largest empire, and so its masses could live to a certain extent off the spoils of said empire, so had less motivation to revolt. After World War II, the US stole away that empire, but because of that labor aristocratic history, the British working class never did any revolts while the US had much labor militancy before becoming the imperial hegemon after World War II.
Now after becoming the imperial hegemon, and therefore the U.S. working class becoming its own labor aristocracy, the USA has had much less labor militancy, as to be expected from the British example.
The lesson to be learned here is that revolution is never going to begin from the imperial core, but only after the imperial core loses all of its imperial holdings, so is no longer able to pay off its people. Only then will imperial core people’s material interests actually become aligned with that of all other workers in the global south rather than with the empire.
Also many people were coerced to participate in imperialism by promising their part of the cake, aka property on stolen land.