"The imperialist war revealed only too clearly that the
labour bureaucracy and the labour aristocracy had in the
preceding period of capitalist development succeeded in 
passing through a profound petty bourgeois degeneration,
in the sense of a vital exhaustion of all their mental
reserves. But the petty bourgeoisie preserves the 
<I>semblance</I> of independence until the first clash.
With one blow the war lay bare and strengthened the
political dependence of the petty bourgeoisie on the
great and greater bourgeoisie. Social imperialism
was one form of that dependence within the Labour Movement."
Leon Trotsky, "Prospects," <I>Where Is Britain Going</I>, 
(London: The Communist Party of Great Britain, 1926), p. 158-9.

[MC5 adds: The above quote from Trotsky before
he completely quit the revolution is correct and
if we substitute "Iraq War" for the World War I to which
he was referring, nothing has changed. Before the war, the
English people pretended independence, but once it started,
the polls showed they swung around to support. In any case, 
though there were only 36,000 troops left in England, no
one dared strike a real blow against the Iraq War, because everyone
knew the petty-bourgeoisie predominated.
<P>
The above quote is also remarkable for distinguishing the 
labor aristocracy and labor bureaucracy and referring to both
as petty-bourgeois. He did so again in subsequent pages. Today,
the Trotskyists tend to focus all their fire on the labor 
bureaucracy in order to let the much more numerous exploiters
of the labor aristocracy off the hook.]