11.09.2014
Yes campaign: In false colours
There are unmistakable parallels between ‘Scottish socialism’ and ‘proletarian nationalism’. Jack Conrad issues a health warning
Before their acrimonious split, Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan - the founding duumvirate of the Scottish Socialist Party - portrayed Scotland as an oppressed nation akin to colonised Ireland, India and Kenya. Morally repugnant, historically dishonest ... but politically expedient. Scottish regiments, Scottish administrators and Scottish capitalists were joint oppressors of Ireland, India and Kenya. Despite that, McCombes-Sheridan protested that Scotland has languished under the English yoke for 300 years. Simultaneously, and no less absurdly, they boasted that Scotland occupies a privileged position in the global struggle for socialism. After regaining independence, Scotland will cut a messianic path to socialism. Marvelling, the people of other, lesser countries, will gain courage and seek to emulate Scotland’s “earthshattering” lead.1
Of course, McCombes was the real author of this left-nationalist fantasy; a variation on the old British road to socialism presented most fully in the pages of Imagine (to their everlasting shame, a book enthusiastically endorsed by John Pilger, Ken Loach and Tony Benn). Despite being pitiful in Marxist terms, this attempt to write a popular “socialist vision for the 21st century” remains the highest intellectual achievement of the SSP. That is why, crucially in light of September 18, it is still worth citing.
Sheridan, it hardly needs pointing out, was given top billing on the front cover because the SSP was busily promoting his personality cult. McCombes played the role of Svengali. Sheridan was his Trilby. The former has tactical flair. The other a needy narcissism. A potent, but volatile mixture.
How to assess Sheridan nowadays? The Comeback Kid of Scottish socialism? The Fallen Idol of Scottish socialism? The Clown of Scottish socialism? Given Solidarity - a Sheridan fan club desultorily backed by the Socialist Workers Party and the Committee for a Workers’ International - perhaps he is all three. What is certain though is the incalculable damage he has done to the cause of socialism.
As for McCombes, he has stepped back from front-line politics. He works as communications editor for the John Muir Trust (doubtless a worthy charity, dedicated as it is to preserving “wild places” in Scotland). And yet, unlike his former prodigy, McCombes remains committed to the SSP. A rump, which under the decidedly uncharismatic leadership of Colin Fox, has become little more than an external faction of Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party. Fox sits on the ‘yes’ campaign’s advisory board and, of course, banks on September 18 opening “Scotland’s road to socialism”.
Class and nation
According to the McCombes-Sheridan world view, Scotland is a proletarian nation. Britain is bourgeois. A concept eerily reminiscent of Enrico Corradini. A successful writer and dedicated man of the left, Corradini supported strikes and protest campaigns and as a result suffered arrest on at least 30 occasions. Yet in 1911 he helped found the Italian National Association, an organisation which drew into its ranks journalists, poets and artists who opposed both liberalism and orthodox Marxism. Corradini fused the direct action and general strikism of Georges Sorel with the nationalism of Charles Maurras.
Here, borrowing, twisting, inverting standard leftwing language, Corradini presents his creed:
We must start by recognising that there are proletarian nations, as well as proletarian classes; that is to say, there are nations whose living conditions are subject to great disadvantage, to the way of life of other nations, just as classes are. Once this is realised, nationalism must, above all, insist firmly on this truth: Italy is, materially and morally, a proletarian nation. What is more, she is proletarian at a period before her recovery. That is to say, before she is organised, at a period when she is still groping and weak. And, being subjected to other nations, she is weak, not in the strength of her people, but in her strength as a nation. Exactly like the proletariat before socialism came to its aid ... [and] just as socialism taught the proletariat the value of the class struggle, we must teach Italy the value of the international class struggle.2
Hence for Corradini, “Socialism is the philosophy of proletarian classes - nationalism is the philosophy of proletarian nations”. “Class struggle” is thereby subsumed by “international struggle”.3
Benito Mussolini, Joseph Goebbels and Gregor Strasser embraced these red-brown politics with a passion. “We are proletarian nations that rise up against the plutocrats,” declared Mussolini on the eve of his ‘march on Rome’.4 Strasser imagined himself answering the call “not of the proletarian class, but of the proletarian nation”.5 For Goebbels, the SA - Hitler’s storm troopers - were “a living, breathing symbol of the proletarian nation”.6 Italy and Germany were, of course, deemed proletarian nations, and as such categorically opposed to the bourgeois nations of France and Britain.7
With McCombes and Sheridan there has clearly been an unwitting, historically uninformed, but unmistakable, reflux of Corradini’s nationalism. Big business, the rich and powerful are damned for being “bitterly hostile towards the idea of independence”. Does this include Stagecoach tycoon Sir Brian Souter? He has, after all, just donated £1 million to the Scottish National Party. Presumably this ‘keep section 28’ backer of independence is an honorary proletarian.8
Nevertheless, despite there being a pro-independence Scottish bourgeoisie, we are told that the “cringing” British unionism of Scotland’s bankers, landowners and wealthy businessmen “conforms to a historical pattern” stretching back over 1,000 years.9 In other words, those above are historically constituted quislings. A bizarre claim, which presumably consigns the royal houses of Balliol, Bruce and Stuart to the sin bin of national traitors. By contrast, the independence cause is equated with the desire amongst ordinary people for control over their lives. A sleight of hand which apparently unites Jacobites, Red Clydesiders and ‘yes’ campaigners.
McCombes and Sheridan are at pains to stress that they bear no ill will towards English people as such. Admittedly, on a personal level, I have never experienced anything other than courteous and civilised behaviour from them. Yet, we find them peddling the psychobabble of national victimhood. Because of the size of England’s population - seven times the rest of the UK taken together - Scotland’s national identity has been “warped and distorted”. A “permanent sense of resentment” against its “domineering neighbour” results.10 Note the treatment of nations as single entities, as personalities. The break-up of the UK, so promises McCombes and Sheridan, will put everything to right - just like the disintegration of the USSR, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, etc.
Leaving the European Union would doubtless do the same for England’s “warped and distorted” national identity. The whole approach is redolent of endless division. There is, to state the obvious, no possibility whatsoever of the World Union of Socialist States coming about through such a horribly regressive programme.
Given their origins, most Scottish left nationalists consider themselves principled internationalists. A socialist Scotland, we are reassuringly told, would not be an “isolationist Scotland”.11 Oh no. It would not involve “rebuilding” Hadrian’s Wall or quarantining “ourselves from the rest of the world”.12 Rebuilding Hadrian’s Wall would, of course, mean extending Scottish territory southwards and the annexation of the bulk of Northumberland and a good slice of Cumberland. Seriously though, whether or not Scottish left nationalists aim for a little or greater Scotland is beside the point. Scotland might want to have mutually beneficial connections with the rest of the world, but would the rest of the world reciprocate? Fidel Castro did not isolate Cuba. But the US did. Why should a ‘socialist’ Scotland be any different?
The ‘tartan revolution’ comes with a left-nationalist warrantee. Scotland will not be “brought to its knees” by an American economic blockade. Scotland will avoid the starvation, poverty and wars of intervention witnessed in Russia. Hence, supposedly, Scotland, so continues the sales patter, will “stand up” to the forces of global capitalism and become an international “symbol of resistance” to economic and social injustice.13 Brave words. But is it mere left-nationalist braggadocio?
Apparently, Scotland can succeed where others have failed because it is “fabulously wealthy”. Scotland has the “material foundations” for a “thriving” socialist democracy. Besides “long coastlines” and a “clean environment”, Scotland has a “flourishing” culture and “legions” of internationally acclaimed musicians, writers, actors and film directors. On top of these blessings, Scotland has “land, water, fish, timber, oil, gas and electricity in abundance”. Better still, Scotland has a “moderate climate”.14 While a “fully-fledged socialist society” might not be possible in Scotland, nonetheless a “socialist government” could move in that direction by taking control of the wealth of the country and using it for the common good - oil, gas, electricity, railways, etc.15
Stalin famously countered Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev with reference to Russia’s continental proportions and immense wealth in natural resources. Land, oil, forests, gold, a population that stood at around 150 million ... and a very, very long coastline. He did not mention a “moderate climate”, true. Despite that absence, Stalin boasted, in his version of Imagine - the second edition of Foundations of Leninism - that Russia had all it needed internally. Not to achieve the “final and complete victory of socialism” - that required the efforts of other countries - but enough to “build up a socialist society”.16
Stalin might have been either cynical or naive in 1924. But, in 1928, responding to the pressures of isolation, he launched an anti-working class, anti-peasant counterrevolution within the revolution. Its name - the first five-year plan. Socialism in one country proved to be anti-socialism in one country.
From a safe remove of 80 years, Scottish left nationalists burnish political credentials by heroically associating themselves with Leon Trotsky and his uncompromising tirades against Stalin’s national socialism. For many this amounts to little more than repeating the stories of childhood. Eg, Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan got their political training under Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe. Yet, despite a Militant Tendency schooling, today they are promoting a Scottish version of ‘socialism in one country’. Obviously, Labourite economism flipped into its pro-SNP opposite.
Scotland with a mere five million people can hardly be expected to replace the Soviet Union as the non-capitalist superpower. However, if by some historical quirk a left-nationalist government came to power in Holyrood, international capitalism would act with frightening ruthlessness. In the immediate aftermath of October 1917 Winston Churchill attempted to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its cradle”. Would Scotland be able to withstand the kind of siege warfare conducted against Soviet Russia by the dominant capitalist powers? The only honest answer is, probably not.
The fact of the matter is that Scotland has a “dependence” on the global economy that is far greater than Russia’s. The degree of “dependence” being determined, in the last analysis, by the level of development of the “productive forces”.17 Scotland is economically advanced; Russia was notoriously backward: a former colonising semi-colony characterised by “primitiveness of social forms and low level of culture”.18
Scotland’s £132 billion gross domestic product is underpinned by “banking, whisky and oil.” In total the kingdom exports £26 billion worth of goods and services internationally.19 So some 20% of GDP comes from overseas markets - the US, Netherlands, France, Germany and Norway ranking at the top.20 By contrast, in 1913, exports accounted for “less than 3%” of Russian GDP.21 Leaving aside oil and gas, Scottish exports to the “rest of the UK” amount to £47.6 billion.22 Hence, if the “rest of the UK” were a foreign country, roughly 55% of its GDP would be accounted for by exports. Then there are imports: computers, finished steel, electronic components, cars, tobacco, timber, aircraft parts, foodstuffs, etc. In money terms £59.4 billion comes in from the rest of the UK (£20.6 billion from the rest of the world).23 A position within the global division of labour which renders Scotland highly vulnerable.
If a left-nationalist Scotland really threatened the imperialist order, as we are told it would, what is to stop the EU and the US agreeing a range of sanctions or imposing a land, sea and air blockade? If Scotland were put under siege, it would surely be facing industrial breakdown, mass starvation and a population exodus within months, if not weeks. If that failed to bring Scotland to “its knees”, there is always a colour revolution or, as a last resort, armies of intervention. No partisan of the working class can afford to dismiss such a prognosis.
Poland
Unflattering though it is, McCombes and Sheridan stand in the same ‘socialist’ camp as Joseph Pilsudski and his Polish Socialist Party. Who was Pilsudski? In the late 19th century he was the paramount figure in the PSP and something of a hero amongst the leading circles of European social democracy.
The PSP adopted Pilsudski’s socialist-nationalist programme for the reconstitution of the Polish Commonwealth out of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires (the country had been all but partitioned out of existence by the 1815 Congress of Vienna).24 Needless to say, having a Polonised Lithuanian background, Pilsudski was biased towards a greater Poland: ie, “a federal republic of the Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian nations”.25
Superficially, this appeared to be in line with the global strategy expounded by Marx and Engels. Tsarist Russia, which had taken something like 60% of Polish territory, constituted “the last great reserve of all European reaction”.26 The tsar maintained his absolutist rule at home by ensuring the survival of little absolutisms abroad. Not that the role of Britain - the most advanced capitalist country at the time - should be forgotten. Russian tsarism and British capital were “the two great pillars” of European reaction.
Every popular movement, revolutionary uprising or democratic settlement faced the danger of being crushed by the Russian colossus (with the full connivance of its British paymaster). That is why Marx and Engels advocated freedom for a smaller, not a greater, Poland, and a “general war of revolutionary Europe” against Russia.27
It should be pointed out, however, that the Marx-Engels team was acutely aware that by the late 19th century Russia was rapidly changing. Defeat in the 1853-56 Crimean War, the freeing of the serfs in 1861 and the subsequent growth of capitalist relations of production were inexorably bringing nearer the day when the masses would decisively enter the stage of history. As a result tsarism was preoccupied by internal problems and less and less inclined to “engage in such activities as the conquest of Constantinople, India and world domination”.28 Russia was ripe for its 1789.
Polish uprisings in the 18th and 19th centuries were directed primarily against Russia. On every occasion the lead was taken by the Polish aristocracy, the szlachta. Not surprisingly then, the partitionist powers sought to liquidate the szlachta as a class. Russia incorporated the richest into its nobility; Prussia, meanwhile, fostered a bourgeoisie. The final solution lay in destroying the economic basis of the szlachta. Serfdom was abolished - in Prussian Poland in 1823, in Austrian Poland in 1849 and in Russian Poland in 1864.
Poland became in capitalist terms the most advanced part of the Russian empire. Trade unions formed in the 1870s and socialist groups - crucially Proletariat - briefly functioned in the 1880s.
Interestingly, the Proletariat Party took a militantly anti-nationalist position. Despite knowing the opinions of Marx and Engels on Poland, the leadership of the Proletariat Party - Ludwik Waryński, Stanisław Kunicki and Szymon Dickstein - favoured revolutionaries in Poland joining their efforts with “our Russian brothers”.29 The Proletariat Party established close contacts with the Russian narodnik organisation, People’s Will. The Proletariat Party believed that the Polish national question was gradually withering and Russia now held the prospect of revolution.
They were only partially right. Aristocratic Poland had become history. The peasantry were national, but passive. The bourgeoisie had but one interest - business. Nevertheless in 1892 the PSP arrived on the scene. It sunk real roots. Unlike the Proletariat Party it was no conspiratorial sect. The luminaries of European socialism were approached to endorse its call for the reconstitution of Poland. Most did: August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Jules Guesde, Antonio Labriola, Henry Hyndman, Eleanor Marx Aveling.
However, the PSP found a critical reception amongst important sections of the working class in Poland itself. Many, especially Jewish, workers had taken on board the anti-nationalist outlook propagated by the Proletariat Party. As a result the PSP camouflaged itself in the vibrant colours of internationalism. The PSP was an affiliated member of the Socialist International. But there was always an underlying nationalism. As we have already noted, the PSP sought not only a breakaway Russian Poland (Congress Poland). The goal was also to organise all Poles along national lines and reconstitute a greater Poland out of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires. That meant hiving off members from existing multinational socialist parties in Russia, Germany and Austria. Relations became tense, and often hostile.
Luxemburg
Though initially PSP members, Rosa Luxemburg and Julian Marchlewski vehemently objected to prioritising the national question. Indeed they produced a sophisticated historical analysis of Polish society, which, although it ran counter to the strict letter of Marx and Engels, provided the conclusions necessary for putting the workers’ movement in Poland onto a sound footing.
In 1897 Luxemburg wrote her The industrial development of Poland. She showed that the working class must inevitably become the main opponent of tsarist absolutism. Thereby the operative slogan ought to be unity against existing states, not the resurrection of national ghosts. Marx’s stance on Poland was thoroughly obsolete, she argued. Luxemburg even boldly ticked him off for advocating Polish independence back in 1848. Nevertheless, Marx’s method served admirably. Marxism, as Luxemburg stressed, is not a dogma, but a method of investigation and a living revolutionary practice.
Reconstituting the Polish Commonwealth was dismissed as being either reactionary or hopelessly utopian. Freeing Poland had to go hand in hand with freeing Russia. Russia “seethed with revolution” and could no longer be viewed simply as the bulwark of reaction.30 While tsarism decayed, a working class had begun to rise. Indeed the revolutionary deluge Luxemburg expected at any moment would sweep away tsarism and Polish nationalism alike. Or so she hoped.
Luxemburg criticised the Proletariat Party for its terrorism, its conspiratorial methods and lack of a minimum programme. Advocating socialism as the only aim disarmed Polish revolutionaries politically. Fighting for democracy and overthrowing tsarism would provide the bridge for uniting the Polish and Russian proletariat. Having done that, the “combined” working class movement would tackle the rule of Polish and Russian capital.31
Luxemburg’s polemical target was, though, the PSP. She brands it as social-patriotic, nationalist socialist and national socialist. The PSP relied on carefully selected words and phrases ripped from the Marx-Engels corpus … that and anti-Russian prejudice. Serious theoretical work was noticeably lacking. Certainly the PSP leadership showed no real concern for working people in Russia. Empty platitudes, yes, but in practice the PSP sought to divide a working class that was objectively being drawn together by capitalist development and which, in tsarism, faced a common enemy.
Luxemburg displayed no indifference towards the national oppression suffered by her fellow Poles. A frequent charge. On the contrary, tsarism’s barbaric treatment of the Polish nationality is roundly condemned. Nor did she adopt a dismissive attitude towards Polish culture. What was progressive should be defended and enriched by the working class movement. But Luxemburg was contemptuous of programmatic calls for national breakaways. She did not want Alsace-Lorraine separated off from Germany and returned to France. Nor did she want a reconstituted Poland.
Almost without exception every state in Europe had national minorities and overlapping populations. Germany, for example, contained Danes, Alsatian French as well as Poles. The German Social Democratic Party organised them all irrespective of nationality. The idea of splitting workers “along nationalist lines” was an anathema for Luxemburg.32
A year after the PSP’s formation Luxemburg and Marchlewski split away, citing its nationalist programme. Together they helped establish the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (later added to with the merger of the Lithuanian group led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, becoming the SDKPiL).
Was their decision to split right or wrong? Loyally contenting oneself with being a silent opposition within a nationalist socialist party would have been criminal. But establishing yet another ineffective sect was clearly mistaken. Despite Luxemburg’s reputation as a ‘libertarian Marxist’, the SDKPiL was run along authoritarian lines by her partner, Leo Jogiches. An opposition that fought openly, that had solid theoretical foundations, that cultivated international contacts, crucially with co-thinkers throughout the Russian empire, would, surely, have been far more effective.
The title of their ‘party’ announced that they would organise only in Russian Poland (and Lithuania). The SDKPiL had no interest in redrawing borders or damaging working class unity; and in 1906 it formally became a national section of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The SDKPiL being an erratic ally of the Bolshevik wing (in fact the Poles were in general closer to Trotsky).
Luxemburg’s anti-nationalist arguments were undeniably powerful. As a mere 23-year-old, she “enthralled and won over the great majority” of the 1893 congress of the Second International.33 Sympathy for her forthright internationalism combined with a growing disenchantment with the PSP. The 1896 London congress voted down the PSP motion for an independent Poland.34 Instead delegates opted for the Kautsky-inspired demand for self-determination: a change fully supported by Russian social democrats (but not the Polish social democrats).
This congress declares that it stands for the full right of all nations to self-determination and expresses its sympathy for the workers of every country now suffering under the yoke of military, national or other absolutism. This congress calls upon the workers of all these countries to join the ranks of the class-conscious workers of the whole world in order jointly to fight for the defeat of international capitalism and for the achievement of the aims of international social democracy.35
Frankly, Luxemburg overcompensated. She wanted to throw out the slogan of national self-determination, along with the nationalist bathwater. Self-determination was impossible under capitalism and undesirable under socialism. Neither being true, Luxemburg deserved the stringent rebukes she received from Lenin.
Lenin stood by the right of Poland to secede. But, alongside Luxemburg, he argued for the voluntary unity of Polish and Russian workers. In point of fact he insisted on unity as a principle time and time again. Eg, we find Lenin typically writing - on this occasion in 1916 - that socialists in the “oppressed nation must, in particular, defend and implement the full and unconditional unity, including organisational unity, of the workers of the oppressed nation and the oppressor nation”.36
So, whatever the sometimes heated exchanges that took place between Lenin and Luxemburg, they were agreed that objective conditions demanded the organised unity of workers - Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, etc, - in the battle to overthrow tsarism. Pilsudski, by contrast, strove for an independent Poland and an independent PSP. Russian “imperialist” revolutionaries were told to keep their noses out of Polish affairs.37 Lenin was consequentially loath to regard the PSP as a “genuine” socialist party.38 Quite right too.
ABCs
Most Scottish left nationalists, knowing the ABCs of European history, prefer not to be identified with Pilsudski - in May 1926 he led a Bonapartist military coup with the somewhat belated support of the PSP. No, understandably, they want to identify themselves with other, more acceptable, figures. John Maclean and Che Guevara have both served as backdrops for SSP rallies. Though Maclean and Guevara were brave revolutionaries, they wandered far and wide from the basic principles of Marxism. Gripped by “spy mania”, Maclean refused to join the CPGB when it was formed.39 He was convinced that British government secret agents provided the finances. Instead he founded a short-lived left-nationalist sectlet. As for Guevara, his politics owed far more to Maoism than Marxism.
Nevertheless, I have come across Scottish left nationalists who are prepared to defend Pilsudski and the PSP against Lenin and Luxemburg. Allan Armstrong, the Republican Communist Network’s principal spokesperson, “seriously” argues that Lenin and Luxemburg should have carried out Pilsudski’s programme of breaking up the Russian empire. Of course, that is in effect to say that Lenin and Luxemburg should not have been Lenin and Luxemburg. That, instead, they should have been Joseph Pilsudski.
Formulating things in this, the only correct, way, actually reveals that comrade Armstrong is dishonest, in that he refuses to admit that he himself is a Pilsudskiite. Though he calls himself a Marxist, that is patently untrue. Being positively committed to the break-up of Britain and the division of the world’s peoples, he is convinced that nationalities and nations will characterise communism. So he is, therefore, being perfectly consistent when he defends Pilsudski.
Incidentally, the RCN is a recognised platform within the SSP.40 Despite that, for the moment, the centre of its practical activities lie squarely with the Radical Independence Campaign and providing Alex Salmond with valuable leftwing cover (the “decisive referendum battleground” lies in winning traditional Labour voters41).
Not surprisingly then, all things considered, according to comrade Armstrong, Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s “political formulations” could be described as “failed”, and this was “only too clear in the case of Poland”. It was Lenin and Luxemburg who were responsible for handing the struggle for self-determination “to Pilsudski’s ‘national-socialists’ on a plate”.42 As an aside, we see once again the inability/refusal of Scottish left nationalists to distinguish between separation and self-determination. What comrade Armstrong means by self-determination is separation. An inexcusable conflation.
But let us examine comrade Armstrong’s argument. Did the politics of Lenin and Luxemburg fail? I think “the case of Poland” proves exactly the opposite. Lenin and Luxemburg were, by no stretch of the imagination, responsible for handing the struggle for self-determination to Pilsudski and his national socialists. Remember, Pilsudski was the dominant figure in the PSP, a party with had real roots in Polish society. By comparison Lenin and Luxemburg began with virtually nothing.
In 1904 discontent arising from the Russo-Japanese war saw PSP membership soar from 4,000 to 40,000. Pilsudski hurried to Japan and struck a deal with the Mikado, the Japanese emperor Mutsuhito. Poland would open a second front. Pilsudski established the ‘Militant Organisation’, which would stage an uprising.
However, the outbreak of the 1905 Russian Revolution changed everything. Separatism suddenly became irrelevant. Hostility to “overbearing” Russian neighbours vanished. Workers in Warsaw and Łódź took their lead from workers in St Petersburg and Moscow in what became a common fight to overthrow tsarism.
Also PSP members increasingly turned to the SDKPiL for theoretical and practical leadership ... and by their own volition adopted many of its precepts and slogans. The SDKPiL grew from a sect to something far more substantial (though it remained much smaller than the PSP). Pilsudski, however, suffered a bitter blow. “The pure nationalists, the ‘social patriots’,” writes Luxemburg’s biographer, “saw with horror their hopes of an independent Poland were ebbing away as fast as the Russian Revolution was advancing.”43
The PSP cleaved into two factions at its 8th congress in February 1906. The PSP-Revolutionary Faction, staying true to its nationalist programme, inevitably ended up abandoning revolution for militarism and diplomatic wheeler-dealing. Meanwhile, the PSP-Left Faction rejected the programme of national independence. In substance it adopted the programme of the SDKPiL. Poland should have autonomy within a democratic Russia.44
Notes
1. T Sheridan and A McCombes Imagine Edinburgh 2000, p187.
2. J Pollard The fascist experience London 1998, p14.
3. Quoted in http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:GW76fyFcl5oJ:www.warwick.ac.uk/~poscv/F%26N/Studnotes1/lect2.pdf+Mussolini+%27proletarian+nation%27&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=6.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletarian_nation.
5. JC Fest Hitler Orlando FL 1973, p111.
6. TS Brown Weimar radicals New York 2009, p50.
7. See N Marks Fascism Minneapolis 1997, pp21-22. J Goebbels ‘National Socialism or Bolshevism?’ in B Miller Lane and LJ Rupp Nazi ideology before 1933 Manchester 1978, pp74-77.
8. www.pinknews.co.uk/2014/08/22/snp-accepts-1m-donation-from-section-28-backer-brian-souter.
9. T Sheridan and A McCombes Imagine Edinburgh 2000, p178.
16. JV Stalin Works Vol 6, Moscow 1953, p111.
17. L Trotsky, German preface to The permanent revolution. Quoted in A Sennett Revolutionary Marxism in Spain 1930-37 Leiden 2004, pp54-55. For full text see www.socialistparty.org.uk/Trotsky/permanent/prge.htm.
18. L Trotsky History of the Russian Revolution Vol 1, London 1967, p21.
19. Financial Times January 29 2014.
20. www.scottish-enterprise.com/sedotcom_home/services_to_business_international/lis/aboutscotland/about_scotland-keyfacts.htm.
21. http://english.caixin.com/2014-07-04/100699663.html.
22. www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Economy/Q/pno/1.
23. www.scottish.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefingsAndFactsheets/S4/SB_14-07.pdf.
24. See JD Zimmerman Poles, Jews and the politics of nationality chapter 5, Madison WS 2004, pp106-25.
26. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p425.
28. DB Riazanov Marx and Anglo-Russian relations and other writings London 2003, p145.
29. Quoted in R Luxemburg The national question New York 1976, p65.
33. Emile Vandervelde, quoted in P Fröllich Rosa Luxemburg Chicago 2010, p34.
34. “Whereas, the subjugation of one nation by another can serve only the interests of capitalists and despots, while for working people in both oppressed and oppressor nation it is equally pernicious; and whereas, in particular, the Russian tsardom, which owes its internal strength and its external significance to the subjugation and partition of Poland, constitutes a permanent threat to the development of the international workers’ movement, the congress hereby resolves: that the independence of Poland represents an imperative political demand both for the Polish proletariat and for the international labour movement as a whole” (Quoted in R Luxemburg The national question New York 1976, p50).
35. Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 20, Moscow 1977, pp430-31.
37. JK Pilsudski Memories of a revolutionary and soldier London 1931, p32.
38. VI Lenin CW Vol 6 Moscow 1977, p458.
39. See R Pitt John Maclean and the CPGB London 1995.
40. www.republicancommunist.org/about.html.
41. The Herald September 4 2014.
42. A Armstrong Fight for the right to party Edinburgh nd, p24.
43. P Frölich Rosa Luxemburg New York 1972, p110.
44. In 1918 the PSP-Left and SDKPiL merged to form the Communist Party of Poland.