06.09.2006

In revealing company

Jack Conrad draws parallels between 'proletarian nationalism' and the SSP and Solidarity in Scotland today

In their sillier moments Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan - even after the acrimonious split - both like to portray Scotland as some sort of internal colony, an oppressed nation akin to 19th century India, Egypt or Ireland. Morally repugnant, politically crazy. After all Scottish regiments, Scottish administrators and Scottish capitalists were joint oppressors of India, Egypt and Ireland. Simultaneously, and no less absurdly, Scotland is said to occupy a privileged position in the global struggle for socialism. After breaking up Britain, an independent Scotland will messianically cut an "earth-shattering" reformist path to socialism; marvelling workers, youth and oppressed of other, lesser countries thereby gain courage and seek to follow in the footprints of glorious Scotland.¹

Of course, it is comrade McCombes who is the real author of this national socialist fantasy elaborated in that dreadful book Imagine (to their eternal shame enthusiastically endorsed by John Pilger, Ken Loach and Tony Benn). Comrade Sheridan was jointly credited on the cover because the Scottish Socialist Party was busily promoting his personality cult. McCombes acted as Svengali. Exactly where Sheridan is heading nowadays is hard to guess. Scotland's Ferdinand Lassalle? Scotland's Derek Hatton? Scotland's Gerry Adams? But McCombes remains steadfastly committed to tartan socialism. Under his leadership the SSP has effectively constituted itself the left wing of Alex Salmond's Scottish National Party. McCombes banks on an SNP Holyrood government pushing open the doors to independence in 2007.

The poison runs deep. While dissenting from this particular strategy, the SSP's Republican Communist Network is just as firmly locked into the orbit of nationalism. The RCN is one of those platforms that refused to go with the Sheridan split (otherwise known as Solidarity - Scotland's Socialist Movement). Despite that, the RCN maintains a calculated distance from the McCombes-Fox-Green centre: it is an eclectic mix of left populists, national communists and revolutionary Stalinites.

Though the RCN likes to reproach McCombes and co for harbouring "an element of nationalism", this is offset, spoilt, ruined with attacks on the supposedly "ill-informed hostility towards the SSP emanating from the majority of the English left".²

The phrase "ill-informed" is used for purposes of distraction, of course. It is generally agreed that the criticisms of the SSP made by the Weekly Worker are very well informed. That said, surely nationalism - even just an "element" of nationalism - should provoke hostility from the authentic left. Whether that description covers the "majority of the English left" (if by that is meant the majority of the left in England) is highly problematic though. After all, when it came to the SSP's "element" of nationalism, the old Socialist Alliance, Socialist Workers Party, Committee for a Workers' International, International Socialist Group, etc approved, acquiesced or turned a blind eye.

If there is such a thing as being 'representative' of the RCN, Bob Goupillot is it. The words quoted above are his. Exactly what his politics are is difficult to tell. Nevertheless, despite being a transparently sincere leftwinger, he suffers from the same overblown and frankly ridiculous Scottish vanguardism as McCombes. Here is what he writes: "I and others wish that our success in unifying the left in Scotland might give hope and inspiration to others and that if we are successful in our enterprise our spark might light a prairie fire. This was the hope of Connolly in 1916 and Lenin the following year. Comrades down south must take some responsibility for putting their own house in order".³

Boasting about success in "unifying" the left in Scotland is a bit of a sick joke nowadays. An own goal. Hubris. Leave aside those still in the Labour Party and exactly what is meant by the left. The fact is that the SSP plunged headlong into a devastating civil war, cleaved down the middle, on the basis of nothing more substantial than Sheridan's sadly mundane sex life and the News of the World court case. Hardly a 1914, a 1917, a 1933 or a 1991. This shows how fragile, how unserious, how unprincipled the SSP was from the start. What follows from short-cut tartan socialism does not "give hope and inspiration". Halfway houses do not work. They theoretically blunt, blur and backfire. They produce a soft, flabby, touchy and badly undereducated cadre. They encourage personality cults and overblown egos. They engender trivial split issues. They do not set alight a "prairie fire" (a Maoist phrase). They disorientate. They demoralise. They fail.

In the midst of World War I James Connolly took his comrades in the Irish Citizen's Army into what he thought was to be a nationwide rising. He did not bother to debate, consult or pursue the doomed venture through his miniscule propagandist party, the Irish Socialist Republican Party. Easter 1916 turned out to be an act of revolutionary suicide. There was no popular mandate, no mass involvement. February to October 1917 was another matter entirely. Millions actively participated. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky led a successful proletarian revolution which did command a majority and did inspire and spread hope throughout the world. The left in country after country sought to emulate the Bolsheviks, albeit sometimes ham-fistedly - organisationally, tactically and programmatically. Putting our "own house" into Bolshevik order is something authentic communists consistently argue for and fight to achieve. However, building a mass Communist Party in Great Britain - and for that matter in the European Union - is not just a task for "comrades down south". A notion redolent with left nationalism. It must involve us all.

Proletarian nations

According to the Weltanschauung of McCombes and co, Scottish nationalism is proletarian, British nationalism bourgeois. Mao Zedong and his epigones divide countries in exactly the same manner and, though it may shock McCombes, the formula can be traced back to Enrico Corradini, the novelist and writer, who in 1911 founded the Italian Nationalist Association. The INA drew into its ranks anti-union capitalists, catholic die-hards, declassed intellectuals and snarling former army officers, all of whom were out to destroy both decadent liberalism and cosmopolitan Marxism. Stealing, twisting, inverting leftwing language, Corradini summed up his outlook in this way: "Socialism is the philosophy of proletarian classes - nationalism is the philosophy of the 'proletarian nations'. 'Class struggle' is therefore replaced by 'international struggle'."⁴ Subsequently Benito Mussolini and Joseph Göbbels took over his baton. For them Italy and Germany were proletarian nations, as opposed to the bourgeois nations of France and Britain.⁵

Big business, the rich and powerful are "bitterly hostile towards the idea of independence", writes McCombes in a similar vein. The "cringing" British unionism of Scotland's bankers, landowners and wealthy businessmen "conforms to a historical pattern" stretching back over 1,000 years.⁶ By contrast the call for an independent Scotland is linked to the democratic desire amongst ordinary people for control over their lives.

McCombes is at pains to emphasise that he bears no ill-will towards English people as such. Yet he promotes the utterly spurious notion that 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" by a "permanent sense of resentment" against its "domineering neighbour".⁷ Notice that he treats nations as single entities, as personalities. The break-up of the UK will presumably straighten out Scotland's damaged national identity - just like the break-up of Yugoslavia and the USSR helped to psychologically adjust its constituent parts? The break-up of the EU - 10 times England's population - will presumably mend its "warped and distorted" national identity and save it from its "domineering" neighbours in mainland Europe. There is no possibility whatsoever of the World Union of Socialist States resulting from such small-minded nationalist rubbish. Means and ends are intimately related.

McCombes's independent socialist Scotland would not be an "isolationist Scotland". Oh no. It would not involve "rebuilding" Hadrian's Wall or quarantining "ourselves from the rest of the world".⁸ Rebuilding Hadrian's Wall would, of course, mean extending Scottish territory southwards and the annexation of Northumberland: ie, tracts of land which today lie in England. Townsfolk in places such as Berwick on Tweed, Morpeth and Blyth will presumably welcome with cheers and garlands the Scottish regiments, as they march in. Are they to be claimed as unconscious brother Scots? The British army meanwhile sits on its butt and twiddles its fingers. Seriously though, whether or not McCombes achieves a little or greater Scotland is beside the point. Scotland might want to have intercourse with the world, but will the world want to have intercourse with Scotland? Fidel Castro's Cuba did not impose a trade embargo on the world. But the US did impose a trade embargo on Cuba. Why should Scotland be any different?

The 'tartan revolution' would not, we are assured, suffer the horrible starvation and wars of intervention witnessed in Russia or Cuba's isolation and grinding poverty. Scotland will not be "brought to its knees" by an American economic blockade. A socialist Scotland will be able to "stand up" to the forces of global capitalism and become an international "symbol of resistance" to economic and social injustice.⁹ Defiant words. But are they mere braggadocio?

Scotland can succeed, apparently, where others before it have failed, because it is "fabulously wealthy". Scotland already 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".¹⁰ While a "fully-fledged socialist society" might not be possible in Scotland, nonetheless a "socialist government" could move in that direction by taking control over the wealth of the country and using it for the common good - oil, gas, electricity, railways, etc.¹¹

Frankly this is threadbare and yet deeply revealing stuff. Stalin, for example, used to rebuff 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".¹²

Looking back over the decades to the 1920s and 30s, the SWP likes to accrue political prestige for itself by associating with Trotsky and his uncompromising tirades against Stalin's national socialism. Yet today it is helping in practice to build "Tommy Sheridan's fan club", though the politics of Solidarity are hardly distinguishable from those of the SSP "¦ and therefore Stalinite nationalism.¹³ The SWP's policy of piggybacking on the SSP and now on  Solidarity effectively underwrites national socialism. Shameful.

Stalin might have been either cynical or naive in 1924. But by 1928 he had 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.

An independent Scotland with a mere five million people can hardly be expected to replace the Soviet Union as the world's non-capitalist superpower. However, the same inner logic would arise. The fact that Scotland is an advanced capitalist economy, not a backward, colonising semi-colony, reinforces rather than diminishes that logic. Its ties of exploitation and dependency on the global economy are greater, not less. If a radical Scotland really threatened the imperialist order, not least Britain, the EU and the US - as we are told it would - what is to stop them imposing sanctions or blockades? Some 20% of Scotland's GDP derives from exports to outside the UK: the EU and the US ranking at the top.¹⁴ No partisan of the working class can therefore afford to take the reassuring nostrums coming from McCombes as good coin. There is every chance that his 'tartan revolution' would go the same way as the disastrous experiments in reformist socialism such as Spain and France in the 1930s and Chile in the 70s.

Would Whitehall good humouredly stand aside, as an SSP-backed Alex Salmond government organised an independence referendum? Surely high court injunctions would rain down, rules requiring more than a simple majority would be imposed and recounts demanded? Are we really expected to believe Britain will gladly hand over North Sea oil and gas to a Salmond-McCombes regime? As the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh's Iranian government in 1953 and the 1956 Suez crisis, etc, show, that is hardly the nature of the beast. Protracted and possibly violent disputes are likely. Retaliation and tit-for-tat counter-retaliation too.

Well before that, moves towards independence would surely be met with a panicked flight of capital and therefore a sudden explosion in unemployment rates. Today the financial sector accounts for 5% of the Scottish workforce or 113,160 people and generates "£5 billion or 6% of Scotland's GDP".¹⁵ Money can move anywhere in the world and does so nowadays at the speed of light. Scottish capitalists who rely on UK or EU trade are likely to shift operations faced with the break-up of Britain and a withdrawal from the EU. Others might stage a deliberate, coordinated strike of capital by laying off masses of workers, and perhaps they would play the potent anti-catholic card. Right populist mobilisations paved the way for the ousting of Chile's Salvador Allende government in 1973. Maybe skilled and professional labour would flood south. How to keep them? The German Democratic Republic planted anti-personnel mines, erected watch towers and built a grim concrete wall; Albania hermetically sealed itself off; Cuba relies on a shark-infested seas.

What about the military threat? The officer corps in the Scottish regiments - who are sworn to loyalty to the crown - might decide to stay loyal. Remember the 1914 Curragh mutiny and top-brass opposition to Irish home rule. There remains a strong Northern Ireland-Scotland link. Orangeism is not just an Ulster phenomenon. Britain would orchestrate paramilitary death squads and terrorism and, that failing, a coup. Faced with a key ally being strategically weakened from within and the prospect of losing valuable bases and economic assets, would the US not act in unison? In all probability an SSP Scotland would find itself compelled to plough precious resources into greatly expanding the armed forces and military capacity. That requires surplus labour. To survive, Scottish national socialism would have no choice but to discipline and exploit the working class. The SSP socialist liberators thereby find themselves turning into their opposites. Good intentions vanish into thin air.

Poland

The SSP combines reformism with nationalism. By so defining itself the SSP leadership has, yes, scabbed on the international revolutionary tradition. A tradition best represented by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky. Unflattering though it is, comrades Alan McCombes, Allan Green, Frances Curren, Colin Fox, etc  stand in the same 'socialist' camp as Joseph Pilsudski (1867-1935) and his Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna).

Who was Joseph Pilsudski? Over a century ago he was the leading figure in the PSP. Pilsudski edited and published its illegal paper Robotnik and initiated the PSP's armed fighting units. Formed in 1892, the PSP adopted his socialist-nationalist programme for the reconstitution of an independent Poland out of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires (which had between them all but partitioned Poland out of existence at the 1815 Congress of Vienna).

This was, it is true, in line with the strategic outlook expounded by Marx and Engels throughout their lives. Tsarist Russia, which took something like 60% of Polish territory, formed the bulwark of reaction. Every democratic movement, revolutionary uprising or democratic settlement in Europe faced the danger of being mauled by the Russian bear. That is why Marx and Engels advocated freedom for Poland and a war of liberation against St Petersburg. Not that they wanted to restore the old Polish commonwealth, which in the 16th century stretched far into what is now Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Establishing a democratic Poland within small borders was seen as a way to collapse tsarism and that was a "primary prerequisite" for the European revolution (later their writings were used - monstrously, illegitimately - by the right wing of German social democracy in order to harness workers to the kaiser's war machine).

It should be pointed out, however, that the Marx-Engels team - in particular Engels - was acutely aware that by the late 19th century Russia was rapidly changing. The freeing of the serfs in 1861 and the subsequent growth of capitalist relations of production was inexorably bringing nearer the day when the masses would decisively enter the stage of history. As a result tsarism was increasingly preoccupied by intractable internal problems and less and less inclined to "engage in such activities as the conquest of Constantinople, India and world domination".¹⁶ Russia was ripe for its 1789 and could thereby be transformed from a fortress of reaction into a fortress of revolution. Nor should it be forgotten that Marx and Engels also viewed Britain - the most advanced capitalist country - as the other bulwark of reaction in 19th century Europe. Toryism and tsarism together formed a counterrevolutionary system. So there was nothing fixed or mechanical about the Marx-Engels assessment.

The heroic Polish revolutions of the 18th and 19th century were directed primarily against Russia. On every occasion the lead was taken by the Polish nobility, the szlachta. In the 16th century this class managed to transform Poland into an aristocratic republic in which the largely ceremonial president called himself king. Naturally the serfs were ground down and exploited more or less ruthlessly. As to the 300,000 nobles - many of whom lived in gentile poverty - they acknowledged no relations of feudal dependence. No Polish noble bent the knee as anyone's vassal.

In contrast the Russian nobility under the tsars were state slaves. At a whim the tsar could put them to death and confiscate their estates and property. The Polish nobility were determined to avoid that fate. By 1655 the Polish state had all but ceased to exist. No army - the nobility refused to pay for it. No diplomatic service - the nobility was not interested. No laws - no-one could enforce them. Old Poland stagnated and rotted from within.

However, Sweden, Prussia, Russia and Austria saw Poland's aristocratic anarchy as their opportunity. The central and western provinces were torn away by Sweden, Moscow's forces seized the east and Cossacks ravaged Polish Ukraine and overran Galicia. Disaster was only put off by a turn to centralism and the return from exile of the king. But it did not last. Aristocratic liberty soon reasserted itself.

Understandably this liberty was perceived as a dreadful threat by the Prussian, Austrian and above all the Russian autocracy. By preventing the establishment of a Polish absolutism the nobility set themselves up as victims, especially of rising tsarism, which emerged from the nuclear winter wrought by the Mongol conquests of the mid-13th century.

Throughout the 17th century the Russian state systematically strove to gain military superiority over the aristocratic anarchy of Poland. In the 18th there began a series of partitions - 1772, 1793, 1795 - and popular rebellions and revolutions led by the szlachta. Napoleon's flight from Moscow finished Polish statehood for a hundred years. The Congress of Vienna to all intents and purposes abolished Poland. All that remained was the short-lived Free State of Krakà³w.

Yet Poland lived on as language, as catholicism and in the imagination. There were four full-blown uprisings in the 19th century - 1830, 1846, 1848, 1863. Each defeat sent a tidal wave of democratic and aristocratic revolutionaries fleeing abroad. Afterwards they were found fighting in the forefront of every revolutionary and progressive cause: Italy and Hungary 1848, the American civil war, Irish freedom, the Paris Commune of 1871, etc.

The partitionist powers sought to liquidate the szlachta as a class. Russia incorporated the richest aristocrats into its nobility. The Russian language was imposed, along with Russian law. Prussia emphasised the creation of a stable 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. The szlachta were finished economically.

Poland became in capitalist terms the most advanced part of the Russian empire. Trade unions formed in the 1870s and socialist groups - crucially the Proletariat Party - briefly functioned in the 1880s. Interestingly the PP took a militantly anti-nationalist position. Despite their detailed knowledge of the opinions of Marx and Engels on Poland, its leadership - Ludwik Warynski, Stanislaw Kunicki and Szymon Dickstein - favoured revolutionaries in Poland joining their efforts with "our Russian brothers".¹⁷ The PP established close contacts with the Russian narodnik terrorist organisation, People's Will. They believed that the Polish national question was slowly dying and Russia now held out the prospect of revolution.

They were only partially right. Aristocratic Poland had become history. The peasantry was national, but passive. The bourgeoisie had but one interest - business. Nevertheless in 1893 the Polish Socialist Party came onto the scene. The PSP united real sections of the working class. Unlike the Proletariat Party it was no conspiratorial sect. The PSP tried to revive the legacy of Marx and Engels on Poland. All the luminaries of European socialism were approached to endorse the call for the restoration of Poland and Polish independence. Most did. Bebel, Kautsky, Bernstein, Guesde, Labriola, Hyndman, Eleanor Marx-Aveling.

However, the PSP found a different reception from workers in Poland. They had taken on board the anti-nationalist outlook inculcated by the Proletariat Party. As a result the PSP had to paint itself in internationalist colours and highlight its socialist credentials in order to secure a mass following.

The PSP sought to organise in, and liberate, not only Russian Poland. The aim was to organise all Poles along nationalist lines and reconstitute Poland out of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires. That meant splitting off membership from the existing multinational socialist parties in Germany and Austria. Relations became tense and strained.

Luxemburg

Though initially PSP members, Rosa Luxemburg and Julian Marchlewski strenuously objected. They produced a sophisticated historical analysis of Polish society which, although it ran counter to the exact words of Marx and Engels, eventually put the workers' movement in Poland on a firm, Marxist footing.

In 1897 Luxemburg wrote her The industrial development of Poland. On the basis of this and other such studies she came to the conclusion that the working class must inevitably become the main opponent of tsarist absolutism. Thereby the operative slogan should be unity against the existing state, not the resurrection of ghosts. Marx's slogans on Poland were totally obsolete. Luxemburg even boldly ticked him off for holding the positions he did on Poland back in 1848. Nevertheless Marx's method served admirably. Marxism, as Luxemburg stressed, is no dogma, but a living method of investigation and a revolutionary practice.

Restoration of Poland is dismissed as anachronistic. It was either a hopeless utopia or it would be reactionary. 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. While tsarism decays, a nascent working class stirs. Indeed the revolutionary explosion Luxemburg expected at any moment would blow away both tsarism and Polish nationalism. Or so she hoped.

Luxemburg criticised the Proletariat Party for its terrorism, its conspiratorial methods and lack of a minimum programme. Putting forward socialism as the only immediate aim politically disarmed Polish revolutionaries. Democracy and overthrowing tsarism would provide the bridge for the united Polish and Russian proletariat. Having done that, the "combined" working class movement would tackle the rule of Polish and Russian capital.¹⁸

But Luxemburg's main target is the PSP. She damns it as social-patriotic, nationalist socialist and national socialist. The PSP simply contented itself with repeating the words of Marx and Engels "¦ that and anti-Russian prejudice. No serious historical and materialist analysis came from that quarter. Certainly the PSP leadership showed no actual concern for the working people in Russia. Empty words there were aplenty, but the practice of the PSP was to divide a working class that was united by capitalist development and which faced a common enemy in tsarism.

Luxemburg displays no indifference towards the national oppression suffered by her fellow Poles. On the contrary tsarism's barbaric treatment of the Polish nationality had to be ended. Nor did she display a nihilistic attitude towards Polish culture. What was progressive should be defended and enriched by the working class movement. But Luxemburg contemptuously dismissed general calls for national breakaways. She did not want Alsace-Lorraine separated off from Germany and returned to France. Nor did she want the reconstitution of 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 off workers "along nationalist lines" was for her an anathema.¹⁹ Class for revolutionary socialists is primary and organising against the existing state the first duty.

Luxemburg and Marchlewski split from the PSP in 1893 against its nationalist programme. They rightly refused to content themselves with serving as a loyal opposition in a nationalist prison. No matter how small in number, revolutionary socialists could directly address the advanced sections of the working class. Conditions were pre-revolutionary. They sponsored the formation of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (later added to with the merger with the Lithuanian group led by Felix Dzerzhinsky). The title of their party showed that they would organise only in Russian Poland (the so-called Congress Kingdom). Whereas the PSP aimed to reconstitute Poland out of three empires, the SDKPiL had no wish to redraw borders.

The SDKPiL only formed because there was in the early 1880s no working class party in the tsarist empire. (And when it did come into existence it proved hard to join.) The first attempt in 1898 ended in fiasco and the arrest of the newly elected central committee. The second attempt, under the auspices of Iskra in 1902-3, produced unity and a central leadership "¦ and a cleavage between the minority (Menshevik) and the majority (Bolshevik) faction. When reunification did eventually occur in 1906, it proved fragile and fleeting. Nevertheless the SDKPiL joined the party of Lenin, Martov, Plekhanov, Trotsky and others in Russia on the principled basis of 'one state, one party'.

Luxemburg herself explained this elementary principle. With the First International, Marx and Engels mainly had to make do with sects. Their aim was to unite the British trade unions and Chartists with European revolutionaries organised under leaders such as Pierre Proudhon, Ferdinand Lassalle, Auguste Blanqui and Mikhail Bakunin. They had groups - smaller or larger - scattered throughout the Germanic, Latin and Slav countries. So in tiny Switzerland there might at any one time be three or four separate and competing branches of the International Workingmen's Association. However, the Second International represented a big step forward. Under its banner were gathered class parties. The Second International therefore promoted the idea of class unity within and against the existing state (a position carried on by the Third International of Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev in 1919).

It cannot be denied that in opposition to PSP nationalism Luxemburg overstated her case. Famously she threw out the slogan of national self-determination along with the nationalist bathwater. Self-determination was impossible under capitalism, she argued, and undesirable under socialism. Neither being true, Luxemburg deserved the stinging rebukes she received from Lenin.

Lenin stood by the right of Poland to secede. But alongside Luxemburg he argued strongly 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 - 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".²⁰

So, whatever the theoretical disputes between Lenin and Luxemburg, they were agreed that objective conditions demanded the unity of workers - Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Estonians, Letts, Poles, etc - in the battle to overthrow the common enemy, the tsarist state. Pilsudski, in contrast, wanted the independence of Poland and the independence of the PSP from the Russian "imperialist" revolutionaries.²¹ Lenin was consequently loathe to regard the PSP as a "genuine" socialist party.²² Quite right too.

ABCs

Suffice to say, most national socialists within the SSP, knowing the ABCs of European history, prefer to be identified not with Pilsudski - who in 1926 led a fascistic colonel's coup - but with other, more acceptable, figures. John Maclean and Che Guevara have served as backdrops for SSP rallies. Trivial eclecticism. Neither produced anything of lasting significance theoretically. Though both Maclean and Guevara were brave and fearless revolutionaries, they wandered far and wide from the principles of Marxism. Gripped by "spy mania", Maclean refused to join the CPGB when it was formed. He was convinced that British government secret agents provided the finances.²³ Instead he founded a short-lived left nationalist sectlet. As for Guevara, his politics owe more to Maoism than Marxism.

Nevertheless I have come across a few national socialists in the SSP who are prepared to defend Pilsudski and the PSP against Lenin and Luxemburg. The RCN's principal spokesperson, Allan Armstrong, comes to mind. He '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 argue that Lenin and Luxemburg should not have been Lenin and Luxemburg, that 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 in fact a Pilsudskiite. Being positively committed to a Scottish road - envisaging a Scottish workers' republic along the lines advocated by John Maclean - he wants to perpetuate the division of the world's people into nations. Unlike Marxism, he is convinced that nationalities and nations will characterise communism. So he is being perfectly consistent when it comes to his - underhand - defence of Pilsudski.

Not surprisingly, according to comrade Armstrong, Lenin's and Luxemburg's "political formulations" "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".²⁴

A rotten, nationalist position faithfully reproduced by comrade Goupillot in his Weekly Worker article: "The Bolsheviks might have found it much easier to undermine Pilsudski's influence amongst workers if they had taken the Polish desire for independence more seriously instead of paying it lip service under the cover of 'supporting their right to self-determination': ie, if they had adhered to the Marx-Engels line".²⁵ As if Marxism was a fixed dogma, not a method which must take account of the fundamental changes outlined above. Eg, Russia was no longer simply a frozen bulwark of reaction. It was ripe for a revolution in which the workers would take the lead. Under these concrete circumstances to mindlessly repeat the dead slogans of the past is to criminally weaken the fighting capacity of the communist proletariat.

As an aside, once again we see in Armstrong-Goupillot the inability, or simply the stubborn refusal, of left nationalists to recognise that advocating self-determination does not stand in contradiction to advocating unity. There is no "lip service" about it when it came to the Bolsheviks. To advocate the revolutionary unity of the workers for the overthrow of the existing state is in fact to advocate striking the most powerful blow against exploitation and all forms of oppression. The CPGB therefore makes no apology for not advocating Scottish independence and the break-up of Britain. As we have said before, supporting a right does not mean one is agnostic about how that right is used.

Let us return to the main 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 over to Pilsudski and his national socialists. Remember, Pilsudski began as the main leader of the PSP, a party with real roots in Polish society. In comparison, Lenin and Luxemburg began with nothing.

Nor was it possible for either Lenin or Luxemburg to determine the new geopolitical relations that emerged out of World War I. And it was this carnage which saw the collapse of half of monarchical Europe, that allowed Pilsudski and his Austrian-financed military legions to reconstitute Poland in 1919 - as a reactionary bourgeois state. Luxemburg was right. An independent Poland did nothing for the working class. She was also correct to forewarn that national socialism would lead those workers who followed it to demoralisation.

To begin with, militant workers were to be found in the PSP and with Pilsudski. Unrest in Poland in 1904 resulting from the Russo-Japanese war saw membership soar from 4,000 to 40,000. Pilsudski travelled to Japan and attempted to strike a military deal with the Mikado. Poland would open a second front in Japan's war with Russia. Pilsudski established the 'Militant Organisation' which would lead the uprising. But the outbreak of the 1905 Russian Revolution changed everything. Separatism was swept aside. Hostility to the "overbearing" Russian neighbours vanished. Workers in Warsaw and Là³dz joined workers in St Petersburg and Moscow in the common fight to overthrow tsarism.

Supporters of the PSP willingly looked to the SDKPiL for theoretical and practical leadership and enthusiastically took up its slogans. The SDKPiL grew from virtually nothing to something substantial (though it remained smaller than the PSP). Pilsudski, however, suffered marginalisation: "The pure nationalists, the 'social patriots'," writes Luxemburg's outstanding biographer, "saw with horror their hopes of an independent Poland were ebbing away as fast as the Russian Revolution was advancing".²⁶

The official leadership, staying true to its nationalist programme, ended up turning its back on the revolution. The PSP split at its 8th Congress in February 1906. The leftwing majority abandoned the programme of national independence. They adopted the substance of the SDKPiL programme. Poland should have autonomy within a democratic Russia.

Pilsudski for his part turned towards a reliance on physical force on the one hand and diplomatic dealing on the other hand. When the PSP's 9th Congress in November 1906 condemned the terroristic activity of Pilsudski's Militant Organisation, he and his "fan club" indignantly withdrew from the party. They formed a separate PSP - Revolutionary Fraction. Shades of Sheridan and Solidarity.

Sheltering under the wing of the Austrian state, Pilsudski transformed the Militant Organisation into the nucleus of a conventional military formation. It was legally recognised as a rifle club and in 1914 the Union of Active Resistance (ZWC) aligned itself as a self-willed servant to German and Austrian imperialism. Austria envisaged a triple Austrian-Hungarian-Polish crown. Germany a 700,000-strong Polish army to hurl against the Russian hordes. Pilsudski remained committed to an independent Poland.

What of Luxemburg? Coming from almost nowhere organisationally, Luxemburg's politics had within 12 years captured virtually the whole working class movement in Poland. In 1918 the PSP-Left united with the SDKPiL to form the Communist Workers' Party of Poland (as the Communist Party of Poland was known till 1925). It was eventually banned by none other than Pilsudski.

Lenin and Luxemburg only failed in Poland in the sense that the Marx and Engels of 1848, who strove for a centralised and democratic Greater German republic, including Austria, failed. They only failed in the sense that the 1871 Paris Commune failed and the Bolsheviks' 1905 dress rehearsal failed. The point though is not failure of this or that attempt but the correctness of the politics of world revolution and universal human liberation.