20.03.2014
Anti-imperialist illusions
What does the class-political independence of the proletariat mean in practice? Mike Macnair replies to Ian Donovan’s allegations of ‘third campism’
Last week we published Ian Donovan’s response1 to Daniel Harvey’s report of the February 8 Communist Platform meeting.2 Comrade Ian seeks to rerun aspects of the debates which took place in the CPGB in spring-summer 2004 about Iraq and the Respect project - debates that ended in an obscure way in the departure from the CPGB of Ian himself and, on the other extreme, of the comrades who went on to form the short-lived ‘Red Party’.
There is nothing in itself wrong with re-debating such matters. They are, as Ian says, live issues, which continue to recur in different forms. And Ian’s views on them are a variant on the common views of much of the far left - which makes it educative to see what is wrong with them.
For the sake of clarity, however, it would be helpful if Ian were to pay attention in his polemic to the course of events since 2004, in relation to both Iraq and Respect (in relation to Respect he does refer to the CPGB’s decision to call for a vote for the SWP’s ‘Left List’ in the 2008 London elections, but gives it a false explanation3). Since a good deal of Ian’s polemic is directed against what I as an individual wrote in 2004,4 his argument might also benefit from reference to the several articles I wrote on Iraq in the period 2004-08; to my polemic against the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty on imperialism in July-August 2004; and to my various writings on imperialism and related issues since then - notably on revolutionary defeatism and revolutionary defencism in chapter 4 of my book, Revolutionary strategy (2008), and on imperialism as such in the introduction to Karl Kautsky on colonialism (2013).
I will not have space in this article to reprise in more than very general outline my arguments on the theory of imperialism - which, I should emphasise, are not CPGB official positions. Searching ‘Mike Macnair imperialism’ and ‘Mike Macnair defeatism’ on the CPGB website will produce the relevant material.
I am not going to address in detail, either, the question of Iraqi politics under the occupation. Comrades can read the articles mentioned above. I will say only that the Sadrist movement, which Ian in 2004 thought was a genuine Iraqi national leadership, was turned on and off like a tap by the Iranian regime in the following period (it was turned off for good in 2008 - Al-Sadr has this February announced his retirement from politics), and that the subsequent development has made completely transparent the sectarian character of the several Islamist trends in Iraq and the current Shia government.
Social pressure
At an early stage in his argument, comrade Ian says that my own and other comrades’ opposition to including in the Communist Platform statement “positive references to the Russian Revolution and the Paris Commune as the two premier examples so far in history of specifically proletarian revolutionary events ... does not seem to me to be some sort of accident or quirk, but must represent at some level an adaptation to social pressure”. I agree that this issue is not merely ‘accidental’. The debate at the Communist Platform meeting is clearly reported by Daniel Harvey. My own view is that to single out the Paris Commune and October 1917 as what the platform ‘stands on’ - as distinct from ‘standing on’ the whole history of the workers’ movement, including these attempts - is to risk writing into our platform the modern far left’s fetishism of the revolutionary moment at the expense of the preparatory tasks of workers’ organisation and the struggle for a majority.5
But for Ian to explain this - which I agree is a real difference of substance and not just style - as “an adaptation to social pressure” is question-begging. Where an argument is plainly wrong (like marginalism in economics) or involves hypocrisy or self-contradiction (like the various sickening crap the media churn out about the various targets of US and UK foreign policy), the persistence of the argument has to be explained by its apologetic/ideological role (“social pressure”). Equally plainly, the fact that the Murdoch press says the sun rises in the east may be a reason for checking the truth of the claim, but is not at the end of the day a reason for disbelieving it. A great many issues fall between these two extremes, but as a general rule it is necessary first to show that a claim or argument is false before explaining it by “social pressure”.6
Without this precondition, it would be equally valid for me to argue that Ian’s position on imperialism reflects the “social pressure” of the global weakness of the workers’ movement and the consequent ascendancy of various forms of petty bourgeois reaction as the only mass-scale apparent ‘alternative’ to capitalist triumphalism (not dissimilar arguments from the “social pressure” of Stalinism made by the ‘anti-Pabloite’ Trotskyists against the ‘Pabloites’ in the 1950s-70s). I do not make this argument; I think that Ian’s position flows from his clinging to Comintern and Trotskyist political dogmas under conditions where their basis has been shown to be false by the course of events. But the argument would be as valid as Ian’s argument - which is to say, not valid.
Two camps
Ian’s fundamental objection to the approach which he attributes to the CPGB leadership is that we are “third campist”. The problem is making sense of this sort of argument, first, in a world after the fall of the Soviet bloc, and second, coming from Ian, given that he proposed to add to the Communist Platform aims the statement that “An isolated socialist government will either be crushed by capital or forced by material circumstances, despite the best of initial intentions, to become a surrogate capitalist force in its own right.” This statement in effect characterises the Soviet regime as state-capitalist, not in the sense in which Lenin used the term in ‘Left-wing’ communism and elsewhere, but in the sense in which various lefts use it to take moral distance from Stalinism: for example, Walter Daum in his Life and death of Stalinism.7
But then the category of ‘third campism’ ceases to make sense. ‘Third campism’ as a political insult originated in Trotsky’s In defence of Marxism, and was entirely framed by the characterisation of the USSR as a part of the workers’ movement (like a trade union led by gangsters) or at least a conquest of the workers’ movement (because of the nationalisations, state monopoly of foreign trade, and the plan). If the USSR had become a capitalist state by 1939, the Soviet-defencism Trotsky argued for would be no different from the German-defencism in World War I of the old Social Democratic Party of Germany right wing (and of Parvus and his co-thinkers).
Setting this issue on one side, we are, I think, in agreement that there are only two fundamental class ‘camps’ in modern society: that of the capitalist class, and that of the proletariat. Even here it is necessary, however, to enter a caveat. The famous passage of the Communist manifesto which Ian quotes said that “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat” (emphasis added).
The statement is one of tendency, not of a completed process. And in The class struggles in France, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and very numerous other pieces of concrete political analysis, Marx recognised the existence and political significance of other classes and social strata: the landed aristocracy, the peasantry, the (urban) petty bourgeoisie and so on. Now, of course, globally the tendency to proletarianisation and therefore of the simplification of class antagonisms has progressed very substantially since Marx’s time. But it is a complete illusion to suppose that the other classes have ceased altogether to be economically or politically significant.
The real issue is that only the capitalist class and the proletariat are capable of leading the society as a whole towards anything but short-term disaster. Hence when, as in Iran after the 1979 revolution, a bloc of a pre-capitalist stratum (imams) with a section of the petty bourgeoisie (bazaari merchants) seizes political power, it inevitably creates not an actual reversion to the pre-capitalist form of ‘Islamic society’, but a form of capitalist class rule.
There are only two fundamental class camps. The question which this poses in relation to any political group or movement is whether this movement is part of the class camp of the proletariat or of the capitalist camp. For example, the mere fact that a group of capitalists is at odds with the currently dominant regime or the currently dominant capitals does not make this group part of the class camp of the proletariat. Nor does the fact that a group of capitalists is exploited by other capitalists - as, for example, Fords exploits its parts supply firms or Tesco exploits its smaller suppliers - make the small businesses in question part of the class camp of the proletariat.
Nor, even, does the question of social oppression. The existence of racism does not make the controllers of Tata Group part of the camp of the proletariat; nor does the existence of sexism make senior managerial women (like Sheryl Sandberg of Lean in) part of the class camp of the proletariat. These anodyne truths become transparent whenever any issue of class conflict, as opposed to conflict between different sections of the exploiting classes, is at stake.
How far do the various middle strata adhere to the class camp of the capitalist class or that of the proletariat? The answer depends on the underlying strength of the class camp of the proletariat as an attractive pole, as well as - secondarily - on the policy of the proletarian party. And in fact, the class camp of the proletariat is currently exceptionally weak politically. This is the price both of Stalinism - as visibly tyrannical, and as promoting the people’s front policy and the idea of ‘national roads to socialism’ - and of its fall, as promoting the idea that socialism is infeasible and leads only to economic failure.
The effect of the absolute political weakness of the proletarian class camp is precisely that such movements are not attracted to this class camp. They tend to assert that they offer a ‘third camp’ or ‘third way’ separate from capitalism and socialism. In the case of the Islamists in occupied Afghanistan or Iraq, this meant that they turned their guns first on women students, leftwingers, trade unionists and so on, second on their sectarian competitors, and only third on the occupiers. Given that there are only two fundamental class camps, the result is that they adhere to the class camp of the capitalist class even when they are fighting the currently dominant capitals and their states arms in hand. The Afghan Taliban is notoriously an agency of the Pakistani security apparat; the Sadrists turned out to be immediately dependent on the Iranian regime; and so on.
This problem of the political weakness of the proletarian class camp is exacerbated because the majority of the organised left publicly offers to rerun Stalinism - either directly, as with pro-Stalin trends and Maoists, or by its own organisational methods, as in the Socialist Workers Party and so on.
The offer to rerun Stalinism also operates through the far left’s version of ‘anti-imperialism’ as involving prettifying this or that regime which happens to be the current target of US and British imperialist policy - here mimicking the old cold war Soviet idea of the ‘anti-imperialist camp’.8 We can perfectly well attack the sickening cynicism and hypocrisy of the imperialists’ media attacks on Ba’athist, or Iranian clerical, or Putinite forms of repressive government, given their own support for the Saudi regime, and so on, without making it our job to suggest that the regimes attacked are something other than what they are. And the same is true of non-state movements, like the Sadrists and other sectarian, mosque-based militias in occupied Iraq.
In this condition of weakness, the primary task of the proletariat is to re-establish its own class-political independence and thereby to revive its organisations and their political weight. Without prioritising this task and achieving it at least to some degree, the question of winning over sections of the intermediate strata to the side of the class camp of the proletariat through adroit policy may be a future task, but is simply not posed as an immediate task. To the extent that a policy of inter-class alliances is used as an argument against the Marxist class policy and for a ‘people’s’ movement, and hence against proletarian class-political independence, the problem is not just one of running before we can walk. It guarantees that it will continue to be the case that the intermediate strata and movements based on them will adhere to the class camp of the capitalist class.
National rights
Ian argues in effect that national, religious, etc movements which are currently resisting immediate attack by US imperialism are part of the class camp of the proletariat. I deny it. Ian’s argument for their being part of the class camp of the proletariat consists in a single point: “insofar as they resist the domination of ‘their’ population by an imperialist/colonialist occupation force, in that narrow sphere they are fighting against oppression, and that aspect of their actions deserves support, just as it would if it were being carried out by more superficially attractive, ‘democratic’ bourgeois forces. Neutrality on such struggles is a capitulation to the demonisation of the oppressed by political agents of the oppressor, and can only undermine the authority of communists among the oppressed.”
I am not arguing and have never argued that communists in imperialist countries should promote “neutrality on such struggles”. I argued, going back to the 2004 debate on Iraq, that communists in the UK had as their primary task to fight to get British troops out of Iraq, using any means necessary, and that this did not imply either prettifying the people who were at that moment fighting US and British troops, or abandoning efforts to build solidarity with those pitifully weak forces that were attempting to build a working class movement in Iraq. In other words, however objectionable the politics of the Sadrists and the other sectarian militia - or, for that matter, of the Ba’athist regime overthrown by the invasion - the US and UK still had no business in Iraq and should get out.
I argued that it was a complete illusion to suppose that giving political solidarity to the Sadrists because they were at that moment fighting US and British forces, or more generally calling for ‘victory to the resistance,’ would in any way strengthen the practical anti-imperialist task of fighting in this country to get British troops withdrawn. The political solidarity hypothetically offered to ‘the resistance’ by Ian, and by the British SWP, was in any case no more than a token moral gesture. Going way back to the US movement against the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese Communist Party, in spite of being Stalinist, took seriously those in the US anti-war movement who fought to build a mass campaign, but took much less seriously those who sought to insist the anti-war movement should be based on the slogan, ‘Victory to the NLF’, as a political marker of their ‘anti-imperialism’.
Underlying this, however, is a more fundamental issue. Is the mere fact that a movement is “fighting against oppression” sufficient to make them part of the class camp of the proletariat? The answer is quite plainly that it is not. Take, for example, the decision of the Ottoman empire to enter World War I on the German side. It is pretty obvious that the motive of this decision was the quite real oppression experienced by the Turks under the regime of the Ottoman Debt Administration, the capitulations, extraterritoriality of British and French nationals, and so on.9 Nonetheless, it would be absurd to represent this fact as making the Young Turk regime in 1914 part of the class camp of the proletariat.
Ian presents his argument in terms of the “duty to defend the right to self-determination of dependent countries targeted ... by imperialism”. The implications are clearest in his (defeated) amendment to commit the Communist Platform to opposing the attempts of imperialist states to “enforce an effective monopoly” in weapons of mass destruction - ie, Ian proposes we adopt what Charlie Pottins has called the ‘mullahs’ bomb’ line. The analysis of politics in terms of duties to defend rights here is a disastrous political error.
A series of examples. The German state in the 1960s-70s included substantial numbers of former Nazis, criminals from the point of view of the proletariat (and from that of the Weimar constitution and its criminal law). This did not imply that the tactic of the Red Army Fraction of (among other ‘urban guerrilla’ activities) attempting to execute such persons was in the objective interest of the proletariat. The British state has no right to hold the territories it holds in the South Atlantic. Nonetheless, the decision of the Argentinian military junta to invade these territories in 1982 was substantially operatively identical to the decision of a left activist who is persuaded by a police provocateur to plant bombs: though there was a ‘right’, attempting to exercise this ‘right’ was against both Argentinian national interests and those of the proletariat. The same is true of the Iraqi Ba’athist regime’s decision to invade the equally illegitimate Kuwait statelet in 1990.
The efforts of the Iranian clerical regime to attain nuclear capability in the face of the opposition of the US have the same general character: an understandable but mistaken response to provocations, which has disastrous effects for national interests and in particular for the interests of the proletariat as a class. In all these cases the argument that leads immediately from rights to duties produces politically stupid conduct.
Anti-imperialist united front
Ian’s argument, like other Trotskyist, Maoist and left ‘official’ communist variants of the same argument, conflates two issues.
The first is an old traditional argument of Marxism, Engels’ claim in his 1847 speech on Poland, that “a nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations”, or Marx’s argument in the 1870 resolution of the First International’s general council on Ireland that “a nation that enslaves another forges its own chains”.10 This is an argument about the politics of the oppressor country, and it requires the workers’ movement in the oppressor country to oppose its ‘own’ government’s oppression of another country. It is entirely correct: class-political independence of the proletariat requires rejection of identification with your ‘own’ state’s claim to control the affairs of other countries. However, this argument does not require of the workers’ movement in the oppressed country, or of international organisations of the working class, any particular attitude to the local nationalists or other opponents of the national oppression.
The second argument is a strategic line adopted by the early Communist International: that of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’. The documents can be found in the history section of the Marxists Internet Archive, in relation to the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East and of the Second, Third and Fourth Congresses.
The strategic conception here was to replicate both within oppressed countries, and on a world scale, the smychka or worker-peasant alliance. This had allowed the Bolsheviks, by their commitment to the expropriation of the landlords and peasant land redistribution, to win power, stabilise their hold on that power in autumn 1917 and eventually win the civil war of 1917-21. On a global scale, the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ implied a limited positive alliance with the colonial nationalists - implemented, for example, in Soviet collaboration with the early development of the Turkish regime of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and in Chinese relations between the early Communist Party and the Kuomintang.
The early Comintern resolutions insisted on the local communists, in spite of this limited positive alliance, maintaining class-political independence in relation to the nationalists. This turned out in practice to be easier said than done; and this lesson - that it is easier said than done for the workers’ movement to combine partial support for cross-class nationalism with class-political independence - has been repeated over and over again in the period since the 1920s.
The plausibility of the strategic line of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ depended on the theoretical diagnosis that imperialism was the ‘highest stage of capitalism’, which was common in the Second International and expressed most clearly in Lenin’s pamphlet of the same name. In this theory, capitalism initially developed on a national scale, but the overproduction of capital and consequent falling rate of profit led to financialisation, monopolies, tariff barriers and the export of capital to colonised countries. As the phenomenon became generalised in the late 19th century, capitalism ran up against its limits. Hence, objectively, the national struggles of the colonised countries immediately posed the question of socialist revolution: there was no possibility of oppressed countries joining the ranks of the imperialist powers (notwithstanding that Japan had, after the Meiji restoration of 1867- 68 and in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95, done just that). The objective dynamics therefore posed the question of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’, and the danger - stressed by earlier Marxists - of the workers’ movement losing class independence by falling in behind bourgeois or petty bourgeois revolutionaries could be treated as a subordinate problem.
As I have already indicated, in my view this strategic orientation was a mistake: there is an objective conflict between partial support for cross-class nationalism, even of oppressed nations, and the working class developing its own class-political independence. The case is a fortiori where what is involved is not ‘modernising’ nationalism, but political leadership by some pre-capitalist exploiting group on the basis of utopian-ideological claims to restore a lost past. The fact that the Stalinists turned cross-class nationalism into ‘official communist’ dogma in the forms of the ‘people’s front’, ‘national roads to socialism’ and the ‘anti-imperialist camp’ no doubt exacerbated the problem, but did not create it (indeed, the Russian smychka itself proved in the 1920s to pose acute political and economic problems).
Organisations of Trotskyist origin - even large ones like the Bolivian Partido Obrero Revolucionario in the 1950s and the Sri Lankan Lanka Sama Samaja Party in the same period and into the 1960s - have proved to be as unable to negotiate the problem as ‘official’ communist and Maoist ones.
Part of the problem is that nationalism precludes the strategic possibility of actually defeating the operations of imperialism, which are globally coordinated and backed by a monopoly of military high-tech (as Ian mentions in relation to ‘weapons of mass destruction’). The successes of radical nationalism in the cold war period were, in fact, made possible by the global role of the USSR - even if the radical anti-imperialist left tended to regard the USSR as an unreliable ‘rearguard’. Hugo Chávez’s ‘Bolivarianism’ had the ideological strength that it offered at least in theory a continental perspective; but the Chávistas have made no real attempt to make anything of this perspective.
The underlying justification for the positive ‘anti-imperialist united front’ was the theory of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. This was a defensible theory at the time of World War I and indeed at that of World War II, but was nonetheless wrong. There was no national stage of capitalist development: the British capitalist state came into the world in 1688-89 as an imperialist entity operating on a global scale, and the French revolutionary regime was instantly compelled in the 1790s to operate on the same global scale. The problem which produced World Wars I and II was not capitalism reaching its absolute limits and the ‘closure of the world’ - Trotsky’s “death agony of capitalism” - but the decline and ‘death agony’ of the British empire and the British-led world order. Once the reins had been handed over to the USA, a new period of capitalist expansion could, and did, develop.
The corollary of this point is that it is not true that the objective dynamics of national struggles against imperialist oppression necessarily and immediately pose the question of workers’ power and socialism. Formal decolonisation can take place and did take place very extensively after 1945. While for most ‘decolonised’ countries this meant only a transition to ‘semi-colonial’ status (like Latin America in the 19th century), it did nonetheless involve the removal of immediate, political, colonial subordination, and in that sense ‘self-determination’. Lenin correctly emphasised in 1916 the importance of this limited political self-determination, against the ‘imperialist-economists’ (Pyatakov and so on), and the Poles, who denied its significance in a world economically dominated by the great imperialist powers.
In some cases (for example, South Korea and Taiwan) US geopolitics led to actual capitalist development: as subordinate US allies, but not more subordinate than, for example, Greece. China is in transition from a Stalinist regime to the beginnings of an imperialist one (witness its operations in Africa and Latin America). And so on.
Although its theoretical foundations were unsound, the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ continued to have real plausibility as long as the Soviet Union survived. When the Soviet Union fell, with it fell the connection of the nationalists to the left. The Trotskyists, Maoists and left ‘official communists’, and comrade Ian, have just not caught up yet. (They have similarly not caught up yet with another major change in politics. Before 1989, the imperialist centres were deeply allergic to ‘revolution,’ and put a lot of effort into promoting Fabian gradualism, against which the ‘revolutionary left’ perforce defined itself. Since 1989, the imperialists are happy to see ‘revolutions’, including, where appropriate, mass street mobilisations and so on, as long as these revolutions are to introduce neoliberal models against nationalists).
With the basis of its plausibility as strategy gone, the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ remains as a sort of moral ‘tic’ of fragments of the far left. The moralistic character is very visible in Ian’s ‘rights’-based arguments. The effect is, contrary to his claim that communists can take the lead in the anti-colonial movement on this basis, to make the workers’ movement in the oppressed country entirely hostage to the particular tactical choices of the nationalists (or imams, or warlords, or whatever) so that it becomes for Ian and other adherents of the view (John Rees, for example) a moral or political obligation to tail-end these forces.
Those on the left who can see that this moral ‘tic’ has no progressive political content have tended to fall into the opposite and worse error - that of prettifying and ‘refusing to oppose’ the actions of the ‘democratic’ imperialists, our ‘own’ included: for example the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. In reality, even if the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ was always founded on a mistake, it is still true that “a nation that enslaves another forges its own chains”. Class-political independence requires overt opposition to these operations.
Respect
With the core of the argument addressed, I can be much briefer on Respect. This was certainly not a ‘popular front’ in the sense that an important wing of the British ruling class was involved. Rather, it was - and several of us made the point at the time - an ‘unpopular front’ of the same style as the fronts set up by the ‘official’ Communist Party in the 1930s and later with a few red clergymen, oddball aristos and other political flotsam and jetsam. The reality was that outside its local base in inner east London it had almost no purchase, and was entirely dependent on the SWP.
The initial response of CPGB was to attempt to participate in and build Respect, while at the same time drawing certain clear political lines against its leadership - that is, again, mainly, the SWP. But it was very clear that the project was politically aimed at becoming a people’s front or ‘rainbow coalition’ project - unsurprising, given George Galloway’s character as a pretty much unreconstructed Stalinist with an Arab nationalist overlay, and the evolution of the SWP towards ‘official communist’ ideas. Moreover, even from the first, the SWP’s bureaucratic control of the project and attempt to exclude political discussion by avoiding ‘boring old meetings’ meant that it was actually very difficult to build Respect.
Hence, while in the 2004 Euro elections we simply called for a vote for Respect candidates, in the 2005 general election we tried to project a line of class-political independence by calling for votes for those Respect candidates we could identify as in some sense workers’ candidates - Galloway included - and not for those like Anas al-Tikriti and Yvonne Ridley, who did not in any sense represent a political project for the working class as a class. This line - and not the idea of ‘reactionary anti-imperialism’ - informed our decision to call for a vote for the SWP’s Left List in 2008.
The underlying guiding principle is the same as in the question of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ and the supposed moral obligation to give token support to those ‘actually fighting’: that the proletariat needs to recover and organise around class-political independence if it is ever to get back the level of political weight which will allow it to win over the middle strata of society and take power. This is a really fundamental political lesson of the victories and defeats of the last century l
mike.macnair@weeklyworker.org.uk
Notes
1. ‘Not a matter of style’, March 13.
2. ‘Solid basis for intervention’, February 13.
3. P Manson, ‘Rival Respects go head to head in London’ Weekly Worker March 20 2008.
4. At that time in opposition to the majority line of CPGB, as can be seen from leading articles in this paper from the same period.
5. In addition, I pointed out in the meeting that for 21st century communists to say we ‘stand on’ these particular events is a little like imagining the bourgeois revolutionaries of the 17th and 18th centuries asserting that they ‘stood on’ the failed attempts of the medieval Italian city-states: identifying ourselves with a history of failure, rather than confronting the reasons for the failure.
6. Cf G Carchedi Behind the crisis (Chicago 2012) and my review, ‘What drives capital’s global crises?’ Weekly Worker May 23 2013.
7. I use Daum as an example because Ian has said informally that he finds this approach potentially usable; but, as far as the politics is concerned, the example could equally be Martov, Ciliga, Cliff or many others.
8. Cf more recently Ahmadinejad in 2009: ‘Iran’s election results mark a big victory for the entire anti-imperialist camp’ (http://news.xinhuanet.com/ english/2009-07/01/content_11636229.htm).
9. M Birdal The political economy of Ottoman public debt London 2010; M Aksakal The Ottoman road to war Cambridge 2011.
10. Engels on Poland: www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1847/12/09.htm#engels. General Council resolution on Ireland, generally accepted to be drafted by Marx: www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1870/03/28.htm.