10.08.1995

Stageist road to socialism

Danny Hammill responds to the debate on the national question

DAVID CRAIG’S polemic on the national question (Weekly Worker 105), despite its great length, offered very little of substance, which is unfortunate given the extreme importance of this issue to ‘British’ revolutionaries. This is hardly surprising, as it appears to be based on a misreading of comrade Manson’s ‘Viewpoint’ (Weekly Worker 104), or at least an extreme overreaction to its contents.

David gets off to a false start. Comrade Manson’s innocent comment that if “separation appears inevitable, then we should insist that the democratic rights of the Scottish people must be honoured” - is pounced on with undignified glee: “So Peter does not insist on the democratic rights for the Scottish people now”.

Comrade Manson, as I understand it, was not suggesting that the CPGB, like a magician miraculously pulling a rabbit out of a hat, would suddenly advocate independence for Scotland if the situation became ‘too hot to handle’. Quite the opposite in many ways. All that comrade Manson was saying, given the fact that the CPGB supports the right of Scotland to self-determination, is that we would honour that right if such a mass demand existed. I also assume that comrade Manson would support the right of Scotland to self-determination in the here and now, not in some future socialist state.

Fairly clear, you would have thought. Not so. David Craig is determined to prove, come hell or high water, that comrade Manson is guilty of “putting forward pseudo-communist arguments, helping to maintain the existing unionist state”, whose “real position is conservative”. Still, as David puts it, “Perhaps this is not surprising after years of the domination of our movement by Stalinism” - which rather ignores the history of our tendency/faction.

David’s examination of “the theoretical roots” of nationalism and self-determination, and his support for revolutionary ‘federalism’, lapses into incoherence in many places. At one stage he scolds comrade Manson for “confusing the ‘independence’ (ie, separate republics) with the ‘federal republic’ argument” and confidently declares: “We are for one state, a multinational state, organised as a Federal Republic of England, Scotland and Wales.”

Fair enough: this position seems to be clear - it is certainly not a nationalist outlook of any description. However, a few paragraphs later the focus slips somewhat. Now, David posits the following scenario:

“Is it not obvious that if Scotland became independ-ent, which at present we do not advocate, the Scottish people would be confronted directly with the question of whether their new state would be a republic? Does anybody think that the political ‘disease’ of republicanism would not spread south?”

Here is a peculiar thing. David does not “advocate” Scottish independence - heavens forbid! However, the implication is that independence would be a good thing per se. The Scottish working class would spontaneously develop a revolutionary republican ideology and then spread it southwards. In other words, Scottish independence would be the first step - or ‘stage’ even - on the road to communism. In many ways, I disagree more with the actual methodology David employs rather than the actual idea of a federal republic, as it seems over-reliant on spontaneity.

Frustratingly, it is impossible to nail down David’s federal republic, or locate it in any concrete reality. Indeed, it stubbornly conflates into either devolutionism or outright national independence. Hence, David admits that the federal republic does not represent “socialism or even a workers’ state”; it is just “a step forward”. Yes, but where are we heading?

David clearly believes that the bourgeois democratic tasks have yet to be completed. The role of communists, presumably, is to complete the last lap of this historic race and abolish the ‘feudalistic’ UK state. In order to back up his quasi-Menshevik schema, David wheels in the big guns of “Marxist dialectics”.

Evoking the spirit of Engels and Lenin, David claims that, by “applying Marxist dialectics to our centralised bourgeois monarchy”, it is obvious that it will “evolve into its opposite, a federal republic”. At the risk of sounding facetious, surely the opposite to our centralised bourgeois monarchy would be a centralised proletarian state.

No matter. David has by now firmly grasped the telescope by the wrong end and is not going to let go. Slightly bafflingly it has to be said, David speculates, “Just as small enterprises evolve in monopoly capital and multinational capital, so there is a predictable historical process.”

Leaving aside the observation that David seems to mistake clairvoyance for Marxism, it strikes me as slightly absurd to advance the idea that a separate Scotland is a historic necessity, without which socialism is impossible. What you can rationally say is that under certain conditions a separate Scotland might act as a progressive ‘catalyst’ and under others it might act as reactionary diversion. Obviously, the main factor will be political - ie, who leads the Scottish working class.

David, though, is convinced that the clock of history is ticking away furiously: “Every month or year of delay means the current undemocratic marriage is more likely to end in violence and separation.” But, if we act now, the option of a “peaceful democratic solution like the recent break up of Czechoslovakia into Czech and Slovak republics” is still open to us.

I find this a very artificial, ‘stageist’ approach to the question, as it tries to railroad communists up an alley of David’s own making by a volley of moralistic exhortations.

At the end of the day, what is David Craig’s objection to the current ‘union’? Simply, that the union was “forced on the people of Wales and Scotland” and that the “marriage has become more like a prison” and so on.

The point is, though, to evaluate what role the Act of Union played in history - the role it played in the development of the working class as a conscious class for itself.

From this perspective, I would argue that the Act of Union, despite itself, played a progressive role from the viewpoint of the ‘world historical process’. It acted as a ‘facilitator’ with regards to the creation of a truly national working class, united by a common language, culture, etc. In a similar fashion, Engels argued in Anti-Duhring: “The introduction of slavery under certain prevailing conditions was a great step forward. Without the slavery of antiquity, no modern socialism.”

For all I know, comrade David Craig might agree with this. So, the question is how do we proceed from this starting point, which David concedes has so far been “relatively prosperous and peaceful”. The CPGB should continue, in my opinion, to oppose with equal vigour Scottish, Welsh and “British nationalism” (as David puts it) and avoid making a federal republic a programmatic ‘tenet’.

If comrade David does not really believe us; if he thinks that the CPGB’s platform is a devious attempt to “buy off” the Scottish working class before it spontaneously bursts the unionist UK state asunder; then perhaps it is more his own lack of communist vision on display, rather than comrade Manson’s supposed “fear of petty bourgeois nationalism”.

Nevertheless, this is a very complex and sensitive question, and decades of English chauvinism and arrogance are bound to have sown some distrust and suspicion on all sides.