13.03.1997

Neither reformism nor nationalism

Where will SML’s reformist socialist-nationalism lead?

Given the enormous defeats suffered by the working class over the last 20 years, both in Britain and internationally, it is hardly surprising that separatist tendencies and ideas come to the fore. Today in Britain the extremely low level of working class activity has added to conditions whereby in Scotland nationalism exerts a growing and powerful influence.

This is to be seen not merely in the standing of the Scottish National Party. The nationalist stance or trajectory of many on the left in Scotland bears sorry witness to the reactionary nature of the period - Peter Taaffe was definitely wrong when in Militant he greeted the new decade as the “red 90s”.

Communists are duty bound to wage a resolute and unremitting struggle against every manifestation of nationalism or accommodation to it - above all when it comes in the guise of ‘socialism’. Obviously the most recent left convert to nationalism and hence subject demanding criticism is Scottish Militant Labour.

Last month Phil Stott announced SML’s adoption of the socialist-nationalist perspective of “breaking up” Britain and realising an independent class state in Scotland (Scottish Socialist Voice February 7 1997). SML aims to do no more than weaken the United Kingdom state (revealingly it does not demand British withdrawal from and the unity of Ireland). Presumably it is left to workers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to overthrow the United Kingdom state. Moreover in pursuit of its reactionary national socialist utopia SML now pledges to vote ‘yes, yes’ in Blair’s “rigged referendum” for his “lapdog” parliament.

The fight against the existing monarchist constitution through mobilising the masses around the minimum demand for a sovereign parliament with full (ie, constitution-making) rights, has in effect been put off to another day. SML will urge Scottish voters to seize the chance of a glorified county council in the foolish belief that “this very limited democratic reform” represents a step in the direction of socialism.

Having a step-by-step, reformist programme for ‘socialism’ such a course appears eminently sensible. With eating grows the appetite. SML “will” therefore “support any step towards greater autonomy for Scotland”, even Labour’s “lapdog” parliament. Of course, that cannot satisfy the working class. But for SML there exists a fixed stairway all the way to the socialist future. One reform, one step inexorably leads to another. So from a tame Edinburgh parliament there is for SML a mechanical inevitability that leads in due course directly to Scottish socialism. In its turn a “socialist Scotland” would, says comrade Stott, be the “first step towards a wider socialist federation of Britain - and eventually Europe” (Scottish Socialist Voice February 7 1997).

This is pulp theory. Capitalism cannot be gradually reformed into its opposite. We communists do not deny the vital role played by the fight for reforms. But only by way of revolution can the working class realise socialism. Trade union, democratic and electoral struggles are important because they can prepare the working class - that is, create the subjective factor necessary for socialism.

With communist leadership demands for reform - not least Scottish self-determination and a federal republic - help form the working class throughout Britain into a class conscious of its historic mission to liberate humanity. Through its own self-activity the working class becomes organised, strong, confident and full of initiative. Through its own experience it also becomes convinced that it is impossible to transform society without first conquering political power.

Means determine ends and ends determine means. Hence for Marxists the demand for a Scottish parliament is primarily about the struggle it can engender. At every stage we therefore stress the cardinal importance of working class self-activity. For example, political strikes and demonstrations, occupations and councils of action, civil disobedience and a mass boycott of Blair’s “rigged referendum”. So while the CPGB fights for reforms, we always seek to do so using the most militant, most revolutionary means the situation allows. Only in this way can the workers be prepared for the revolution and state power. Achieving this end explains why the CPGB is so insistent on not compromising or watering down the Scottish Socialist Alliance’s key demand for a parliament in Scotland with full, constitutional, powers.

Once a Scottish parliament is considered in itself as the means to “transform Scotland into a modern socialist democracy” and not as a demand to prepare the working class for revolution there exists a slippery slope. The adherents of socialist reformism arrive at what are for them the most unexpected results.

Rosa Luxemburg was spot on when she argued that if the fight for reforms are “made an end in themselves” then such a fight “not only does not lead to the final goal of socialism but moves in a precisely opposite direction”. As soon as “immediate results” - be they Blair’s “lapdog” parliament or the SSA’s parliament with full powers - become the prime objective, the “clear cut, irreconcilable point of view, which has meaning only insofar as it proposes to win power, will be found more and more inconvenient”. The “direct consequence”, Luxemburg said, will be a policy of adaptation, a policy of “political trading” and an “attitude of diffident, diplomatic conciliation” (R Luxemburg Reform or revolution New York 1978, p31).

Adaptation and diffident diplomacy has already begun. SML will surely huff and puff about a multi-option referendum. However, it is already waving the white flag. It promises faithfully in advance to vote ‘yes, yes’ if Blair’s “rigged referendum” remains unchanged. A parliament with full rights is thereby traded by SML for something more ‘realistic’. Naturally those who irreconcilably continue to fight for ‘self-determination - nothing less’ are mocked for their lack of ‘political sophistication’ and attacked with the hoary old line of playing into the hands of the Tories.

SML combines the politics of reformism with the nationalist ‘principle’ of organisational autonomy from its Socialist Party co-thinkers. By so doing SML’s leaders have unwittingly placed themselves outside the international revolutionary tradition represented by their claimed mentors, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Tommy Sheridan, Phil Stott, Allan McCombes and co stand in the same ‘socialist-nationalist’ camp as Joseph Pilsudski and his Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna).

The PSP was formed in 1892. The party adopted a socialist-nationalist programme for the reconstitution of an independent Poland out of the German, Austro-Hungarian and above all the Russian empire (which had between them partitioned it out of existence at the 1815 Congress of Vienna). One year after its formation Rosa Luxemburg and Julian Marchlewski led a split against the separatism of the PSP.

Marx and Engels had throughout their political lives advocated the reconstitution of Poland. Russia, which had taken the lion’s share of Poland in 1815, formed the bulwark of reaction in Europe. Settling scores with tsarist Russia was, wrote Marx, the “primary prerequisite” for the European revolution.

However in the late 19th century ‘static’ Russia began at last to move. Tsarism was disintegrating. New proletarian forces stirred. In the more advanced Poland too there was change. The revolutionary lesser aristocracy no longer existed. The Polish bourgeoisie was cowardly and reconciled to absolutism. The workers were organising and needed to be guarded against succumbing to nationalist tendencies.

It was against this background that Luxemburg - to be followed by Franz Mehring and Vladimir Lenin - came to the view, after exhaustive study, that national independence could no longer be the immediate aim of the Polish working class. Overstating her case, it is true that she generalised her opposition to Polish separatism by opposing the demand for national self-determination. She thus earned stinging rebukes from Lenin. Nevertheless, whatever the polemical disputes between Lenin and Luxemburg, they were both agreed that objective conditions demanded the unity of workers - Russians, Poles, etc - for the overthrow of the tsarist empire. Luxemburg’s party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania therefore wanted to join together with Lenin, Martov, Trotsky and Plekhanov in the revolutionary struggle and in one organisation (that came about in 1906).

Suffice to say there are those socialist-nationalists within the SSA who, knowing the ABC of European history, want to be identified with the international revolutionary left rather than Pilsudski (in May 1926 he led a fascistic colonel’s coup).

To keep their self-image it is bizarrely argued by the Republican Worker Tendency that Luxemburg and Lenin should have carried out the break-up of the Russian empire programme of the PSP, not Pilsudski. It should be noted in passing that like SML this tiny sect is ‘organised’ on a federalist England-Scotland basis; even more strangely, along with the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer it positively wants the division of people into nations to characterise communism. Not surprisingly then, according to these socialist-nationalists Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s “political formulations” “failed ( ... only too clear in the case of Poland)”. It was Luxemburg and Lenin moreover who were responsible for handing the struggle for self-determination “to Pilsudski’s ‘national socialists’ on a plate” (Republican Worker Tendency Fight for the right to party p24).

By their very nature neither SML nor any of the socialist-nationalist sects can grasp the fact that to advocate self-determination does not stand in contradiction to advocating unity. To advocate the revolutionary unity of the workers for the overthrow of the existing state is in fact to take the lead in the struggle against oppression in all its forms.

The CPGB calls upon the working class in Britain to support the right of Scotland and Wales to self-determination up to and including independence. The fight for a federal republic is in our view the best way to ensure the right for Scotland and Wales to determine their own future and at the same time secure the closest unity of the workers in Britain. The CPGB makes no apology for not advocating the break-up of the United Kingdom. We are perfectly consistent. Supporting a right does not mean we have no view about how that right is used.

For example communists support the democratic right to form protest groups. But that does not commit us to supporting every protest group. Nor does it prevent us from opposing and campaigning against the formation of a new protest group. We recognise the right of even anti-abortionists such as Spuc to freely organise and argue for their reactionary views. But we will at the same time fight against the influence such bigots have over the working class.

Did the politics of Luxemburg and Lenin fail? I think “the case of Poland” proves the contrary. Nor were Luxemburg and Lenin responsible for handing over the struggle for self-determination to Pilsudski and his ‘national socialists’. It was hardly possible for them to predict the new territorial relations brought about by World War I. And it was this carnage, which saw the collapse of half of Europe, that allowed Pilsudski and his Austrian-financed 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 predict that nationalist-socialism would lead those workers who followed it to demoralisation.

To begin with the mass of militant workers followed the PSP and Pilsudski. However, with the outbreak of the 1905 Russian revolution separatism was swept aside. Workers in Warsaw and Lodz joined workers in St Petersburg and Moscow in the fight to overthrow tsarism. Proletarian supporters of the PSP looked to the SDKPiL for leadership and took up its slogans. The SDKPiL grew massively. Pilsudski was marginalised. “The pure nationalists, the ‘social-patriots’,” writes Luxemburg’s outstanding biographer, Paul Frölich, “saw with horror that their hopes of an independent Poland were ebbing away as fast as the Russian revolution was advancing” (P Frölich Rosa Luxemburg New York 1972, p110).

The official leadership thus ended up turning against the revolution. The PSP split in February 1906. The leftwing majority abandoned the programme of national independence and adopted the substance of the SDKPiL programme. Coming from almost nothing, Luxemburg’s politics had within 12 years captured virtually the whole Polish working class movement. Finally 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).

Luxemburg and Lenin only failed in the sense that the Marx and Engels of 1848, who strove for a Greater German republic, including Austria, failed. They only failed in the sense that the Paris Communards of 1871 and the Bolsheviks’ 1905 ‘rehearsal’ failed.

Jack Conrad