11.09.1997

A sectarian approach to self-determination

Bob Pitt, editor of ‘What Next?’, reviews Jack Conrad’s pamphlet, Blair’s rigged referendum and Scotland’s right to self-determination

This pamphlet sets out the political line on Scottish self-determination promoted by the group around the Weekly Worker, of which comrade Conrad is the leading theoretician, and it is a characteristic product of that tendency. It is well written, thoroughly researched, cogently argued - and almost entirely divorced from political reality!

A distinctive feature of the CPGB/Weekly Worker, and one which has separated it from virtually everyone else on the left in Scotland, has been its insistence that Marxists should campaign for a boycott of the September 11 referendum on a Scottish parliament. The pamphlet roundly denounces Scottish Militant Labour (SML) for advocating a double ‘yes’ vote in the referendum (for a Scottish parliament and for tax-varying powers). This, it is argued, is a cop-out from the demand for a democratic republic of Scotland within a federal Britain and Europe - a demand supported by the Scottish Socialist Alliance, in which SML and the CPGB are both participants.

The CPGB comrades have been at pains to emphasise that they are not advocating political passivity. As Mary Ward, a leading CPGB member in Scotland, is quoted in the pamphlet as saying, they are in favour of “an active boycott”. Jack Conrad expands on this point:

“An active boycott means calling for political strikes, meetings and demonstrations, occupations and civil disobedience. Instead of fostering constitutional illusions in Blair’s sop and meekly queuing up to vote for it, our aim is to win the masses to use the most advanced, most militant, most resolute tactics the objective situation allows” (emphasis added).

But there’s the rub. Could any sober analysis of the objective situation lead you to the conclusion that Scottish workers would respond to the call for a boycott campaign with “political strikes, meetings and demonstrations, occupations and civil disobedience”? Certainly at the time of writing, two weeks before the date of the referendum, there hasn’t been the slightest sign of it.

What we have here is the classic example of the ultra-left method whereby agitational demands are conjured up by the self-appointed revolutionary vanguard without the slightest concern for the actual state of working class consciousness. It is fantasy politics. Despite the orthodox Marxist emphasis on the leading political role of the working class, it is in fact based on a sectarian contempt for this class as it actually exists.

Myself, I find it impossible to understand how critical support for the proposed Scottish parliament is incompatible with advocating a genuine democratic republic and a parliament with full powers, including the right to secession. Indeed, in view of the widespread support among working people in Scotland for their own parliament, even in the restricted form presently on offer, it is difficult to see how Marxists could get a hearing for their programme without critically advocating a double ‘yes’ vote in the referendum.

In a letter to the Weekly Worker Tom Delargy of SML described the CPGB’s line on the referendum as “ultra-left nonsense”, pointing out that working people in Scotland, even those who are critical of the referendum and of the limited powers that are proposed for the Scottish parliament, would regard the Weekly Worker’s policy as tantamount to scabbing. This was harsh, but almost certainly true. The question is - how did the comrades of the CPGB arrive at such a ridiculous political position, which has walled them off from the very people they seek to influence, thus dooming themselves to sectarian irrelevance during the referendum campaign?

I suspect that the explanation is not unconnected with the woodenly orthodox Leninism that informs the comrades’ understanding of the role of revolutionary leadership. Not so long ago I wrote an article in the Weekly Worker advocating a struggle against Blairism around basic demands that enjoy majority support in the movement - a minimum wage at median male earnings, reform of the anti-union laws and so on. In reply I was given a stern lecture, replete with quotations from What is to be done?, on the need to combat working class ‘spontaneity’. The task of Marxists, according to this line of reasoning, is not to advance practical proposals that can actually take the workers’ movement forward, but to make maximalist propaganda which has no resonance within the class.

I’m not suggesting that Lenin ever descended to the sectarian depths reached by some of his self-proclaimed followers, but there was a fundamental flaw in his concept of socialist consciousness being brought into the working class “from without” which fuels such sectarianism. It is worth noting that Trotsky always opposed the one-sidedness of the formulation in What is to be done?, believing to the end of his life that Plekhanov was correct against Lenin on this point. It seems to me that some clarity on this issue might enable us to avoid the trap of falling, as Blair’s rigged referendum so obviously does, into the sterile ‘vanguardism’ which today disfigures the revolutionary left and renders it politically impotent.