18.06.1998

Workers’ unity, not national socialism

Peter Taaffe and Scottish Militant Labour are on the verge of divorce. But this is no private affair. Shamefully in the name of defending Marxism both sides want to break up the historically constituted working class in Britain along nationalist lines

Hidden away in the Members Bulletin, the Socialist Party and Scottish Militant Labour are conducting a furious and surely final internal polemic. The immediate issue is clear. The executive committee of SML is proposing to transform the Scottish Socialist Alliance into a “hybrid” or “transitional” Scottish Socialist Party. SML will itself be liquidated as a distinct public organisation. Membership, branches, press, financial resources and full-timers becoming those of the SSP. A loose Scottish Committee for a Workers International - meeting no more than monthly - is supposed to continue the political tradition of Peter Taaffe, Lynn Walsh and Mike Waddington. The comrades are not convinced. Hence the executive committee of the Socialist Party (in England and Wales) has condemned SML for “effectively proposing the dissolution of our Marxist tendency in Scotland” and retreating “from the programme and methods of Trotskyism” (Members Bulletin No29, May 1998).

The executive committee of SPEW is suggesting two alternatives. Option one - SML simply transforms itself into the SSP. Other forces from the SSA are then invited to join. For Taaffe and his comrades this has a dual advantage. The new organisation would be led by what he imagines to be co-thinkers. It would also be affiliated to his Committee for a Workers International. Therefore in the last analysis Taaffe exercises control. Option two - a broad SSP. A renamed SML would operate within it as an open faction affiliated to the CWI ... and would again therefore in the last analysis be under Taaffe’s control (or, as Lynn Walsh reportedly put it, “under the close supervision of the international leadership” - Members Bulletin No28, April 1998).

None of this remotely appeals to Alan McCombes, Tommy Sheridan and Phil Stott. The comrades seriously believe themselves to be standing on the threshold of the big time - MSPs, splitting the Scottish Labour Party, winning Scottish trade unions, etc. If only they can ride the tiger of nationalism. Of course in the short term a small price has to be paid. “London-based leaders” must be distanced, and perhaps ditched altogether, in order to assuage Scottish “attitudes” and “prejudices”. That explains why in their ‘Proposals on a Scottish Committee for a Workers International within the SSP’ they refuse point blank to insist that the new SSP should affiliate to any foreign ‘party’ or ‘international’. Their residual SCWI ‘club’ would for the moment be the “affiliated section” of the CWI. It would also “retain formal links with the Socialist Party in England and Wales” through “representation on the Socialist Party national committee and national conference”. However, to ensure that no control is exercised from London, SPEW would only “be invited to participate in discussions” in Scotland (Member Bulletin No29, May 1998).

Evidently we have a classic power struggle. Of the two sides there can be no doubt that it is SML which has proved the more devious, skilful and ambitious. At least in terms of manoeuvre. It was in Scotland that the old Militant Tendency made its first ‘open turn’. Having gained a real degree of mass support through the success of the anti-poll tax movement they went on in 1992 to gain some respectable votes in Glasgow. SML leaders now think they could have made a breakthrough. The ‘open turn’ was belated. In late 1989 and early 1990, when the anti-poll tax movement was at its height, they had to be “persuaded by the intervention of the British EC not to stand candidates against Labour in selected areas” (Members Bulletin No29, May 1998). They have no intention of being cheated again. So SML has, step by careful step, moved itself away from Taaffe and SPEW. For example, SML had a mere token presence at SPEW’s last congress - Alan McCombes did not bother attending.

SML not only operates under a name now denounced by comrade Taaffe - he says that the word ‘militant’ is associated in the popular mind with islamic fundamentalism and other “sinister connotations” - but crucially it has been playing a divergent course (Members Bulletin No17, May 1996). Where Taaffe relaunched Militant Labour as the SP on the basis of building a “small mass party”, in Scotland McCombes and co have set their sights on a much broader project. They put their energies into the SSA and in due course transforming it into a party “embracing into its ranks socialists who do not necessarily regard themselves as revolutionaries, Trotskyites or even Marxists” (Members Bulletin No29, May 1998).

To serve that goal SML has effectively silenced Taaffe. It began publication of a carniverous Scottish Socialist Voice. Nowadays The Socialist and Socialism Today are endangered species in Scotland. Publicly therefore Taaffe has no vehicle to disseminate his views or challenge others. SML’s leadership has also tried to ensure that Taaffe has no influence over its own ranks. The Members Bulletin is restricted to a tiny circle in Scotland. Indeed Mike Waddington, its editor, complains that Scotland reported zero sales for No26, zero for No27 and a mere four for No28. In order to follow the debate, he says, SML members have had to rely on “the Weekly Worker” and the “net” (Members Bulletin No29, May 1998).

As a result Taaffe is in no position technically to appeal to the SML rank and file over the heads of its leadership. He cannot organise an effective mass rebellion. The comrade is reduced to a long-range exchange of documents between leaderships. So this is a polemical war of one executive committee against another. Of course SML tops have dug themselves in well not only technically, but politically - being set on a nationalist course, they only need to win in Scotland. It is Taaffe who is exposed both at home and abroad - Farooq Tariq, head of the Pakistan organisation, has already rebelled against Taaffe and declared that “the comrades in Scotland are correct” (Members Bulletin No28, April 1998).

SML’s EC defends itself by attacking. It accuses Taaffe before his entire cadre of pursuing a sectarian and unsuccessful course. Of putting his narrow interests and failed method above the potential in Scotland. Taaffe has no “clearly worked out strategy for building mass revolutionary parties”. By implication he is mired in “mechanical formal logic” and therefore has an inability to grasp the need for a new turn in Scotland (Members Bulletin No29, May 1998).

Comrade Taaffe is, as I have suggested, very vulnerable. Once he projected himself as a high priest of strategy and Marxist theory. The growth of Militant Tendency in the Labour Party during the 1980s was supposedly proof of a historically inevitable evolutionary process to which everything had to be sacrificed (the left turn by the trade union bureaucracy in the wake of the debacle of the 1975-79 Wilson-Callaghan government and the changed climate that brought about within the Labour Party were the real causes). Taaffe has in fact proved himself woefully inadequate as any sort of Marxist. It was not so long ago that he was assuring his followers that talk of “capitalist restoration” in Eastern Europe and the USSR was a “chimera” (Militant July 21 1989). That Gorbachev’s “coming to power signalled the beginning of the political revolution” and that we were entering the “red 1990s” (Militant January 19 1990). He was unable to distinguish a period of reaction from a period of revolution.

Following Neil Kinnock’s witch hunt, the fortunes of Taaffe’s organisation rapidly waned. Membership slumped from some 8,000 to below 700 today. Maintaining the overblown Hepscott Road apparatus is enormously costly and has caused deep resentment, not least from the much depleted Merseyside region. In the attempt to survive comrade Taaffe desperately turned to the ‘social movements’ he once condemned as diversions. Gay, feminist and black politics have proved no solution. On the contrary they have engendered centrifugal stresses and strains as the parts adapted themselves chameleon-like to their surroundings. The Labour Party gave Militant a dull coherence. Outside its committee room world Taaffe’s tailist method leads to fragmentation. Panther UK broke away amid rancorous accusations of white domination. Gay and women’s questions are already the exclusive domain of ghettoised sections. Even on the terrain of elections, success only highlights Taaffe’s methodological inadequacy. The May 7 1998 local elections in England saw SPEW lose all sitting councillors. In contrast Dave Nellist got himself elected - but he is publicly aligned with the Socialist Alliances and therefore an implicit opponent of Taaffe’s ‘small mass party’ strategy.

Needless to say, it is over Scotland where the tailist method of Taaffeism has most thoroughly exposed itself. Here is a kingdom where over the last 20 years or thereabouts a powerful national movement has developed (latest opinion polls show 52% support independence). The Scottish National Party eyes next May’s elections to the Edinburgh parliament with relish. “The independence process is underway,” boast SNP strategists (The Guardian June 6 1998).

Instead of fighting nationalism SML and SPEW bow before it. Gone are the days when Militant meekly echoed the Labourite call for “Scottish devolution”: ie, a reformed constitutional monarchy. For a short intermediate period SML committed itself - along with the SSA - to a “federal” republic of England, Scotland and Wales (SSA Policy papers ’97 Glasgow 1997, p4). That did not stop SML rallying behind Tony Blair’s monarchical Scottish parliament and voting ‘yes, yes’ in the September 11 1997 rigged referendum. Yet so seductive is the pull of nationalism, so programmatically adrift is SML, that it has now abandoned the cause of working class unity. Its leadership is nowadays committed to securing Scottish independence and the nationalist break-up of the United Kingdom.

Naturally this has gone hand in hand with adopting ahistorical and divisive mythology. Tommy Sheridan writes of Scotland suffering for 300 years as “little more than a colonial outpost” (Scottish Socialist Voice June 30 1997). Scotland is put in the same oppressed camp as Ireland, Africa and India. The role of Scotland as an integral part of British imperialism is swept under the carpet.

Comrade Taaffe acquiesces to this nationalist opportunism. Thus we read in SPEW’s ‘In defence of the revolutionary party’ the following dire confession: “We believe that the call for an independent socialist Scotland can position the forces of Marxism at the forefront of the struggle for self-determination, linking the fight for independence with the fight for a socialist transformation of society” (Members Bulletin No29, May 1998). Taaffe also concedes that SML should constitute an independent organisation within his CWI simply on the basis of pro-nationalist opinion polls (the dye was cast in April 1996 when he specifically linked the “relationship between the Scottish and British organisation” to the level of “national consciousness” Members Bulletin No16). The principle of organising one democratic centralist working class party in order to overthrow the existing bourgeois state does not enter the poor man’s head - so eager is he to appease SML.

However, when SML proposes to take the next nationalist step and further loosen its links with London, albeit in the form of the CWI, Taaffe strenuously objects. Of course, he merely rails against symptoms. The comrade has no principled answers - he is after all part of the problem. What SML is doing is perfectly consistent with the method of chasing and adapting to existing consciousness - taken to a fine art by Taaffe himself. (His comrades in Wales are incidentally beginning their own ‘Scottish turn’ and rejecting the “traditional concept we have long held of an all-British road to socialism” - R Davies Members Bulletin No28, April 1998.)

In what is a desperate bid to stop the break-up of his own little bureaucratic empire, comrade Taaffe berates SML with the ‘revolutionary party’ and the ‘revolutionary programme’. He says SML is abandoning the revolutionary party by liquidating itself into an SSP - which will be based initially on the minimalist platform of the SSA. Comrade Taaffe, you are a hypocrite. Your whole tradition is one of mirrors and double-speak, where reformism is called revolutionism and where socialism is equated with parliamentary legislation and nationalisation, not working class self-liberation (Taaffe actually bans public use of the term ‘revolution’).

Though it is claimed otherwise, in private neither SPEW nor its predecessors have a revolutionary programme. Whatever the subjective intentions of those who wrote Militant: what we stand for and the Socialist Party’s founding Manifesto, they are indistinguishable from the revolutionary-reformist programmes of ‘official communism’: ie, for factional reasons what is reformist in said to be revolutionary. In point of fact, just like the various versions and editions of the British road to socialism,the programmatic logic of SPEW is counterrevolutionary (for our critique of revolutionary-reformism see J Conrad Which road? London 1991).

Taaffe says that the SCWI ‘club’ will not be a ‘revolutionary party’. He is quite right. But not because of the absence of weekly meetings, a regular press and full-time functionaries. Organisations are defined by their programmes - their aims and strategic methods. A revolutionary Marxist party - ie, a Communist Party, to use the scientific term - is the voluntary union of its members at the highest level of organisation around a revolutionary programme. It is the programme that makes an organisation revolutionary - the programme and the means of carrying it out forming a dialectical whole.

The prime task of communists is uniting the working class for the revolutionary overthrow of the existing state (that is what our minimum programme is designed to achieve). Only in exceptional circumstances does that involve breaking up an existing state. The key to revolution in Britain is not, as the SWP and the like say, organising in the workplace - trade union consciousness develops spontaneously. No, the key is raising the workers to the level of a political class, a class that has answers for all social questions, a class that champions the fight for democracy (that is why theory is so vital). Here lies the fundamental demarcation between Leninism and economism or strikism.

When it comes to Scotland, that means winning the workers across the whole of Britain to fight for self-determination. That implies something more than wanting a Scottish parliament “with real powers to take measures in the interests of working class people”, as SPEW’s founding document limits itself to (Manifesto’97 p27). Scotland’s people ought to have, as a matter of principle, the right to freely decide their own future up to and including full independence. That is why the CPGB counterposed the demand for a parliament with “full powers”- ie, full constitutional powers - to Blair’s Edinburgh sop (J Conrad Blair’s rigged referendum and Scotland right to self-determination London 1997, p10).

What direction things take in Scotland will at the end of the day be decided by what happens in Wales and above all in England. If the working class movement in England fails to champion Scotland’s right to self-determination, separatist ideas will continue to grow in attractiveness (and justification). The abolition of involuntary union and the securing of voluntary union is only possible if the workers of England side in a revolutionary manner with Scotland (and Wales). Hence working class unity is bound up with the struggle against the undemocratic UK state and constitution.

SML is not committed as a programmatic minimum to overthrowing the existing monarchical state, but merely to weakening it. Phil Stott elaborated this minimal perspective in a landmark article (‘Falling apart’ Scottish Socialist Voice February 7 1997). He began by detailing the popular backing in Scotland for constitutional change. Though his figures are somewhat confused no one doubts that “since 1987 support for independence has risen steadily” (ibid). Nevertheless comrade Stott mechanically extrapolates along that psychological line to an “inevitable” break-up of Britain. The only thing uncertain in the comrade’s mind is the exact route.

SML is very excited about the prospect of independence. Too excited. The changed post-general election political climate leaves the forces of “pro-market nationalism” and “democratic socialism” facing each other in an almost Darwinian battle for supremacy. Or so says Stott and his SML comrades. Against an SNP parliament “completely under the thumb of Brussels” SML advocates “a parliament with wide-ranging powers over the economy”. Powers that SML seems to equate with introducing “a socialist Scotland”.

SML’s “socialist Scotland” would mean a £6-an-hour minimum wage, a 35-hour week, the building of 100,000 homes, the restoration of benefits to 16 and 17 year-olds and the “rebuilding of our disintegrating public services”: ie, the sort of minimum or immediate reforms we should be fighting for now, under the existing state and the existing capitalist system. SML’s “socialist Scotland” would also mean “a huge redistribution of wealth” from the rich to the poor, from big business to the working class - again something we should be fighting for now as a minimum programmatic demand.

Nationalism and Marxism are antithetical. Nationalism considers nations and national cultures positively. National differences between people are viewed as essentially healthy and something to be sustained into the distant future. Left nationalists give this ‘principle’ a national socialist gloss. The road to socialism is seen through the prism of the nation.

Marxism considers nations and national distinctions negatively. We want to create conditions whereby nationalism, nations, nationality and the nation state all wither away. Marxists oppose every form of nationalist ideology, whether this is represented by an established state or those forces striving to create a new state through a breakaway.

Needless to say SML does not defend the Marxist point of view. It positively promotes a Scottish national road to socialism (which comes via a bourgeois parliament and introduces nothing more than minimal social democratic reforms, leaving by its own admission wage labour and hence the capital-labour relationship intact). Its socialism is national, statist and bureaucratic: ie, it is objectively anti-working class and thus anti-socialist.

Instead of working class unity against the existing UK state SML seeks a breakaway Scotland; presumably leaving the workers in England and Wales to overthrow it. SML therefore has a programme to weaken, not to smash the UK state. To facilitate that paltry aim SML has decoupled itself from Taaffe’s organisation. More importantly in terms of the future it calls for an end to the historic unity of the working class in Britain. The TUC and its affiliates are unlikely to survive intact the creation of an independent class state in Scotland. Hence, as capital becomes increasingly global, SML irresponsibly tries to divide the forces of the working class.

It is essential not to conflate all nationalisms as equally reactionary. The nationalism of an established capitalist state is inherently conservative. Fascism, the most degenerate form of bourgeois nationalism, is counter-revolutionary and thoroughly undemocratic. But petty bourgeois nationalism may contain a revolutionary democratic content. Communists support that content unconditionally. At the same time it is vital not to abandon or water down criticism of petty bourgeois nationalism or advocacy of an independent working class approach to the national question.

The relative decline of British imperialism has laid the basis for a new Scottish nationalism (certainly not the revival of a mythical nationhood going back to Kenneth MacAlpine or Macbeth). From the mid-19th century onwards being Scottish was potentially at least to share in the “lucrative” booty of the British empire (L Colly Britons London 1992, p373). Now it means cuts, insecurity and a denial of rights. As the ruling class turns inwards in the drive to increase the rate of exploitation and thus shore up world economic competitiveness, the old identification in Scotland with the state has been replaced by an alienation from it. Blair’s constitutional revolution from above has done nothing to reverse that trend yet.

Given the perceived absence of a viable socialist alternative, bourgeois petty nationalism comes to the fore. In the form of the SNP it promises to secure for Scotland a better position in the world economic pecking order through the formation of a new, independent Scottish state within the European Union.

The masses in Scotland certainly view themselves as disadvantaged within the UK. Not only opinion polls tell us that. Every election, every grievance, every strike is coloured by the national question. And no SWP attempts to economistically explain away the national question by listing the ‘primacy’ of all-Britain “issues like health, education, welfare and union rights” - will make the Scots forget their “Scottishness” nor the undemocratic denial of their right to self-determination within the UK (Socialist Worker June 13 1998).

We consider ourselves obliged to criticise those such as the SWP, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the SLP who downplay, avoid or dismiss the national question in Scotland by appealing for the “unity of the Scottish, English and Welsh workers” around routine trade union demands and “true socialism” (C Bambery Scotland: the socialist answer London 1997, p16). Such organisations are in effect English chauvinists. Their socialist rhetoric is not internationalism. It is nothing but preaching submission: ie, the other side of the coin peddled by Tony Blair and Donald Dewar.

Wherever a national question exists, Marxists approach it from the principle of democracy and internationalism. We seek at all times to build the maximum unity and ever closer relations between nationalities, especially the working class. The working class has no interest in any delay in solving the national question, and has everything to gain from an immediate settlement of disputes. Communists therefore seek an immediate solution. We denounce any and every delay or procrastination as reactionary.

That is why in 1997 we did our utmost to expose the undemocratic Edinburgh parliament through the Campaign for Genuine Self-Determination. The parliament has limited tax-raising powers but no power over the constitution. MSPs cannot decide to make Scotland independent. The whole thing was a calculated sop, a prophylactic designed to strengthen Labourism and preserve the UK constitutional monarchy system.

We support the right of nations to self-determination up to and including forming an independent state. Communists are for peaceful and democratic secession as opposed to any kind of coercive or violent maintenance of unity. The use of force to maintain unity - for example in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998 - is an admission that the state’s territory has divided into oppressed and oppressor nations. Unlike SMP and SPEW the CPGB unconditionally defended the right of the oppressed to take up arms to win democratic rights from the oppressor. That is why we said: For the IRA, against the British army!

Supporting the right of self-determination does not mean communists desire separation. On the contrary, advocacy of separation is something exceptional. For example, between Ireland and England/Britain there is a whole history of violence and brutal oppression. Hence we demand the unconditional withdrawal of Britain and the reunification of Ireland. Significantly SML does not. The comrades support the British-Irish Agreement which legitimises the undemocratic division of the island - they urged a ‘yes’ vote in the May 22 referendum. This is true to form. When the British army was sent in by the Labour government on August 14 1969 Militant refused to demand its immediate and unconditional withdrawal. Those who called for ‘troops out’ were denounced as “attorneys of the Provos” (Bulletin November-December 1979).

Separation only becomes a communist demand if unity is imposed by force. The relationship between England and Scotland has not primarily been characterised by violence. At least since the 1707 Act of Union. It should not be forgotten that 1745 - the heroic last stand of Scotland, according to nationalist fable - was more a “Scottish civil war” (M Lynch Scotland London 1992, p338). The Young Pretender wanted to re-establish the Stewart dynasty over the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. He rallied a number of catholic clan chiefs in the highlands, but was opposed by other sections of Scottish society - most notably the presbyterian clergy, lawyers and the large southern burghs.

Our policy is decided on the basis of historical conditions and circumstances in each case. Communists in general favour voluntary unity and the biggest possible states as providing the best conditions for coming together and the merger of peoples. Under present circumstances there would be nothing remotely progressive about a Scottish army, a customs post at Gretna Green and the splitting of the historically bonded peoples.

Yet the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is constitutionally the unity of hereditary crowns, not the voluntary union of free peoples. Sovereignty formally lies with the monarch, not the people. Formally self-determination for Scotland and Wales does not and cannot exist under our present constitutional system. The 1707 Act of Union, which merged the two parliaments of England (and Wales) and Scotland, had no popular mandate. The rich and powerful decided. Democracy was entirely within their fief. It suited their interests for Scotland to be part of a centralised British state - massive bribery helped no end. Not surprisingly there was a quid pro quo. For example in 1712 Scottish MPs in Westminster voted unanimously to repeal the Act of Union. They were swamped by English MPs. Given the huge disparity between the populations of England on the one side and Scotland and Wales on the other, the UK must be dominated by the English (who have no problem with self-determination). It is the peoples of Scotland and Wales who cannot freely determine their own future. With or without Blair’s Edinburgh parliament and Cardiff assembly, they must go cap in hand to Westminster. Hence there exists within the UK monarchical system an inherent democratic deficit.

We want to create the best conditions for the closest unity of the people of Britain. The CPGB therefore stands for the immediate abolition of the monarchy and the abolition of the acts of union. We communists seek to mobilise the working class of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in a political struggle for a federal republic and a united Ireland. (As Marx, Engels and Lenin argued, a federal republic in the British Isles would represent a step forward from the constitutional monarchy - it is not, I stress, some universal principle.) A democratic and transitional aim. The federal republic establishes the voluntary union of the peoples of Great Britain. If this is achieved, as we intend, using proletarian methods, it is also means the revolutionary destruction of the constitutional monarchy: ie, official Britain. And thus the realisation of our minimum programme. The federal republic therefore is no question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment, but the first condition for the social emancipation of the working class.

So Scotland’s constitutional status is not only a matter for the Scots. It is a democratic question that must see the whole of the working class in Britain united around a correct strategy. Only by mastering the gamut of social contradictions can the workers raise themselves from the economic, trade unionist struggles of a slave class to that of a political and potential ruling class.

There are those leftwingers who dogmatically absolve themselves from what they wrongly describe as the ‘bourgeois’ task of ending the monarchy and winning a republic in Britain. They say the only answer is socialism (why not communism?). Naturally this pose is never applied by the likes of these to wage and other economic demands. When it comes to trade union politics, they do not turn up their noses with haughty references to the maximum demand for the abolition of the system of wage slavery - which, like the call for communism, is quite correct in terms of propaganda. In rejecting the communist minimum programme these types at one at the same time make maximalist gestures while practising the capitalist politics of the working class.

Through their own self-activity the workers become organised, strong, confident and full of initiative. Through experience they also become convinced that it is impossible to transform society without first conquering political power. Hence for Marxists the demand for Scottish self-determination is primarily about the struggle it can engender. At every stage we stress the cardinal importance of working class self-activity. So while the CPGB fights for reforms, we always seek to do so using the most revolutionary means the situation allows. Only in this way can the workers be made ready for state power.

Once Scottish self-determination is considered in itself as a reformist 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 precisely in the opposite direction”. As soon as “immediate results” 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 consequences”, 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, conciliation and diffident diplomacy have already begun in earnest. Both Taaffe and SML have traded a federal republic for a ‘realistic’ royalist sop. Both Taaffe and SML have dropped the fight for working class unity in favour of the popularity of nationalism.

SML as an organisation combines the politics of reformism with the nationalist ‘principle’ of autonomy from their ‘co-thinkers’ in SPEW. By so doing SML’s leaders have unwittingly placed themselves not in the tradition of their claimed mentors, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, but Joseph Pilsudski and his Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna).

Pilsudski was the leading figure of the PSP. Formed in 1892, it adopted his socialist-nationalist programme for the reconstitution of an independent Poland out of the German, Austria-Hungarian and Russian empires (which had between them all but partitioned it out of existence at the 1815 Congress of Vienna). Luxemburg and Julian Marchlewski split with the PSP in 1893 over this SML-type perspective.

Their Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania wanted to join with Lenin, Martov, Plekhanov, Trotsky and others in Russia committed to the overthrow of the tsarist state in one party (that came about in 1906). Pilsudski, in contrast, wanted the independence of Poland and the independence of the PSP from the Russian “imperialist” revolutionaries (JK Pilsudski Memories of a revolutionary London 1931, p22). Lenin consequently was loath to regard the PSP as a “genuine” socialist party (VI Lenin CW Vol 6, Moscow 1977, p458). Quite right too.

By its very nature neither SML nor other such national socialists are able to grasp the fact that to advocate self-determination does not stand in contradiction to advocating unity - within one party against the existing state. To advocate the revolutionary unity of the workers is to take the lead in the struggle against oppression in all its forms. Our fight for a federal republic is the best way to ensure the right of Scotland and Wales to self-determination and at the same time the best way of securing the closest unity of workers against our common enemy. The CPGB consciously follows the road of Luxemburg and Lenin - the road of democracy, unity and revolution.

Jack Conrad