25.06.1998

Appeal to members

Scottish Socialist Alliance takes nationalist road

On June 20 1998 the Scottish Socialist Alliance took a fateful step. The 50-strong annual conference voted to dump the previous commitment to a “federal” republic. By an overwhelming majority it agreed to commit the organisation to campaign for “an independent socialist Scotland” (motion one). Around this nationalist locus the SSA will almost certainly become the Scottish Socialist Party “by the early autumn” (motion four).

Naturally the change was presented to SSA members in the language of pseudo-internationalism. Alan McCombes, leader of Scottish Militant Labour, used all the hand-me-down phrases along with the familiar caveats and get-out clauses. “Ultimately, only the worldwide victory of socialism can bring about international collaboration.” It is “not possible to build and sustain an oasis of socialism in the middle of a worldwide capitalist desert”. “Even the most industrially advanced countries of the world would be unable to survive indefinitely as isolated outposts of socialism, shut off in permanent quarantine from the rest of the world.” “The struggle for socialism internationally will not erupt simultaneously.” Because of “differing traditions and conditions it will tend to evolve in a more fragmented and disjointed manner” (my emphasis ‘For an independent socialist Scotland’ Pre-conference discussion papers).

The programme and its antecedents are unmistakable. From Joseph Pilsudski to Joseph Stalin, we have heard it all before. It is the old refrain of socialism in one country - in this case Scotland. Like his predecessors comrade McCombes resorts to the notoriously misused “law of uneven development”. The implicit assumption is that Scotland stands in the vanguard of the class struggle, if not at the epicentre of the world revolution. This being the case, Scotland should not wait for the backward English (there can be no doubt that the defeats suffered by the working class over the last 20 years provide fertile ground for inertia, pessimism and resignation). Nor should Scottish workers fight to overthrow the existing state. Quite the reverse. Midwife McCombes wants to preside over the birth of a new class state. Scotland should break-away from the United Kingdom. Once free from the body of England and the restraints of Westminster, the Scots will rapidly embrace socialism. Or so it is believed. True, a socialist Scotland could not “survive indefinitely in isolation”. But the presumption is that its splendid achievement “inspires others to follow the example”.

If by some fluke comrade McCombes became chief minister in Edinburgh as a result of a post-independence parliamentary revolution, the result would certainly be the opposite of what he intends. The capitalist state exists nationally and territorially. Yet, capitalism as a mode of production is fundamentally a global system of exploitation. Capitalism can be abolished within the borders of one country using a despotic state. Yet Marx and Engels explicitly warned against such experiments with “local communism” or national socialism. Foresight that in many ways augured the tragic history of the 20th century.

Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Hoxha’s Albania and Castro’s Cuba prove that a national post-capitalism is perfectly feasible. However, they also prove that the consequences in terms of humanity are disastrous. Partial negations do not create something superior, more dynamic and more sustainable than capitalism. Instead of being an “oasis” attractive to others, they become giant prison camps where workers are subject to a modern state-slavery.

Of course being backward and to some extent peripheral, the USSR, China, etc, could temporarily develop the productive forces and wealth available to the state by means of universal statisation and forced mobilisation of resources and labour power. That is hardly the case with Scotland. It is not only an advanced country in terms of industry and socioeconomic sophistication. It is thoroughly integrated into and reliant on the world market. The sweeping nationalisation advocated by McCombes and his comrades would not be an advance. Nor would it even revive the social democratic achievements of the 1950s and 60s he so fondly admires.

General state ownership would be woefully regressive. The very notion of a Scottish steel, car, oil, computer or shipbuilding industry is a reactionary utopia. Such industries operate nowadays on a global scale and according to a global division of labour. Instead of breaking them apart - which would surely mean ruination - the historic task of the working class is to fully socialise them. Only by bringing capital, where it exists as a system, under social control can the workers - necessarily as a world class - really free themselves.

Equally bankrupt is the method underlying the SSA/SSP. It is opportunist in an almost chemically pure form. Abandoning struggle - albeit reformist - within the UK state in favour of advocating a break-up and separation of Scotland is justified in terms of swimming with the tide of popular opinion. Latest polls show a small majority favouring independence. It is one thing to advocate self-determination for Scotland. It is another matter entirely to advocate independence. The former is a democratic demand. The latter is nationalism.

Scotland ought to have as a matter of principle the right to freely decide its own future. But that does not mean communists are indifferent to the way that right is exercised. On the contrary we are very partisan. The CPGB is for the closest possible voluntary unity of people in general and the workers in particular. That is why we single-mindedly fight to organise the workers in Britain into one party against the common enemy - the UK state. Our programme calls for the abolition of the UK state and a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales and the reunification of Ireland. Carrying this through using proletarian methods, as we intend - workers’ councils, etc, - would see not the reform of official Britain, but its death. The precondition of working class self-liberation.

Comrade McCombes claims that if support for an independent Scotland “represented a backward, rightwing trend in society, an isolationist or xenophobic development”, then it should be resisted. But, he says, the “sections of society who favour independence are those who are generally more socialist-leaning, including a big majority of young people and low paid workers”. Those who

“intransigently oppose independence include the most rightwing, conservative sections of the population, in particular the Scottish ruling class of landowners, financiers and big business interests”.

Poland before the 1905 Russian revolution provides a striking parallel - one that does nothing to sustain the national socialist conclusions of comrade McCombes and the SSA/SSP majority. For a century Poland had been a revolutionary nation. Divided by Prussia, Austria and Russia - which got the lion’s share - the independence cause championed by the lesser aristocracy was undoubtedly progressive. Yet in the twilight of the 19th century, that changed. The lesser aristocracy disappeared as a revolutionary class. The bourgeoisie reconciled itself to integration with tsarist Russia. Despite the fact that the mass of peasants and the “socialist-leaning” working class remained committed to independence, there was a brave minority which dared swim against the stream. Rosa Luxemburg, Julian Marchlewski and a small leftwing faction broke from the newly formed Polish Socialist Party - an affiliated section of the Socialist International - because in 1893 it adopted the pro-independence programme of Pilsudski.

Though economically and politically Poland was in advance of Russia, their split - the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania - declared for the unity of all workers throughout the tsarist empire against the tsarist empire (they found an ally in Lenin who, while demanding the right of self-determination for Poland, quite consistently also called for unity). The SDKPiL joined the RSDLP of Lenin, Martov, Trotsky and Plekhanov in 1906.

Of course in the storm of 1905 Pilsudski and the PSP fought guns in hand as one would expect from those committed to nationalist-revolution. The programme of SSA/SSP, however, combines nationalism not with revolution, but reformism. Comrade McCombes holds that the SSA’s Charter for a socialist Scotland is a “full-blooded socialist programme”. The truth is rather more prosaic. As a united front around immediate or limited issues the SSA Charter is acceptable. As a “full-blooded socialist programme” it is lamentable. The Charter is essentially no different from the Labour Party’s 1918 clause four and will be used in the same way. There can be no doubt about it. The leadership of SSA/SSP intends to put forward for the May 1999 Scottish election a platform that can be realistically achieved within the parameters of the Edinburgh parliament.

Inevitably the SSA/SSP will end up tailing the SNP and its big business agenda, just as SML in a previous manifestation once tailed Labourism. Independence is seen as a necessary stage before socialism can be realised, almost exactly as putting Labour into office was seen as a necessary stage. In the run-up to the May 1997 general election Scottish Socialist Voice painted the SNP in a reddish hue and suggested that a vote for Alec Salmond’s candidates would be tactically astute in constituencies where the SNP was the main force against the Tories.

Organisation loyally follows politics. The proposed SSP will be social democratic in terms of structure - trade union affiliates, lesbian and gay networks, and “respect for different shades of opinion” (as we have seen in practice already, that means rightist, not leftist opinion). Allan Green, SSA secretary, parades the PDS in Germany as his model. Reforging a Leninist CPGB is for him not “relevant to the needs of the 21st century”. Bill Bonnar, a co-editor of the SSA’s journal Red is another self-appointed attorney for the ‘third way’, which is neither “revolutionary in the sense that it envisages the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order, nor reformist in the sense of reforms which stabilise and protect capitalism” (Red No4, summer 1998). In other words comrade Bonnar’s much vaunted ‘third way’ is a common or garden left reformist schema to use the awesome power of a beneficent state to bring emancipation from above.

The SSA’s conversion to unashamed nationalism, the proposal to establish a reformist-nationalist SSP in the autumn, is not an advance for the working class. Neither in Scotland. Nor Britain. Nor the world. It is a setback both for the part and the whole. A body of fine activists has swapped British left reformism for Scottish nationalism. The project for an all-Britain Socialist Alliance has seen an important section close itself as a united front. The door to the SWP and the SLP has been locked and bolted in Scotland. The frail English and Welsh Socialist Alliances are now alone. Of no less consequence, SML has de facto divorced itself from Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party. That was what SML members voted for at the June 20 conference. The impatience, the urgency driving the decision to transform the SSA into the SSP is not the May 1999 Edinburgh parliament elections - as maintained. It is the death wish of SML. Its leadership is eager, not to say desperate, to liquidate SML as a public organisation in favour of life at the top of a “hybrid” or “transitional” reformist-nationalist SSP. The only opposition within SML ranks was a mealy-mouthed worry about timing from the likes of Colin Fox. Needless to say, the final stand of Taaffeism came to naught and passed almost unnoticed.

Those in the SSA committed to the revolutionary overthrow, not the nationalist weakening, of the UK state can give no support to the proposed SSP. They cannot agree to nor accept a reformist-nationalist programme as the basis of joint activity, not least because the SSP will not be a party in terms of being the advanced part of the working class. In form and content it will be a reformist-nationalist sect.

The interregnum between the June 20 conference and the autumn launch of the SSP must be used for propaganda and agitation against the reformist-nationalist course and for preparing the ground for a principled split. The fight is not over. But it would be foolish to imagine that a pro-workers’ unity majority can be won by autumn or that everything should be staked on winning one within the narrow confines of the SSP. That would in itself be a form of liquidationism. The key lies with Marxist theory and the perspective of reforging an all-Britain Leninist party.

Jack Conrad