04.03.1999
Scottish national socialism and its red prince - part 1
Jack Conrad replies to Allan Armstrong of the Scottish Socialist Party
In defence of definition
Allan Armstrong has the privilege of leading the very small Red Republican faction of the Scottish Socialist Party - through which his microscopic Communist Tendency operates and finds expression. The Red Republicans constitute the extreme nationalist wing of the SSP - for example, if Tommy Sheridan were elected to Holyrood, they moralistically demand that he should refuse to take the oath of loyalty to the United Kingdom crown and thus not take his seat. No crossed fingers, no MSP, no parliamentary voice. It would be wrong, however, to dismiss comrade Armstrong as simply yet another primitive sectarian oddity who should be filed away under ‘C’ for cranks.
He is the most consistent, articulate, knowledgeable and theoretically sophisticated advocate of Scottish national socialism. Anyone who has troubled to examine his writings - not least the recent 10,000-word Weekly Worker polemic against the CPGB - will appreciate that comrade Armstrong is not only widely read, but possesses a strategic vision far beyond the short-term electoralism and crude economism of his SSP peers (we published Allan Armstrong’s “‘Union’ Jack and defence of the ‘British nation’” in two parts over February 18 and 25).
In relative terms then he towers above the puny ‘theoretical’ efforts of official SSP ‘tops’. Hugh Kerr, Tommy Sheridan, Bill Bonnar, Alan McCombes, Allan Green and Phil Stott have no coherent programme. Their Scottish national socialism rests precariously on a wobbly construct of anti-English legends, kailyard reformism and the upward curve of pro-independence opinion polls. Precisely because the SSP’s Scottish national socialism is shallow and so vulnerable to criticism or the slightest unexpected ripple of events, comrade Armstrong’s theory, or a variant of it, stands well placed to be given official status in the not too distant future - with or without its author’s blessing. In that sense, if in no other, Allan Armstrong is the SSP’s heir apparent.
Having given, I am duty bound to take. Comrade Armstrong’s theory is profoundly flawed. On any basis it is alien to scientific socialism and the interests of the world working class. For all his ability to pluck quotes from various Marxist texts the comrade is in fact no more than a left nationalist and a utopian whose socialism relies on pure voluntarism (the will is all). The objective laws of history and scientifically based social practice are rejected in favour of anarchistic subjectivism.
This can be seen quite clearly in the comrade’s opening gambit against me in his Weekly Worker polemic. Predictably he objects to my use of Stalin’s justly famous definition of a nation supplied in his 1913 pamphlet Marxism and the national question (incidentally Lenin had the highest opinion of this work: he gave it “prime place” in the “Marxist literature” on the subject). It is not that Stalin became in later life a bureaucratic dictator and a killer on the scale of Genghis Khan. Comrade Armstrong is not stupid. No, his problem with Stalin’s definition is the linking of nations to the rise of capitalism and other objective or materialist criteria.
Let me briefly reiterate Stalin’s definition. A nation is a “definite community of people”, he writes. Nations are invariably formed through the merger of the most diverse tribes, nationalities and ethnic groups, brought about in the first place by the dynamic of capitalism. Stalin cites “the British, the Germans” as an “historically constituted community of people” (JV Stalin Works Vol 2, Moscow 1953, p303). Nations must not be confused with loose empires such as that of Alexander the Great or state communities such as Belgium, Spain or the former Soviet Union, which have a common territory but no “common language”. A nation must also have, “strictly speaking”, a “common economic life” and “economic cohesion” (ibid pp305, 306). Stalin therefore sums up the “characteristic features of a nation” in the following pithy manner: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture” (ibid p307). Karl Kautsky had a similar ‘objective’ definition (far narrower than Stalin, in point of fact, who gave full weight to subjective factors; Kautsky wrote of nations as a “community of language” - see The materialist conception of history Yale 1988, p380).
Stalin stresses that nations have a history - hence a beginning and an end. Nations come into existence and will certainly go out of existence. In other words they are not fixed categories with their origins in the mist of time, but are fluid and transient. So to understand this or that contemporary nation we must seek out the non-thing, not project what exists back into history.
Comrade Armstrong appears to dismiss Stalin’s definition out of hand. Why? Stalin’s theory was “developed in the heyday of imperialism” and represents nothing more than “high social democracy” which “viewed capitalism as progressive and socialism as inevitable”. Hence, says a sneering comrade Armstrong, “if your nation” passes the “objective” test, thanks to the pulse of “economic forces”, then “there should be a one-directional movement towards a greater unity, which ‘objectively’ helped to create the basis for a socialist future”.
A string of problems are immediately evident. Comrade Armstrong seems to equate imperialism with colonialism and colonial empires. Perhaps the notion that the “heyday of imperialism” was in 1913 is a careless slip. There is, however, no mistake when the comrade labels Stalin a “social democrat”. He similarly describes Lenin, Trotsky and for that matter a certain ‘Union’ Jack Conrad.
Of course, in 1913 Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky called themselves social democrats. They were members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Communists used that “pig of a name” till 1918 when they discarded the “soiled shirt” and re-adopted their true “scientific name”. Comrade Armstrong knows all this perfectly well. His intention though is to childishly belittle every trend that came from within the Second International, above all its revolutionary left wing, and in the process boost his own credentials as a pristine ‘Marxist’. But for the sake of consistency he should label Marx and Engels social democrats too. Their party in Germany was the Social Democracy. And what about comrade Armstrong’s heroes, John Maclean and James Connolly? Were they not members of the Second International - albeit marginal in terms of theoretical contribution?
We can argue about the emphasis any general analysis of the emergence of nations should give - to economic developments on the one hand and political developments on the other. For comrade Armstrong, it should be noted, “nationalism and nations rise primarily due to political, not economic factors.” He accuses Jack Conrad of being one-sided: “For Jack, nations cannot arise until there has been a sufficient development of the productive forces. Therefore nations can only be said to exist with the triumph of capitalism.” Apparently I “ditch” any notion of “dialectical development expressed through class struggle”.
I flatly reject the claim that my Lenin-Stalin-derived theory of nations downplays the class struggle. National movements, even in recent times, have carved nation states out of the most difficult conditions with the support of the popular classes - Vietnam, Eritrea and Georgia being examples. Stalin himself refers to the “strength of the national movement” being “determined by the degree to which the wide strata of the nation, the proletariat and peasantry, participate in it (JV Stalin Works Vol 2, Moscow 1953, p317). As to Lenin, the constant theme in his countless articles and pamphlets dealing with the subject is not some “objective” check list, as a dismally unoriginal comrade Armstrong suggests. On the contrary Lenin deals with the national question in political and class terms. He was willing to see the tiniest nation states - 50,000 was a figure used. For Lenin the national question was primarily a democratic question, a question over which the proletariat - crucially the proletariat in the oppressor countries - must take an active lead. Jack Conrad takes the same political view. That explains why he champions the right of Scotland to self-determination. Can comrade Armstrong deny it? As an intelligent and honest man he cannot.
The real problem is not my objectivism, but comrade Armstrong’s subjectivism. He dismisses objective criteria when it comes to defining the nation. Hence in the name of attacking the vulgar economic reduction-ism, which did indeed characterise some of the theorisation of certain leaders of the Second and Third Internationals, he throws out the baby with the bathwater. In my account nations emerge - not out of nowhere, but through and on the material foundations of definite economic developments (not forgetting the role of common geography, language, culture, etc).
It is not the “triumph” of capitalism which by itself invents the nation state, but it is economic progress which facilitates it. Of course, the term ‘nation’ is an ancient one. But applied in its modern way Marxists have argued that nations first came into being with the “rise” of capitalism: eg, Britain and then the universal paradigms of France and the USA.
Before that, for instance in classical and feudal societies, there were clans, nationalities and classes, but no nations. Take the Greeks of Hellas. These people spoke the same common language, but with distinct tribal dialects. They shared the same common territory, but fought innumerable wars against each other. They had a recognisably common culture, but they were not united economically. Scattered self-sufficient peasant agriculture, tribal identity, petty artisan manufacture and painfully slow internal communications saw the Greeks living in numerous rival poleis. There was no Greek nation. Objective conditions did not allow it ... or does comrade Armstrong imagine that the Greeks of 550 BCE could have been forged into a single nation by political struggle or whim?
Interestingly comrade Armstrong provides no alternative definition of the nation. He does tell us that their “fullest development” comes about “as a product of increasing democratic practice connected with the rising class struggle”. He therefore traces the origins of the Scottish ‘nation’ back before history to the “primitive democracy” associated with the “pre-state communal social systems”. This Celtic-centric account forms the basis for the following statement:
“Despite the limits of bourgeois understanding of democracy, there can be little doubt that there is a close link between the idea of a wider franchise and the idea of a nation which incorporates all its citizens. It is the vote which makes you a full citizen of the nation. This is central to most versions of developed modern nationalisms, even if the nationalists themselves do not always adhere in practice to the fullest tenets of bourgeois democracy.”
My objection here is that comrade Armstrong fuses together the categories of nation and state. An elementary error. Not all nations are states and more to the point most states, even the most democratic ones, are not nations. In fact the vast majority of states nowadays are not nation states.
How should communists respond to this situation? Since the days of the Communist manifesto the historic task we assign to the world’s working class is winning the battle for democracy in order to positively overthrow the existing state machine, including the multinational state - the road to communism and universal human liberation is thereby opened.
Our task is not the breaking up of states like Canada, Ukraine, India, South Africa, Iraq, Belgium, etc, into national pieces. While for us the self-determination is a general principle, we advocate separation only under exceptional circumstances. Separation as a universal panacea, it hardly needs saying, is the programme of nationalism - a programme advocated by comrade Armstrong and the SSP in the name of socialism.
In this the comrade’s views owe nothing to the programme advanced by Marx and Engels. Yet there is an illuminating parallel in the Second International in the form of the Polish Socialist Party and its leader Joseph Pilsudski. While it creates confusion, not clarity, if comrade Armstrong insists on calling me a social democrat, so be it. But if I am a social democrat in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Stalin, then he should admit his antecedents in rightwing social democracy.