25.03.1999
Scottish national socialism and its red prince - part 4
Jack Conrad concludes his reply to Allan Armstrong of the Scottish Socialist Party
Self-determination and the federal republic
Britain is a national trinity according to the stipulations of the monarchical constitution. Yet neither England, Scotland nor Wales are nations. Rather they are the archaic legal-geographical demarcations of the state of Great Britain: ie, two kingdoms and one principality. The actual inhabitants themselves are united by a common territory, a common language, a common economy and a historically formed common culture and psychology. In other words Britain is not, as comrade Allan Armstrong suggests, some loose or ephemeral conglomeration of peoples who are doomed to a quick divorce, but a stable, historically constituted community: ie, a nation.
Of course, it is clear that every nation is a process of making and remaking. Cromwell’s Commonwealth was forged in the fire of a puritan revolution from below. Cool Britannia is the ideological cloak of a Blairite constitutional revolution from above. In other words Britain is not a fixed category, let alone a personality. Nations are a multitude of connected moments, realities and living beings. As a nation Britain is a relatively recent phenomenon. I would link its inception with Protestantism and the translation and printing of the bible in English during the 16th century. That and the growth of commercial and agricultural capitalism began to lay the foundations of a neoteric common culture and economy. So Britain can be only some 450 years old.
Nevertheless in terms of embryonic raw material and cultural roots the British nation must be located in the murky undercurrents of the past – in its nothingness. It is not that the Roman conquest of Britannia under Claudius and the subsequent Germanic and Norse invasions from the 5th to the 11th centuries ‘inevitably’ produced the present British nation (the ‘Danish’ and ‘Norwegian’ Norse, including the Normans, being an integral part of the folk movement of Germanic tribes and warrior bands that migrated into the decaying western Roman empire). There were, as there always are, many avenues, many courses history could have taken. The dark ages and certainly the Norman tornado were accidental. But happen they did, along with the negative formation of the British-Welsh and then the English. It is not a matter of using DNA tests to prove the Brito-Romano-Germanic origins of the modern British cline. Biology is irrelevant. The key overriding factor that culturally unites the overwhelming majority of the people in Britain is English (a greatly simplified Low Germanic language with a huge number of loan words).
In arguing that a British nation exists, I am not asserting that it has only a single identity. I profoundly disagree with comrade Armstrong who cyclops-like can only see official Britain (and a largely mythical Scotland). There are, as I have often said, many identities - regional, local, age, gender, religious, ethnic, etc - and by no means least, there are the competing identities advocated by those above, and crucially for us, those below. Leveller democracy, Owenism, physical force Chartism, militant trade unionism, Labourism, CPGB communism. Britain is plural. Britain is therefore open- ended. Hence there can be disunity in defeat or unity in revolt, disunity in passivity or unity in victory. Nothing is predetermined. But we do have a starting point. That is why a firm, scientific, grasp of the present and a vision of the future is so essential. Our political programme has no worth unless it is extended into tomorrow, when, in the poetic words of the outstanding French historian, Fernand Braudel, “we pass through the gates of today” (F Braudel The identity of France London 1989, p27).
To an unbiased observer Jack Conrad’s motive in stressing the corporeal reality of the British nation is plain and unmistakable. It has nothing whatsoever to do with some ‘Union Jack’ British patriotism, as ridiculously insisted upon by comrade Armstrong. His royal saltire is white and blue and flies this day over Edinburgh castle. My flag is red. I am an internationalist and, following in the footsteps of Thomas Paine, a “citizen of the world”. Nor is it because I entertain some project of British national socialism. I am by birth and upbringing British, or, if you like, English. But by conviction I aspire to Marxist communism. Not surprisingly then I hold that there can be no road to socialism which premises itself on the isolated British nation or United Kingdom state. Socialism is a universal act of self-liberation by the universal class. Though it is not a formulation I would normally use, I am a “global nationalist” (a paradoxical phrase coined by our pro-nationalist Stalinite correspondent, Ivor Kenna - see Letters Weekly Worker March 18).
No, the reason I wish to highlight the British nation is to wield it as a polemical scythe. My intention is to lay bare the debilitating consequences that lie hidden underneath the carefully nurtured myths of Scottish nationalism ... and thus lessen the danger of a disastrous split in the historically constituted working class in Britain. By definition Scottish nationalism, both right and left, must on the one hand deny the tangible British nation and on the other hand invent a phantom Scottish nation. If in modern times there was, and today there still is, a British nation, Scottish nationalism has a big problem. Crucially the absence of a Scottish nation.
That implied lacuna in good part explains the malevolent bile about the CPGB and its co-thinkers being pro-UK “unionists” and even “racists” (comrade Armstrong freely throws about both charges). Without its fanciful 400 years of English oppression, Scottish nationalism - whether it be the SNP or Settler Watch, the CWI in Scotland or Allan Armstrong’s Red Republicans - is electoralist opportunism at best or at worst crude anti-English bigotry. (The CWI in Scotland is opportunist in an almost chemically pure form. Its break with Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party was justified in terms of swimming with the tide of nationalist opinion.)
My politics are very different. In actual fact I do not need the British nation. I discuss and analyse Britain because that modality must be taken into account by revolutionaries. No more. Marxists start programmatically not with nations, but the enemy state. Within each state we seek to organise the workers into one Communist Party (needless to say, we also envisage a new International with subordinate sections). That state could be a nation state: eg, Britain, Germany, France and Italy. By the same measure it could be a multi-national state, like Belgium, India or Canada. To the extent that it is transformed from a trading bloc into a superstate that also applies to the European Union - as a good nationalist, comrade Armstrong can then call us the ‘Euro-left’ or perhaps even ‘Eurocommunists’. Either way the aim of our programme is to unite the workers as a political class in order to overthrow first the existing state, and then, according to the forward march of the world revolution, all existing social conditions. Our efforts today are designed to that end.
Unfortunately most of the left in Britain is hopelessly mired in economism or strikism. Pay, anti-trade union laws, health and welfare cuts are their main diet. Socialism is a splendid, but disembodied future. However, the main characteristic of economism is a denial or downplaying of democratic demands. For example, in pre-revolutionary Russia the economists maintained that the task of social democrats (ie, communists), was to support, promote and politicise the economic struggles of the working class. As proletarian confidence, solidarity and trade union organisation grew, so would socialist consciousness. Or so the strike-chasers thought. The tsarist monarchy, the fake duma parliament, demands for a constituent assembly, the right of self-determination for the innumerable oppressed nationalities in the Russian empire, peasant land hunger, women’s equality, etc were patronisingly described as being above the workers’ heads - or issues that would be solved by socialism.
In contrast Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed that the working class had to be united to smash the tsarist monarchy system. Socialist consciousness would not primarily grow by workers improving their own pay and conditions through economic strikes, but by taking up and fighting for the fullest, most extensive democracy. Every denial of justice, every act of bureaucratic arbitrariness in the countryside, every resentment, every example of national oppression had to be the concern of the workers if they were to become the hegemon of the revolution. Such an ability to think and act strategically comes from Marxist science and building and educating a mass proletarian party.
The CPGB models itself on the Bolsheviks politically and programmatically. Hence in Britain the CPGB takes a revolutionary democratic approach to the UK state and the constitutional monarchy system. Here stands the main enemy. In our minimum programme (ie, within the social parameters of the capitalist system) we therefore demand the immediate abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords, the acts of union and self-determination for Scotland and Wales, and the reunification of Ireland. In place of the constitutional monarchy system the CPGB poses the need for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales.
The ‘federal republic’ slogan encapsulates both the democratic right to self-determination and the unity of the working class in Britain, in opposition to Blair’s plan for a new constitutional monarchy system. It also encapsulates the unity of the working class in Britain against nationalism. Actually Blair has unwittingly done us a great service. In remaking the UK constitution - albeit to strengthen the system of class rule - he shows everyone that the constitution is neither timeless nor natural. It is plastic, artificial, a product of historical making and contemporary remaking. Consequently the call for constitutional change is no longer fringe politics. Constitutional change today lies at the heart of political debate and action. What Blair has begun from above we can complete from below.
Comrade Armstrong feels threatened. To save his precious national road he deviously caricatures the call for a federal republic as the “most ‘advanced’ defence of the British state” (Weekly Worker February 25). Revolutionary federalism is merely a form of “accommodation” with the state, he froths. Virulent nationalism turns him away from class unity and drives him towards anarchist irrationality. Automatically and instinctively he rejects anything pan-British, even the growth of working class power. He might have been trained by Ivan Pavlov. Marxists, it should be said, are not indifferent to state forms. Nor do we advocate the instant abolition of the state. Under capitalism we fight to extend democracy to its limits, preferring - surprise, surprise - dual power to fascism. Certainly the workers will need their own semi-state for a few decades after the socialist revolution. So what determines the communist attitude towards a state is not whether its borders stretch from John O’Groats to Land’s End, but democratic and class content. Surely ushering in a federal republic using proletarian methods, as we intend - workers’ councils, etc, would see not the salvation of official Britain, but its death. Only a narrow-minded nationalist could describe that as “accommodation” or “defence”.
It should also be noted that we do not put a scientific assessment that there is a British nation before the palpable feelings of masses of people in Scotland and Wales. Millions think they are nationally disadvantaged or oppressed (a subjectivity that constitutes a material factor). So Stalin’s fivefold classification of what constitutes a nation is not used as a “check list” of who qualifies and who does not qualify for self-determination, as comrade Armstrong hints. That was not Stalin’s intention as a pamphleteer in 1913. Nor was it his practice as the commissar for nationalities in the Soviet government of 1917. Those who take such a dry and utterly repellent stance are alien to the spirit of Bolshevism. Our approach is designed to further democracy and puts politics, not dogmatism, in the driving seat.
Having left no room for confusion that Scotland’s right to self-determination is entirely a political and democratic question, let us proceed to discuss the CPGB’s attitude to that right.
Advocating self-determination is not the same as advocating 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 agnostic about how 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 means resolutely combating nationalism in its many and varied manifestations.
Nationalism and Marxism are antithetical. Nationalism considers nations and national cultures positively. National differences or distinctions between people are viewed as essentially healthy and something to be sustained into the distant future. Left nationalists like comrade Armstrong and the SSP give this ‘principle’ a national socialist gloss. The road to socialism is seen through the prism of the nation. Marxism on the other hand considers nations and national distinctions negatively. We want to create conditions whereby nationalism, nations, nationality and the nation state quietly wither away, not proliferate. Hence 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.
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 counterrevolutionary 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.
I have argued that the relative decline of British imperialism laid the basis for a novel Scottish nationalism (certainly not the revival of a nationhood going back to Kenneth MacAlpine or Macbeth). From the mid-19th century onwards being Scottish - with the obvious exception of worst paid labour - was to share in the “lucrative” booty of the British empire (L Colly Britons London 1992, p373). Under Thatcher it meant cuts, the poll tax and a denial of rights. Identification with the state reached its zenith in World War II and in the subsequent long boom. Now there is widespread alienation. Blair’s constitutional revolution has yet to reverse that trend.
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. Sectionalism is undoubtedly rife. 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).
Its secretary, Chris Bambery, claims the SWP is committed to “politics, politics, politics”. By that he means giving a political coloration to strikes. “Every strike becomes political,” he says, bowing in the direction of his leader’s latest line in catastrophe prediction. According to the sage, the “smallest improvement in the workers’ conditions ... bring conflict with the capitalist system” (T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, p82). Demonstrably untrue. Yet when it comes to real politics - ie, the relationship between all classes and the state, the way we are ruled and our rulers rule - the SWP has miserably tailed Blair. Instead of formulating constitutional demands in its much vaunted Action programme, the SWP reflects and panders to narrow trade unionist consciousness and even attempts to breathe life into the so-called Alternative Economic Strategy of the ‘official communists’ (the SWP’s Action programme was first published in Socialist Worker September 12 1998).
Mesmerised by economism, the main slogan of the SWP for the post-May 1997 period has been ‘tax the rich’. This is, of course, a perfectly correct demand. But, unless placed within the context of a communist minimum programme, it challenges neither the way we are politically ruled nor economically exploited. The Liberal Democrats entered the last election under the banner of increased taxation. Communists must raise political – ie, constitutional - demands and slogans. We need a working class alternative to Blair’s new constitutional monarchy system.
What is particularly notable about Blair’s programme of constitutional reform at this moment in time is the complete absence of any working class input or alternative. Indeed, as we have long argued, it is the atomisation, the (temporary) disappearance of the working class from the political stage that has created the conditions whereby Blair can propose and feel safe in carrying through his programme. Though millions are alienated from the state, there is neither pressure nor threat from the working class. That can, must and will be ended.
To that end 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 else 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 principles of democracy and internationalism. We seek at all times to build the maximum unity and ever closer relations between nationalities. The working class has no interest in any delay in solving national questions, 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 proposed Edinburgh parliament and the rigged nature of Blair’s September 11 referendum (not 1998, as comrade Armstrong mistakenly says). In the name of genuine self-determination we made propaganda for an active boycott. The CPGB found itself in a difficult but enviable position. Alone we intransigently defended and boldly advocated independent working class politics: ie, the right of Scotland (and Wales) to self-determination. Our call for a boycott of Blair’s rigged referendum earned us hatred from all manner of high-ups. Scotland Forward coordinator Paul Vestry unsuccessfully tried to eject us from meetings. Donald Dewar’s cronies banned our material in Glasgow. Alan Green proposed our expulsion from the Scottish Socialist Alliance. Nevertheless our message found a definite, mass, echo amongst nationalist and radical workers.
It was not only the SSP’s Alan McCombes and Alan Green who wanted a sop parliament. Secretly the SSP’s other Allan entertained a similar agenda. Shamefully comrade Armstrong cannot bring himself to tell the truth. He maintains that the CPGB called for a “stay-at-home abstention on September 11”. He even pretends that our politics leave us “well placed” in the future to serve the “British ruling class” as “critical cheerleaders” in its “project to maintain the unity of their state” (Weekly Worker February 25). Evidently comrade Armstrong has overplayed his hand. True, Holyrood can marginally alter income tax rates. But it has no say over the constitution. MSPs cannot make Scotland independent. The whole thing, including the September 11 1997 referendum, is a prophylactic designed to reinforce 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. Unlike the SSP, the CPGB unconditionally defends the right of the oppressed to take up arms to win its 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. Comrade Armstrong would have it that now, under the conditions of Good Friday, the CPGB urges Irish republican socialists to “accept partition and British rule”. Jokingly he asks “how much longer before” we raise the demand for the Twenty-Six Counties “to join the UK too” (Weekly Worker February 18). I will put such silliness down to comrade Armstrong’s inability to distinguish between his own fetid imagination and our long record of solidarity with Irish republicans and opposition to British imperialism. Suffice to say, we still demand the unconditional withdrawal of British troops and right of Ireland to reunify. Significantly comrade Armstrong’s SSP does not. His party leadership supports the Good Friday British-Irish Agreement, which legitimises the undemocratic division of the island.
As a certified break-up merchant, comrade Armstrong might care to tell us what programmatic position he would take under an independent SNP Scotland (no wild speculation). There would appear to be three basic options. Serve the new governing elite as a “critical cheerleader”? Join us in fighting to unite the workers to overthrow the state? Keep bashing away with the separatist hammer?
There are plenty of fault lines. Glasgow resents Edinburgh. Aberdeen has oil. Gaelic speakers would be advantaged if it were the official language over ‘colonial’ English. It is it is hardly inconceivable to imagine Orkney and the Shetland Islands hankering for separation. There are also the old border counties - Roxburgh and Berwick. They have far more in common with northern England than the Scottish highlands.
We communists are quite prepared to take self-determination to extremes - if there is a genuine democratic grievance let Orkney, Cornwall, Shetland, the Isle of Man, etc, decide their own fates, up to and including independence. But we communists would try and persuade people to unite. Separation into tiny statelets is neither a communist method nor principle. Fragmentation, or breaking up, is not a road to socialism. It is though the ideal of anarchism. When put into practice, as it was in Spain in 1868-74, it led, as Engels famously illustrated, to “the boundless, and senseless disintegration of the revolutionary resources” and a walkover for counterrevolution (F Engels MECW Vol 23, Moscow 1988, p597). Think again, comrade Armstrong and the SSP, think again.
Separation, as I have said, 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. So our policy is decided on the basis of historical conditions and the 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. That Marxist approach also informs our politics vis-à-vis the EU. The CPGB refuses to defend the pound sterling against the euro. We also oppose all campaigns for a British withdrawal from the EU.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is constitutionally the unity of hereditary crowns, not the voluntary union of peoples. Sovereignty formally lies with the monarch, not the people. Therefore 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 make a union 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 inborn democratic deficit. 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 such 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.
Communists have no project to save the existing British state. Comrade Armstrong’s numerous statements purporting to show otherwise go beyond the normal bounds of serious polemics. To say nothing of clarity and saving valuable time, he would do his own cause less harm by sticking to what the CPGB actually says, rather than resorting to what are transparent fabrications. Needless to say, the CPGB wishes to create the best conditions for the closest unity of the people of Britain against the UK state. We 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.
Comrade Armstrong knows that Marx, Engels and Lenin wrote favourably about a federation in the British Isles. The comrade introduces an irrelevance from Lenin - a mere social democrat, according to Armstrong - about federation under Russian tsarism being meaningless. Indeed it was. But that was hardly the case following the October Revolution. The USSR was formed as a federation of workers’ republics with the right to self-determination for nations enshrined in the constitution. Anyway, that aside, the comrade interestingly discusses Engels’ position on Ireland in 1891.
He concludes that Engels’ call for a British-Irish federation in his ‘Critique of the Erfurt programme’ was historically conditioned. That with the upsurge of class struggle around the Irish TGWU, the 1913 Dublin lockout and then the 1916 Easter uprising, the Dáil Eireann and the Black and Tan war, independence again became the only principled demand. I wholeheartedly agree. But the CPGB advances a federal republic not as some universal panacea. For us it is a democratic and transitional aim specific to a Britain which now has a burning internal national question.
And, having cited the ‘Critique of the Erfurt programme’, perhaps comrade Armstrong would forgive me if I refer to Frederick Engels’ central point. Federalism “would”, he wrote, “be a step forward” in the UK which in spite of its single parliament has four “nations” - a term he used loosely - and “three different systems of legislation” (F Engels MECW Vol 27, Moscow 1990, p228). However, and this is the point, federalism was “a step forward” to the “one and indivisible republic”. This is the form most suited to the needs and struggles of the proletariat. Engels reckoned already in the 1890s that federalism was becoming a “hindrance” in the eastern states of the USA. In Switzerland it was “tolerable” only because of the country’s torpor. Furthermore, in Bismarckian Germany, said Engels, federalism on the Swiss mode; would be “an enormous step backwards” (ibid).
Over 100 years later looking at capitalistically advanced countries like the USA, Australia and catatonic Switzerland, I am of the opinion that communists should be for sweeping changes. Federalism in these countries now constitutes a constitutional weapon in the hands of backward states, territories and cantons. In Switzerland it perpetuates alpine insularity. The majority of Australians want to abolish the monarchy. But a referendum majority is required in the majority of states. State rights are the main bulwark against republicanism. We favour a united republic and a single chamber of parliament. In the USA too not only should federalism go but so must the presidential system and the Senate. Logically comrade Armstrong should rush to defend Uri and Nidwalden, Queensland and Tasmania, Louisiana and Alabama, and urge them to split away - Jefferson Davis tried in 1861.
Unlike Engels our present-day critics on the left generally absolve themselves from what they wrongly describe as the ‘bourgeois’ task of ending the monarchy and winning a federal republic. Comrade Armstrong defines his sect around the maximum slogan, ‘Scottish workers’ republic’. The SSP tops find the terms ‘republic’ and ‘republican’ a ticklish problem, given the catholic-protestant, Irish-Scots divide that lurks beneath the surface in Scotland. They opt for the less provocative ‘independent socialist Scotland’. The difference is important, but at the end of the day secondary. Both the revolutionary-nationalist and reformist-nationalist wings of the SSP abstain from independent working class politics under capitalism. Naturally their ultra-left pose is never applied 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. So in rejecting the communist minimum programme these comrades 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.
Frankly, neither comrade Armstrong nor the SSP majority defends the Marxist point of view. Of course, the SSP majority promotes a Scottish national road to socialism (which comes via the Holyrood 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. In contrast comrade Armstrong and his Communist Tendency are national revolutionaries. They would introduce an instant communism in Scotland. No doubt intentions are sincere. Everything must be terribly democratic. But their whole project will produce results that are completely opposite. Pol Pot is an awful warning.
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 economic activity. It is thoroughly integrated into and reliant on the world economy. General nationalisation would be woefully regressive. The very notion of a Scottish steel, car, 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.
What really unites comrade Armstrong with the SSP majority (Alan McCombes and the CWI in Scotland, Alan Green, Hugh Kerr, Bill Bonnar, etc) is the fight for a separate Scotland: both wings of the SSP therefore share a programme to weaken, not smash the UK state, presumably leaving the workers in England and Wales to overthrow it. Instead of working class unity against the UK state the SSP would end the historic unity of the working class in Britain. Hence, as capital becomes increasingly global, the two wings of the SSP irresponsibly try to divide the forces of the working class.
Communists will oppose both nationalist wings equally.