20.05.1999

Spontaneous economism and the challenge of revolutionary democracy - part two

Marxism and national self-determination

To paraphrase Lenin: ‘No one can discredit Marxism as long as it does not discredit itself’. That maxim ought to be kept in mind when looking at the dispute that has been raging in the Weekly Worker over socialism and the battle for democracy.

The immediate issues at dispute are well known to regular readers: counterposing the democratic republic to the socialist republic; Nato’s air war to ‘liberate’ Kosova and the CPGB’s call for Kosova independence; Scotland and the programmatic demand for an England-Scotland-Wales federal republic; the CPGB’s defence of the right of national self-determination as a generally applicable slogan.

We have already dealt with the seemingly radical rejection of the federal republic in the name of socialism in part one of this article (Weekly Worker May 13). Our terribly revolutionary critics haughtily demand a socialist republic. The only republic they countenance is a red one. Yet, far from being in the tradition of Marxism, we proved that on the contrary, such a pose is characteristic of economism: ie, the downplaying or belittling of the struggle for democracy under capitalism.

Economism is actually the modern Janus. One face is leftist. But the other is rightist. The practical conclusion of them all - from the Morning Star to the SWP - is that workers should concentrate on economic issues - wages, cuts, anti-trade union laws. High politics and constitutional reform are best left to Tony Blair and New Labour. That is the right face. The “socialist republic” in contradistinction to the “completely inadequate” minimum programme and the “Kautskyian” struggle for the democratic republic. That is the left face - as submitted by Tom Delargy in the Weekly Worker (April 15). Though there are details and nuances reflecting comrade Delargy’s personality and political evolution, in effect he presented the thinking of the economists as a body.

Apparently unbeknown to comrade Delargy, Marxists such as Marx, Engels and Lenin (and to a considerable degree Trotsky) were revolutionary democrats who fully grasped the necessity of the working class taking the lead against every instance of oppression, every democratic deficit, every act of bureaucratic arbitrariness. In their day Marx and Engels not only chided their followers in Germany for not taking up the fight for a democratic republic against the kaiser state, but raised the perspective in the monarchist British Isles of a federal republic. Lenin approvingly cites this in State and revolution.

Those ‘Marxists’ - ie, economists - who arrogantly disparage or dismiss the fight for a democratic republic in the Britain of today are actually closer to anarchism - a trend which views democracy of any kind with contempt. We showed, using the arguments of comrade Delargy as a foil, that the economists mouth a hopelessly garbled Marxism when it comes to the United Kingdom monarchy system and the democratic republic. Evidently that is no one-off. The economists have a superficial loyalty to, and knowledge of, Marxism. That is why they can, and do, present themselves and their left-rightism to the public as Marxism. Unless such comrades undertake a serious rethink, they will have to be thoroughly exposed by way of unremitting polemic. Either that or they will surely further discredit Marxism in the eyes of the broad masses of the working class.

Under the aegis of Marxism the economists have an equally non-Marxist approach to national self-determination. Recognition that the world as a whole is ripe for socialism and that Nato’s air war against rump Yugoslavia is an imperialist war leads them to reductive conclusions that can best be described as puerile. For the economists ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’, answer all questions. Having memorised the words ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’, they deludedly rattle them out as half-digested solutions and theories, in the process repeating all the errors of the ‘imperialist economists’ whom Lenin famously crossed swords with in the early years of the 20th century.

Of course, economism is no fleeting ailment, affecting a minority of socialist opinion. It is endemic. Economism has long been the dominant school of thought that passes itself off as Marxism in this country. Therefore in focusing in on Sandy McBurney’s (often confused and contradictory) ideas on self-determination, we are not merely dealing with a freelance leftwinger - as an individual the comrade is a sincere and basically honest revolutionary. On the contrary we are dealing with almost the whole spectrum of left sects and publications. No doubt we shall return, again and again, to do battle with economism. It will not be easily beaten, but beat it we must.

So let us turn to comrade McBurney’s stated belief that the demand for self-determination is to all intents and purposes outdated and that while it might once, ages ago, have been progressive, nowadays it is ubiquitously reactionary. In so doing we shall begin by making a slight detour into Russian history and the revolutionary democratic approach of the Bolsheviks.

1. Bolshevism and democracy

As I have indicated, comrade McBurney’s ideas are rather confused. In the abstract he recognises that self-determination might be legitimate: “We recognise the right of national self-determination and do not support state measures taken against those advocating that right within oppressed communities,” he claims (Weekly Worker April 29). Yet nowhere does our comrade apply self-determination. The demand might perhaps have been correct in the distant past; it might perhaps be correct sometime in the future. It is all hot air. Suffice to say, everywhere the CPGB concretely raises the demand - eg, the United Kingdom, Yugoslavia - comrade McBurney is there bitterly opposing us. Not surprisingly his reasoning universally rules out the demand. The negative criteria applied to our given examples reveals him to be a dogmatic opponent of self-determination in practice.

Comrade McBurney has discovered that the world has changed since 1916 when Lenin hurriedly penned his splendid pamphlet A caricature of Marxism and imperialist economism. In the late 20th century global capital “rules indirectly”. The comrade is right, of course. But that elementary fact is no excuse, neither logically nor politically, for interning Marxism and the fight for democracy and resuscitating an always useless economism. Nevertheless that is exactly what our necromancer comrade McBurney would have us do.

The comrade lets slip at his general approach by quoting from Russian history:

“A democratic slogan or demand that in one period or situation is progressive can in another turn into its opposite. The demand for a constituent assembly pre-October 1917 in Russia - yes. Post-October 1917 - no” (Weekly Worker April 15).

Though it is not at first obvious, we have here a useful starting point from which to explore comrade McBurney’s ideas. Every communist slogan has a past, but its essence points to a desired future. Prior to February 1917 the Bolshevik’s main slogans were: overthrow of the tsar and the tsarist system, and for a constituent assembly born of revolution. Under the given conditions they fought for the fullest possible democracy, thereby facilitating working class hegemony over the peasant masses and their own self-liberation. In February 1917 tsarism collapsed like a house of cards. Naturally slogans relating to the overthrow of tsarism were now obsolete. Nevertheless the Bolsheviks’ remained centred on working class hegemony and the extension of democracy. They reconfigured their slogans: all power to the soviets and a constituent assembly.

Kerensky’s provisional government was unelected and relied on the unwillingness of the timid Menshevik and Right Socialist Revolutionary majority in the soviets to complete the revolution. Discontent in every part of society steadily grew. In October (November) the Bolsheviks finally obtained a slim majority and in anticipation had launched their insurrection. The 2nd Congress of the Soviets solemnly proclaimed that all power has passed “into its own hands”. Needless to say, the Bolsheviks did not drop the demand for a constituent assembly. They oversaw the elections themselves in the full expectation that they and their Left SR allies would gain a thumping victory. Due to the breakdown in communications in a chaotic Russia, the paucity of communist organisation in the countryside, the inability of the Left SRs to secure their candidates on the ballot lists, and numerous other accidental factors, the Right SRs won.

Either comrade McBurney is ignorant of these salient facts or he considers the Bolsheviks gravely mistaken. That they should have said “no” to elections for the constituent assembly. It can only be the latter. The comrade is no half-wit. However, in my opinion the Bolsheviks were not mistaken. They were ill-prepared. No matter how it was portrayed in retrospect, re-enacting Cromwell and Bonaparte from below was no sign of revolutionary prowess. With better planning and a slight delay of a couple of months a communist-Left SR majority was within reach. Such a constituent assembly would doubtlessly have legitimised - that is, constitutionalised - the rule of the workers and peasants through their soviets and then shut up shop. The likelihood of the Right SRs and right Mensheviks actively going over to the camp of counterrevolution would thereby at the very least have been greatly reduced. Certainly the white counterrevolution could not have donned the cap of democracy and the constituent assembly.

The key question, however, is not speculation about different historical outcomes. No, it is whether or not the dispersal of the constituent assembly at the dead of night by a ‘tired’ red guard was principle or expedience. For this writer it was quite clearly no principle. In other words we should view it broadly in the same light as the banning of opposition parties, including soviet parties, Cheka terrorism, the forcible requisitioning of peasant produce, one-man management, and the substitution of the Communist Party for the working class and the soviets, etc, during the course of the ruinous civil war.

Having touched upon a chapter in the history of the Russian revolution where democracy had to be violated in the perceived interests of survival, we can usefully take the reader on to the Bolshevik’s stand on self-determination. The 1st Congress of Soviets unconditionally “proclaimed the rights of the peoples of Russia to self-determination”. This “inalienable right” was “confirmed” by the 2nd Congress - which it will be recalled had a Bolshevik majority. One of the first decrees issued by the newly formed Bolshevik-Left SR Soviet government stated that the peoples of Russia were now equal and that every nation had the right to self-determination “even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state” The declaration was jointly undersigned by V Ulyanov (Lenin) and Djugashvili-Stalin.

As the US communist, John Reed, reported at the time, “immediately” the Central Rada at Kiev declared Ukraine an independent republic, as did the government of Finland “through the senate at Helsingfors”. Independent governments also sprang up in Siberia and the Caucasus. “All these ‘governments’,” says Reed, “had two characteristics in common: they were controlled by the propertied classes, and they feared and detested Bolshevism” (J Reed Ten day that shook the world Harmondsworth 1970, p231).

As with proceeding with elections to the constituent assembly, we presume that comrade McBurney would, looking back from the lofty vantage point of 1999, consider the Bolshevik government wrong in its commitment to self-determination. And that is putting it mildly. Given the dire results, were not Ulyanov and Djugashvili criminally irresponsible? If comrade McBurney had been around in 1917 surely he would have vehemently argued for their removal from office ... or more. That is hardly being hyperbolic, because when we come to the contemporary world our dear comrade flatly rejects self-determination on three counts, two of which in actual fact apply to 1917 just as much as 1999.

2. Nature of the epoch

Firstly, self-determination is condemned as a diversion from his abstract socialism. Capitalism is dying and socialism just waiting to be born. Secondly, the leaderships of national movements are “gangsters”: ie, those demanding secession are invariably reactionaries. Thirdly, the demand for self-determination has largely been realised in the post-colonial world. We will deal with these counts each in turn.

It is undoubtedly true that historically speaking we live in the epoch of capitalist decadence and the transition to communism. That has been the case at least since the dawn of imperialism, as a stage in the development of capitalism, during the close of the 19th century.

However, that economic truth does not lead us to reject the logical ordering of our political programme. First, the minimum section - which includes demands that are technically feasible under the socio-economic conditions of capitalism, but which actually takes us to the point of revolution (inevitably certain demands such as self-determination overlap). Second, the maximum programme, which comes into operation after the working class has organised itself as a ruling class and is in possession of state power. Here, not in the minimum programme, one finds mention of the socialist republic. To ask for the CPGB for raise that demand at this “moment” in time - ie, as an immediate aim - and not merely to uphold it in terms of propaganda value, as suggested by comrade McBurney, is to desert Marxism and for that matter common sense (Weekly Worker April 29). The minimum programme and the struggle for democracy cannot be skipped.

Comrade McBurney forgets a small detail. We are not in a revolutionary situation or in state power. The revolution has not just happened. The parties of the left are not setting up makeshift offices in Buckingham Palace, nor are the workers’ councils using the chamber of the House of Commons as a convenient central meeting place. To counterpose the socialist republic and socialism to self-determination and democracy in the here and now is to substitute the wish for the means. This explains why the comrade is so incoherent when it comes to the political struggle in the present day. Why he is unable to distinguish the violence of the oppressed from the violence of the oppressors. Why he is confused (enraged) by the outbreak of national struggles, when the world supposedly has - or should have - left behind such primitivism. Why he segues so easily from denouncing to apologising for imperialism.

The workers make themselves into a ruling class, realise themselves, by mastering the gamut of questions and issues in society, whether it be capitalist or socialist. Alone the workers have “radical chains” (Marx). Out of their own long-term interest in freedom the working class must become the foremost champions of democracy. It is that, or remain in perpetuity a slave class. With us therefore the maximum programme is logically connected to the outcome of the minimum programme. Besides showing how the associated community of producers emerges positively as a mass movement out of the revolutionary democratic struggle conducted under capitalism, the programme announces that our overriding aim is the full development of individual and social creativity. The freedom of each being conditioned by the freedom of all.

To achieve freedom requires revolution. As we have said, not just any revolution though. The socialist revolution will have to be democratic, in the sense that it is an act of self-liberation by the majority and aims to take the democratic state to its limits as a semi-state that is already passing away. Democracy and socialism should not be counterposed. The two are inexorably linked. Without socialism democracy is always formal and stops short of ending exploitation. Without democracy socialism is only post-capitalism: it is not proletarian socialism. The task of the working class is therefore to champion democracy, not leave it to the bourgeoisie. Existing democratic forms must be utilised, new forms developed - eg, soviets or workers’ councils - and given a definite social or class content. The purpose is to extend democracy and control from below both before and after the qualitative break represented by revolution.

Comrade McBurney downplays the struggle for democracy. Capitalism has more or less done it all. Instead he wants the working class to concentrate on its “own” issues. In Scotland I take that to mean low pay, cuts and giving a Glasgow Marxist Forum coloration to strikes. Naturally we communists do not ignore or dismiss such matters. However, in and of themselves such spontaneous struggles take place entirely within the sphere of bourgeois economics. The workers remain a slave class. There is no bridge between the now and the future. That bridge is and can only be politics. The working class must be trained through political struggle to become a universal class. For that, theory and a Marxist programme are vital.

Socialism is no more than a means to an end. Comrade McBurney appears to forget that socialism is not what we are aiming for. The project of Marxism is not about simply ending capitalism and bringing about the socialist republic - through which the workers supposedly gain their freedom. As stated above, post-capitalism without democracy is just another form of slavery (I know comrade McBurney agrees). That is why our stress is on working class power and self-activity, rather than some distopian model. Socialism is not a party dictatorship over the proletariat, nationalisation of capital, or ‘liberating’ the productive forces by removing the profit motive fetter. We should leave such reactionary blueprints for the future to Stalinites, Taaffites and Scargillites.

The purpose of the minimum programme is, in the first place, to arm the workers against its main enemy, the state of the ruling class, and thereby step by step to prepare in practice the subjective conditions for revolution. Without the struggle for democracy revolution is impossible, a mere hollow phrase. Certainly preaching that socialism is the answer to all problems is more than useless. It is a hindrance.

Hence when it comes to Yugoslavia comrade McBurney has his instant, but lifeless solution. “The only way out” of the quagmire, is, he insists, “through the mobilisation of the working class fighting for its class interests around a socialist programme” (Weekly Worker April 29). Brilliant! That the working class in Yugoslavia exists merely as an atomised object, not a united subject, that it is politically formless without exception in every national fragment, does not appear to impinge unduly on comrade McBurney’s consciousness. Such awkward facts can be banished simply by endlessly repeating the mantra ‘socialism, socialism, socialism’.

If the working class was in power in Serbia, Bulgaria and Slovenia, or on the verge of taking power, then the comrade’s immediate demand for “a socialist federation of the Balkans” would make perfect sense. Unfortunately our friend is blind to reality. Serbia is not socialist nor is it fighting an anti-imperialist war. It is fighting for its sacred right to oppress the Kosovars - to the point of driving the entire population from their homeland. For any democrat it follows that the resistance of the Kosovars is just. The KLA is not Marxist but its struggle has a vital democratic content. Namely, the right for the Kosovars to live in Kosova and to be able to freely determine their own future. Communists - above all in the oppressor country Serbia - must champion these elementary rights. If they do not, effectively they pass into the camp of Milosevic and his Socialist Party regime. Pitifully some Trotskyites in the west proudly boast of their military defence of Serbia - not that they have sent a penny or a man to the Yugoslav army.

3. National liberation movements

Comrade McBurney does not have a liking for those who lead the “new” national liberation movements. He says that nowadays these movements “are ethnically defined, anti-democratic and pro-finance capital, and thus pro-imperialist”. Moreover such movements

“utilise (and for their own ends often consciously seek to exacerbate) national disadvantage or oppression where it exists. They violently crush any dissent within their ‘own’ communities and suppress any attempt at working class self-activity” (Weekly Worker April 29).

Let us take the KLA and compare and contrast it with an ‘old’ liberation movement: the liberation movement that dominated Irish politics for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. It has had many names - United Irishman, Boys of Wexford, Fenian Brotherhood, Land League and Parnellism, Nationalist Party and Sinn Fein.

Did not the leaders of these organisations ethnically define themselves and their enemy? That is, the Irish and the British. Surely they did. The “new” KLA is no different. Nor by definition is any other national liberation movement.

Did the ‘old’ Irish liberation movement have within its ranks anti-democratic elements? That is, elements that dreamt of returning a mythical Irish golden age of brave warriors, fair maids and wise chiefs? Elements who instinctively considered universal male suffrage an anathema, that could have had no thought of women’s sexual or social equality? Obviously. After the rise of Orangeism and Carsonism was there no blind hatred of the protestant minority from within the catholic majority? Of course there was. Kosovars who have been driven from their towns and villages, who have been raped or robbed and systematically humiliated by Serbs, are surely similar.

Was the ‘old’ Irish liberation movement overwhelmingly anti-capitalist? No, for the most part they were pro-Irish peasant and pro-Irish capitalist. Despite its ‘Marxist-Leninist’ and Enverist past the “new” KLA is of the same petty bourgeois stripe.

Did not the Irish turn in their hour of need to the enemy of its main enemy? Yes, aid was sought from France on countless occasions. And in both World War I and World War II prominent members of the ‘old’ Irish liberation movement contacted Germany in the hope of obtaining weapons and political pledges. The “new” KLA is to all intents and purposes doing likewise with Nato. Who does comrade McBurney expect them to turn to in face of the Serb terror machine? Russia? Greece? The SWP?

Do we think the KLA is well advised in calling upon Nato to liberate them? No. But that does not lead us to abandon democracy and defence of Kosovar rights to imperialism (which plans for Kosova to become a Nato protectorate). In the same spirit we recall James Connolly’s preference for a victory of a “superior” Germany over the “inferior” British monster in 1914. A jealous Britain, he said, had unjustly launched a “war upon the German nation” (J Connolly Selected Writings London 1988, p244).

What of working class self-activity? Sinn Fein denounced the TGWU Dublin general strike of 1913 in defence of hard-pressed Irish capitalists. The IRA later suppressed workers’ strikes and peasant land occupations. The “new” KLA would certainly do the same if there was any working class self-activity in Kosova.

Communists criticise all shortcomings in the programmes of national liberation movements - where they strive for purely sectional class gains or national privileges, we condemn them. We have no need to paint such forces in the colours of communism. However, that does not lead us to ignore the democratic content of their struggles. Nor does it mean we gloss over the fundamental difference between an oppressed nation and an oppressing nation.

In the British Isles Ireland was the oppressed nation and Britain the oppressing nation. That is why Marx and Engels spared no effort in getting British workers to side with the Irish liberation movement. They did not sympathise with the British state or blame the Irish for exacerbating “national disadvantage or oppression” with their boycotts, terrorism and non-cooperation.

In the Balkans Kosova is an oppressed nation. Serbia is the oppressor nation. That is why the CPGB calls upon Serbian workers to take the side of the Kosova liberation movement. We do not blame the Kosovars for their oppression. In terms of the Yugoslav ‘socialist’ state that began with Tito - Kosova was denied the status of a republic. But this democratic deficit became brutal oppression under Milosevic’s Serbian chauvinism. Not only were Albanian universities and the Kosova parliament closed, but in 1999 he launched his version of the ‘final solution’. Sickeningly comrade McBurney implies that the KLA has connived at this horror.

We could supply countless other examples both ‘old’ and “new”. But that would be to miss the point. Communists do not for one moment imagine that liberation movements are vehicles for socialism and universal human liberation - be they the ‘old’ Congress in India, Mao’s Peoples Liberation Army, the NLF in Vietnam, or the “new” KLA in Kosova, the ELF in Eritrea, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. No, our primary concern is with the working class, in particular in the oppressing country.

Only if workers in the USA sided against their government in Vietnam could they begin to free themselves. The black civil rights movement is a testament to that truth. Those leftist in the USA who pointed out that the ‘Marxism’ of Ho Chi Minh was of the Stalinite variety were doubtless right. But if they went on to argue in the name of an abstract socialism that US workers should refuse point blank to side with the NLF against the US army, that both sides were equally reactionary because Vietnam got weapons and other help from a ‘state capitalist’ or ‘bureaucratic collectiv-ist’ USSR, then quite frankly they would earn and deserve our contempt.

Perhaps in desperation comrade McBurney scrapes the bottom of his polemical barrel. He maintains that by refusing to drop the principled demand for Kosova independence the CPGB “essentially” merges “with the media campaign against the significant anti-war feeling at home” (Weekly Worker April 29). This stinks. As well as Kosovar independence, our slogans are well known and perfectly clear: No to the Nato air war, imperialism out of the Balkans. Besides joining and building for mass demonstrations and backing local anti-war committees, on June 10 the CPGB is fielding slates of candidates against bomber Blair in the Euro elections on these very slogans. Our actions speak louder against Nato than comrade McBurney’s refusal to side with the oppressed against their oppressors.

4. Imperialism has already done it all

Comrade McBurney is an admirer of imperialism. Touchingly he tells us that self-determination is an irrelevance because it has already been realised under imperialism. “Since Lenin’s time,” he tells us, “the old European empires have gone and national self-determination for the countries of the third world has been achieved” (Weekly Worker April 29).

The same goes for his native Scotland. He assures us that “the people of Scotland already have that right”. If the Scots want independence or a parliament with full powers, “they can vote for it”. Not that the UK state would stand in their way or threaten violence. Heaven forfend. The British government has presumably mended its way since it put Ireland upon the dissecting table. No attempt then to hive off north eastern Scotland and keep the North Sea oil. Rest assured. Nor would there be any procrastination. No, the British government would never dream of requiring a 50% majority of the entire population, or some such other sneaky formulation or breathing space. As tried and tested democrats the UK state will instantly accept a simple and straightforward Scottish parliamentary or referendum majority. “All the bourgeois parties have said they accept the right of the Scots to obtain independence,” our comrade announces (Weekly Worker May 6). Comrade McBurney is a naive. His faith in UK politicians is truly remarkable. As we all know from experience, one should always trust what bourgeois politicians say. Their word is their bond. Come off it, comrade McBurney.

The comrade has arrived at the fantastic conclusion that democracy is fully developed under capitalism. To all intents and purposes it can go no further. Yet for me capitalist democracy in the UK is flawed, limited or virtually non-existent in every area of social, cultural, political and economic life.

There is a hereditary monarchy and an unelected second chamber. Neither Scotland nor Wales have the right to self-determination. There is no provision for independence in the constitution. In that sense Scotland and Wales are oppressed. Women still occupy a subordinate position. Youth suffer under a bureaucratic dictatorship in secondary schools and higher education. Migrant workers are denied basic citizenship rights. Trade unions are crushed by draconian restrictions. The European Union is run by an unaccountable coterie of corrupt bureaucrats. Millions remain unemployed and are subject to threat and intimidation from petty state officials. Pensioners are forced to retire and then eke out a miserable living.

Everywhere this writer looks, he sees how democracy could be enormously extended under capitalism. Not comrade McBurney. (Though for reasons that escape me in terms of logic he does call for a European constituent assembly and an annual parliament. Then again, no one is demonstrating or fighting in the streets for such demands. And maybe even if they were such slogans would be “used” by the labour bureaucracy in an “attempt to blunt proletarian self-activity”. And to employ comrade McBurney’s own words once more, if people “want” such measures they can “vote” for them. And surely our comrade should anyway be counterposing to them a socialist Europe and a socialist annual parliament. It is all a complete mess.)

Faced with a growing national movement in Scotland which has put Alex Salmond’s SNP into second place in the Holyrood parliament comrade McBurney answers with economic struggles now and socialism in the future. Wages on the one hand, expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the other. He cannot bring himself to seriously consider our the demand for a federal republic, simply because it does not abolish class exploitation.

Comrade McBurney might just as well object to divorce or homosexual equality. Every Marxist knows that democracy under capitalism is limited, partial and subverted. Yet democracy and the struggle to extend it trains the workers and brings to the fore the class contradiction between labour and capital. That is the crux of the matter. Far from being a diversion, demanding immediately that Scotland and Wales have the constitutionally enshrined right to self- determination within a federal republic is crucial. Without training the workers in the spirit of consistent democracy there is no struggle for revolution.

What then of the post-colonial world? Given the deeply reactionary nature of most independent states, I fear that comrade McBurney might regret with hindsight that the great European empires were dismantled. “The fruits” of independence are indeed obvious. Numerous petty and not so petty wars, suppression of working class self-activity by a selfish aidocracy, and kow-towing to the IMF and transnational capital, which leeches the lifeblood from the masses. Economistic logic surely “shows” that demands for independence played directly into the hands of “elites” who were seeking to “carve out new states in order to achieve power for themselves and a more lucrative direct relationship with finance capital” (Weekly Worker April 29). Comrade McBurney and the economists should think about where such one sided logic takes them.

As our subject matter is national self-determination, it ought to be finally emphasised to comrade McBurney that nations rarely correspond to states. In imperialism’s post-colonial world so admired by our comrade, it is states which have political independence, not nations which have self-determination. The difference is crucial. Within almost every post-independence state there exist nations and national questions. India is a patchwork of over 100 distinct peoples, none of which can freely secede. Africa’s fixed state borders - drawn by the colonialists - cut across its real nationalities and proto-nationalities.

In that respect the ‘third world’ mirrors the ‘second world’ (and some parts of the ‘first world’: eg, the UK). Marxists do not want, nor do we sow, disunity. Quite the reverse. The CPGB is for the closest voluntary union of people and their merging and assimilation. We are therefore the most dangerous opponents of nationalism. Far from playing into the hands of nationalism our programme positively resolves national questions under the leadership of the working class.

Comrade McBurney and the economists just ignore the national question, or side with the oppressor state in dismissing national grievances as little more than “middle class” greed or pure invention. These are the politics which really fuel nationalism. Which lead millions who are questioning the established constitutional order to conclude that the Marxists have nothing to offer them. That is the unintended upshot of economism.

Jack Conrad