WeeklyWorker

30.09.1999

Bourgeois democracy or socialism

Do oppressor communities have the right to create their own states? José Villa accuses Jack Conrad of sacrificing the rights of the majority

Jack Conrad’s theses on Ireland have two significant innovations. First, they advocate the right of self-determination, including the right to create its own state, for a people who the author recognises do not constitute a nation.  Second, they propose to give that right to the British-Irish. I would argue that for Marxists self-determination is only applicable to nations and it is not a universal principle. To accept that an ethnic group should have that right would mean a significant alteration in Marxist principle, even more when it is a case of a privileged community whose benefits have been achieved through backing the imperial power at the expense of the rest of the same nation.

In order to clarify the differences I would like to start by stating where I agree with Jack:

It is important to clarify some concepts. Jack is demanding an extension of the right of self-determination to ethnic communities. There is a big difference between nations and ethnic groups. The first is constituted by groups of people, divided by antagonistic classes, who share the same territory, a common history and many cultural, linguistic (this could be one or more languages) and economic links. The second is a group of people who share only some of these characteristics. They could be based around a common faith, descendants, race, roots in another country, languages, customs or cultural manifestations. In many societies some social classes, occupations or strata have overlapped with what are today considered ethnic groups.

Every nation has many ethnic groups or communities. Britain has hundreds of them. Some British communities (like the Afro-Caribbean or muslim) are larger than the British-Irish. Marxists must demand the right for every community to cultivate their own languages and dialects, to have their own schools and associations, to freely practise their cults - as well as the right not to be segregated on racial, linguistic or religious grounds - and other democratic rights. However, we are not in favour of giving them the right to form their own state. There are tens of thousands of ethnic groups all over the planet and it is simply impossible to advocate their right to form sectarian, ethnically-based states which would create several other problems. When ‘rights’ for some of these communities could mean trampling over the rights of other communities, we are not going to back them. For instance, we do not defend the right of the white British to put quotas on coloured people or immigrants.

In fact imperialism created many communities as tools to impose its dominance. They were privileged strata based on native inhabitants or immigrants. There were one million French descendants in Algeria. Most of them came from poor backgrounds. However, Algerian anti-imperialists correctly were against giving them the right of self-determination.

Today Britain has other enclaves in lands that it took from other countries. In Gibraltar, the Malvinas or other Caribbean or oceanic islands a significant proportion or even most of the population would not like to separate from what was the largest overseas empire.

The USA has several political-military bases over the planet. In Guantánamo and Panama it has its own enclaves. Perhaps a significant proportion (or even a majority) of the local population would like to keep the dominance of the world’s mightiest power instead of returning to their former backward semi-colonial countries. However, communists should support the right of Cuba or Panama to expel the yankees and to retake their own territories. If tomorrow Puerto Rico votes for independence we would not recognise the right of a section of that island that wished to become part of the USA.

Perhaps Jack could point out that these pro-imperialist communities could not be compared with the British-Irish, who have a 300-year tradition. It might be interesting to study the case of the Boers and the white Anglo-South Africans. The white settlers arrived in South Africa more or less at the same time as the British settlers crossed the Irish Sea. While the different Irish communities are part of the same nation, speak the same language and share many racial and cultural features, the Afrikaners and white Anglo-South Africans spoke different languages and had strong racial, cultural and even national differences in relation to the rest of the population. There are at least 12 linguistic-national groups and the Afrikaners have their own common, fully developed language.

The whites represent a similar percentage of the South African population to the British-Irish in relation to the whole of Ireland. They also dominate entire regions. Many racial segregationists insisted on allowing the Boers national self-determination, including the right to have their own state.

In South Africa anti-imperialists were against giving the whites any right to self-determination and were also against the Bantustans. We were against the white capitalist segregationist project of dividing the South African peoples amongst racial or national-linguistic groups.

Marxists wanted to win as many workers as possible from the white population (at least five times larger than the British-Irish), but they never advocated self-determination for the Boers or Anglo-South Africans. They knew that the white proletariat was privileged and had better wages than their black brothers and sisters and that the best way to win them was in the fight for better social and economic conditions and to end the segregationist, authoritarian state through building an equal and multi-ethnic society.

Many leaders of the ANC, SACP and other left organisations were whites. The progressive whites did not fight for a separate state in which the European descendants could cultivate their own culture because it would mean a state based on the most reactionary layers and against the rest of the population.

The right of self-determination is not a universal principle even for nations. When the right of a nation to build its own state could only be realised through oppressing other nations we should not support that right. An Afrikaner or white Anglo-South African state could only be achieved through suppressing the national rights of the Southern African peoples. That is why we demanded of the Euro-Africans in Zimbabwe, South Africa and other black countries that they should accept majority rule.

We do not support the right of Sikhs to create their own Khalistan at the expenses of Punjabi Indians. In Palestine we do not support the right of the Israeli Hebrews to establish their own separate state. The country was built up through expelling most of its native population. Four million Jews were gathered together from all over the world and, despite their huge linguistic, ethnic, cultural and historical differences, were trying to unite in one single nation against the Arabs. If we recognise the Israeli state we would recognise its rights over Palestinian lands and over the expulsion and segregation of four million Arabs, and we would support the right of a religious community to create a country based on the Old Testament. In Palestine we are for a multi-ethnic workers’ state in which the toilers of all communities (christian and muslim Arabs, oriental, Arab; western, Russian and black Jews; Druses, Beduins, etc) would be equal.

Jack believes that the best way to win some support amongst an oppressor community is to advocate their democratic right to secede and create their own state if they wish to do so. The problem with that idea is that it walks all over another democratic principle: the rights of the majority of the same nation.

We cannot equate the rights of the oppressed with those of the oppressor community. Furthermore, such ‘rights’ are frequently in contradiction with those of the majority. For example, the capitalist ‘democratic’ right to hire and fire workers or to acquire property and capital is in absolute antagonism with the workers’ democratic rights to job security, better living conditions and control of the means of production. In the case of South Africa, Palestine or Ireland the right of self-determination for the oppressor people would affect the right of self-determination for the oppressed.

Jack says that there are one million British-Irish and that they ought not to be directly identified with loyalty to the queen or with protestantism. Although both aspects are dominant trends inside that community, what distinguishes that people from the rest of the Irish is that they are mainly descended from former British settlers and have some cultural allegiance to Britain.

For Jack, if we became the champions of the democratic rights of that privileged community we might be able to split it, and the cornerstone of such rights is to accept their possible wish for a new partition of Ireland. Tom Delargy pointed out that Jack’s theses have two contradictory points. It is not possible to reconcile the right of self-determination of the Irish nation as a whole with the right of its pro-British layers to veto it and to re-divide the nation and the country (Weekly Worker September 16).

For decades or even centuries the Irish nation has overwhelmingly, continuously and repeatedly expressed its democratic desire to have its own united republic. It is not acceptable to turn this reality on its head - converting the minority’s pro-imperialist veto into a democratic decision imposed against the majority.

For eight centuries Britain ruled Ireland. Its domination was so ruthless that several rebellions were crushed in blood. Britain caused the death of more than one million during the potato famine and today more than 80% of Irish descendants do not live on the island. In 1921 the orange statelet was created as a reactionary colonial outpost against the wishes of the great majority of the Irish nation. It was established in two thirds of Ulster, where the pro-British were a tiny majority. The Irish catholics, nationalists and republicans remained second class citizens, suffering discrimination in jobs, housing and state employment, and terror and abuse from the British army, the RUC and the paramilitaries.

If Irish national consciousness was defined in the struggle against British imperialist domination, British-Irish consciousness is defined in the struggle for defending what was the largest overseas empire against its first and last colony (Ireland). The British-Irish want to be more British than the British.

Like many other peoples who have benefited from imperialism at the expense of a native population, their allegiance to the imperialist motherland has hardened. The political representatives of this community are united in their desire to keep their privileges, to smash the IRA (the main armed force that prevented their total domination), and to veto national reunification.

In order to win some sympathy amongst the British-Irish Jack proposes that revolutionaries should accept repartition if they decide not to be part of a united Ireland. He even suggests a formula in which the northern Six Counties would be divided in half: one county and four half-counties for each community. This alternative would not satisfy anybody and would not solve any problem. The orange state would be reduced by approximately a half but with a more concentrated British loyalist majority. The loyalists would feel resentment against the Irish catholics for taking some of their post-1921 territory, and this would increase their desire to be part of the UK. The Irish nationalists would still be unhappy because the island would still be divided and many catholics would remain in ghettos inside the British-Irish state. Sectarianism and communalism would persist.

Jack repeatedly uses the example of the Russian Cossacks. They were the tsar’s most reactionary tools against the workers and the oppressed nations. If the Bolsheviks granted a soviet republic to them, why could we not allow the same right to the British-Irish? Jack confuses many things. First, the Bolsheviks were against giving any national or democratic rights to the Cossacks. Even more, at the beginning of the civil war they said that all the Cossacks were a reactionary stratum that needed to be smashed. In the course of the war Lenin realised that it was possible to split this mass around social and class questions. Later on, when the reds defeated them,Lenin imposed the victors’ conditions. The Cossack elite was expropriated and a non-sovereign Soviet republic based on the oppressed Cossack labourers was established in the middle of Russia as part of the Soviet federation. The Bolsheviks would never ever accept the right of a reactionary and segregationist Cossack state to secede.

Today Jack is advocating a principle that the Bolsheviks never fought for: the right of an ethnic group to secede, and, even worst, the right of an oppressor community to create its own state against the wishes of the majority of their oppressed nation. A British-Irish state created in this capitalist system and without a revolution would be a continuation of the same orange segregationist and ultra-reactionary statelet. Advocating democratic rights for an oppressor community means denying democratic rights to the oppressed nation as a whole.

A big problem that the CPGB has is the way in which it deals with the question of bourgeois democracy. It raises it as a universal principle. Jack is in favour of federal bourgeois republics in Britain and Ireland. The struggle for a pure bourgeois democracy has led to the immolation of the democratic rights of the majority of the Irish nation. In addition it creates a barrier between democratic and socialist demands. The only way to achieve full democracy and national rights is to expropriate the ruling class and to socialise the means of production. A real solution to the constitutional, national and social issues in the British-Irish islands could only be achieved when the capitalist class is expropriated through a socialist revolution and a federation of workers’ republics.

However, the CPGB’s programme stands for a bourgeois democratic stage. Its central goal is to sort out the monarchy’s crisis, advocating a pure bourgeois solution: a federal republic. Marxists should not propose replacing the UK with another kind of capitalist federal state à la Germany or USA. Unfortunately, anti-capitalist revolution, socialism and a federation of workers’ republics are absent from the CPGB’s day-to-day programme. Adapting to bourgeois democratic principles means sacrificing the struggle for democratic rights for the oppressed majority and for a socialist alternative.