07.10.1999

Bolshevism and consistent democracy

Jack Conrad replies to José Villa on the rights of peoples to self-determination and the struggle for socialism

José Villa - a former leading member of Workers Power - prefaces his polemic against me with the assertion that my 20 theses on ‘Ireland and the British-Irish’ contain “two significant innovations” (Weekly Worker September 30). What are these “innovations”? The first, advocating the right of self-determination, including the right to form a separate state, for a people who the “author recognises do not constitute a nation”. The second, proposing to give that right to the British-Irish.

Comrade Villa argues that these “innovations” are wrong because for “Marxists self-determination is only applicable to nations and it is not a universal principle”. Furthermore, to “accept” the right of self-determination for “an ethnic group” would mean an “alteration in Marxist principle”, something all the more objectionable in the case of the British-Irish, a “privileged community” whose benefits have been achieved “through backing the imperial power at the expense of the rest of the same nation”.

Along with comrade Villa I too think that there is a “big difference” between nations and ethnic groups. But what are nations? And what are ethnic groups? Unfortunately comrade Villa’s definition of the nation is like his polemic as a whole, an eclectic combination of truth and error. Let me quote him. Nations are “constituted” by definite groups of people, divided by “antagonistic classes”, but who share “the same territory, a common history and many cultural, linguistic (this could be one or more languages) and economic links”.

Nations under capitalism are certainly “constituted” by “groups of people” who are “divided by antagonistic classes.” What of nations after the workers’ revolution? Do nations immediately vanish along with the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist ruling class? Surely not. Socialism abolishes the division of society into antagonistic classes. Yet though socialism ushers in a classless society the existence of different nations - ie, historically constituted communities of people who share a common territory, language, culture and an economy - will continue albeit in truncated form for some considerable time into the future.

Then there is the artless suggestion from our comrade Villa that nations can have more than one language. Here is an “innovation”. Anyone familiar with the Bible knows the tower of Babel story and how god “confused” the language of “all of the earth” and thereby created nations (Genesis 11). Did not the ancient Greeks define themselves as a proto-nationality according to their common language as opposed to the non-Greek-speaking ‘barbarian’ outsiders. Mutual incomprehensibility amongst people who continuously interact with each other must lead members of one language group to identifying themselves at the same time as separate and a commonality. Hence in the modern era language was a vital element in the formation of nations. Benedict Anderson is of the opinion that “print-languages” under capitalism provided the cultural raw materials “for national consciousness” (B Anderson Imagined communities London 1991, p44).

Up to now Marxists - till the arrival of comrade Villa, that is - have insisted that nations must share a common language. Here are a few authorities covering between them a broad spectrum. Kautsky defines nations as a “community of language” (K Kautsky The materialist conception of history New Haven 1988, p380). “Language,” says Trotsky, “... becomes national together with the triumph of commodity exchange which integrates nations” (L Trotsky The history of the Russian Revolution Vol 3, London 1967, p39). “There is no nation,” emphasises Stalin, “which at the one and the same time speaks several languages” (JV Stalin Works Vol 2, Moscow 1953, p304). Even Otto Bauer confirms that “it is unthinkable that a nation should maintain itself in the long run as a community of culture without a community of language, this most important instrument of human communication” (O Bauer The nation in G Balakrishnan [ed] Mapping the nation London 1996, pp53-4). In other words countries such as India, Switzerland, Spain and Canada are not nation-states, but multinational states.

What of ethnicity and ethnic groups: ie, those whom I supposedly want to exercise self-determination, including the right to form their own states? Ethnicity is a very wide sociological category. It encompasses nations. But it also includes religious, national and racialised minorities, and even certain occupations and sexual preferences. An ethnic group is therefore any community of people who in one way or another set themselves apart from other people, or are set apart from other people, on the basis of “perceived cultural difference” or “perceived common descent” (my emphasis, S Jones The archaeology of ethnicity London 1997, pxiii).

There are many competing approaches to ethnic identity, but recently there has been a useful corrective bias towards self-labelling. In other words the primary definition of an ethnic group is sited not so much on how others may define them, as on how they define themselves. Thus imposed names such as ‘Eskimo’, ‘gypsy’ or ‘Laplander’ are rejected in favour of Inuit, Roma and Saami. Be that as it may, individuals are bound to possess a vast array of often complex and overlapping ethnic identities, from the regional to the national, to the transnational. So, for example, I think of myself  as a Londoner, south-eastern English, British, European, an atheist and an internationalist communist - four or five identities. Up the road from me in Highgate lies buried a Jewish man whose father converted to Protestantism, who was also a Londoner, an atheist and a communist, but who was born in Germany and spoke German as his mother tongue - again a typically rich combination of identities.

Ethnic identities are potentially incredibly fluid, uberous and potent. Mostly in so-called normal times they are lax and protoplasmic and hardly matter. By and large we take what we are for granted. On the other hand in periods of persecution, or under adverse conditions of intense competition, or when you are forced by circumstances to settle abroad, they can become of crucial, inescapable and overarching importance. Hence a sudden deterioration in the economy, a shift in the balance of class forces or the storm clouds of war can give rise to a multitude of often novel ethnic identities up to and including national-ethnic identities which grip the imagination of masses of people, national-ethnic identities which hitherto slumbered dormant underneath the surface or gestated in no more than embryonic form.

Evidently the notion of some “universal” principle of ethnic self-determination would be no panacea; rather a reactionary nightmare. Taken to its absurd conclusion, not only does ethnic self-determination or autonomy mean the creation of countless nano-statelets, but split personalities. Ethnic identity does after all resemble a Russian doll. Endlessly each one reveals another. Even if we apply the more rational plan of pre-World War I social democracy in Austria-Hungary for extra-territorial autonomy, it would result in numerous rival ethnic parliaments overseeing cultural, educational, scientific and language matters. Inevitably such a plan institutionalises and freezes divisions between people who invariably live and work alongside each other on broadly the same territory. The Good Friday agreement, it should be noted, embodies something similar for Northern Ireland.

Let me assure comrade Villa that Jack Conrad entertains no schema whereby Kurds, Zulus, Australians, Jews, Sikhs, Irish, Muslims or any of the other hundreds of ethnic groups scattered throughout the towns and cities of Britain - and all other countries - have the sovereign right to form their own separate states. As a communist I favour the unity of people within the largest democratically agreed state boundaries and the revolutionary assimilation, or merging, of cultures.

Comrade Villa is not consistent. Bizarrely, writing like an Austro-Marxist philistine, you, comrade Villa, demand the “right” of every “community” to “have their own schools”. Segregation is not something I call for. On the contrary, I envisage secular schools in which every community mixes. As I am sure comrade Villa is aware, here I follow in the footsteps of European enlightenment thought in general and Bolshevism in particular. Against the Austro-Marxists, Lenin made this rather germane statement: “One cannot be a democrat and at the same time advocate the principle of segregating schools according to nationality” (VI Lenin CW Vol 19, Moscow 1977, p504). My thesis 11 applies this to a united Ireland: “Communist are for secularism and against denominational schools, colleges and other such institutions.”

What of the British-Irish? My contention, comrade Villa, is that while the British-Irish cannot be strictly defined as a fully developed nation, nor are they an inexcitable everyday religion or an inert ethnic group (the same goes for the catholic-Irish minority in Northern Ireland). The British-Irish could be described as an historically constituted semi-nationality or semi-nation, which shares a common territory, language, culture and economic life. On a nought-to-100 index, from non-nation to full nation, the British-Irish would score, say, 75. The eastern republics that federated to the early Soviet Union - Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, etc - surely fell well short of full nationhood too. In many instances there was no print-language. Certainly no mass literacy. Economically such republics were extremely backward. Nevertheless formally these republics enjoyed full self-determination in the USSR, up to and including the right to secede.

It is correct to say that Britain is the main problem in Ireland and that the majority of Protestants in Northern Ireland have throughout the 20th century constituted a labour aristocracy (a politico-economic category). They have sought to preserve meagre privileges at the expense of Catholics by initiating and buttressing sectarian discrimination from below and by appealing above to the Northern Ireland and British states. However, the Protestants are not simply a labour aristocracy: “There is an undeniable historically established religious, ethnic and cultural dimension” (thesis 1 Weekly Worker August 26).

More than that. The British-Irish have continuously inhabited parts of what is now Northern Ireland since the early 17th century. That gives them nearer a 400-year tradition than the 300 years comrade Villa grants them. They settled primarily in Antrim and Down as a mass of ‘strong farmers’ - from England, but mainly Scotland - and were used to pacify the most rebellious part of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Ireland and hence “assure” it for an absolutist monarchy that had recently redefined itself according to a nationalised version of Protestantism: ie, Anglicanism.

As was bound to be the case, the settlers quickly diverged from their origins and formed another - hybrid - Irish identity. They ceased being Scottish or English. Yet in general they kept themselves as a commonality against and separate from the Irish catholic majority (both Gaelic and Anglo-Irish). Significantly, cultural links between Scotland and the British-Irish in Northern Ireland are nowadays still stronger than those between the British-Irish and the south. Either way, the million-strong British-Irish are “an historically constituted and distinct community of people” (thesis 2).

Being Presbyterians, they were themselves subject to prohibitions as dissenters by the Anglican ascendancy: eg, the Corporation Act (1662), the Test Act (1673). They were oppressed-oppressors. Hence many of the ‘strong farmers’ of Antrim and Down took part in the 1798 United Irishmen rising. That revolutionary moment of fraternity between the British-Irish in north-eastern Ulster and the general mass of oppressed Irish led to a strategic reorientation by the United Kingdom state. The Presbyterians were included within the protestant ascendancy from the 19th century onwards (previously exclusively Anglican).

Comrade Villa writes blithely of Britain oppressing Ireland for 800 years. This is a conventional Irish nationalist formula. It is also a crude simplification. Britain only took united political form with James VI of Scotland’s dynastic assumption of the English throne in 1603 and then, following the 1688 Glorious Revolution, the act of union and the merging of the two parliaments in 1707. More than that, till the reformation and the planting of a mass of British-Irish protestant settlers, the other population of Ireland by no means constituted a single commonality.

In ancient times the mass of illiterate Irish peasants spoke various dialects of Gaelic. Above them ruled an elite of thieving petty kings and warrior chiefs. The Ui Neill and Eoghanachta were the main powers from the 5th century. Ireland was a geographical entity, little more. Fragmentation or irrelation was further complicated by the successive waves of Norse, Norman and English pre-feudal and feudal adventurer-settlers, pirate-traders and royal conquerors (defeated or marginalised elites from Ireland did their fair share of raiding-settling too - in the 8th century ‘Irish’ states were established in Dyfed, the Isle of Man and western Scotland).

Norse cities - Dublin, Cork, Wexford and Wicklow - dominated the western seaboard of 8th and 9th century Ireland. New Gaelic kingdoms arose from the ruins of the old and turned the tables on the Viking incomers. The two cultures found an uneasy cohabitation until the Norman invasions of the 12th century. These quintessentially feudal incursions fitfully continued throughout the subsequent centuries till the formation of the absolute Tudor and Stewart monarchies and their attempt to physically uproot and replace whole swathes of the native population. What must be understood, however, is that this native population was no longer universally Gaelic-speaking, as it had been 700 years before. Ireland was now divided into Gaelic-Irish and Anglo-Irish cultures and a mosaic of hostile baronies. (There were some notable examples of assimilation by Gaelic Ireland: for example in the lightly settled north-east of Ulster and Connaught, but this was not the general rule.)

The Tudor, Stewart and Cromwellian drive for conquest negatively defined the Irish as Irish - both the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish - not in terms of language or nationality, but religion. The catholic majority were victims of constant persecution as Catholics and denied basic rights. The old English in Ireland were thereby “excluded” from the emerging British nation (SG Ellis Tudor Ireland London 1985, p319). Because they remained catholic the Anglo-Irish became simply Irish. The bitter divisions between the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic feudal cultures “gave way ultimately to a sense of common Catholicism” - the highly fragmented Gaelic-Irish slowly merging with and forming a new “subordinate” English-speaking culture “in the polity of Ireland” (H Kearney The British Isles Cambridge 1995, p170). As a consequence the Irish national question and British domination both took the outer form of religion.

There are striking similarities between Ireland and the south Slavs. The Croats, Serbs and Bosniacs speak the same language - not least thanks to Vuk Kardadzic, the “virtual founder” of modern literary Serbo-Croat, who in the 19th century resisted attempts to create a print-language out of church Slavonic (E Hobsbawm Nations and nationalism since 1780 Cambridge 1991, p60). True, there are still distinct dialects spoken and they use different alphabets - Croats have Roman characters and Serbs Cyrillic ones. Nevertheless these south Slavs share common imagined origins and many collective experiences, as well as a language.

However, due to a combination of factors (eg, incorporation by culturally antipathetic empires - the Ottoman and Hapsburg - Nazi divide and rule and, capping it all, the malevolent disintegration of bureaucratic socialism) they are today ferociously and bloodily divided by religion. This despite the fact that Tito presided over a secular state and most Yugoslavs were non-observant, if not outright atheists. Religion has returned in another form to define the ethnic-national lines of demarcation, conflict and state formation.

Would comrade Villa dismiss the Serbs as having absolutely no rights to self-determination? How about simply damning them as a “privileged community” who sought benefits “at the expense” of the rest of the south Slav nation? The CPGB has consistently taken an altogether different approach. Negatively we are for the right of all the peoples in former Yugoslavia - whether defined by national-ethnicity or national-religion - to self-determination. The Kosovars, Hungarians, Macedonians, Croats, Montenegrins, Bosniacs, Serbs, etc should be free to decide their fate, including whether or not to separate; be it from former Yugoslavia, Bosnia or Serbia. Positively, at the same time, we also seek the widest unity: eg, a democratic federation of the Balkans. These two principles are not “contradictory”, as comrade Villa foolishly maintains (echoing his ally of convenience, Tom Delargy of the Scottish Socialist Party), but complementary and universal. Jack Conrad applies the same method to Ireland and the British-Irish.

Who are the British-Irish, according to comrade Villa? The British-Irish are a “privileged segment of the Irish nation which oppressed the Catholics, nationalists and republicans and served Britain against the Irish nation’s right of self-determination”. Historically comrade Villa equates the British-Irish as akin to the white South Africans, in particular the Boers, and the French Algerians. He also cites British enclaves such as Gibraltar, the Malvinas and certain Caribbean islands, where “most of the population” would not like to break their links with Britain. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, the comrade also brings into play US overseas bases in Panama and Guantánamo in Cuba. None of these peoples - or troop emplacements - have the right to self-determination in the programme of José Villa.

Again we have muddle. Comrade Villa states that whites in South Africa like the British-Irish “also dominated entire regions”. Frankly, this is sheer sophistry. White South Africans dominated the whole of South Africa from the formation of the union in 1910 to the election of the ANC government in 1994. There is, however, no historically constituted territory where white South Africans have a clear majority. The same can be said of the French Algerians. Under the apartheid system there were, of course, restricted zones, especially in urban areas. Yet they were entirely artificial, relying on black domestics and huge numbers of other labourers who were forced to commute daily from nearby shanty towns or live in inhuman compounds. Nowhere that can be called historically significant, I repeat, do white South Africans outnumber black, Asian and coloured South Africans. Furthermore, it ought to be added that white South Africans are made up of two distinct language groups: the English and Afrikaners.

There is a political-economic parallel between the British-Irish on the one hand and the white South Africans and the French colons in Algeria on the other - they operated as a labour aristocracy. Nevertheless the economic gap between the oppressed and the oppressed-oppressors in Northern Ireland in comparison to apartheid South Africa or colonial Algeria is comparatively tiny. We do not have the ‘first world’ within the same territory as the ‘third world’. Moreover, when assessing the different outcomes in Algeria and South Africa in terms of the ‘privileged segment’ of the population surely Marxists view South Africa - where they stayed - as infinitely preferable to the mass exodus of the French colons.

The communist programme does not aim to expel the British-Irish from Ireland. We must win them to the cause of socialism and communism. The same goes for the now historically established Jewish population in Israel mentioned by comrade Villa. It is one thing to oppose the Zionist-inspired influx in the late 1940s and the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian Arab population. It is another to deny the rights of the four million Jews who now inhabit Israel, 60% of whom were born there. Should they be driven into the sea? I think not.

As to Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, the fact that comrade Villa shoehorns them into the same category as US military bases is worrying. It shows beyond doubt that he has not broken fully with petty bourgeois anti-imperialism: ie, ‘third world’ nationalism. Whatever the particular imperial reasons for British involvement in Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands, I am firm in my conviction that those who are historically rooted in these territories should have self-determination. Presumably comrade Villa would have celebrated a forcible takeover of Gibraltar by general Franco and the imposition of fascist terror. He did after all ‘militarily’ support the attempted ‘liberation’ of the Falklands/Malvinas by the military dictatorship of the butcher general Galtieri. In this way comrade Villa elevates the mystical nationalist principle of territory above the rights and wishes of living peoples. To my mind such a stance is thoroughly undemocratic. It is false, not genuine anti-imperialism.

Let me now turn to the much-discussed Cossacks. I pointed out in my previous polemics on the British-Irish that the Bolsheviks stood on the principle of self-determination for all peoples in Russia and gladly welcomed the Don Cossacks’ decision to establish their own autonomous republic within the Russian Soviet federation.

Comrade Villa disagrees: “The Bolsheviks,” he says, “were against giving any national or democratic rights to the Cossacks.” In fact, “At the beginning of the civil war they said that all the Cossacks were a reactionary stratum that needed to be smashed”(my emphasis). True, in the course of the war Lenin “realised that it was possible to split that mass around social and class questions”. Later, “when the reds defeated them, Lenin imposed the victors’ conditions”, the comrade informs us (original emphasis). “The Cossack elite were expropriated and a non-sovereign Soviet republic based on the oppressed Cossack labourers was established in the middle of Russia as a part of the Soviet federation. The Bolsheviks,” concludes comrade Villa, “would never ever accept the right of a reactionary and segregationist Cossack state to secede.”

If comrade Villa is correct in terms of principle, that his sketch above accurately reflects the programmatic approach of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, then I have no hesitation in concluding that they were wrong. If that was Bolshevism, then I declare myself non-Bolshevik. But I sincerely believe that history shows a different picture. More, when it comes to principles - and it is principles that this debate around the British-Irish is primarily concerned with at this moment in time - the Bolsheviks took a position entirely at odds with the one outlined by comrade Villa. This means that either comrade Villa is wrongly informed or he is tailoring the history of Bolshevism to suit his own purposes.

The Cossacks, we should stress, were no run-of-the-mill people or ethnic group. They were an historically established privileged caste of peasant-soldiers who served as the counterrevolutionary terror troops of tsarism. Between the 15th and 18th centuries Russian settlers were planted on the frontiers of the Muscovite empire. In return for a perpetual obligation to perform military service these Cossacks were granted parcels of land. Lenin noted that on the league table of rich peasant households, the “first place amongst them is held by the Cossacks” (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p223). Organised in large military communities - voiski or hordes - they were subject to an elected ataman who exercised dictatorial powers. In the 19th century the Cossacks had, according to EH Carr, “become the mainstay of the regime” (EH Carr The Bolshevik Revolution Vol 1, Harmondsworth 1975, p300n). They also formed the “nucleus” of the counterrevolutionary white armies during the civil war (ibid). As Lenin angrily wrote, the Cossacks “were fighting for their privileges” (VI Lenin CW Vol 30, Moscow 1977, p81).

Is there a qualitative difference between the Cossacks and the British-Irish? Surely not. Except that in a small county like Ireland the British-Irish add up to something like 20% of the population. The Cossacks were a mere drop in the continental ocean of Russia.

From the start the Bolsheviks promised all nations within the Russian empire the right of self-determination up to and including the right to separate. Stalin, as the Bolsheviks’ leading spokesperson on nationalities, made this abundantly clear at the 7th Conference of RSDLP(B), in April 1917, slamming those such as Pyatakov who refused to countenance self-determination. Stalin in characteristic style rhetorically asked himself, “How is the political life of the oppressed nations to be arranged?” In answer to his own question he insisted that, “The oppressed peoples forming part of Russia must be allowed the right to decide for themselves whether they wish to remain part of the Russian state or secede and form independent states.”

Stalin cited the ongoing conflict between the Finnish bourgeoisie, which wanted independence, and the provisional government, which refused to grant it (incidentally the Bolsheviks recognised the independence of Finland after the October Revolution in spite of its counterrevolutionary regime). The Bolsheviks, he said, had to side with the Finnish’s people’s right to self-determination. Why? Because

“it is inconceivable for us to accept the forcible retention of any people whatsoever within the bounds of a unitary state. When we put forward the principle that peoples have the right to self-determination, we thereby raise the struggle against national oppression to the level of a struggle against imperialism, our common enemy. If we fail to do this, we may find ourselves in the position of bringing grist to the mill of the imperialists. If we, social democrats, were to deny the Finnish people the right to declare their will on the subject of secession and the right to give full effect to their will, we would be putting ourselves in the position of continuing the policy of tsarism” (my emphasis, JV Stalin Works Vol 3, Moscow 1953, pp54-55).

Stalin hammered home the principled position of Bolshevism again and again in the run-up to the October Revolution. Here he is in August 1917:

“We absolutely insist that union must be voluntary, for only such union is genuine and lasting. But that requires, in the first place, full and unqualified recognition of the right of the peoples of Russia to self-determination, including the right to secede from Russia. It requires further that this verbal recognition should be backed by deeds, that the peoples should be permitted right away to determine their territories and the forms of their political structure in their constituent assemblies. Only such a policy can promote confidence and friendship among people. Only such a policy can pave the way to a genuine union of the people” (ibid pp223-24).

As indicated above, the principle of self-determination and voluntary union was carried through into practice after the October Revolution. One of the first decrees of the new Soviet regime was the ‘Declaration of the rights of the peoples of Russia’, signed in “the name of the Russian Republic, People’s Commissar for Nationalities” by Djugashvili-Stalin and V Ulyanov (Lenin). Here is the bulk of it:

“... The 1st Congress of Soviets, in June of this year, proclaimed the rights of the peoples of Russia to self-determination. The 2nd Congress of Soviets, in November last, confirmed this inalienable right of the peoples of Russia more decisively and definitely. Executing the will of these congresses, the council of people’s commissars has resolved to establish as a basis for its activity in the question of nationalities, the following principles:

1. The equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia.
2. The right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state.
3. The abolition of any and all national and national-religious privileges and disabilities.
4. The free development of national minorities and ethnographic groups inhabiting the territory of Russia.

“Decrees will be prepared immediately upon the formation of a commission on nationalities” (J Reed Ten day that shook the world Harmondsworth 1970, p231).

Note that there is no caveat about rights only for progressive peoples and opposing national or democratic rights for oppressed-oppressors like the Cossacks. It was indeed in the spirit of consistent democracy that the Soviet government issued its ‘Appeal to toiling Cossacks’ immediately in the wake of the overthrow of Kerensky and co. Not only was a Red Army recruited from factory workers to fight counterrevolution, but: “Hundreds of propagandists were sent to the Don” with the appeal to explain to the working Cossacks that the Bolsheviks were not their enemies, but friends who did not want to rob them of either their land or their liberties (ibid p250). Revealingly, after five Cossack delegates appeared in November 1917 at the 2nd Congress of the Soviets, it was decided to retitle the highest body in the land the ‘All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, Cossacks’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’. A wonderful list-title that was “retained” till the foundation of the USSR in 1922, when the names of the separate groups were dropped (EH Carr The Bolshevik Revolution Vol 1, Harmondsworth 1975, p301n).

Soviet Russia was constitutionally founded as a federation of Soviet republics. As the embodiment of the “voluntary union of the peoples of Russia”, Lenin thought the Soviet constitution “should fully reassure the Cossacks” (VI Lenin CW Vol 36, Moscow 1977, p472). His optimism was not misplaced. By February 1918 there was a marked swing towards the Bolsheviks, particularly amongst younger Don Cossacks (attracted by the revolution’s call to divide the lands of the great Cossack landowners, abolition of compulsory military service and restrictions on free movement). They rose up against “their fathers and Kaledin”. The 1st Congress of the Soviets of the Don Republic, held over April 9-12 1918, “regarded the Don Republic as part of the RSFSR” and declared the “working Cossacks’ readiness to defend Soviet power” (VI Lenin CW Vol 42, Moscow 1977, p509n).

Stalin, as commissar of nationalities, could therefore write in February 1919 that a “voluntary union of the working people of all the independent Soviet Republics” is “now yielding its beneficent fruits”. He sums up the process in the following passage:

“Thus, from the breakdown of the old imperialist unity, through independent Soviet republics, the peoples of Russia are coming to a new, voluntary and fraternal unity. This path is unquestionably not the easiest, but it is the only one that leads to a firm and indestructible socialist union of the labouring masses of the nationalities of Russia” (JV Stalin Works Vol 4 Moscow 1953, pp236-7).

Comrade Villa makes much of the autonomous status of the Don Republic. Too much. For him it correlates with “non-sovereignty” and therefore presumably an absence of the right to secede. Here we have a failure to appreciate the original concept of Soviet autonomy. Again I will turn to Stalin as commissar for nationalities. This time in October 1920: “Soviet autonomy,” he explains,

“is not a rigid thing fixed once and for all time; it permits of the most varied forms and degrees of development. It passes from narrow, administrative autonomy (the Volga Germans, the Chuvashes, the Karelians) to a wider, political autonomy (the Bashkirs, the Volga Tartars, the Kirghiz); from wide political autonomy to a still wider form of it (the Ukraine, Turkestan); and, lastly, from the Ukrainian type of autonomy to the highest form of autonomy - to contractual relations (Azerbaijan). This flexibility of Soviet autonomy is one of its prime merits; for this flexibility enables it to embrace all the various types of border regions of Russia, which vary greatly in their levels of cultural and economic development” (JV Stalin Works Vol 4, Moscow 1953, p367)

As any student of the Russian Revolution knows, however, there was a drift going on in Stalin’s outlook and practice. Stalin would soon openly launch his ‘autonomisation plan’, by which all the independent Soviet republics would be incorporated into Russia and thus cease to have the right to secede. This, as comrade Villa is certainly aware, led to a clash between Stalin and an ailing Lenin. Against Stalin “haste”, Lenin rejected ‘autonomisation’ and argued strongly for a guarantee of continued equality in “a formal union with the RSFSR, in a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia”. Stalin famously responded by accusing Lenin of “national liberalism” (M Lewin Lenin’s last struggle London 1975, p52). It is sad that someone of the stature of José Villa, who proudly calls himself a communist, should on this basic democratic issue side with Stalin’s burgeoning bureaucratic tendencies instead of defending the essential principles of Leninism.

Comrade Villa closes his polemic badly. He repeats his economistic claptrap about the CPGB’s “central goal” being a “pure bourgeois republic”. A falsehood. When it comes to the withdrawal of British troops, comrade Villa does not demand as a precondition that Ireland must first be socialist. Does that mean the comrade’s “central goal” is a “pure bourgeois republic” in Ireland? No, of course not. Failure to unconditionally oppose British imperialism would be to desert the principles of revolutionary democracy and to give up on the real struggle for socialism.

In the British Isles we communists want the working class to take the lead in all democratic issues. Concretely the CPGB demands a federal republic which guarantees the right of Scotland and Wales to self-determination. The CPGB also calls for a united Ireland. Jack Conrad proposes that Ireland too should also have a federal dimension in the form of a British-Irish province, so as to ensure that unity between the dichotomised communities is voluntary and thus lasting. This is something I would fight to realise both before and after the expropriation of the capitalist class, as an integral part of the struggle to reach communism and working class self-liberation.

This is our real “central goal”, to which we subordinate everything in our programme.