Letters
Universal panacea
I am quite honoured to receive such a well elaborated, double-page response from comrade Conrad (‘Bolshevism and consistent democracy’ Weekly Worker October 7). Jack’s use of quotations from some 20 books shows that he knows a lot about the subject. Unfortunately, my friend did not respond to my main point: that the right of self-determination of the Irish nation as a whole is incompatible with the right of self-determination of its pro-British layers.
To allow the unionists the right to secede is to support their right to veto Irish national self-determination and to keep a sectarian and segregationist statelet in the north. Jack’s desire to be very democratic towards an oppressive community means sacrificing the democratic rights of the oppressed majority overall. The fact that he accepts a new partition, allowing half of the Six Counties to reunite with Ireland and the other part to secede or remain inside the UK would not satisfy anybody and would increase ethnic cleansing and the likelihood of communal massacres.
I would like to come back on many issues where I think that my friend is incorrect. For instance, he says that a common language is indispensable for a nation and that Switzerland is a multinational country. It was Lenin who described Switzerland as an example of a multilinguistic nation (as Wales or Ireland are). However, for the moment I will try to keep the debate around the central issue.
The CPGB is transforming the right of self-determination into a universal panacea which could be applied anywhere, even to non-nations and against the anti-imperialist cause. In fact, it has led it to make proposals against the democratic right of the oppressed nation to be united, and free of the remnants of colonial occupation. A pro-imperialist minority could be granted many democratic rights, but not the right to undertake a sectarian and pogromist repartition. The unionists do not want self-determination: they want to maintain their historic and privileged domination. If the unionists were to fight for their right to secede in opposition to Irish unification on the grounds that they are a semi-nation, would Jack support them or call for them to be armed?
The only way to win British-Irish workers to our side is through combining demands on improving their social conditions with saying to them that they would be better off rejecting loyalist privileges and accepting national unification under socialism.
José Villa
LCMRCI
New majority
One point that Jack Conrad’s critics have overlooked is that there is no role for Britain or the USA in his proposals. Only the Irish, both north and south, are to decide the issues. This makes it a question of how the Irish majority deal with their most troublesome minority. Do they try to incorporate them or repress them? A philistine would take the view that it just isn’t going to happen, so why the fuss? Steve Riley (Weekly Worker September 2) and his sympathisers are making a fuss because they are only prepared to consider the protestant community as a subordinate, perpetually isolated minority.
However, a revolutionary programme needs to build a class with progressive answers to real problems and must show a path by which the working class can contend for power with the bourgeoisie by uniting the broadest forces to our side. Democracy is the key to building trust and removing deeply ingrained hostilities and gives the class the necessary experience to mould itself into a ruling class. The right to self-determination does not imply that exercising it in favour of secession is the best answer, nor is it just a matter of reflecting reality, though this is always a good place to start. Most importantly it contains the necessary moral attitude for a majority that wishes to incorporate alienated reactionary minorities.
The revolutionary usurpation of power is just an episode in the permanent revolution which has already started and goes on to abolish class altogether. Steve Riley’s argument implies there are two distinct periods. The present period, in which we only agitate for the military overthrow of capitalism (and of course higher wages), and the post-revolutionary period, in which we have socialism. Neither is true.
The question of whether the Protestants are a nation or not is irrelevant: there are an awful lot of them, they live close enough to coordinate a military campaign, they have guns and they have the support of a section of the British ruling class. They can fight, they might fight and they could even win. Comrade John Pearson admitted at the last Party aggregate that in the case of negotiations turning out this badly we can then concede their right to self-determination, but we should not let them know what our bottom line is because it is a bad negotiating tactic. Of course the Orange Order can make their own calculations as to what the odds are and keep their own bottom line just as close a secret. The problem with this Machiavellian approach is that it makes civil war more likely. Neither side is being honest with the other, thus maximising distrust, entrenching prejudice and polarising the situation between Catholics as a whole and Protestants as a whole, while encouraging imperialism to come fishing in troubled waters.
The opposition conceded that Conrad’s position might serve to split the protestant moderates from the Ulster bigots, but, according to these comrades, the Ulster bigots are just bigots: reason, justice and moderation are beyond them and always will be. There is no alternative but to crush them.
The point, however, is not to split the protestants, but to split both the Catholics and the protestants. Democracy is not just about majority rights: it is also about change - change for the better on the basis of substantive equality. In principle even the Rev Paisley may prefer it. It is about getting rid of the catholic majority as well as the protestant minority, and creating a secular majority in its place. But only the majority has the power and authority to make this change. A majority that lacks the political vision to supersede itself is reactionary. In politics the word ‘split’ usually means divide (and thereby rule), but it also can mean breaking from the past, and this is the sense that I wish to emphasise.
The opposition to Conrad’s theses wrongly interpret his position as being essentially advice to the bourgeoisie on how to settle their Irish problem. It is nothing of the sort. The left has for so long been in opposition that they can only advise the working class to say ‘No! No! No!’ In fact a bit like Ian Paisley. They have no concept of a positive programme. Another fault that flows from their distrust of democracy is that it inevitably leads to a party that is separate and external to the class rather than a part of the class; a throwback to old ‘official communism’.
Phil Kent
London
Left posturing
Peter Manson’s article on the SWP’s Labour Party lobby (Weekly Worker October 7) calls to mind another lobby of the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth called by the WRP in 1985, after the defeat of the miners’ strike.
In the final weeks before the WRP exploded (and when all leaders knew it was coming) Simon Pirani produced a good document attacking the party’s ultimatistic perspectives. He questioned why on earth we had gone to Bournemouth to demonstrate against the Labour Party on the instructions of the political committee when the Alexander Pavilion rally (a 5,000-strong culmination of the WRP’s Campaign to Free the Jailed Miners) had decided to lobby the conference. Practically everyone on the left recognised that to march around Bournemouth and not even go near the conference was about as foolishly sectarian an exercise as we had ever attempted. Why not go to Scotland to demonstrate?
Mark Fischer explained in the Weekly Worker (September 23) that Peter Taaffe was a crazy sectarian to deny there was any point in putting pressure on the Labour Party. Even Indonesian dictators were susceptible to international pressure. But comrade Peter Manson says that we must be demonstrators and not lobbyists. It is useless to attempt to get Tony Blair to change his mind; the point was to influence the Labour left. To do what precisely? If a tiny demonstration at his London embassy that he may not even hear about is putting pressure on Habibie, why is a 2,000/4,000/10,000 (take your pick) lobby and demonstration not going to influence Tony Blair to change his mind about anything? Would no lobby or demonstration at all have been better? Would that have put greater pressure on Blair?
The whole thing is symptomatic of the disorientation of the sectarian left who say, ‘A plague on the Labour Party (and by implication the workers who vote for it): we will build a new workers’ party’. This just confuses the actual relationship of forces - Blair is still unfortunately popular with most workers - with what we would like to see: a real fightback emerging from the unions and the oppressed.
The existing leadership has consolidated its hold over the structures of the mass workers’ organisations. The anti-trade union laws were of enormous assistance in consolidating the dead hand of the Labour bureaucracy over the rank and file workers. The SWP are at least partly correct in that the spirit of a fightback is re-emerging, but the bureaucracy is succeeding again and again in snuffing out the revival.
Therefore lobbying all Labour movement conferences (trade union, TUC and Labour) is a vitally necessary activity to pressure splits in that bureaucracy. We have a right and a duty to demand of Tony Blair a long list of unfulfilled promises as well as many socially necessary measures he avoided or fudged. We have a right and a duty to demand that the left Labourites and trade union bureaucrats fight Blair for the things they claim to represent. We also have an obligation not to be foolish and expect that demands will win concessions on their own. But they may force errors which will benefit us; they may force lefts to fight that bit harder and go further than they desire and so give space to the working class to come forward.
It is the dreadful counterposition of ‘lobby’ and ‘demonstration/rally’ that I find idiotic. It is the counterposition of ‘We will not demand anything of Tony Blair, but organise the working class to smash capitalism’ and more pathetically ‘Smash the monarchy and the House of Lords and keep capitalism’ that is so foolish. This has nothing whatsoever to do with revolutionary strategy and tactics and is just ultra-left posturing.
The SWP, for all its backwardness, continually gets one aspect of its orientation correct. It knows it must engage the consciousness of the working class by putting demands on its existing leadership and therefore it recruits a vanguard layer emerging into politics. The fact that it quickly destroys them by getting little else right is well known on the left. But why go to Bournemouth and not engage in political conflict with the delegates at the Labour Party conference? Unless your ambition is to fill the political space unlamentably vacated by the old WRP in 1985?
Gerry Downing
London