14.10.1999

Protestant veto

Lenin opposed self-determination for the British-Irish, writes Tom Delargy

I would like to start by disentangling my own position from some of Jack’s other critics. Jack stands firmly on orthodox Leninist foundations when he takes issue with José Villa on the question of segregated schools. Hopefully, this was a slip of the pen on the part of my “ally of convenience”. Jack is no less right when he argues that it would be a mistake for communists to applaud the driving of the British-Irish into the sea. And yet I find it difficult to believe that a single one of Jack’s critics seriously proposes such a ‘solution’. It is hard not to suspect that Jack might be trying to frighten simple-minded CPGBers into his lobby by drawing a caricature of the opposition inside his own party.

Either way, those born in Ireland clearly need to have the right to remain there, and to have full citizenship rights. Exactly the same has to go for similar groups, such as Israeli Jews or white South Africans. Limits of space preclude me from elaborating on the many other areas of agreement, so I shall now turn to what divides us.

The more Jack has written on the subject, the clearer it has become that he is not just drawing up rules for the secession, from a future united Ireland, of a British-Irish entity in the north of the island. No, the ‘right’ of self-determination which he attributes to what he insists is an historically constituted people has a bearing on his attitude to their incorporation into a united Ireland in the first place. Such incorporation has to be voluntary rather than forced. Jack (clearly suffering from overwork) has chosen to align himself with the Reverend Ian Paisley and David Trimble. For Jack, the ‘British-Irish’ - a category which (let’s be frank, Jack) can only be clearly defined in religious terms - must have a veto over the creation of a united Ireland. All those who have in the past taken up arms in order to prevent the creation of a united Ireland (the UDA, etc) must, in retrospect, be recognised as legitimate freedom fighters. Jack is, for the time being, unprepared to recognise this logic; it is, however, inescapable.

Possibly in a desperate bid to distract potential recruits to his cause (to distract them from the loyalist path down which his theses threaten to drag the CPGB), Jack has resorted to accusing me of having a Stalinist attitude to the British-Irish question. Jack has the nerve to castigate as Stalinists myself, Dave Craig and others - people who, unlike Jack, never thought the Stalinist states were progressive, people who did not need to see the USSR collapse before pinpointing 1928 as the year when the Soviet Union ceased to be any kind of workers’ state. And all because we are prepared to tolerate the “forcible” incorporation of the British-Irish into a united Ireland.

Is there a shred of legitimacy to such an accusation? There is not. I have, in writing, pleaded with Jack to pay a little less attention to Lenin’s writings on the rights of the Cossacks in Soviet Russia and a little more to his writings on whether or not the Ulster protestants have the right to exercise a veto over the establishment of a united Ireland. Here is the most germane of all Lenin’s quotations on the British-Irish:

“A home rule bill for Ireland is now going through parliament. But in Ireland there is the Northern province of Ulster, which is inhabited partly by English-born protestants as distinct from the catholic Irish. Well then, the British Conservatives, led by Carson, the British version of our Black Hundred landlord Purishkevich, have raised a frightful outcry against Irish home rule. This, they say, means subjecting Ulstermen to an alien people of alien creed! Lord Carson has threatened rebellion, and has organised gangs of reactionary armed thugs for this purpose.”

Lenin goes on to accuse the Liberals of “losing their nerve, bowing to the reactionaries, making concessions to them, offering to conduct a referendum in Ulster and put off reform for Ulster for six years!”

He continues:

“The haggling between the Liberals and the reactionaries continues. Reform can wait: the Irish have waited half a century; they can wait a little longer; you can’t very well ‘offend’ the landlords! Of course, if the Liberals appealed to the people of Britain, to the proletariat, Carson’s reactionary gangs would melt away immediately and disappear. The peaceful and full achievement of freedom by Ireland would be guaranteed.

“But is it conceivable that the liberal bourgeoisie will turn to the proletariat for aid against the landlords? Why, the Liberals in Britain are also lackeys of the money-bags, capable only of cringing to the Carsons” (VI Lenin On Britain Moscow 1979, p170).

Jack can be expected to raise objections to parts of this passage. I myself have some criticisms of it: designating the Ulster protestants (or British-Irish) as a ‘labour aristocracy’ is fine by me, but dismissing them as “landlords” would suggest less than the firmest grasp of the entire situation or, alternatively, polemics gone mad (a little bit of Conradism, perhaps). I would also question Lenin’s assessment of the ease with which the resistance of the British-Irish could be quelled. Nevertheless, on the essentials, it is clear that it is Jack, not me, who has the problem.

Lenin was not so ignorant of the situation in Ireland at the time to fail to notice that there existed hundreds of thousands of British-Irish. Indeed, his opposition to a referendum held separately in Ulster can only be explained by his appreciation that it would, or could, be lost due to the preponderance of the British-Irish inside that particular province. For Lenin it is clear that this labour aristocracy can be granted no right to self-determination if the exercise of it gives them an effective veto, when it comes to the liberation of the whole of Ireland. Lenin is revealed here as no less prepared than I am to ‘force’ the British-Irish, to some extent against their will, into a united Ireland. Here, in this passage, Lenin also identifies the (mysterious?) political agency, or one of the political agencies (along with the Irish working class) capable of putting into practice the Leninist project of uniting the whole of Ireland. So, Jack, was Lenin himself an advocate of a “new form of slavery”? It is back-to-the-drawing-board time.

Jack has repeatedly suggested that if his critics get their way communists will be perceived as advocating the driving of the British-Irish into the sea! This is nonsense. It is equally nonsense to suggest that any of Jack’s critics would advocate the British-Irish becoming second class citizens in a united Ireland any more than we think he advocates second class citizenship for the catholic population inside his “British-Irish entity”, independent or otherwise. But the numerical preponderance of the British-Irish inside any part of Ireland clearly could not (as far as Lenin was concerned) give them rights to be used by British imperialism as a pretext with which to frustrate the attempt by the Irish people as a whole to take control of the most productive part of Irish industry, precisely where the British-Irish were concentrated.

If Jack fails to understand this much, then he fails to understand that, for Lenin, the right of nations to self-determination was all about supporting the struggle for freedom of oppressed nations. Lenin supported this right both for its own sake (because it could make the struggle of the proletariat for supremacy within the new state less complicated and, therefore, easier) and for the effect such a struggle has in educating the proletariat of the oppressor nation as to who its true allies are. Each and every defeat for the bourgeoisie of an oppressor nation cannot but bring forward its overthrow by its grave-digger: not the oppressed nation, but its own proletariat.

Jack really ought to ponder on the following quote from Lenin:

“From their daily experience the masses know perfectly well the value of geographical and economic ties and the advantages of a big market and a big state. They will, therefore, resort to secession only when national oppression and national friction make joint life absolutely intolerable and hinder any and all economic intercourse” (my emphasis, VI Lenin The right of nations to self-determination Moscow 1979, p34).

In this pamphlet Jack can find as much proof as he could possibly require that whenever Lenin refers to the right of nations to self-determination, this is short hand for the right of oppressed nations. Self-evidently the reason why Lenin was opposed to the self-determination of the British-Irish is because they fail to qualify, on the grounds that they have never suffered any oppression at the hands of the Irish people. Possibly uniquely of Jack’s critics I concede that, inside a united Ireland, elements of such oppression might rise to the surface. If this was to occur, the consequent unanticipated friction would necessitate the search for new solutions.

But the central point is that oppression does not exist today, nor is it likely to do so within a united Ireland. This is important because all our perspectives ought to focus upon the real situation rather than the less likely scenarios. To do otherwise is to descend into what Marx dismissed as “purely scholastic questions”. And even in the unlikely event of elements of oppression appearing, before Leninists could grant the British-Irish the specific right to a separate state, certain conditions would have to be put in place. Regrettably, there remains enormous equivocation on Jack’s part as to whether or not he is offering unconditional support for the British-Irish to opt for a state of their own, and on whether he is prepared to tolerate the secession in turn of the catholic minority from his British-Irish state.

Jack insists he is opposed to the oppression of catholics inside the existing orange state and would tolerate no such oppression inside a new British-Irish state. I believe him. But the guarantee he insists upon in thesis 15 is unconditional, and that is the problem. All the evidence available to us suggests that, whereas there are realistic (if far from guaranteed) prospects for the existence of a secular united Ireland, one in which no community suffers any oppression, the borders Jack has drawn up for a British-Irish entity are likely (other things being equal) to give Paisley, Trimble et al everything they want. If the armed wing of the British-Irish resistance to a united Ireland make plain their intention to draw up borders similar to those advocated by Jack and to declare UDI, just where will Jack stand?

This is the question to which we most urgently need an answer. Given that the Irish will, perfectly reasonably, fear that they are witnessing a rerun of history, there will, inevitably, be armed resistance inside catholic-dominated areas to any such scheme. They will no more be satisfied with any ‘autonomy’ delegated to them by the existing political leadership of the British-Irish than the East Timorese were satisfied with the kind of ‘autonomy’ promised by the existing Indonesian state.

Jack might want to question my insertion above of the caveat, “other things being equal”. This is a reference to the political realities in Ulster today. If Jack supports immediate withdrawal by the forces of British imperialism, then he has to take into consideration the political consciousness of the British-Irish as they are today, not as they will be on the eve of a successful socialist revolution.

Because the working class is, regrettably, not on the verge of taking power today (neither in Britain nor Ireland), everything Jack says about the national policy of the Bolshevik government, when Russia was a workers’ state, is entirely besides the point. And even if a workers’ republic was immediately on the agenda in Ireland, comparison between the British-Irish and the Cossacks is unhelpful.

In Jack’s latest article (Weekly Worker October 7) he described the Cossacks as “an historically privileged caste of peasant-soldiers who served as the counterrevolutionary terror troops of tsarism”. He then went on to pose and answer the following question: “Is there a qualitative difference between the Cossacks and the British-Irish? Surely not.” Jack is here insulting the British-Irish. They are no peasant soldiers: on the contrary, they constitute an integral component of the working class in the north east of Ireland. And, as Jack himself stressed, the income differentials between the two component parts of the working class in Ulster is minuscule when compared to similar labour aristocracies like, say, the white South African working class. From an objective point of view, the overwhelming majority of the British-Irish (quite unlike the case of both the white South Africans and the Cossacks) have, even in the short term, nothing to gain and everything to lose by any continuation of support for oppression.

In his first attack on my position (or what was inaccurately presented as my position), Jack wrote: “Comrade Delargy is convinced that the antagonism cleaving the British-Irish and the catholic-Irish cannot be resolved, even partially, under capitalism. I profoundly disagree.” Do you know what I find most extraordinary about this sentence, Jack? It is that in it everything is back to front. While I would prefer a united Ireland to be a workers’ republic from day one of its existence, and while I insist that no stable (ie, permanent) solution to the British-Irish problem is possible otherwise than in a workers’ republic, it is incorrect to say (as Jack himself acknowledged elsewhere in his article) that my support for a united Ireland is conditional on the working class raising itself to political supremacy.

When I wrote (Weekly Worker September 16) that thesis 16 contained some relevant points, what I meant is that a federation of two workers’ republics might solve the problem posed by the British-Irish permanently and definitively rather than merely partially and in an unstable manner, this being all I anticipate under capitalism - a position with which Jack, sometimes, seems to concur. One of my several objections to Jack’s theses is their reference to the solution of the various national questions in Soviet Russia. Such references must mean (if they mean anything at all) that it is Jack, not myself, who is making his support for a united Ireland conditional on its being born as a workers’ republic. While such ultimatist ‘solutions’ might suit the purposes of loyalist paramilitaries, they have no place in a Leninist programme.

If, on the other hand, theses 9 and 16 were not intended as an ultimatist excuse for refusing to endorse the immediate reunification of Ireland, then Jack must be peddling the myth that a voluntary, peaceful and stable settlement can be enshrined in a capitalist constitution and guaranteed by the forces of the capitalist state. If this is Jack’s position, then he is a demonstrating mind-boggling naivety.