04.11.1999
Defending revolutionary democracy
John Stone insists that the British-Irish can have no right to secede
We have to congratulate the CPGB for its very democratic, open and instructive debate on the Irish question. Its main leader, comrade Conrad, is not only showing a great degree of tolerance and dialogue, but also a vast political culture. He has written several two-page articles responding to different criticisms on that subject. Unfortunately we have not read in the Weekly Worker the position of the CPGB’s minority, something that would help the discussion.
Nevertheless, I am not the only person to point out that Jack has not attempted to tackle a central point in the debate. There are two rights which are completely antagonistic: the right of self-determination for the Irish nation as a whole, and the right of its unionist layers to oppose this and to keep British rule in a part of that nation. Comrade Jack is trying to do the impossible with this mix of oil and water. In his efforts to be a consistent democrat regarding a privileged minority he is sacrificing the rights of the oppressed majority.
The Irish nation has fought for many decades to achieve unity and complete liberation from foreign imperialist monarchical rule. These bourgeois democratic-revolutionary tasks have not been fully achieved in Ireland. One third of the Irish live under the United Kingdom. In Northern Ireland the anti-unionist population are subject to discrimination and harassment. Communists have to be the champions of this unfinished democratic goal and explain that only the working class, irrespective of ethnicity, can fully emancipate Ireland from imperialism and the monarchy.
Jack is saying that in order to attain an Irish republic we need to make some democratic concessions to the British unionists - to whom he has given the status of a semi-nation called the ‘British Irish’ - and allow them the right to secede. However, what he does not grasp is that, in allowing the pro-British to separate, he is endorsing a new partition and the continuation of their reactionary veto against the right of self-determination for the Irish nation as a whole. Jack thinks that the best way of winning support amongst protestant workers is by becoming the best fighter for its right to create a federal or sovereign state.
There are several problems with this formulation. First, national self-determination is a demand without resonance among the unionists. Why should we try to impose it on them? The loyalists do not want to secede from the United Kingdom, to unite with Ireland or even rule only in the areas in which they are a clear majority. Unionism does not fight for self-determination or against a foreign power, but to keep its own oppressive domination.
Secondly, the unionists and anti-unionists are not two different nations or nationalities. They are two interpenetrated communities from the very same nation, inhabiting the same territory. Despite the presence of distinct historic, religious and even linguistic inclinations in some layers of both communities, their main difference - as comrade Armstrong has described - is around political inclinations. There have been pro-British Catholics, and former union supporters in the Twenty-six Counties have never demanded any special status. A pro-British, self-governing territory would be a centre of reaction, segregation and loyalty to the crown.
Thirdly, the model that Jack proposes - a new repartition of Northern Ireland, allowing one entire county and four half counties to each side - is something that is not going to satisfy anybody. Unionists and nationalists would both see it as a surrender to the other side. Loyalism would lose at least half its statelet and anti-unionists would not achieve Irish national self-determination and unification. Even worse, this is a recipe for increased communal division - one that would encourage ethnic cleansing.
Fourthly, the best way of gaining an audience amongst pro-British workers and winning them away from their loyalist leaders is through championing their class rights. We need to struggle alongside them for better wages, jobs, housing and living conditions and encourage common demonstrations and strikes organised jointly with anti-unionist workers. Supporting a ‘national’ right for an oppressor community simply reinforces loyalism. The problem with Jack is that he is not putting forward a strategy for socialist revolution and a republic. Rather he gives priority to purely political, democratic demands, because he wants to limit the aims of the movement to the completion of a first, bourgeois democratic, stage in the revolution.
Jack has argued that communists should follow the example of imperialist Germany in the way it convinced the East German Ossis to voluntarily abandon their state and accept absorption within a federal state:
“Surely, if a dull conservative like Kohl recognised the need to proceed with care and caution, taking full account of the wishes of the Ossis, should not communists approach the British-Irish problem as consistent democrats, not ham-fisted nationalists?” (Weekly Worker September 9).
The German and Irish questions are quite different. Germany was divided along class lines and social models. In the east the capitalists were expropriated while in the west they managed to expand and become Europe’s main economic power. Eastern Germany collapsed as a result of the new Cold War and the collapse of Soviet bureaucratic planning and totalitarianism. The west was able to ‘voluntarily’ annex the east for many reasons. There was no foreign power attempting to maintain a separate eastern state; the special ‘socialist’ ideology and system that sustained the DDR was defeated internally; and the Ossis were massively bombarded by propaganda which convinced them that they would be better off thanks to an injection of billions of deutschemarks. The shift towards a market system would end scarcity and provide a democratic parliament.
We cannot emulate that process because we are not one of the world’s mightiest powers. On the contrary, the main enemy that we have is a powerful imperialist country and its supporters. Instead of attempting to unite Ireland through money, our method is to achieve that goal thorough revolution. An argument constantly put by Jack is that the loyalists are heavily armed and that we need to convince them to come to a nonviolent arrangement in which everybody would be satisfied: there would be a united Ireland and a self-governing British-Irish territory. This utopia shows the increased influence that all the propaganda about the advantages of peaceful negotiations and democracy is achieving. Jack arrives at such a position because he is applying a different methodology than the one used by Lenin. He believes that all nations and even many non-nations have the right to secede. For example, regarding pro-colonialist communities in colonial outposts he wrote that “those who are historically rooted in these territories should have self-determination” (Weekly Worker October 7).
Lenin had a very different understanding. For him: “The focal point in the social democratic programme must be that division of nations into oppressor and oppressed which forms the essence of imperialism … It is from this division that our definition of the ‘right of nations to self-determination’ must follow … the social democracy of the oppressor nation must demand that the oppressed nation should have the right of secession” (VI Lenin CW Vol 21, Moscow 1977, p409). Lenin only fought for the right of self-determination for oppressed nations, and against oppressor nations. Our friend Jack does not base his analysis on that dichotomy. Comrade Conrad is for the right of self-determination of oppressor non-nations against oppressed nations.
Who are the oppressor and oppressed in Ireland? Ireland was London’s first colony and the North is its last significant colony. The anti-imperialist community in the Six Counties has lower incomes, higher levels of unemployment, worse housing and suffers constant hostility from the RUC, Orange Order and paramilitaries. Jack is not guided by ‘consistent democracy’, but an abandonment of revolutionary democracy. Why should an oppressed nation have to voluntarily limit its own democratic, republican and self-determination rights in order to conciliate a community which has accumulated privileges that oppress and divide?
The Ulster unionists are not the only example of a community heavily backed and armed by a foreign ruling power to resist a revolutionary anti-colonialist movement. In Latin America, East Timor, Algeria, southern Africa, Palestine and many other former colonies the imperialists created a privileged section that fought alongside them against progressive pro-independence movements. In the process of expelling the imperialist rulers it would be an act of inconsistency or even betrayal to try to win the pro-colonialist layers through offering them their right to keep their special status dividing the country.
During the Chinese revolution we critically supported Mao when he invaded some imperialist enclaves, and would have done so had he taken places like Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan, even against the wishes of many people. In South Africa or Palestine we cannot support the right of the oppressor nation to secede. Jack tried to dodge that point by saying that he does not want to drive the Jews (or unionists) into the sea, and that there is no significant area in which white South Africans are a majority. We do not recommend massive deportations. In Palestine we are in favour of a non-confessional, multi-ethnic, democratic workers’ state in which all their inhabitants would have equal rights. We would not accept a new partition in which the Arab native population ends up with the poorest areas and limited sovereignty, and would in effect have to accept the legitimacy of their previous expulsion from their former lands. We are against building a Jewish nation or state, based only around a religion and hostility to the Arabs.
In South Africa’s Transvaal and Orange Free State there are many areas which have a clear Afrikaner white majority. When black rule was gaining ground, many white separatists launched the idea of self-government. The Boers, unlike the pro-British Irish, are a completely different nation and race with a very distinctive history and language. Even more, they were one of the first peoples this century that fought vigorously against British rule and they were subjected to the first concentration camps. However, we cannot accept their right to violate majority rule in order to keep their privileges and create a state under reactionary segregationist rules.
Jack’s methodology in Northern Ireland is also applied to the Malvinas and other imperialist outposts. For him we have to defend rights of its 2,000 inhabitants to self-determination against “the military dictatorship of the butcher general Galtieri” (Weekly Worker October 7). We would certainly not support an imperialist state like Spain in any conflict with Britain around Gibraltar. However, when it comes to the Malvinas, we are obliged to support a semi-colony in its attempt to recover its former islands. Thatcher’s victory in that war allowed her to defeat the Labour left and later to launch heavy attacks on the miners and other unions, and it also helped imperialism to impose its conditions and IMF austerity measures on Latin America.
The only way in which Argentina could have won the war would have been through transforming it into a massive anti-imperialist struggle. Millions of Latin Americans were being mobilised in the streets, and a mass wave of occupations of imperialist embassies and multinational corporations would have given a huge boost to the anti-imperialist movement worldwide. An Argentinean victory would not only have been a devastating blow against Thatcher, but would also have produced progressive radical change inside Argentina. As we saw in the case of Yugoslavia or Iraq, when dictators are beaten by imperialism, a worse scenario is imposed on the people. Jack prefers to sacrifice the anti-imperialist struggle of tens of millions of Argentineans and Latin Americans in order to defend a colonial outpost’s tiny loyalist population.
Lenin defended oppressed nations when they fought against imperialist enclaves. My friend Jack has the opposite idea: to defend the rights of the Kelpers and unionists within those enclaves in opposition to the oppressed nation. Jack also has a mechanical conception of nation. It is based on Stalin’s book, which was never used by Lenin or Trotsky as a source of reference. If a people does not fit Stalin’s check list, he would deny its character as a nation - but it does not matter, because Jack advocates the right of ethnic communities to have their own state.
Following Stalin, Jack writes: “Up to now Marxists - till the arrival of comrade Villa, that is - have insisted that nations must share a common language” (Weekly Worker October 7). It was Lenin who described Switzerland as an example of a democratic nation based on four languages. He also always described bi-linguistic Belgium or Netherlands as nations. In the 1860s Marx described the Italians as a nation and supported its unification, even though only three per cent spoke Italian. At least 80% of the world’s nations are based on more than one tongue. Sometimes that contradiction is resolved through adopting one or more official lingua franca.
The danger of Jack’s position is that he allows the possibility of splitting the Irish, Scottish and Welsh nations according to language. Those that speak Celtic tongues could be considered separate nations, despite the fact that there is a common consciousness between English-speaking and Celtic-speaking peoples that they belong to the same nation. He might also accept further divisions of these nations on religious grounds or because of allegiance to the UK.
Jack also insists that Yugoslavia is “today ferociously and bloodily divided by religion” (Weekly Worker October 7). He insists that religious communities could have the right to create their own state. However, the Balkan and Irish peoples are not mainly divided by interpretation of the bible. Croats and Serbs share a similar language, but they are divided by more than a 1,000 years of separate history, culture, and territory, as well as being ruled by different powers.
Jack’s mistake is that he transforms self-determination into a panacea. Not only nations, but also communities united around religion or political allegiances could be supported in creating their own states. Lenin considered self-determination as a bourgeois democratic right that has to be subordinated to the struggle against imperialism and linked to the idea of making a socialist revolution. The CPGB does not put forward a strategy for socialist revolution and workers’ republics. Its goal is first to achieve a capitalist federal republic.
A solution à la Germany would not convince either unionist or anti-unionist workers. In trying to transform a bourgeois democratic principle into an absolute one, Jack has ended up championing democratic rights for a privileged minority (unionists) and violating the democratic rights of the majority (the Irish nation as a whole). In trying to build a bridge to the unionist workers he creates even more confusion and the possibility of increased communal division.
The right to self-determination for a pro-imperialist community is completely rejected by everybody. The only way to win unionist workers to our side is by raising class and not communal-separatist demands, and by raising the strategy for an Irish united secular workers’ republic, linked with Britain and Europe through a socialist federation.