02.12.1999
Irish freedom and socialist revolution
I congratulate comrade Mary Godwin on her report of the November 13-14 CPGB weekend school on the national question (Weekly Worker November 18). It is concise, balanced and comprehensive. There is just one correction I would seek to make to Mary’s précis of the statement I delivered on behalf of the CPGB minority. I would furthermore wish to elaborate the minority’s position, something we have been urged to do by comrades Mark Fischer, John Stone and Dave Craig.
I am reported as saying, “The task of communists is to overcome the historic division of the Irish working class between its nationalist and pro-imperialist sections. This can be achieved by fighting for the entire programme of the CPGB and uniting the working class in the struggle against all capitalists” (my emphasis). I actually said, of course, “the Communist Party,” and not “the CPGB”. I was referring to the Communist Party that must be built in Ireland.
We of the minority do not though disregard, or downplay, the equally crucial necessity for the programme of the CPGB to address the Irish national question and to do so in terms that unequivocally advocate the defeat of ‘our own’ imperialist United Kingdom state, in its being driven out of Ireland. Indeed our starting point in our difference with the Party majority is precisely the issue of what the CPGB programme should contain on the Irish question.
We defend the existing formulation within the draft programme, which is:
“Ireland is Britain’s oldest colony. In 1921 the Irish nation was dissected. A sectarian Six County statelet was created in order to permanently divide the Irish working class and to perpetuate British domination over the whole island of Ireland. We communists in Britain unconditionally support the right of Ireland to reunite. Working class opposition to British imperialism in Ireland is a necessary condition for our own liberation - a nation that oppresses another can never itself be free. The struggle for socialism in Britain and national liberation in Ireland are inextricably linked. Communists in Ireland also have internationalist duties. They must fight for the closest spirit of fraternity between workers in Britain and Ireland and their speediest coming together. They must be resolute opponents of nationalism.”
The CPGB majority however, has won a resolution at a Party aggregate, stating that the programmatic formulation “requires elaboration and further development. This is especially so in relationship to the British-Irish” (Weekly Worker October 21). The precise terms of what this elaboration will be have not yet been proposed by the majority, yet we can get some indication from the text of the 20 theses, ‘Ireland and the British-Irish’, which were published in the Weekly Worker on August 26, and of course from the extensive debate which has raged since.
Thesis 20 states: “Communists support the right of a British-Irish one-county, four-half-counties entity in a united Irish republic to self-determination, but argue against exercising that right in favour of secession. We favour voluntary unity and the growing together of the two traditions in Ireland on the basis of a common struggle for international socialism and world communism.” The second sentence of this thesis is one we are agreed upon and it adequately codifies a crucial element of the minority’s approach to the question of a communist programme for Ireland, of which more later. It is the first sentence wherein the difficulty lies. If the draft programme of the CPGB were to be altered such that it stated, “The CPGB supports the right of a British-Irish one-county, four-half-counties entity in a united Irish republic to self-determination, but argues against exercising that right in favour of secession”, then it would hardly be accurate to describe this as an “elaboration” of the existing formulation. Rather, it would be a fundamental contradiction of the principle, “We communists in Britain unconditionally support the right of Ireland to reunite” (my emphasis). The CPGB can hardly sustain unconditional support for the right of Ireland to reunite if, say, in observing the proceedings of an inaugural constitutional convention of all Ireland, we were to cry foul (and presumably advise the British working class to withdraw its support), should the principle of the constitutional right of the ‘British-Irish entity’ to self-determination not be carried.
The winning of unconditional support from the British working class for Irish freedom is a pivotal requirement of a communist programme for Britain and has been since Karl Marx himself developed the position in 1869. It must not be put at risk now by an incorrect application of the principle of the right of nations to self-determination. In addressing the Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, on December 10 of that year, Marx explained how the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment for the British working class; rather it is the first condition for their own social emancipation: “It is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland … The English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland ... The English reaction has its roots in the subjugation of Ireland.” It remains the case that a successful revolutionary struggle in Ireland would have the potential to spark the socialist revolution in Britain, Europe and beyond.
The latest revolutionary upsurge in Ireland, however - one led by petty bourgeois politics - has failed. The unification of Ireland has not been achieved and the main revolutionary party, Sinn Féin, is about to enter the devolved government of the Six County province of the United Kingdom. In an historic compromise, the Irish republican movement is accepting the partition of Ireland and the institutionalisation of the continued existence of two communities in the north.
This failure is no surprise. It was anticipated for instance, by comrade Jack Conrad, who had this to say in a supplement in The Leninist in November 1984:
“The politics of petty bourgeois nationalism have proved incapable of developing or sustaining an all-Ireland revolutionary movement against British imperialism which can rally to its banner both those experiencing repression most severely - today the catholic masses in the Six Counties - and all oppressed and exploited sections of the Irish population, including the protestant working class, or at least a section of it, all of which would be necessary if Britain is to be ejected from Ireland … Sinn Féin, because of its petty bourgeois nationalism, cannot fight for the hegemony of the working class over the national question. It thus refuses to see that the struggles for national liberation and socialism, far from being separate, must be linked if British imperialism is to be defeated. Because of this there is always the danger that if petty bourgeois nationalism continues to dominate the national struggle, as in the past it will do a deal with British imperialism.”
The domination of the post-partition national struggle in Ireland by petty bourgeois politics is not something that was inevitable. It was in no small part due to the rotten politics of an ‘official communist’ movement, under the direction of the Soviet bureaucracy, which handed hegemony of national struggles to bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces the world over. That politics - a reversion to Menshevism - was a product of the defeat of the major political lesson of the October revolution. This was the understanding that, in the imperialist epoch, permanent historic gains in the process of transition from capitalism to socialism and communism will only be realised when the leadership of the revolutionary struggle - from national democratic revolution to international socialist revolution - lies with the working class. We now have to fight to rewin dominance for that politics. That fight is simultaneously a struggle to make the working class that is ready for revolution. The forging of that class is the primary task of communists in relation to Ireland, just as it is in relation to all states within the globalised capitalism of today.
The working class that is ready to make revolution is a class that has achieved the highest degree of unity, the class-for-itself that Marx described. It is a class that fully understands the need to press uninterruptedly from national democratic victories to international victories in the socialist expropriation of the capitalist class. Sectional, supremacist, separatist, racist and reactionary prejudices of all kinds will surely perish in the furnaces that mould this class. Mary Godwin was correct when she reported the belief of the CPGB minority that it is bizarre for communists to assume that sections of such a working class will want to go off, after its victory, and form their own separate states.
The current conjuncture in Ireland presents a fresh opportunity for the development of communist politics, for the re-establishment of the project of forging working class unity. This will not be achieved by the crass economistic politics of the likes of the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, which the Weekly Worker is correct, and indeed duty bound, to ruthlessly oppose. We have seen before in the history of Ireland occasions when unity of the working class was achieved on economic demands only. It proved ephemeral precisely because of those limitations and because of its refusal to take up the national and democratic questions. Clearly the way to unite the class is by fighting for the full scientific programme of the Communist Party: the resolution of the national question; the whole battery of democratic demands; the whole range of demands for the satisfaction of the needs of the working class. We will overcome the divisions of the working class by uniting it in struggle against the capitalists - the green, the orange and the red-white-and-blue capitalists all, and by winning it to become the champion of all struggles of the oppressed.
The very best assurance that communists can give to the likes of the ‘British-Irish’, who might be worried at the prospect of the reversal of the poles of oppression when an oppressed nation is liberated, is that when revolutions are led by working classes and by communist parties we are not contemplating the preservation of any existing states, but the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the smashing of existing capitalist states. In unifying Ireland, as in all other steps forward for the world revolution, we start with clean sheets upon which to draw constitutions.
John Pearson