17.01.2002
National liberation and workers' revolution
Solidarity with the Irish in their war against British occupation was the theme of the CPGB executive committee's statement of November 25 1920 (see Weekly Worker November 22 2001). This declared: "In such a case as Ireland's - the case of a small nation held in forcible suppression by a great imperialist state - the national struggle and the class struggle are inseparable. The struggle against imperialism for national independence is a necessary phase of the struggle against capitalism for the workers' independence"; and "The republican movement is essentially a working class movement. There are, it is true, middle class men as well as bourgeois by the chance of birth. But they do not mould it. They are being moulded by it. The strength and vigour and inspiration of the movement lies in the workers and the workers' organisations." A different analysis is offered by PL Gray in this contribution to the Party's weekly paper. The comrade suggests that nationalism within the workers' movement could serve the Irish bourgeoisie, and urges the CPGB to assist the formation or a Communist Party of Ireland to win working class hegemony over the liberation movement An Irish policy
What is to be our attitude towards the Irish revolution? Shall the Communist Party in Britain simply support Sinn Féin on the ground that the Irish workers' republic will not come before the nationalist aspirations of the Irish are satisfied (The Communist March 26 1921)? Or because Connolly decided in 1916 that "an Irish republic was the precondition for an Irish workers' struggle" (The Communist April 2 1921)? And is the only alternative to such a policy, apart from helpless neutrality, to support the terrorist activity of the British government, as comrade Jackson suggested recently? These are questions demanding speedy answer - it will not do to postpone clarifying our ideas on them; just as the capitalist world is beginning to point the finger of scorn at British imperialism, so the workers' international will begin to look askance at a Communist Party which fails to grapple in a practical way with one of the most pressing problems discussed theoretically at the last [2nd - ed] congress of the Third International, the problem of the 'subject race'. The kind of easy formula for solving the problem, which was quoted above, will not do. It is too easy; it is too automatic in its operation; precisely because it is a formula, of a type often heard on Marxist lips, it tends too frequently to lead to absolutely non-Marxist - ie, non-revolutionary - conclusions. Communists can only be guided by principles whose form may change from week to week, but whose essence remains unchangingly revolutionary; and the form of 1900 or 1916 may not be suitable for 1921. Here are a few tentative suggestions on what the policy of 1921 should take as its foundation. In all countries in which the political subjection of a whole race helps to maintain the supremacy of an exploiting class belonging to another race, it is natural and revolutionary that communists should wholeheartedly support the nationalist struggle of the subject race. By supporting it they are striking a blow, and often a deadly blow, at the military or political power of the exploiters, and directly relieving the pressure on the proletariat of the 'ruling race', which is assisted by this means in its battle for the complete overthrow of the ruling class and the establishment of its own rule. That rule alone can and will completely set free the subject race; and, if it is still in the first stages of economic development, it becomes possible for it to step straight on the road to communism, with the fraternal help of the proletariat of the 'dominant race'. That is why the communists support the struggle of the Koreans against the Japanese exploiters; of the Persians, Turks, Tartars, etc against the Russian tsardom; of the subject races of the British empire against our own rulers, of the Filipinos and negroes against the United States capitalists, and so on. But there is another type of nationalist struggle in which we must act more circumspectly. It does not always happen that history gives us the opportunity of dealing with her changing phases at one time. She is capricious; she often brings forth, at one and the same moment, both the movement, which is 'next on the agenda', and the movement, which logically is its negation. Even before the bourgeoisie has had an opportunity of shaking itself free from all fetters and impediments to its expansion, history may produce the strong proletarian movement, which, in all previous cases, she taught us to believe could only come after the victory of the bourgeoisie. Consequently, providing the proletariat possesses a political party which has done its duty, it can become class-conscious and self-confident enough itself to strike the blow that at once removes the national enemy and opens the road towards socialist reconstruction of society. It was in their inability to grasp this as practical politics that the Mensheviks in Russia were distinguished from the Bolsheviks from the very first. They repeated, and repeat today, according to the gospel, 'a bourgeois revolution must precede the proletarian revolution'; and even today they continue to assert that the Bolsheviks have perpetrated a gigantic hoax upon mankind - their revolution is not a proletarian, it is a bourgeois revolution, 'and the poor fellows do not know it'. We in Great Britain must guard against any self-inflicted mental castration. If the national Irish insurrection had come, on the scale and with the enthusiasm it has today, not today but 20 years ago, it would have been the duty of the communists to support it as unhesitatingly, with as little mental reservation, as it is their duty today to support the Koreans and the Cingalese. But economic progress, that does not wait for Communist Parties, has produced in Ireland an exploiting capitalist class; and British political sagacity has produced in Ireland a strong capitalistic farmer class; their activities, in their turn, have produced a true industrial and agricultural proletariat, with its own specific requirements, and even its own (joint) organisation, the ITWU and the Irish TUC. We have had good proof during the last five years - Connolly's 'Citizen Army', Limerick, Belfast, last year's 'soviets' during the Mountjoy prisoners' strike - of the independent revolutionary capacities of the Irish workers. The rank and file of the IRA is composed of workers, who, in the large cities at any rate, have definitely divergent views from their leaders. Once this is so, communists cannot pursue the same tactics as before. It would be absurd, of course, to deny that the Irish workers at present have 'nationalist aspirations'; and it would be a crime on that account to slacken any agitation against the militarist and reactionary horrors that are being perpetrated in Ireland at the present moment. It would be a crime, whatever their mistakes, to refuse Irish workers our support, merely out of lofty theoretical considerations. But the fact remains that those nationalist aspirations, to the extent that they exist, have become a dead-weight, and became so when Connolly spoke for the first time of the "workers' republic"; they are being made use of by the Irish bourgeoisie, and, in so far as they prevent the Irish workers from clearly seeing their own peculiar revolutionary role in Irish affairs, they are preparing the way for the rule of an Irish class of exploiters in place of the British - a class nonetheless determined and powerful, by the way, because it is composed of solid farmers, with a stake in the country and a share in an agricultural cooperative society (to say nothing of the industrial capitalists for whom Sinn Féin is burning to provide an opportunity). Objectively, actually, the Irish workers are quite capable of taking over affairs themselves. It remains, therefore, to prepare them psychologically, which is the function of the Party. What, then, are the duties of a practical and revolutionary Communist Party at such a moment? I submit that they are: * To recognise that the 'nationalist aspirations' of the Irish workers, to the extent that they exist today, are dangerous illusions; * To recognise that they do exist today; * To agitate ceaselessly amongst the British workers, explaining that the cause of Dublin Castle is the cause of the British capitalists; * To agitate seriously amongst Irish workers, with a view to getting them clearly to realise that they themselves, if they only decide on it and organise accordingly, are capable of taking over their country when the opportunity offers, and running it as a workers' (soviet) republic, instead of allowing it to become the prey of Sinn Féin farmers and bankers and Sinn Féin manufacturers. Perhaps such agitation should take the form of helping the Irish workers to build a Communist Party of their own despite all the obvious difficulties at the present moment: that is for the Party or the Communist International to decide. The Communist April 16 l921
Worker