31.07.2002
Scottish mists and Polish echoes
The decision of the Scottish Socialist Party to adopt a 'no' position on the euro referendum at its special conference (Glasgow Caledonian University, June 22 2002) is perfectly logical. Presumably the SSP will soon complement its rotten stance on the euro by demanding a Scottish withdrawal from the European Union. After all the SSP is a left nationalist formation, bent on breaking away from the existing United Kingdom state and achieving Scottish independence. That will quickly be crowned by the achievement of a trail-blazing Scottish socialism - all done, of course, under the auspices of a sovereign Holyrood parliament. SSP leaders are fond of portraying Scotland as somehow occupying a privileged position when it comes to the global struggle for socialism. They envision little Scotland messianically cutting an "earth-shattering" reformist path to socialism - marvelling, the workers, youth and oppressed of other countries thereby gain courage and seek to emulate the glorious Scottish model. Basically in their schema Scottish nationalism is proletarian. British nationalism bourgeois. Big business, the rich and powerful are "bitterly hostile towards the idea of independence", write Tommy Sheridan and Alan McCombes. The "cringing" British unionism of Scotland's bankers, landowners and wealthy businessmen "conforms to a historical pattern" stretching back over 1,000 years (T Sheridan and A McCombes Imagine Edinburgh 2000, p178). By contrast the call for an independent class state in Scotland is linked to the democratic desire amongst ordinary people for control over their lives. Comrades Sheridan and McCombes are at pains to emphasise that they bear no ill will towards English people as such. Yet they promote the utterly spurious notion that because of the size of England's population - seven times the rest of the UK taken together - Scotland's national identity has been "warped and distorted" by a "permanent sense of resentment" against its "domineering neighbour" (ibid p184). The break-up of the UK would presumably put everything to right - like the break-up of Yugoslavia and the USSR. Naturally their independent socialist Scotland would not be "isolationist". It would not involve "rebuilding" Hadrian's Wall or quarantining "ourselves from the rest of the world" (ibid p187). Establishing Hadrian's Wall as the frontier would, of course, mean extending Scottish territory southwards and the annexation of Northumberland: ie, tracts of land which today lie in England. Townsfolk in places such as Berwick on Tweed, Morpeth and Blyth will presumably welcome with wild cheers and flowery garlands the incoming Scottish regiments. Are these people to be claimed as unconscious brother Scots? The British army meanwhile sits on its butt and twiddles its fingers. Seriously though, whether or not comrades Sheridan and McCombes achieve a little or greater Scotland is beside the point. Their Scotland might want to have intercourse with the world, but will the world want to have intercourse with their Scotland? Castro's Cuba did not impose a trade embargo on the world. But the US did impose a trade embargo on Cuba. Why would Scotland be any different? The 'tartan revolution' would not, we are assured, suffer Cuba's isolation and grinding poverty or the horrible starvation and wars of intervention witnessed in Russia. Scotland will not be "brought to its knees" by an American economic blockade. Socialist Scotland will be able to "stand up" to the forces of global capitalism and become an international "symbol of resistance" to economic and social injustice (ibid p189). Bold claims. But is it mere braggadocio? Apparently Scotland can succeed where others before it have failed because it is "fabulously wealthy". Scotland already has the "material foundations" for a "thriving" socialist democracy. Besides "long coastlines" and a "clean environment", Scotland has a "flourishing" culture and "legions" of internationally acclaimed musicians, writers, actors and film directors. On top of these blessings, Scotland has "land, water, fish, timber, oil, gas and electricity in abundance". Better still, Scotland has a "moderate climate" (ibid p189). While a "fully-fledged socialist society" might not be possible in Scotland, nonetheless a "socialist government" could move in that direction by taking control over the wealth of the country and using it for the common good - oil, gas, electricity, railways, etc (ibid p190). Frankly this is threadbare and deeply worrying stuff. Stalin, for example, used to rebuff Trotsky with reference to Russia's continental proportions and immense wealth in natural resources. Land, oil, forests, gold, a population that stood at around 150 million. He did not mention the length of the coastline or a "moderate climate", true. Despite these omissions Stalin boasted in his version of Imagine - the second edition of Foundations of Leninism - that Russia had all it needed internally. Not to achieve the "final and complete victory of socialism" - that needed the efforts of other countries - but enough to "build up a socialist society" (JV Stalin Works Vol 6, Moscow 1953, p111). As an aside it is worth noting that, gazing back to the 1920s and 30s, the Socialist Workers Party claims as its own Trotsky's thundering tirades against Stalin's national socialism. Yet the SWP maintains a studied diplomatic silence when it comes to the SSP's modern-day programme of socialism in one country. Apart from a lone article written by Neil Davidson and Donny Gluckstein - which was commissioned for Frontline No3 - journal of the International Socialist Movement - there have, as far as I know, been no SWP polemics against the SSP's left nationalism. Not in Socialist Review, International Socialism or Socialist Worker nor from the Socialist Worker platform. Such a position is opportunist. Worse, national socialism is effectively condoned. Hence Chris Bambery's platonic formulation that the break-up of Britain would be a welcome blow against imperialism - forgetting the equal blow against working class unity. Shameful. Stalin might have been either cynical or naive in 1924. But by 1928-29 he had launched an anti-working class, anti-peasant counterrevolution within the revolution. Its name - the first five-year plan. Socialism in one country proved to be anti-socialism in one country. A separate Scotland with a mere five million people can hardly be expected to play any kind of independent role in world politics. If a radical or revolutionary Scotland embarked on a separatist course which really challenged the power of capital and the leading imperialist powers - not least Britain, the EU and the US - what would stop them imposing asphyxiating sanctions or organising armies of intervention, financing a coup d'etat or kidnapping first minister Tommy Sheridan? Remember Congo, Panama, Chile. Even the USSR, a superpower, eventually fell. Would Whitehall meekly hand over North Sea oil and gas to a dangerous Sheridan-McCombes government in Holyrood? There surely would be endless and bitter disputes. Retaliation and tit-for-tat counter-retaliation. What about other industries which they might care to nationalise? Would there be no flight of capital? Banking capital can be moved anywhere at the speed of light. Would there not be deliberate sabotage? Would not hundreds of thousands of jobs in Scotland be wiped out virtually overnight? Maybe skilled and professional labour would flood south. How to keep them? The German Democratic Republic erected watchtowers and a wall, Albania hermetically sealed itself off, Cuba relies on a shark-infested ocean. What about the military threat? Maybe the officer corps in the Scottish regiments - who are sworn to loyalty to the crown - would mutiny. Maybe Britain would invade to aid them. Maybe the US would threaten to bomb the new addition to the axis of evil. Would not a Sheridan-McCombes Scotland find itself compelled to plough precious resources into greatly expanding their armed forces and military capacity? That requires surplus labour. To survive this Scottish socialism would have no choice but to discipline and exploit the working class. The SSP socialist liberators thereby find themselves turning into their opposites. All the good intentions vanish into the mist. Quite understandably the SSP provokes mixed reactions. The SSP has drawn into its ranks almost everything that is serious on the left in Scotland - including in May 2001 the Socialist Workers Party. The Committee for a Workers' International - in Scotland led by Phil Stott - cannot afford to walk away from the SSP in high dudgeon, as Peter Taaffe did at the Socialist Alliance's December 2001 conference. More than that though. From the solid foundations of cementing left unity the SSP has confidently forged ahead and won a real hearing from sections of the working class. Tommy Sheridan is widely respected and admired. Opinion polls show the SSP standing at around eight percent, which would "translate into as many as seven MSPs in next May's Scottish parliamentary elections" (The Guardian July 27 2002). The SWP's John Rees claims that the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales are just behind in terms of popular standing and political impact. We are breathing down the SSP's neck, he says. Further gains are inevitable. If only. The SWP, as the majority faction in the SA, still has an occluded and unambitious fixation. Maintaining the SWP as a confessional sect. Meanwhile the SWP ensures that the Socialist Alliance is politically becalmed as old Labour in exile - though the overwhelming majority of comrades are revolutionaries and Marxists - and is denied a paper or any effective channels of ongoing debate and dialogue with the working class. Is it any surprise then that in England, Wales and Northern Ireland innocent eyes alight upon Scotland with envy? And yet there is the SSP's cancerous left nationalism. How to explain the paradox? The working class in Britain and the world over has suffered huge defeats over the last two decades. It is therefore only to be expected that separatist tendencies and ideas come to the fore - not least as manifested in the SSP and its nationalist programme. Despite days of action by rail and local government workers and a string of left victories in trade union elections, the class struggle has not galvanised millions of minds or set the country aflame. Statistics show strikes at their lowest level since records began. Socialist consciousness barely exists. But discontent and resentment ferments and bubbles up from below. Under these contradictory circumstances petty nationalism, separatism and the politics of identity can find a ready audience and exert a powerful influence. Hope in a hopeless world. The SSP combines reformism with nationalism. Where the Socialist Alliance, as presently constituted, is in danger of being left high and dry with the birth of the New Labour left, the SSP has exploited a definite niche in Scottish politics. Between the Labour Party's monarchical unionism and the SNP's monarchical nationalism. By carefully positioning itself in this space the SSP leadership has, of course, put itself in a position that is completely at odds with the international Marxist tradition. A tradition best represented by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky. Unflattering though it is, comrades Tommy Sheridan, Alan McCombes, Frances Curren, Catriona Grant, Murray Smith, Colin Fox, Keef Tomkinson and co surely stand in the same national 'socialist' camp as Joseph Pilsudski and his Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna). Joseph Pilsudski is not a well know figure nowadays. But a century ago he occupied leading positions in the PSP, a party much admired and feted by European progressive and democratic opinion. Pilsudski edited and published its illegal paper Robotnik and commanded the PSP's armed fighting units. Formed in 1892, the PSP adopted his socialist-nationalist programme for the reconstitution of an independent Poland out of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires (which had between them all but finally partitioned Poland out of existence at the 1815 Congress of Vienna). This was, it is true, exactly in line with the strategic outlook expounded by Marx and Engels throughout their political lives. Tsarist Russia, which held something like 60% of Polish territory, formed the bulwark of reaction in Europe. Every democratic movement, revolutionary uprising or liberal settlement faced the threat of Russian cannons and muskets. That is why Marx and Engels forcibly advocated a war of liberation. Settling scores with tsarist Russia was a "prerequisite" for the European revolution. The Polish revolutions of the 18th and 19th century were directed primarily against Russia. On every occasion the lead was taken by the Polish nobility, the szlachta. In the 16th century this swollen class managed to transform Poland into an aristocratic republic in which the president called himself king. Naturally the serfs were ground down and exploited more or less ruthlessly. As to the 300,000 nobles - many of whom lived in genteel poverty - they acknowledged no relations of feudal dependence. No Polish noble bowed the knee as anyone's vassal. In contrast, the Russian nobility under the tsars were state slaves. At a whim the tsar could put them to death and confiscate their estates and property. The Polish nobility were determined to avoid that particular fate. By 1655 the Polish state had all but ceased to exist. No army - the nobility would not countenance one. No diplomatic service - the nobility would not pay for it. No laws - nobody could enforce them. Old Poland stagnated and sank into decentralised putrefaction. Sweden, Prussia, Russia and Austria fixed upon Poland's aristocratic anarchy as their opportunity. First the central and western provinces fell into the hands of Sweden, then the Muscovites occupied the east and finally the Cossacks ravaged Polish Ukraine and overran Galicia. Disaster was only put off by the return from exile of the king. But his fragile centralism could not hold. Aristocratic self-interest soon reasserted itself. Understandably this aristocratic liberty was perceived of as a dreadful threat by the Prussian, Austrian and above all the Russian autocracy. Hence by preventing the establishment of a Polish absolutism the Polish nobility set themselves up as victims, especially of the rising tsarism in Russia which had emerged from the nuclear winter wrought by the dreadful Mongol conquests of the mid-13th century. Throughout the 17th century the Russian state systematically strove to gain military superiority over the disorganised aristocratic anarchy of Poland. In the 18th there began a series of partitions - 1772, 1793, 1795 - and popular rebellions and revolutions led by the szlachta. Napoleon's flight from Moscow finished Polish statehood for a hundred years. The Congress of Vienna to all intents and purposes snuffed Poland out of existence. All that remained was the short-lived Free State of Krakow. But Poland hung on as language, as catholicism and in the imagination. There were four full-blown uprisings in the 19th century - 1830, 1846, 1848, 1863. Each defeat sent a wave of aristocratic revolutionaries fleeing into exile. Here they were found fighting in the forefront of every revolutionary and progressive cause: Italy and Hungary 1848, the American civil war, Irish freedom, the Paris Commune of 1871, etc. The partitionist powers sought to liquidate the szlachta as a class. Russia incorporated the richest aristocrats into its nobility. The Russian language was imposed along with Russian law. Prussia emphasised the creation of a stable bourgeoisie. The final solution lay in destroying their economic basis. Serfdom was abolished - in Prussian Poland in 1823, in Austrian Poland in 1849 and in Russian Poland in 1864. That finished the szlachta as a social class. Poland became in capitalist terms the most advanced part of the Russian empire. Trade unions, formed in the 1870s, and socialist groups - crucially the Proletariat Party - briefly flourished in the 1880s. Interestingly Proletariat took a militantly anti-nationalist position. Despite their detailed knowledge of the opinions of Marx and Engels on Poland the leaders of the Proletariat Party - Ludwik Warynski, Stanislav Mendelson and Szymon Dickstein - favoured revolutionaries in Poland joining their efforts with "our Russian brothers" (quoted in R Luxemburg The national question New York 1976, p65). The Proletariat Party established close contacts with the Russian Narodnik terrorist organisation, People's Will. They believed that the Polish national question was slowly dying and Russia now held out the prospect of revolution. They were only partially right. Aristocratic Poland had become history. The peasantry were national, but passive. The bourgeoisie had but one interest - business. Nevertheless in 1893 the Polish Socialist Party came onto the scene. The PSP united real layers of the working class. Unlike the Proletariat Party it was no conspiratorial sect. The PSP tried to revive the legacy of Marx and Engels on Poland. All the luminaries of European socialism were approached to endorse the call for the restoration of Poland and Polish independence. Most did. Bebel, Kautsky, Bernstein, Guesde, Labriola, Hyndman, Eleanor Marx-Aveling. However, the PSP got a different reception from workers in Poland. They had taken on board the anti-nationalist outlook inculcated by the Proletariat Party. As a result the PSP had to paint itself in internationalist colours and highlight its socialist credentials in order secure a mass following. The PSP sought to organise in, and liberate, not only Russian Poland. The aim was to organise all Poles along nationalist lines and reconstitute Poland out of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires. That meant splitting off membership from existing multinational socialist parties in Germany and Austria. Relations became tense and strained. Rosa Luxemburg and Julian Marchlewski, who were initially PSP members, strenuously objected. They produced a sophisticated historical analysis of Polish society which, although it ran counter to the Marx-Engels texts, eventually put the workers' movement in Poland onto a firm Marxist footing. In 1897 Luxemburg wrote The industrial development of Poland. On the basis of such profound studies she came to the conclusion that the working class must inevitably become the main opponent of absolutism. Therefore what was needed was unity against existing states, not the resurrection of ghosts. Marx's slogans on Poland were totally obsolete. Luxemburg even boldly ticked him off for his positions on Poland back in 1848. Nevertheless Marx's method served admirably. Marxism, as Luxemburg stressed, is no dogma but a living method of investigation and a revolutionary practice. Restoration of Poland was dismissed as anachronistic. It was either a hopeless utopia or it would be reactionary. Freeing Poland had to go hand in hand with freeing Russia. Russia "seethed with revolution" and could no longer be viewed simply as the bulwark of reaction. While tsarism decayed, a nascent working class stirred. Indeed the revolutionary explosion Luxemburg expected at any moment would blow away both tsarism and Polish nationalism. Or so she fervently hoped. Luxemburg criticised the Proletariat Party for its terrorism, its conspiratorial methods and lack of a minimum programme. Putting forward socialism as the only immediate aim, it politically disarmed Polish revolutionaries. Democracy and overthrowing tsarism would provide the bridge for the united Polish and Russian proletariat. Having done that, the "combined" working class movement would tackle the rule of Polish and Russia capital (R Luxemburg The national question New York 1976, p93). But Luxemburg's main target is the PSP. She damns it as social patriotic, nationalist socialist and national socialist. Insults all. But accurate. The PSP simply contented itself with dryly repeating the words of Marx and Engels as a mantra and fostering anti-Russian prejudice. No serious historical and materialist analysis came from that quarter. Certainly the PSP leadership shunned prospect of disciplined organisational unity with Russian socialists or coordinated action alongside working people in Russia. Fine phrases there were aplenty, but the practice of the PSP was to divide a working class that was becoming more and more united by capitalist development and which together faced a common enemy in tsarism. Luxemburg did not belittle the national oppression suffered by her fellow Poles. On the contrary tsarism's barbaric treatment of the Polish nationality had to be ended through joint revolutionary efforts. Nor did she display a nihilistic attitude towards Polish culture. What was progressive should be defended and enriched by the working class movement. But Luxemburg contemptuously dismissed general schemas and calls for national breakaways. She did not want Alsace-Lorraine separated off from Germany and returned to France. Nor did she want the reconstitution of Poland. Almost without exception every state in Europe had national minorities and overlapping populations. Germany, for example, contained Danes, Alsatian French as well as Poles. The German Social Democratic Party organised them all, irrespective of nationality. The idea of splitting off workers "along nationalist lines" was for her an anathema (R Luxemburg The national question New York 1976, p74). Class for revolutionary socialists is primary and organising against the existing state the first duty. Luxemburg and Marchlewski split from the PSP in 1893 in protest against its programme. They rightly refused to serve a life sentence as a loyal opposition within a nationalist prison house. No matter how small in number, revolutionary Marxists could directly address the advanced sections of the working class. They sponsored the formation of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (later expanded, with the merger of the Lithuanian group led by Felix Dzerzhinsky). The title of their party indicated that they would organise only in Russian Poland (the Congress Kingdom). Whereas the PSP aimed to reconstitute Poland out of three empires, the SDKPiL had no interest in redrawing borders. The SDKPiL only formed because there was in the early 1880s no working class party covering the tsarist empire. And when it did come into existence as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, it proved hard to consummate unity. The first attempt to establish the RSDLP in 1898 ended in a fiasco and the arrest of the new elected central committee. The second attempt, under the auspices of Iskra in 1902-03, produced a central leadership and then an instant cleavage between the minority (Menshevik) and the majority (Bolshevik) factions. When reunification did eventually occur in 1906, it proved fragile and fleeting. Nevertheless the SDKPiL joined the party of Lenin, Martov, Plekhanov, Trotsky and others in Russia - on the principled basis of 'one state, one party'. Luxemburg herself explained this elementary principle. With the First International Marx and Engels mainly had to make do with sects. Their aim was to unite the British trade unions and Chartists with European revolutionaries organised under leaders such as Pierre Proudhon, Auguste Blanqui and Mikhail Bakunin. They had groups - smaller or larger - scattered throughout the Germanic, Latin and Slav countries. So in tiny Switzerland there might at any one time be three or four separate and competing branches of the International Workingman's Association. However, the Second International represented a big step forward. Under its banner were gathered class parties. The Second International therefore promoted the idea of unity within and against the existing state (a position carried on and taken to a higher level by the Third International of Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev in 1919). It cannot be denied that in opposition to PSP nationalism Luxemburg overstated her case. Famously she threw out the slogan of national self-determination along with the nationalist bathwater. Self-determination was impossible under capitalism, she argued, and undesirable under socialism. Neither being true, Luxemburg deserved the stinging rebukes she received from Lenin. Lenin stood by the right of Poland to secede. But, alongside Luxemburg, he argued strongly for the voluntary unity of Polish and Russian workers. In point of fact he insisted on unity as a principle time and time again. Eg, we find Lenin typically writing - in 1916 - that socialists in the "oppressed nation must, in particular, defend and implement the full and unconditional unity, including organisational unity, of the workers of the oppressed nation and the oppressor nation" (VI Lenin CW Vol 22 Moscow 1977, p148). Comrades Sheridan and McCombes, take note"¦and for that matter the Socialist Worker platform too. So, despite the nuanced theoretical disputes between Lenin and Luxemburg, they were agreed on what counted in practice - that objective conditions demanded the unity of workers - Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Estonians, Letts, Poles, etc, - in the battle to overthrow the common enemy, the tsarist state. Pilsudski, in contrast, wanted the independence of Poland and the independence of the PSP from the Russian "imperialist" revolutionaries (JK Pilsudski Memories of a revolutionary and soldier London 1931, p32). Lenin was consequently loath to regard the PSP as a "genuine" socialist party (VI Lenin CW Vol 6 Moscow 1977, p458). Quite right. Suffice to say, most national socialists within the SSP leadership, knowing the ABC of European history, prefer not to be identified with Pilsudski - who in 1926 led a fascistic colonel's coup. Instead they have turned to other, more acceptable, iconic figures. Recently the images of John Maclean and Che Guevara have graced SSP conferences, rallies and meetings. Eclectic poverty. Neither of them produced anything of significance theoretically. And, though both Maclean and Guevara were brave and fearless revolutionaries, they wandered far and wide from the basic principles of Marxism. Maclean refused to join the CPGB when it was formed, convinced that British government secret agents provided the finances. Instead he founded a short-lived left nationalist sectlet. As for Guevara, his politics owe more to Maoism than Marxism. Nevertheless I have come across one or two honest national socialists in the SSP who are prepared to defend Pilsudski and the PSP against Lenin and Luxemburg. Allan Armstrong of the Republican Communist Network - an officially recognised SSP platform - comes to mind. In a hard-hitting polemic against the CPGB he argued that Lenin and Luxemburg should have carried out Pilsudski's programme of breaking up the Russian empire. Comrade Armstrong is positively committed to nationalism; he welcomes the division of people into nations and, unlike most Marxists, is convinced that nationalities and nations will flourish under communism. So he is being perfectly consistent. Not surprisingly comrade Armstrong believes that Lenin's and Luxemburg's "political formulations" "failed" and that this was "only too clear in the case of Poland". It was Lenin and Luxemburg, needless to say, who were responsible for handing the struggle for self-determination "to Pilsudski's 'national socialists' on a plate" (A Armstrong Fight for the right to party, Edinburgh nd, p24). As an aside, by their very nature neither the SSP nor any of its national socialist platforms care to admit that advocating self-determination does not stand in contradiction to calling for unity. The revolutionary unity of the workers against the existing state requires, for its fulfilment, taking the lead in the struggle against oppression in all forms, not least national oppression or inequality. The CPGB calls upon the working class in Britain to support the right of Scotland and Wales to self-determination, up to and including independence. That is embodied in the fight for a federal republic, something which is in our view the best way to cement the closest unity of workers under present circumstances. The CPGB therefore makes no apology for not advocating the break-up of Britain. We are perfectly consistent. Supporting a right does not mean one is agnostic about how that right is used. For example, communists support the democratic right to form protest groups. But that does not commit us to supporting every such organisation. Nor does it prevent us from opposing and campaigning against the formation of a new protest group. We recognise the right of even reactionaries like Brian Souter to promote his outrageous views on homosexuals and clause 28. However, we will at the same time fight against the influence such bigots have over the working class and other sections of the population. But let us pick up our historical thread once more. Did the politics of Lenin and Luxemburg 'fail'? I think "the case of Poland" proves exactly the opposite. Lenin and Luxemburg were, by no stretch of the imagination, responsible for handing the struggle for self-determination to Pilsudski and his national socialists. It was after all hardly possible for them to determine the new geopolitical relations that emerged during and after World War I. And it was this carnage, which saw the collapse of half of Europe, that allowed Pilsudski and his Austrian-financed military legions to reconstitute Poland in 1919 - as a reactionary bourgeois state. Luxemburg was right. An independent Poland did nothing for the working class. She was also correct to forewarn that national socialism would lead those workers who followed it to demoralisation. To begin with, the mass of militant workers followed the PSP and Pilsudski. Unrest in Poland in 1904 resulting from the Russo-Japanese war saw membership soar from 4,000 to 40,000. Pilsudski travelled to Japan and attempted to conclude a military pact with the Mikado. Poland would open a second front in Japan's war with Russia. Pilsudski established the 'Militant Organisation' which would lead the uprising. The outbreak of the 1905 Russian Revolution changed everything. Separatism was swept aside. Hostility to the "overbearing" Russian neighbours became solidarity. Workers in Warsaw and Lodz joined workers in St Petersburg and Moscow in the common fight to overthrow tsarism. Working class supporters of the PSP willingly looked to the SDKPiL for theoretical and practical guidance and enthusiastically took up its slogans. The SDKPiL grew massively, though it remained smaller than the PSP. Pilsudski, however, suffered marginalisation. "The pure nationalists, the 'social patriots'," writes Luxemburg's outstanding biographer, "saw with horror their hopes of an independent Poland were ebbing away as fast as the Russian Revolution was advancing" (P Frolich Rosa Luxemburg New York 1972, p110). The official leadership, staying true to its nationalist programme, ended up turning its back on the revolution. The PSP split at its 8th Congress in February 1906. The leftwing majority abandoned the programme of national independence. They adopted the substance of the SDKPiL programme. Poland should have autonomy within a democratic Russia. Pilsudski for his part turned towards a reliance on physical force on the one hand and endless diplomatic dealing on the other hand. When the PSP's 9th Congress in November 1906 condemned the terroristic activity of Pilsudski's Militant Organisation, he and his followers indignantly stormed out. They formed a separate PSP-Revolutionary Fraction. Sheltering under the wing of the Austrian state, Pilsudski transformed the Militant Organisation into a nucleus of a conventional military formation. It was legally recognised as a rifle club and in 1914 the Union of Active Resistance (ZWC) aligned itself as a self-willed servant to German and Austrian imperialism against the Russian foe. Austria envisaged a triple Austrian-Hungarian-Polish crown; Germany a 700,000-strong Polish army to hurl against the Russian hordes. Pilsudski remained doggedly committed to an independent Poland. What of Luxemburg? Coming from almost nowhere organisationally, Luxemburg's politics had within 12 years captured virtually the whole working class movement in Poland. In 1918 the PSP-Left united with the SDKPiL to form the Communist Workers' Party of Poland (as the Communist Party of Poland was known till 1925). The party was eventually banned by Pilsudski. Lenin and Luxemburg only "failed" in Poland in the sense that the Marx and Engels of 1848, who strove for a centralised and democratic Greater German republic, including Austria, failed. They only failed in the sense that the 1871 Paris Commune failed and the Bolsheviks' 1905 dress rehearsal failed. Doubtless the world will witness many more such failures. But to succeed we must lay hold of what is politically right, strong and true: the enduring politics of working class unity. Jack Conrad
Worker