31.03.2010

Misusing Marx and Engels

Allan Armstrong of the Scottish Socialist Party's international committee replies to Nick Rogers

First, I would like to thank Nick for the tenor of his contribution to the debate about communist strategy in the states of the UK and the 26-county Irish republic (‘Workers’ unity, not separatism’ Weekly Worker March 18).

After our initial sparring in earlier issues of Weekly Worker and on the Republican Communist Network website, Nick’s contribution develops further his own case for a British approach and a British party (I am still not sure to what extent the alternative and logically more consistent ‘one state, one party’ stance of having an all-UK party is supported in the CPGB). Before going on to the other issues Nick raises, I will answer his question on whether I support breakaway unions in Scotland.

Union solidarity

I have consistently argued that the struggle to attain effective union organisation cannot be reduced to which national flag flies over a union HQ. Most of the left, in practice, uphold the sovereignty of the union officials located in their existing union HQs, hoping to replace these some day. This is why many of their union campaigns amount to electoral attempts to replace existing union leaderships with Broad Left leaderships. In more and more cases, the latest Broad Left challenges are being mounted against old Broad Left leaderships, suggesting a serious flaw in this strategy!

Of course, many on the left would say - no, we champion the sovereignty of the union conference. However, the relationship between most union conferences and their union bureaucracies is very similar to that between Westminster and the government of the day. In both cases, executives only implement what they wish to, whilst systematically undermining any conference/election policies they, or the employers/ruling class, oppose. In the case of unions, this division is accentuated by elected-for-life and appointed officials, who enjoy pay and perks way beyond those of their members - a bit like cabinet ministers.

Therefore, I uphold the sovereignty of the membership in their workplaces - a republican rank and file industrial strategy, if you like. From this viewpoint ‘unofficial action’, the term used by bureaucrats to undermine members and to reassert their control, is rejected in favour of ‘independent action’. Action undertaken by branches can be extended by picketing, and by wider delegate or mass meetings. Certainly, this places a considerable responsibility upon the membership in the branches concerned, necessitating their active involvement in strategic and tactical discussion over the possibilities for extending effective action. Furthermore, instead of politics being largely confined to the select few - union bureaucrats and conference attenders - as when unions are affiliated to the Labour Party - politics becomes a vital necessity in workplace branches.

Nick asks, how can the Scottish Socialist Party effectively support action by, for example, civil servants who are organised on an all-British union basis, when we are organised on a Scottish political basis? Actually, it is quite easy. The SSP has members on the executives of all-Britain trade unions, and we seek wider unity for effective action with officers and delegates from England and Wales. Indeed, we can go further and state that we would seek cooperation with union members in Northern Ireland, when action involves all-UK unions, such as the FBU. Yet, in the latter case, support for joint action over economic issues should not prevent socialists raising the political issue of Ireland’s breakaway from the UK state. There is an obvious analogy here for the SSP.

Indeed, there are three other territorial union forms in these islands, - Northern Irish unions (eg, Northern Ireland Public Services Alliance), Irish unions which organise in the north (eg, Irish National Teachers Union and the Independent Workers Union) and all-islands unions (eg, Ucatt). Nick’s attempt to equate more effective action with all-Britain unions would in no way help socialists to bring about unity in such varied circumstances. Championing the sovereignty of the union branch and the forging of unity from below in expanding action offer the best way of achieving this.

Nick mentions the Educational Institute of Scotland - the major teaching union in Scotland, and one of the last unions organised on a Scottish basis. The EIS is affiliated not only to the STUC, but to the TUC and, although not affiliated to the Labour Party, its leadership has, since the mid-1970s, been as loyal to Labour as any. The EIS is one of the strongest adherents of ‘social partnership’, with large chunks of its official journal indistinguishable from government/management spin - especially its articles on governmental education initiatives.

Until I retired, I was a member of the EIS, a union rep (shop steward) for 34 years, and served on its Edinburgh local executive and national council. I was also a member of Scottish Rank and File Teachers (until they were sabotaged by the Socialist Workers Party) and later the Scottish Federation of Socialist Teachers. I always upheld the sovereignty of the membership in their branches. Furthermore, I was also centrally involved in the largest campaign that rocked the Scottish educational world and the EIS, in 1973. Here, for the first time, I came up against the sort of arguments Nick raises.

The 1973 strike action was organised unofficially/independently. It took place over more than three months, with huge weekly, school-delegate-based meetings. We also argued within the official structures of the EIS (whilst even drawing in some members of the two other small unions). It was here that the old CPGB, Labour Party and Militant supporters told us we should end our independent action and confine ourselves to getting motions passed calling on the union leadership to take a national lead.

If we had done this, it is likely there would have been no industrial action at all. As it was, the massive independent action forced the official leadership to move. And it was the independent rank and file movement which sent delegates to schools in England to try and widen the challenge to the Tory government over pay. Labour Party and CPGB union officers, all stalwart left British unionists, confined official union activity to Scotland!

There is a definite parallel between Nick’s advocacy that the SSP should abandon its own independent organisation and join with the British left, planning for the ‘big bang’ British/UK revolution they hope for in the future, and those old CPGB, left Labour and Militant arguments I first faced back in 1973.

Some years later, in 1988, I became chair of the first Anti-Poll Tax Federation (Lothians) and co-chair of the conference of the Scottish Anti-Poll Tax Federation. The campaign against the poll tax started a year earlier in Scotland, due to Thatcher’s propensity to impose her own form of devolution here - testing out reactionary legislation in Scotland first.

Militant emerged as the largest political organisation in the federations. Militant became torn between those who wanted to maintain an all-Britain Labour Party orientation, continuing to prioritise activities inside the party’s official structures, and those who saw the necessity to become involved in independent action through the anti-poll tax unions. Fortunately, it was the latter view that won out.

The negative effect of pursuing a tacitly British unionist strategy was demonstrated by the SWP. Its slogan was - “Kinnock and Willis - get off your knees and fight” (referring to Labour leader Neil Kinnock and TUC general secretary Norman Willis: ie, pushing for others to lead). They argued that only a Britain-wide campaign backed by the official trade union movement could win. When a special Labour Party conference in Glasgow voted against non-payment, the SWP declared the game was over, and some Scottish members went on to pay their poll tax.

The majority in the federations stuck to their guns and built the independent action first in Scotland: eg, through non-payment, confronting sheriff officers (bailiffs), etc, and by sending delegations to England and Wales, to prepare people for widened action the following year. Spreading such action from below contributed to the Trafalgar Square riots of March 31 1990, which put finally paid to the poll tax and to Thatcher.

Internationalism

‘Internationalism from below’, which the SSP international committee has advocated at the two Republican Socialist Conventions, represents a wider and more politicised development of such actions by our class. Any reading of our documents will show that our ‘internationalism from below’ stance flows from an analysis of the concrete political situation, and unlike Nick’s and the CPGB’s stance, does not stem from some abstract attempt to extend a ‘one state, one party’ (or trade union) organisational form over all British/UK socialists; or from a belief in the efficacy of the top-down, bureaucratic ‘internationalism’, which is intrinsic to such attempts.

Although rather belated in its formation, the Scottish Socialist Alliance, set up in 1996, directly stemmed from the lessons learned in the anti-poll tax campaign. (Socialist republicans in the Scottish federation had argued for the setting up of such organisations from 1990.) Furthermore, contrary to what Nick maintains, far from having a purely Scottish orientation, SSA/SSP members took an active part, providing speakers, to help set up the Socialist Alliances in England, Wales and the Irish Socialist Network. The main obstacles we faced in helping to form new, democratic, united front organisations came from the British left!

The UK is not just any old state. It was once at the centre of the world’s largest empire ‘upon which the sun never set’. Today, it forms the principal ally of US imperialism, the dominant power in the world. Today, the UK is ‘Hapsburg Austria’ to the USA’s ‘tsarist Russia’.

For the greater part of their political lives, Marx and Engels argued that socialists should make opposition to the Romanov/Hapsburg counterrevolutionary alliance fundamental to their revolutionary project. Support for the Polish struggle to gain political independence, particularly from the Russian and Austrian empires, was central to Marx’s and Engels’ strategy. Engels held on to this perspective until the end of his life, opposing the young Rosa Luxemburg on Polish independence in the process. Socialists need to adopt a similar strategy today towards the US-UK imperial alliance.

It took some time before Marx and Engels came to an understanding of the best method needed to unite socialists organisationally to promote revolution and struggle against reaction and counterrevolution. However, they outlined their most developed position within the First International, when, significantly, they had to confront the British left of their day. This tendency tried to uphold a ‘one-state, one-party’ stance, when they denied the Irish the right to form their own national organisation within the international. In arguing against a prominent British First International member, Engels stated:

“The position of Ireland with regard to England was not that of an equal, but that of Poland with regard to Russia ... that was not internationalism, but simply preaching to them submission to the yoke ... and attempting to justify and perpetuate the dominion of the conqueror under the cloak of internationalism. It was sanctioning the belief, only too common amongst English [British] working men, that they were superior beings compared to the Irish, and as much an aristocracy as the mean whites of the slave states considered themselves to be with regard to the negroes.”

The Second International (SI) abandoned Marx’s and Engels’ ‘internationalism from below’ principle. They adopted a ‘one state, one party’ organisational principle instead, which soon became the conduit for social-chauvinist and social-imperialist thinking within the social democratic movement.

Luxemburg and Lenin both accepted this new organisational principle. Luxemburg thought, though, that dominant-nation chauvinism, which she still recognised, could be combated by pushing for all-round democratic reforms, without regard to the specific nationalities in any particular state (albeit, as Lenin noticed, with the inconsistent qualification that, after the revolution, Poles should enjoy political autonomy).

Lenin also recognised the dominant-nation social-chauvinism and social-imperialism found in the SI, but thought this could best be combated through the 1896 SI congress decision to uphold ‘the right of nations to self-determination’. Lenin thought, though, that any need to actually fight to implement this right was constantly being undermined by ongoing capitalist development, which he thought led to greater working class unity. Furthermore, after any future revolution, national self-determination would not be required, since workers would then want to unite together, initially within the existing state frameworks, after these had been suitably transformed.

Lenin tended to support the exercise of self-determination retrospectively, only after he had recognised its political significance: eg, Norway in 1905, Ireland in 1916. Lenin’s refusal to recognise the real political significance of left-led national movements within the Russian empire from 1917 (eg, Finland and Ukraine), contributed to the isolation of the revolution, and also to the burgeoning great Russian bureaucratic character of the new USSR.

Luxemburg’s refusal to get socialists to fight for the leadership of national democratic movements contributed even more to the particular political marginalisation of socialists in Poland, compared, say, to those ostensibly less revolutionary Finnish socialists. They had been much more brutally crushed in the 1918 white counterrevolution in Finland than the Polish socialists had been in the imperial-backed nationalist revolution there. One reason why Finnish socialists and communists were able to rise from the ashes is that they were still remembered as leaders in the national struggle against tsarist Russian and German occupation.

Today

Fast-forward to today, and we can see the constitutionally unionist form of the UK state places the national question at the heart of the democratic struggle. Unfortunately, the CPGB has only the most abstract understanding of the British unionist state. As yet, it does not even fully comprehend the difference between a nation and a nationality. During the 1997 devolution referendum campaign, the Weekly Worker denied there was such a thing as a Scottish nation, claiming there was only a British nation, in which there lives a Scottish nationality. The existence of a wider Scottish nation, and not just a narrower ethnic Scots nationality, can easily be demonstrated in the well-known Scottish names of Sean Connery, Tom Conti, Shireen Nanjiani and Omar Saeed.

The logic of the CPGB’s position, if it had upheld its own particular version of national self-determination, should have been to argue for the 1997 referendum ballot to be confined to (ethnic) Scots. This would, of course, have brought it into line with the far-right nationalist Siol nan Gaidheal!

When the RCN argues for a challenge to the state and to its anti-democratic crown powers in Scotland, this stems from a recognition that republican political consciousness is currently higher here (itself a reflection of the importance of the national question). If socialist republicans in Scotland can take the lead in the political struggle against the UK state, the task of socialists in these islands becomes something similar - to build solidarity and to extend the challenge by breaking each link in the unionist chain.

Whether we end up with independent democratic republics (and only weaken imperialism - nevertheless a better basis for future progress than the UK imperial state which exists at present) or are able to move forward to a federation of European socialist republics depends on the ability of socialists/communists to build ever widening independent class organisation, culminating in workers’ councils.

Full version of this article at republicancommunist.org/blog