Re: Scottish independence and the SSP

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard wrote: 'Marxists have traditionally (at least since Lenin)
upheld the right of self-determination of nations only for nations or
nationalities that are oppressed in some way: for example through
specific measures that discriminate against nationals through
suppression of their language and culture, or that withhold certain
rights for nationals that are accorded to non-nationals such as the
citizens of the dominant nation(s).' This view is a common one on the
left but it is based on such a total misunderstanding of what the
national question is and how socialists respond to that it merits a
detailed treatment.

Before going on to the substantive issues, let's look at what
'self-determination' means and what constitutes 'national oppression'.
Many Marxists who should know better imbue self-determination with more
than it really consists of: often it is used as a synonym for
independence, or it is used to mean 'national liberation' or some such.
This is false. For Marxists, self-determination means one thing and one
thing only: the right to form an independent state. No more and no less.
And our position is for the self-determination of nations. And when
Richard talks about discrimination against nationals and suppression of
language and culture as in themselves constituting 'national oppression'
he conflates two issues. National oppression has one concrete form and
one concrete form only, and that is a desire on the part of a national
group to constitute itself as a nation state which is thwarted by
another nation state. That is national oppression. Of course, national
oppression often involves suppression of language, culture and so on,
but these things are not in themselves national oppression but
by-products of national oppression.

The problem is that these arguments are used by Marxists in a sectarian
way to deny self-determination in concrete instances. The following
schema is drawn up: self-determination (which really means independence)
applies to oppressed nations (and only to oppressed nations). Oppressed
nations thus have to prove not only that they are nations but also that
they are oppressed (both by objective criteria) before the right to
self-determination is even on the agenda. And then, normally, since
Marxists reserve themselves the right to advocate or not independence in
specific conditions it is usually argued that this particular context is
one in which it would not be a 'good idea'. It's like a legal argument
designed so that the Marxists can pay a certain lip-service to the
national question while in practice denying it any weight at all their
conceptions of struggle. (If you think this is a parody go to Wales and
listen to what is often called (and correctly so) the English left
begrudging the issue. I assure you that I'm not making this up). Now,
I'm not accusing Richard of doing this: but he is repeating the same
arguments that are used in drawing up this false approach to the
national question; an approach which is schematic, simplistic, and
sectarian.

So Marxists (I argue) support the self-determination of nations (all
nations, by the way), and a nation that is unable to self-determine
(i.e. is unable to realise the desire to establish a politically
independent state) is nationally oppressed. So what do socialists say
concretely in relation to Scotland? Before turning to this it is
necessary to dispose of some other points of confusion in relation to
the national question.

First, the question of the nation. I have heard the argument applied to
Scotland (and more commonly to Wales) that they are not nations,
therefore the right of self-determination does not apply. But attempts
to define nations by objective criteria will always fail: trying to
explain national movements and national consciousness as functions of an
'objective' national existence inverts the real order of things. As I
have had to point out previously on this list: the reality is the other
way round: national existence itself is a function of national movements
and national consciousness. To put it another way, 'nations' as such do
not exist (other than in the minds of nationalist theoreticians) other
than in the form of national states and national movements. For Lenin,
for exactly this reason, and he repeated this many times, the national
question was not reducible to questions of language, territory,
economics or culture, but pertained 'wholly and solely to the sphere of
political democracy'. For this reason Lenin had no truck with conjuring
up definitions of 'the nation'. Are the Scots a nation? The only
question necessary is: do they think they are a nation? And since they
clearly do, that is the end of the matter. As Trotsky once put it: : 'An
abstract criterion is not decisive in this question; far more decisive
is the historical consciousness of a group, their feelings, their
impulses. But that too is not determined accidentally but rather by the
situation and all the attendant circumstances.' (Leon Trotsky on Black
Nationalism and Self-determination (New York, 1980) 27-28.)

So what do revolutionaries say concretely today in Scotland? 'Yes, we
support your (theoretical) right to self-determination, but since the
majority of the Scots don't want to be independent it isn't important at
the moment, and even if it were we would reserve our right to argue
against its practical implementation.'? No. This is big power,
reactionary Greater British chauvinism dressed up as Marxism.

Revolutionaries can say: 'Your right to self-determination will be
enshrined in the make-up of the future, post-revolutionary soviet
Britain/Europe/world.' Again, this is not good enough. This would be
mere words. Revolutionary policy if not concrete is nothing: we need to
give answers in the here and now. Forgive me for quoting Trotsky again
here: I do so not out of idolatry but because the experience of leading
the Russian Revolution and Third International is something far more
profound than what any of us has experienced. Writing on Spain in the
1930s, he said:

'In the future, national questions, as well as others, will be decided
by soviets as the organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But we
can only lead the workers towards soviets. We cannot force soviets on
the workers at any desired moment; still less can we force upon the
people the soviets that the proletariat will create only in the future.
In the meantime, it is necessary to answer today's question. [...]
Without the slogans of political democracy to supplement and concretise
it, the slogan of national self-determination is a senseless formula, or
still worse, it is dust thrown in the eyes.' ('The Spanish Revolution
and the Dangers Threatening it' (May 1931), The Spanish Revolution
(1931-39) (New York, 1973), 117-18)

How do revolutionaries answer today's question in Scotland? Writing on
the Ukraine, Trotsky posed the problem of self-determination like this:

'The slogan of an independent Ukraine does not signify that the Ukraine
will remain forever isolated, but only this, that she will again
determine for herself and of her own free will the question of her
interrelations with other sections of the Soviet Union and her western
neighbours. [...]

'In order freely to determine her relations with other Soviet republics,
in order to possess the right of saying yes or no, the Ukraine must
return to herself complete freedom of action, at least for the duration
of this constituent period. There is no other name for this than state
independence.' ('Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads',
Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) (New York, 1973)

This is the necessary approach we need in Scotland (and, by extension -
without wanting to develop an all-encompassing schema - it seems to be
at least to be the kind of approach necessary in both Wales and Euskadi
too). The Scots are not demanding self-determination? How do you know?
Who has ever asked them? When will the present Greater British
chauvinist state ever be able to manage the question of
self-determination within its borders? I argue that self-government -
returning to Scotland 'complete freedom of action' -  is the only
tenable argument that revolutionaries can make that takes the question
seriously, which does 'not set up any sectarian principles' between the
revolutionary movement and the Scottish people

It is certainly true that, realistically, the Scottish people, for
example, will only be able to genuinely self-determine by means of a
constituent congress of workers' soviets. But to advance that as a
concrete demand in today's conditions would be the most unpardonable
sectarian propagandism. How do we 'answer today's question'? It is in
this sense that I raise the demand for self-government - the ability to
'determine for herself and of her own free will the question of her
interrelations' with other states, the winning of 'complete freedom of
action', of 'state independence' And this demand, I would argue, would
be a transitional demand (in the sense that Lenin and Trotsky understood
such things). For in the absence of a soviet republic, what would be the
mechanism for determining the Scottish people's view on
self-determination? It doesn't exist. Neither Westminster, nor the
Scottish Parliament, nor the European Committee of the Regions, are
adequate vehicles for this. The Scottish Parliament is not adequate
because it has no powers to make such decisions. Who decides what powers
it has? Westminster? Why should this be so? Why cannot the people of
Scotland decide this for themselves, through elections to a Parliament
which takes on itself the right to determine its own powers? Why cannot
the Scottish people themselves decide what powers rest in the Parliament
by voting for parties and candidates accordingly? This would be the
concrete content of self-government for Scotland. This is what state
independence means: the ability to make and carry out decisions relating
to self-determination. This side of the proletarian revolution this is
the only realistic (i.e. concrete) way of posing the question.
Self-determination without the means to implement it is meaningless. But
the demand is a transitional one for in the present conjuncture the only
form of state that would be able to concede a form of political
structure of this type (effectively a constituent assembly) would be a
workers' one. Of course, this may change in the future, in which case
Marxists, at least non-dogmatic ones, would modify their programme, as
they have done in the past.

Now, it will be objected that the demand for self-government (which is a
pedagogic way of calling for a constituent assembly) is a
bourgeois-national demand, and bourgeois-national demands have no place
in imperialists states where the bourgeois revolution has been
'completed'. But this reasoning is based on a misunderstanding of what
transitional demands actually are. To return to Trotsky: the aim of such
demands was to 'help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to
find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the
revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands,
stemming from today's conditions and today's consciousness of wide
layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final
conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.' This doesn't mean
that 'democratic' demands, i.e. demands seen as pertaining to the
bourgeois revolution, cannot be transitional in this sense. The
post-Second World War Fourth International (and especially the US SWP)
vulgarised the method of transitional demands raising them to the status
of a 'maximum programme', but a transitional demand is only something
that would be normally unachievable in a given conjuncture: there is no
such thing as an 'inherently' 'transitional' demand in this sense. We
should not over-estimate the capacity of the bourgeoisie to realise the
goals of its own revolution: the contemporary British state reveals that
it has been unable to do so. It would be a nonsense to claim that the
British bourgeois revolution has been essentially completed when -
amongst a raft of other anomalies (House of Lords, constitutional
monarchy, royal prerogative, etc.) - self-determination for Scotland and
Wales is not only non-existent but not even remotely on the (bourgeois)
agenda. The completion of the bourgeois revolution - in the British
state as elsewhere - lies through the path of proletarian power. The
transitional nature of the self-government demand lies precisely here:
that it would require, in the present conjuncture, a revolutionary
workers' government (be it at a Scottish, British or European level -
and without wishing to overspeculate on the future I will argue that we
need to pose these questions at a minimum within a European context) to
implement it.

Now the hypothetical Scottish workers' state of the future, as the
Russian one of the past, would have to confront the military and
economic strength of the combined imperial powers: the Scottish workers'
state of the future is not going to survive solely on the basis of
simple solidarity from the workers of the world. The Bolsheviks
understood this well. They understood the October revolution as a phase
of a European revolution: they considered that October would not survive
unless the revolution unfolded across Europe, especially initially in
Germany. And over three quarters of a century later it is clear to us
today that they were right: the gains of October were liquidated
precisely because there never existed the possibility of constructing
socialism in a single country. We understand the Scottish (or Welsh, or
British, or Basque, etc.) revolution in the same way: to have any sense
or  meaning at all, it has to be seen as a phase of a revolution within
this sphere: as a phase within the European revolution.

During the Ruhr crisis of 1923, Trotsky published an article in Pravda
in which he motivated the slogan of a United States of Europe. In this
article he wrote:

'[...] we are now concerned not with the future socialist economy of the
world, but with finding a way out of the present European impasse. We
have to offer a solution to the workers and peasants of torn and ruined
Europe, quite independently of how the revolution develops in America,
Australia, Asia or Africa. Looked at from this point of view, the slogan
of the United States of Europe has its place on the same historical
plane with the slogan A Workers' and Peasants' Government; it is a
transitional slogan, indicating a way out, a prospect of salvation
[...].' ('Is the Time Ripe for the Slogan "The United States of
Europe"?', Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist
International, vol. 2, 343)

Trotsky's transitional programme, written in 1938 and revered in an
almost biblical way by Trotskyists subsequently as a timeless recipe for
revolutionary slogan-mongering contains no reference to the demand for a
united states of Europe. But in 1938, with the European powers straining
at the leash of war, such a slogan would have appeared as pacifist
nonsense: it would have had no 'transitional' character - in 1923 the
slogan could be given a transitional character because of its context.
The closer war drew, the more the slogan appeared to have a maximum,
socialist character. And today's situation poses this demand as a
transitional measure anew. For revolutionary socialists today, it seems
to me that the immediate context in which we situate the revolution in
Scotland is neither that of Scotland itself nor that of Britain, but
that of Europe: the Welsh (and the British) revolution are phases of the
European revolution or they are nothing: anything short of this -
calling for a 'socialist Britain' or a 'socialist Scotland for example -
would be mere verbiage. Alongside the demand for self-government, it
seems to me essential that we also raise the demand of the United States
of Europe: these tow demand, transitional both, seem to me to be the
central plank of revolutionaries' armoury in Scotland today.

To summarise. We advance the position of self-government, so that the
people of Scotland can determine on their own part their relations with
not only the rest of the British state but the rest of Europe (and
indeed the rest of the world). Rather than favouring an 'independent
Scotland' we should advocate an autonomous Scotland within a United
States of Europe. The economic and political unity of Europe again
asserts itself today as the solution of the crisis of rising poverty and
unemployment: national solutions to social problems, be they capitalist
or socialist solutions, are as untenable at the dawn of the twenty-first
century as they have ever been. While steps have been taken to bring
about a bourgeois united states of Europe in the form of the European
Union, at best this will be a unity of the relatively rich national
states leaving the peoples of the periphery languishing in an
impoverished semi-colonial existence on the fringes (within which the
right to self-determination would be unthinkable). We need to argue that
the bourgeoisie will be able to unite Europe neither democratically nor
without force, and that European unity requires a revolutionary workers'
government: we must give the demand for a united states of Europe a
completely different content than that given it by the bourgeoisie.
Scottish membership of this union will have to be decided on by the
Scottish people: the democratic mechanism for such a decision cannot be
a referendum organised by the British state but a Welsh
assembly/parliament with full powers, i.e., a Scottish constituent
assembly. A referendum would merely pose the stark choice: secede or
not; but we do not at the present demand secession, but the right to
secede, and we need to fight for the government, a revolutionary
workers' government - Scottish, British and European - that will
guarantee this right.

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