[Marxism] National questions and 'national questions'

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

With apologies to Phil, for I normally value his posts
highly, I think he's on rather thin ice when he says that
'context is everything' is a Marxist axiom. In fact, it is
difficult to see how 'context is everything' could be an
axiom for anything, for if the context really is everything
then that means there are no axioms, and if the axiom is
that there are no axioms then the axiom itself disappears in
a puff of its own logic. If we want Marxist axioms along
these lines then what we are talking about are things like
'a concrete analysis of a concrete situation' or 'the
concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many
determinations' or some such, which is quite a different
matter.

The problem with saying things like 'context is everything'
is that it can be used as cover for that cloak of
opportunism, empiricism. With regard to the national
question, the way it normally works is this: 'Well,
comrades, normally we would support your struggle for
national rights, in fact we have a proud record of
supporting national rights in countries very far away from
our own, but in this case, we, the historically chosen
revolutionary vanguard, have decided that there is some
other question that is far more important, and, in this
context, our Central Committee has decided that your demand
for national rights just do not count enough. On yer bikes.'
Which is just more grist to the nationalist mill. Of course,
I'm not saying that Phil is saying this, he wouldn't, I
know, but I do want to stress that this particular argument
is not a happy one.

What is it with Scotland, then? Well, clearly, Scotland is
not Ireland, which is something that Scottish nationalists
do not understand. But neither is it Lancashire, which is
something the Greater British chauvinists don't understand
either. What explains the recent rise of radical Scottish
nationalism (expressed in a desire for greater forms of
self-government)? It is not just a question of conjuncture:
there is nothing that Scotland suffered that didn't happen
in Lancashire either, yet there is no Lancashire national
consciousness or Lancashire national movement. There is in
Scotland a different - nationally different - historical
development, which is reflected in the way that social
questions take on a national aspect. (By the way, I see that
Richard Fidler talks about 'the putative existence of a
Scottish nation'. 'Putative'? What does this mean here?)
This is how the national question works. Of course, Phil is
right when he says 'I see no reason not to compare Scotland
with Ireland, India, Nigeria, Kenya etc.' But I *would*
compare Scotland with the Basque Country and Catalunya, for
example.

(And, while I'm talking about the Spanish state, what's this
I hear from David Walters about 'non-revolutionary' Basque
and Catalan nationalists negotiating with Europe? News to
me; and news to the Basque and Catalan nationalists too I
should imagine. But what's the problem here? Negotiation or
Europe? Revolutionaries don't negotiate? Since when? Or we
don't talk to 'Europe'? Why - because it's bourgeois? And
what about bourgeois parliaments? We don't participate in
them either? No wonder nationalist movements have bourgeois
leaderships if socialists come out with this kind of stuff.)

As for 'supporting every claim to secession', I don't see
how this leads you to supporting Loyalists, Afrikaners and
Zionists, since the last time I looked they were not arguing
for secession.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating here. Phil
favourably refers to the positions of the British SWP and
the Weekly Worker. You make your own friends in politics,
and if I was in the SSP (which I would be if I lived in
Scotland) I would not be siding with the disruptive sectoid
oppositionists of the SWP and Weekly Worker against the SSP
leadership.

Phil is also wrong on the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. The
don't support self-determination for Zionist Israel and
Loyalism. The support what they call a 'federal Ireland' and
the existence of the present state of Israel in the name of
'self-determination', which means that one, they accommodate
to imperialism, and, two, the don't understand what
self-determination means, which is quite a different thing.
And they held these positions long before the break-up of
Yugoslavia.

Which is interesting. There seems to be a logic here that
says that because a certain bunch of reactionaries support a
certain position it is automatically out of bounds for
Marxists. Trotsky wrote an article once where he urged that
the left 'had to learn to think': that it was not sufficient
to put a minus where the bourgeoisie puts a plus. This is a
case in point. There is nothing that says that because you
support Croatian, Slovenian or Kosovan national rights (or
independence or self-determination, call it what you will),
you are necessarily forced to support imperialist
intervention (which seems to be the implication that
surfaces frequently here). This is what in less enlightened
times was called the 'amalgam' (or what less enlightened
souls than me might call 'Stalinism'). The one doesn't
follow from the other. Of course, reactionaries lie. They
are doing that in Iraq right now. And, naturally, those who
support imperialist intervention will say that they are
doing this in order to support somebody's just rights. But
the reverse just doesn't hold true.

And I have to say this too, to finish. When Melvin says 'The
Ukrainian nationalists were objectively reactionary,
bourgeois and showed their true fascist nature. They were
reactionary in 1917, 1922, 1929, 1950 and 2003' we are back
into the realm of 'revolutionary' and 'non-revolutionary'
nations. This kind of nonsense needs to go straight back
into the Hegelian dustbin where it belongs.

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