[Marxism] Harry Quelch and Ireland

[Philip Ferguson <philip.ferguson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My friend Ted Crawford mentions Harry Quelch's article, "Would Ulster Be
Right to Fight", written in 1912 at a time when the Tories were
threatening rebellion, and raising the possibility of armed rebellion,
against Liberal Party legislation to grant Home Rule to Ireland.

Ted describes Quelch as "a worker, and leading Social Democrat with whom
Lenin stayed in England".

However, Quelch was also a British chauvinist and a supporter of
Hyndman's patriotism.  I recognized the name Quelch because back in the
early 1980s I had written a short paper on Lenin, Ireland the British
communists.  I knew Lenin had attacked Quelch for capitulating to
British imperialism on the issue of Ireland.

So, after reading Ted's post I did a google search on Quelch and Lenin
and turned up, among other things, an article by Lenin on the Marxist
Internet Archive, about the 1911 British Social Democratic Party
conference.  (I thought they were called a Federation rather than a
party, but maybe they changed their name at some point.)

A branch in Hackney had put forward a sound, basic
anti-militarist/anti-imperialist resolution and this was opposed by the
national-chauvbinist Hyndman.  Lenin notes, "The entire Party Executive
Committee, including Harry Quelch - we have to confess with shame -
supported Hyndman. The 'amendment' they moved declared no more nor less
than the following: 'This Conference holds that the maintenance of an
adequate navy for national defence' is an 'immediate object'!"

A paragraph later, Lenin further notes "The miserable sophistry Quelch
had to resort to may be seen from the following passage in his speech
(as reported in Justice, which defends Hyndman)!... 'If we believe in
national autonomy, we must have national defence and that defence must
be adequate, or it is useless. We are opposed to imperialism, whether
British or German; the small nationalities under Prussian rule hate her
despotism, and the small nations threatened by her regard the British
Navy and German Social-Democracy as their only hope. . .'"


Quelch's position on Ireland had little to do with trying to apply a
Marxist analysis to the national question there.  Rather, it was a
reflection of the national chauvinism that was so widespread within the
British Social Democracy and that also appeared in the British CP when
it was first established.  Quelch favoured defence of British
imperialism.  This meant an "adequate defence", as he himself put it, in
terms of the army and navy of the British state and ruling class.  And
it meant defence of the right of Britain to rule Ireland.  This, of
course, was the real meaning of the Tory rebellion against Home Rule.
The ruling class in Britain itself was thoroughly intertwined with the
old Protestant Ascendancy upper class in Ireland and the Orange business
interests in the north-east.  Ireland, unlike Britain's other colonies,
had been territorially integrated into the British state, so
independence for Ireland was seen as a challenge to the integrity of the
imperialist state itself.

Those social democrats with an opportunist position on the British
state, "national defence" etc, like Quelch, were scarcely likely to
support independence for Ireland (indeed, some of them didn't even
support Home Rule).

Quelch's position in support of the "right" of the Unionist minority in
Ireland to "self-determination" is not fundamentally different from the
Zionist demand for their "right" to "self-determination" (ie their right
to Israel) or the white South African demand for "self-determination"
via apartheid.

The right of nations to self-determination, in the Marxist sense, does
not mean the right of oppressor national minorities (eg in Ireland and
South Africa) or newly-conquering oppressor groups (eg Israel) to
maintain oppression through control of their own nation state.  Lenin
also noted, for instance, the difference between the nationalism of
oppressed peoples and oppressors.  Quelch accommodated himself to the
nationalism of the oppressor - the British state (which operated in
Ireland partly through creating a social base of support, the
Unionists/Loyalists).

Now, I'm all for free debate and free expression, but I do wonder
whether Quelch's article is appropriate for a specifically *Marxist*
archive.  If it does go up on the site, I think there should be some
note with it about Quelch's politics and the Marxist opposition to him.

And we should be clear about how strongly people like Lenin and Trotsky
felt over Ireland and over people like Quelch.  Lenin vigorously
denounced British leftists over their tardiness, to put it mildly, in
championing Irish freedom and Trotsky wrote that British socialists who
failed to fully support (and he was talking about material as well as
verbal support) the independence movements in Ireland and Egypt and
India deserved to be branded with infamy if not with a bullet.  (Quelch
certainly comes into the category of people Trotsky favoured branding
with a bullet.)  

It wasn't for nothing that the Communist International had a rather
complex set of conditions for membership, among them the requirement
that parties in the imperialist world had to provide material aid to
national liberation movements fighting the ruling class of that party's
state - ie Lenin and Trotsky made it a precondition of the British CP's
membership in the Comintern that it had to provide material support to
the Irish independence movement which, at that time, was fighting a war
with the British state.  The British CP was given a hard time at early
conferences of the Third International by Lenin, Radek and others over
the issue of Ireland.

Philip Ferguson


   
  







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