Category Archives: nation state

Nationalism planning for a United Ireland

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The Belfast paper – The Irish News – has a column every Saturday by Patrick Murphy that regularly flagellates Sinn Fein for its hypocrisy and incompetence, sectarianism and corruption, its elevation of the cause of a united Ireland over a united people, and the constitutional question over questions of economic and social equality and poverty. Most of all it is criticised for its nationalism, even its betrayal of it through its recognition of the legitimacy of the ‘two traditions’ in Ireland, which translates as two nations and thereby betrays its own stated goal of a united nation.

Sinn Fein is not the only target and the SDLP and Southern parties get a lashing now and then as well.  It’s a bit repetitive, even if accurate in its own way, and his style can sometimes be irritating.  Anyway, the irony is that for all his economistic denunciations of nationalism, he is actually a bigger nationalist than the SDLP, Southern parties and Sinn Fein.

His bête noir is the European Union, which he sees as robbing Ireland of its sovereignty with Irish membership akin to allying with the British Empire against Germany in World War I, betraying Connolly’s entreaty to ‘serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland’. Of course, he has no difficulty is demonstrating the imperialist character of the EU and its current complicity in the imperialist and Zionist genocide in Palestine etc.  But he is no Marxist and so is unable to appreciate that his belief in a sovereign independent Ireland is a pipe-dream; a reactionary attempt to turn the clock back to a world of independent nation states that also ironically never existed and will never exist.  A recent article by Boffy sets out what is going on here.

By coincidence the Saturday issue of The Irish Times has an article by the Taoiseach Simon Harris setting out the need for the Irish State to defend its current success from the potentially devastating effects of a Trump presidency through some sort of ‘diplomatic offensive’.  This can only involve reminding Trump of how useful the Irish state is for the United States – “Ireland’s offering is one that speaks to Trump . . .”  Since what speaks to Trump most of all is willing and obsequious servility, the Irish are well practised in ingratiating themselves with US presidents, getting the opportunity to do so every St Patricks day with a ridiculously over-sized bowl of shamrock.  What handing over the bowl by the Irish Taoiseach symbolises is the handing over of the country to its true and ultimate chieftain.

The idea of Patrick Murphy that Ireland could genuinely be an independent and sovereign state, against the United States and outside of the European Union, is so divorced from reality it has been abandoned by every other Irish nationalist party.  Irish socialists should not take on the burden of trying to claim it and should instead recognise the ending of the era of nation states as heralding the ending (very painful ending) of capitalist nation states and inevitably of the nationalist ideology that is sustained by them.

The decline of nation states and agglomeration of super-states and imperialist alliances, demonstrated by the US and China and by NATO and BRICS, is an expression of the development of the productive forces of capitalism upon which the possibility of socialism rests.  The intensifying competition and rivalry between these imperialist states and their alliances poses an existential challenge to the interests of the working class, which, as Marx said, has no fatherland but can only assert its interests as an international class.

This means opposition to imperialist war, which currently means opposition to the imperialist conflict in Ukraine and the country’s proxy war on behalf of western imperialism against Russia.  It means rejecting the idea that an old slogan, and one not understood, of self-determination can be proclaimed as justification for supporting one or other side of this imperialist rivalry and the war it has generated.

That consciousness, including political consciousness, often lags behind economic and social development is nothing new and partly explains why many on the left have become enthusiasts for one imperialist alliance or the other.  This leads to hypocritical claims of opposition to oppression by the other side while ignoring the oppression of the favoured imperialism.  So, for example, the United States is claimed to be the key enemy of the working class of the whole world, including of Russia and China, while the role of these states in oppressing their own working class is a “separate question”, as one apologist for these states put it to me.

But let’s get back to the Murphy column in The Irish News.  He notes the recent ‘plan’ by Sinn Fein minister Conor Murphy to create 10,000 new student places centred on Derry.  He notes that it is based not on the purpose of new university facilities and what their wider role might have for development but mainly on where they will be sited.  Along with nearly all Stormont ‘plans’ it doesn’t have the money behind it to make it happen but promises to at least have some.  In this respect it is better than the new Health Service three year plan, recently announced while the first year was already three-quarters over and which promised new stuff if it had the money and cuts in the meantime.  This didn’t stop it being welcomed.

One of the many criticisms of the Conor Murphy plan was that it was a Northern Ireland plan that will reach full fruition by 2032, by which time his party leader has promised that Northern Ireland will not exist! Oh dear, nationalists revealing that they don’t believe their own hype?  I have to admit I almost laughed out loud.

Sinn Fein has been banging the drum on the ‘conversation’ about a united Ireland for years, demanding that the Irish government and everyone else start planning for it, lest the project suffer from the same lack of preparation as Brexit.  And here it is presiding over plans that ignore it!  Repeated calls for plans are followed by silence and their complete absence. Why? Because any plans would immediately confront obstacles that no one wants to talk about; assurances no one would believe, and promises that would invite the response of ‘why don’t you do that now then?’

Behind the empty rhetoric is the reality that nationalism itself has nothing to offer, which the utterly incapable Stormont regime has demonstrated in spades.  For socialists, the national question and a united Ireland is an Irish democratic revolution which cannot promise radical economic and social advance outside of an accompanying socialist revolution. All the limitations to an independent and united Ireland set out above would apply.

At most it is the act of uniting the country alone that would be justified as a democratic advance itself and during ‘the Troubles’ this was how it was implicitly understood.  Now, it is claimed by nationalists that it will have all sorts of other economic and social benefits that Sinn Fein says everyone else must plan for but which it can’t convincingly demonstrate exist and can’t plan for itself.  Instead, what political arrangements that are touted are flimsy and insubstantial – a new flag or national anthem – or actually undemocratic – some mechanism to guarantee continuing unionist power and influence.

All around us we see the pervasiveness of nationalist thinking and the failings of its nostrums.

Oppressor and Oppressed (10) – separating nations or uniting workers?

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1920: M.N. Roy (centre, with black tie) with Vladimir Lenin (left) and Maxim Gorky (behind Lenin). An émigré communist party emerged in October 1920 in Soviet Tashkent under Roy’s guidance.

All the arguments employed against Lenin are claims on behalf of a national solution to national oppression.  The USC article asserts that Lenin believed that ‘the separation of an oppressed people and its creation of an independent state divided the proletariats of various nations, while a bourgeois multinational state with a ruling nation in command united them.’  But this makes no sense.

If Lenin believed that bourgeois empires united workers, why did he oppose great Russian chauvinism, or even place such importance on the right to self-determination if the former did not divide workers and the latter was required in order to unite them?  The article goes on to say that ‘state boundaries do not hinder the international drawing together of the workers of various nations. On the contrary, boundaries signify a respect for equal rights, and a real drawing together is only possible among equals.’

The world has by and large witnessed the end of multinational empires but where is the equality of nations?  How does the imposition of different laws, rules and regulations of labour; the creation of separate national labour organisations; the creation of separate economic, social and political circumstances in general – giving rise to different struggles – lead to drawing workers together?  Is not the point of the creation of such nations, from the nationalist point of view, that the different classes of the nation are ‘naturally’ to be separate from other nationalities and united within – workers with capitalists etc?

Since when was it possible for unequal nation states to achieve equality, and when did larger states stop imposing their interests on smaller ones, through political interference, economic coercion and war?  Is Ukraine not dramatic proof of all of these, by the West as well as Russia?  The author appears to recognise this when he writes that ‘modern American capitalism, which is not weighed down by feudal traditions, does not require the incorporation of other peoples into its state borders in order to dominate them.’  As we know, this hasn’t prevented repeated direct military invasion and occupation by it.  

The socialist demand for the equality of nations means only the right to independence and not belief in the possibility of real equality between vastly different states.   Their drawing together does indeed require the right to separation but rejection of the exercise of such a right can evidence that that this has already happened, to a greater or lesser extent.  Ultimately only the removal of the capitalist imperative to accumulate capital can remove the dynamic of antagonism between capitalist states.

In the Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions for the Second Congress Of The Communist International, Lenin wrote that the 1914-18 war and the imperialists’ actions after it ‘are hastening the collapse of the petty-bourgeois nationalist illusions that nations can live together in peace and equality under capitalism.’

It is claimed in the USC article that the demise of the Tsarist multinational state after the First World War demonstrated the progressiveness of purely national formations, but the Second World War rather exposed the very restricted limits to this.  Cold War conflict muted direct war in Europe after World War 2, but even the success of the European Union in muting conflict between the major powers within Europe has not made all states within it equal.  The collapse of multinational Yugoslavia was not a progressive event, entailing war, ethnic cleansing and lasting bitterness and conflict.  Again, the war in Ukraine demonstrates that nation state independence is no obstacle to the intrusion of the more powerful.

The author opposes what Marx, and subsequently Lenin, considered as progressive tasks: ‘it was unfitting for a workers’ social-democratic party to support even the “progressive” tasks of capitalism on the eve of the First World War, because these tasks were accomplished with steel and blood.’   As Marx said, capitalism had never ‘effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation’, but that through its ‘development of the productive powers of man . . .  bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world . . .’  K Marx, The Future results of British rule in India, Collected Works Vol 12 p 221 and 222)

The author argues that Lenin’s concept of imperialism meant that ‘capitalism was decaying and that the only way out was through a socialist revolution and the disintegration of multinational and colonial empires. . . In this second period Lenin linked the resolution of the national question in Russia to the victory of the proletarian revolution’ and ‘considered that the peoples of Russia could unite again only in a union of republics with equal rights.’

In the Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions Lenin wrote at its beginning that ‘In conformity with its fundamental task of combating bourgeois democracy and exposing its falseness and hypocrisy, the Communist Party, as the avowed champion of the proletarian struggle to overthrow the bourgeois yoke, must base its policy, in the national question too, not on abstract and formal principles but, first, on a precise appraisal of the specific historical situation and, primarily, of economic conditions.’

In this document he noted that ‘from these fundamental premises it follows that the Communist International’s entire policy on the national and the colonial questions should rest primarily on a closer union of the proletarians and the working masses of all nations and countries for a joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow the landowners and the bourgeoisie. This union alone will guarantee victory over capitalism, without which the abolition of national oppression and inequality is impossible.’

In 1916, after writing his brochure on imperialism, he wrote against a political opponent – in A Caricature of Marxism – that ‘every sensible worker will “think”: here we have P. Kievsky telling us workers to shout “get out of the colonies”. In other words, we Great-Russian workers must demand from our government that it get out of Mongolia, Turkestan, Persia; English workers must demand that the English Government get out of Egypt, India, Persia, etc.’

‘But does this mean that we proletarians wish to separate ourselves from the Egyptian workers and fellahs, from the Mongolian, Turkestan or Indian workers and peasants? Does it mean that we advise the labouring masses of the colonies to “separate” from the class-conscious European proletariat? Nothing of the kind. Now, as always, we stand and shall continue to stand for the closest association and merging of the class-conscious workers of the advanced countries with the workers, peasants and slaves of all the oppressed countries. We have always advised and shall continue to advise all the oppressed classes in all the oppressed countries, the colonies included, not to separate from us, but to form the closest possible ties and merge with us.’

‘We demand from our governments that they quit the colonies, or, to put it in precise political terms rather than in agitational outcries—that they grant the colonies full freedom of secession, the genuine right to self-determination, and we ourselves are sure to implement this right, and grant this freedom as soon as we capture power. We demand this from existing governments, and will do this when we are the government, not in order to “recommend” secession, but, on the contrary, in order to facilitate and accelerate the democratic association and merging of nations. We shall exert every effort to foster association and merger with the Mongolians, Persians, Indians, Egyptians.’

In June 1920 ‘a precise appraisal of the specific historical situation’ meant that ‘world political developments are of necessity concentrated on a single focus—the struggle of the world bourgeoisie against the Soviet Russian Republic, around which are inevitably grouped, on the one hand, the Soviet movements of the advanced workers in all countries, and, on the other, all the national liberation movements in the colonies and among the oppressed nationalities, who are learning from bitter experience that their only salvation lies in the Soviet system’s victory over world imperialism.’

‘Consequently, one cannot at present confine oneself to a bare recognition or proclamation of the need for closer union between the working people of the various nations; a policy must be pursued that will achieve the closest alliance, with Soviet Russia, of all the national and colonial liberation movements. The form of this alliance should be determined by the degree of development of the communist movement in the proletariat of each country, or of the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement of the workers and peasants in backward countries or among backward nationalities.’

‘Federation is a transitional form to the complete unity of the working people of different nations. The feasibility of federation has already been demonstrated in practice both by the relations between the R.S.F.S.R. and other Soviet Republics . .  . In this respect, it is the task of the Communist International to further develop and also to study and test by experience these new federations, which are arising on the basis of the Soviet system and the Soviet movement. In recognising that federation is a transitional form to complete unity, it is necessary to strive for ever closer federal unity . . . ; second, that a close economic alliance between the Soviet republics is necessary, otherwise the productive forces which have been ruined by imperialism cannot be restored and the well-being of the working people cannot be ensured; third, that there is a tendency towards the creation of a single world economy, regulated by the proletariat of all nations as an integral whole and according to a common plan. This tendency has already revealed itself quite clearly under capitalism and is bound to be further developed and consummated under socialism.’

He finishes the draft theses with the statement, that ‘complete victory over capitalism cannot be won unless the proletariat and, following it, the mass of working people in all countries and nations throughout the world voluntarily strive for alliance and unity.’  From all this it is clear that Lenin never departed from the view that the purpose of socialists, including in its national policy, was to create the maximum unity of the working class in its struggle for socialism. 

The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign has published an article that usurps the purpose of the demand for national self-determination as argued by Lenin, from one of strengthening the unity of the working class across and between countries to one of supporting the creation of new capitalist states in order to create an (impossible) equality of states; one that somehow leads to working class unity.  Internationalism as the unity of the working class regardless of nation has become the equality of nations, the solidarity of nationalisms with the retention of separate states and, by implication, the rights arrogated by them based on claims for the necessity of their existence.

The purpose is clear: to justify the war in Ukraine and the claims of the capitalist Ukrainian state on the subterfuge that these encompass the interests of its workers, which ‘Lenin’s contradictions’ have supposedly helped prevent from being appreciated.  It has the merit of recognising that Lenin cannot be summoned in support of Ukraine in the war, thereby undermining the arguments of others who think he can.

Series concluded

Back to part 9

Visiting Avignon

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DSC_0373This year I went to Southern France for my holidays, including Avignon, famous for its song ‘Sur le Pont d’Avignon.’ I was there just at the end of its annual arts festival so it was buzzing with life, hosting some fantastic busking musicians who could keep you entertained for hours while licking ice cream.  At least that’s what I did quite a lot of the time.

It’s also famous as the site of exile from Rome of the Popes, from 1309 to 1376, and has a very impressive Palais des Papes, which was their residence and is now a major tourist attraction.  As the audio guide to a visit explains, the palace demonstrated the secular as well as the spiritual (ideological) power of the papacy but the history untold is not one of the rise in the secular power of the papacy but of its decline from its zenith a century earlier.

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Boniface VIII, pope from 1294 to 1303, who liked to wear a crown, declared papal authority over the clergy and threatened France and England with excommunication. In 1300 he also pompously staged a Holy year, selling indulgences to finance his worldly domain. Overreaching himself however he planned the excommunication of the French king, who promptly arrested and imprisoned him in his castle in Anagni.  Even though subsequently freed by the people of the town he was a broken man and died a few months later in Rome.  The second next pope was enthroned in France and eventually establishing his seat of power in Avignon, the start of a series of French popes all largely dependent on the French monarch.

The Catholic theologian Hans Küng remarks that though such events might lead one to assume a tempering of papal claims, this was not the case.  Indeed the guide to the Palais deals a good deal with its vast system of financial management, required to finance building of the Palais and development of the papal bureaucracy:

“In the late Middle Ages, the Roman papacy increasingly lost its religious and moral leadership and instead became the first great financial power of Europe.  The popes claimed a spiritual basis for their worldly demands, of course, but they collected revenues with every means at their disposal, including excommunication and bans” (The Catholic Church)

It was in this period also that saw creation of the doctrine of papal infallibility, originally propagated by an eccentric Franciscan previously accused of heresy.  Apparently this early claim was not taken particularly seriously and was eventually condemned as the work of the devil and the ‘father of all lies’, only to be resurrected later in the nineteenth century.

For political reason the papacy moved back to Rome in 1377 but the next pope showed “such an excess of incompetence, megalomania and outright mental disturbance that there was reason for an automatic dismissal.” (Küng) So another pope, Clement VII was chosen except that the incompetent, megalomaniacal and mentally disturbed pope – Urban VI – didn’t accept this result and so they had a fight over it.  Upon defeat of his troops Clement VII took up residence in Avignon again.

Now we had two popes who excommunicated each other.  You can’t have too much of a good thing; so you had two colleges of cardinals, two Curias and two financial systems.  Clement was supported by France, Aragon, Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and Scotland plus some Germans while Urban was supported by the German Empire, parts of Italy, Flanders, England and some others.

In order to sort this mess out the cardinals met at a general council in Pisa in 1409, deposed the two popes and elected a new one.  Except neither of the existing popes accepted this result either, so the Catholic Church now had three popes! You really can’t have too much of a good thing and we now had a new holy Trinity.

Of course this couldn’t last and eventually the Church managed to get itself just the one pope.

I’d forgotten all this history while doing the tour of the Palais and it would really make for a ripping yarn if it was included in the audio guide to the tour.  But unfortunately some people don’t like the story history tells us.

Another thing I didn’t know was that the area of Avignon continued to be owned and governed by the papacy until the French revolution, only joining the rest of France in 1791.  In the meantime (the Michelin ‘Green’ Guide explains) Jews were confined to a ghetto, locked in at night, compelled to wear a yellow cap, pay dues to their Christian rulers and listen to sermons designed to convert them.

The incorporation of Avignon into a unified French state reminded me of another book I had read some years ago, ‘The Discovery of France’ by Graham Robb.  He noted that at the time of the revolution there were hundreds of small towns, suburbs and villages all more or less independent of any national state.  France was a name often reserved for the small ‘mushroom-shaped’ province centred on Paris.

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There was little common French national identity and no common language among ‘the French.’   As late as 1863 a quarter of recruits to the army spoke ‘patois,’ a ‘corrupt language’.  French seemed to be declining in some areas so that children forgot it when they left school.  Even half a century later some recruits to the French army in the First World War couldn’t speak French and there were reports of Breton soldiers being shot by their comrades because they were mistaken for Germans or because they failed to obey incomprehensible orders.

Most people in the 18th century didn’t travel far and their identity was a local one.  Robb quotes records of 679 couples from 1700 to 1759 showing that almost two thirds of the brides came from within shouting distance of their bridegroom: – “In Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, all but four of the fifty-seven women had married less than five miles from home. Only two of the six hundred and seventy-nine were described as ‘foreign’. This was not a reference to another land.  It meant simply, ‘not from the region.’”

Some of these towns and villages were “flourishing democracies” when France was an absolutist monarchy.  In one village, Salency, the children were never sent away to become servants, all were considered equal, and everyone worked the land. The village was conspicuously clean and tidy, harvests were abundant and crime was unknown.  Of course horizons were limited and no one was allowed to marry outside the village, which had only three surnames.

In another set of villages covering many square miles a clan called Pignou occupied an area in the northern Auvergne. All men over twenty elected a leader, there was no private property and all children in one village were brought up by a woman who ran the communal dairy.  Again people were forbidden to marry outside the clan and those who did were banished forever, “although they all eventually begged to be readmitted.”

So while the destruction of papal control over the mini-state of Avignon was obviously a progressive outcome of the French revolution the destruction of the much loved independence of many small communities by a remote, centralised state with its demands for standardisation, inevitable destruction of local customs (including language) and imposition of oppressive requirements, such as conscription into massive bloody wars, was not.

But such is capitalist progress.  Marxists understand its positive and negative aspects.  In fact understand that capitalist progress is a function of the contradictions and antagonisms within society that does not allow for real separation of good and bad.

Should it be rejected by seeking to go back to the past?  Obviously we can’t now go back to isolated village communities with no private property in the means of production in France or anywhere else but that is not how the question is posed today.

Today it is posed in terms of rejecting capitalist progress at the international level, also characterised by standardisation, centralisation and lack of democracy in favour of a return to more local, nation-state democratic forms.

Unfortunately much of the Left today is no longer confident about the future so seeks solace in the past.  But as we see, this past in the form of nation states was built upon its own brutality and disregard for peoples’ choices.

But just as the development of the nation state also heralded undoubted progress for humanity so also does the internationalisation of capitalism promise the grounds for a new and better society, a socialist one.  This is the ground upon which we must fight and seek to build an alternative.