Category Archives: Nationalism

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

Oppressor and Oppressed (9) – Lenin’s contradictions

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The article published by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (USC) tells us that:


‘In another place Lenin stated that “large states can accomplish the task of economic progress and the tasks of proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie more successfully than can small ones.” But Lenin also wrote the following: “In 1905 Norway separated from Sweden… What does this mean? Did the people lose? Did the interests of culture lose? Or the interest of democracy? Or the interests of the working class from such a separation? Not at all!… The unity and closeness of the Swedish and Norwegian peoples in fact gained from the separation.” This contradiction in Lenin (the progressive nature of multinational states and the progressive nature of the dissolution of multinational states).’

Lenin, however, says no more here than when larger states separate it is better that they do so without conflict, if unity does not have the necessary support, in order that the primary unity sought – that of the working classes of the various nations – is less impaired. Whether Lenin got this right in this particular case is secondary to the general argument.


The article goes on to say that ‘Most of Lenin’s statements, nevertheless, were in support of preserving the integrity of the Russian Empire, in 1903 he considered its disintegration “an empty phrase as long as its economic development continued to bind its various parts more closely into one political whole.” The break-up of Russia, according to Lenin, would be a step backwards, “in contrast to our aim of overthrowing autocracy,” In 1913 Lenin wrote:

“Autonomy is our plan for the organization of a democratic state. Separation is not our plan at all… On the whole we are opposed to separation. But we support the right to separation.”
This, indeed, was Lenin’s position. Both from the necessary, and much to be desired, purposes of development of the productive forces and the unity of the workers’ movement within the Tsarist Empire, the Bolsheviks were opposed to disintegration. As the article goes on to say, “The aim of socialism is not only to destroy the division of humanity into small states and all national aloofness, not only the rapprochement of nations, but also their merging,”


The author of the USC article criticises the idea of multinational states: ‘History has not yet provided us with the example of nations in one state enjoying complete equality, because a state is not only class coercion, but also national coercion. The stronger nation in a multinational state always wishes to be the ruling one.’[1]


Other lessons from history are, however, ignored; such as nation states often being the creation of nationalism, upon which national antagonisms have facilitated wars based on capitalist competition. Nation states often contain national minorities and attempts to create single-nation states often result in odious oppression of national minorities. Nationalism is not the answer to the disease of national oppression that it itself engenders.


It might therefore also be said that History has not yet provided us with the example of nation states enjoying complete equality, because a state is not only an instrument of class coercion, but also of national coercion of one against another. Instruments of class oppression will not be equal when there is competition between them to increase the resources that they can exploit.
The article appears to agree with this but seems to see it as relevant only within multinational states, in which it says that ‘as long as the state — violence — exists, equal rights for nations will be impossible, no matter how democratic the state might be.’


The USC article quotes from a ‘Ukrainian Marxist’ in 1916 ‘disagreeing with Lenin’s statement that a democratic Russian republic would make the realisation of the national right of separation a possibility’:


‘It is ridiculous to speak of the possibility of the ruler of a capitalist state “safeguarding rights of nations to self-determination,” Every state, even the most democratic, and especially today in the age of imperialism, would not only never agree to the separation of oppressed peoples but would always aspire towards new territorial gains, to a further oppression of nations. Capitalist governments have always looked upon the “rights of nations to self-determination” as treason to the fatherland and have punished the guilty with the death penalty… A blind faith in the democratic and socialist advantages of Russia…is in no way an expression —as is often thought — of the Great Russian socialism. On the contrary…the national program of Russian revolutionary social democrats is nothing other than the repetition of Great-Russian liberal patriotic programs.’


This argument contains some measure of truth – that capitalist governments cannot be relied upon not to oppress smaller national groups within their Empire, and is even true against Lenin who believed at this time that only a bourgeois democratic and not a working class revolution was possible. It ignores, however, that national minorities within nation states separated from Empires will also often be oppressed.


In terms of the class nature of the revolution that Lenin at that time believed would occur, he foresaw the working class taking the lead in this bourgeois democratic revolution, ensuring its thoroughly democratic character. Above all, as we have seen from the earlier post, the purpose of the demand for self-determination of nations by Lenin was the unity of the working class; not a presumed higher unity among different classes within a separating nation, with such unity always being that of the working class united with its ruling classes in its subordination. It is precisely this ‘solution’ to national oppression that the USC article attempts to assert.


It is claimed that the greater number of Lenin’s contradictions come from the period of the First World War and Russian 1917 revolutions, attacking what it sees as the cultural implications of Lenin’s policy:


‘Lenin wrote, on the one hand, that it was impermissible to force the Russian language upon the peoples of Russia: “you cannot drive people to heaven with an oak-wood club.” But, on the other hand, he wrote that in Ukraine in the Donbas region ‘the assimilation of the Great Russian and Ukrainian proletariat is an incontestable fact, and this fact is undoubtedly a progressive thing,” even though Tsarist assimilation was precisely the “oak-wood club” that Lenin condemned. For the Tsarist regime forbade the Ukrainian proletariat its own schools and compelled the Ukrainians to learn only in Russian. In another place Lenin wrote that he was for assimilation as long as it was not forced. But where in history does one see an uncompelled, voluntary assimilation?!’


Let’s start at the end – it is exactly the objective of socialist revolution to remove all oppression. That the chronicle of oppression, including national oppression, continues to exist is not at all surprising, given the heretofore failure of socialism. It is also possible, and what matters most, is that what is meant by assimilation is that the political unity of the different national proletariats is not prevented by national cultural, ethnic or racial differences.


‘Assimilation’ does not in itself entail oppression of cultural differences, including in language, but it is not the role of socialism to push against voluntary cultural assimilation, rather to allow those who wish to retain or develop cultural distinctions not to be forced by the state to disavow their cultural practices or to suffer discrimination against them. The example of the Donbas region quoted by Lenin is instructive: Ukrainian independence and Ukrainian nationalism have now, very obviously, failed to unite the different proletariats of the region and only Ukrainian nationalists can claim that ‘decolonisation’, that is the suppression of the Russian language and culture, is now the solution.

[1] We will leave aside such cases as the United States (are these states separate nationalities?) or the UK, where claims for the oppression of Scotland are false, with this country playing an equal, even outsized role, in creation of an Empire. There are other cases such a Belgium and Switzerland where the existence of two and several nationalities within one state has been the case.

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Forward to part 10

Oppressor and Oppressed (8) – where Lenin went wrong?

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Lenin, in the National question in our programme (July 1903), stated that :

‘The Social-Democrats will always combat every attempt to influence national self-determination from without by violence or by any injustice. However, our unreserved recognition of the struggle for freedom of self-determination does not in any way commit us to supporting every demand for national self-determination. As the party of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party considers it to be its positive and principal task to further the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than that of peoples or nations. We must always and unreservedly work for the very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a looser federal unity, etc., for the complete political unity of a state.’

Further, in his Theses on the National Question in June 1913, ten years later, he wrote that:

‘The Social-Democratic Party’s recognition of the right of all nationalities to self-determination most certainly does not mean that Social-Democrats reject an independent appraisal of the advisability of the state secession of any nation in each separate case. Social-Democracy should, on the contrary, give its independent appraisal, taking into consideration the conditions of capitalist development and the oppression of the proletarians of various nations by the united bourgeoisie of all nationalities, as well as the general tasks of democracy, first of all and most of all the interests of the proletarian class struggle for socialism.’

‘Social-Democracy, therefore, must give most emphatic warning to the proletariat and other working people of all nationalities against direct deception by the nationalistic slogans of “their own” bourgeoisie, who with their saccharine or fiery speeches about “our native land” try to divide the proletariat and divert its attention from their bourgeois intrigues while they enter into an economic and political alliance with the bourgeoisie of other nations and with the tsarist monarchy.’

In Critical Remarks on the national question at the end of 1913 Lenin wrote that:

‘The principle of nationality is historically inevitable in bourgeois society and, taking this society into due account, the Marxist fully recognises the historical legitimacy of national movements. But to prevent this recognition from becoming an apologia of nationalism, it must be strictly limited to what is progressive in such movements, in order that this recognition may not lead to bourgeois ideology obscuring proletarian consciousness.’

In 1916, in The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up, he wrote that:

‘The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete casts, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected. It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement, but it would be ridiculous to delete the demand for a republic from the programme of international Social-Democracy on these grounds.’

He goes on to say that no ‘democratic demand can fail to give rise to abuses, unless the specific is subordinated to the general; we are not obliged to support either “any” struggle for independence or “any” republican or anti-clerical movement.’

Supporters of the Ukrainian state in its war against the Russian state and in its alliance with Western imperialism have often held up the words of Lenin on self-determination of nations to justify their support.  In doing so they empty the policy of its purpose, its relevance to the circumstances, its required programmatic context, and break from all the conditions necessary to it that are contained in the various quotations above.

Having taken this historic red flag of out of the cupboard they have made it ready by washing all the colour out of it so that now the flag they wave is white.

An article dug up from the past and published by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign has done everyone a favour and decided that Lenin’s ‘contradictions’ should be led bare.

The article does two things.  It firstly points out the failures of Bolshevik policy in the smaller and less developed countries of the Tsarist Empire, with a failure to live up to their declared aims.  In this regard, there is nothing exceptional to the less developed counties that did not also apply to the heartlands of the revolution in St Petersburg and Moscow; the underdevelopment of the grounds for socialism in these countries was just more pronounced than in Russia itself.  The contradictions in Bolshevik words and actions created by material circumstances were therefore real.

This, however, is subsidiary to the real purpose of the article, which is not to damn Lenin’s policy for its failure due largely to these circumstances, but to damn the policy itself.

This is divided into three periods with different emphases.  So: ‘in the first period Lenin clearly supported the idea of the progressive nature of multinational large-scale states. He considered that such states were more suitable for the workers’ movement and lead to the fusion of nations, which Lenin considered to be the ideal of socialism.’

‘In 1913 he wrote: The wide-ranging and rapid development of productive forces under capitalism demands territories unified and enclosed by large states, in which the bourgeois class alone will be able, together with its antipode, the proletarian class, to concentrate, destroying all the old, medieval, sexual, narrowly local, religious and other obstacles… As long as and insofar as various nations comprise one state, Marxists will in no case propagate either a federalist principle or decentralization. A centralized large state is a great historical step forward from medieval divisions towards a future of socialist unity of the whole world; and other than through such a state (indissolubly tied to capitalism) there is not and cannot be any path to socialism.’

This development carried forward by capitalism continues today, for example, in the creation of the European Union.  The attempts to reverse it are reactionary and have been demonstrated to be so, even to many of its supporters – we need only think of Brexit.  The failure of nation states to accommodate the international development of capitalism led to two world wars and today the development of the world capitalist system – characterised by rivalry between large states – threatens a third.  Neither the contradictions of the current system nor their solution by socialism will be resolved by attempting to go back to purely national development, which never in any case fully existed.  Today, smaller nations become proxies for the largest powers, such as Ukraine is for the US, and their nationalism becomes window dressing for the ‘intrigues . . . and political alliance(s) with the bourgeoisie of other nations’, as Lenin described.

In other words, the analysis of Lenin is valid today.

Back to part 7

Forward to part 9

Oppressor and Oppressed (4) – Against Annexations

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Source

Russia invaded Ukraine with an army much smaller than that of Ukraine and could not hope to annex the country with this force, even when combined with pro-Russian Ukrainian forces in the separated Eastern states.  It would have been stupid to attempt it, and although the Western media has been keen to present the Russians as stupid, and Putin as crazy, their conduct of the war demonstrates otherwise.

Russia has already proclaimed parts of Ukraine as now part of Russia but this in itself demonstrates the intention not to annex the whole country.  Those parts that it claims have populations that reflect the previous deep division in the country, and many within them will support incorporation into Russia.  Many will not and many of these will have fled to areas under control of Kyiv or to Western countries while many others have gone to Russia.

Some supporters of the Ukrainian state on the left started by endorsing the maximalist and unachievable objective of recovery of the Donbas and Crimea from Russian rule.  In this they were promising a forever war and far from defending Ukrainians from any oppression were in reality promoting its continuation. Some have moved away from this maximalist position in acceptance of its impossibility but done so at the cost of greater incoherence.  They now want only gains from the February 2022 invasion to be overturned, which still involves war but also must involve acceptance of what they consider oppression.

This oppression derives, it is claimed, from denial of Ukraine’s right to self-determination and only the free exercise of this right can put an end to this national oppression.  I have done this argument to death in many posts but will briefly recap.

Ukraine was already independent when it chose to ally with Western imperialism against Russia.  From that point it surrendered its freedom of manoeuvre, and its state committed its people to suffer the consequences of advancing NATO membership, which threatened Russia.  If a capitalist state employs its independence to condemn its people to war and invasion it is not its lack of independence that is the problem but the use to which it has been put.  

The regime in Kyiv pursued policies that irretrievably split its own people and undermined the basis of a united Ukraine.  Its nationalist project could not satisfy the ultra-nationalists predominantly in the West of the country while making their demands acceptable to many of the Russian speaking Ukrainians in the East.  The invasion has only radicalised Ukrainian nationalism and make it even less capable of peacefully encompassing both.

Criminally, some socialists in Ukraine and their supporters in the West have decided that some Ukrainians matter more than others and have supported the idea that what is needed is some sort of process of decolonisation from everything Russian.  Unfortunately, such a process will create as much oppression as it purports to relieve.  Ukrainian nationalism is not the solution to the oppression of the Ukrainian people.

The last thing to do then is defend the Ukrainian state but to point out its role in creating the oppressive conditions that stoked division in its people, and now is attempting to impose as the natural order a state oppressive of its pro-Russian minority.

So, if not all of Ukraine is going to be annexed to Russia and the country was already divided, does this exhaust the question?

Is the issue that parts of Ukraine have been annexed by force; is this is the problem and some other means would be valid and legitimate?

Lenin quotes a previous resolution of the socialist movement that ‘a protest against annexations is nothing but recognition of the right to Self-determination”. The concept of annexation usually includes: (1) the concept of force (joining by means of force); (2) the concept of oppression by another nation (the joining of “alien” regions, etc.), and, sometimes (3) the concept of violation of the status quo. We pointed this out in the theses and this did not meet with any criticism.’

On the question of force he goes on to say that ‘Can Social-Democrats be against the use of force in general, it may be asked? Obviously not. This means that we are against annexations not because they constitute force, but for some other reason. Nor can the Social-Democrats be for the status quo. However you may twist and turn, annexation is violation of the self-determination of a nation, it is the establishment of state frontiers contrary to the will of the population.’ (Lenin, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up)

Lenin states in another article that ‘The right of nations to self-determination means only the right to independence in a political sense, the right to free, political secession from the oppressing nation. Concretely, this political, democratic demand implies complete freedom to carry on agitation in favour of secession, and freedom to settle the question of secession by means of a referendum of the nation that desires to secede’ (The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination)

The Russian state has held referenda in annexed regions, to the derision of the West, but the West has talked and acted as if Ukraine consists of only those who support the Kyiv regime.  This regime rejected the Minsk agreements that promised autonomy for Russian controlled regions within Ukrainian sovereignty, which followed only after its initial ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’ to reclaim full control was stopped by Russian and pro-Russian forces.  Since the Zelensky regime has run out of democratic legitimacy by banning opposition parties, censoring the media and cancelling Presidential elections, the various warring parties have no valid claim to be fighting for democracy even of the minimal bourgeois variety.

Ukraine can only occupy Crimea by force and Russia has already incorporated regions of Ukraine by force.  Russia, however, has annexed much of the East of the country, and the question of self-determination, as repeatedly argued by Lenin, is about such annexation.  

This is not to make a fetish of the current internationally ‘recognised’ boundaries of Ukraine, which are drawn from the administrative boundaries of the Soviet Union, but again this simply poses the question and does not answer it. So, we will have to pursue this question.

Back to part 3

Forward to part 5

Oppressor and Oppressed (1) Introduction

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What attitude should we take to resistance movements, such as Hamas?  Boffy’s Blog has a critique of a letter submitted to the ‘Weekly Worker’ that answers this question.  He particularly criticises the following paragraph:

‘Lazare says that Marxists do not side with rightwing groups claiming to speak in the people’s name. Wrong. In the 1950s we supported Eoka in Cyprus against the British. Likewise we supported the IRA. Lazare fails to understand that the nationalism of the oppressor and oppressed is not the same. It is all very simple. We support the struggle of the oppressed.’

This opens up a range of issues, but let’s start by breaking them down:

‘Lazare says that Marxists do not side with rightwing groups claiming to speak in the people’s name. Wrong.’

This claim, I think, is wrong.  Why would we – socialists/Marxists – side with right-wing groups?  What would these groups be doing that would warrant support?  Any anti-colonial or anti-imperialist struggle they would be involved in might put us ‘on the same side’ of such a struggle, only so long as they were actually involved in struggle, but would not mean that ‘we side with them’.  Any such struggle they carry out against imperialism will not be one against capitalism, i.e. not be waged against the system that at a certain historical stage we call imperialism.

They will not seek the emancipation of the working class and will seek instead the creation of a new capitalist state.  They will therefore have, or seek to advance, common class interests with the oppressor, therefore making their opposition defective, temporary and prone to betrayal.  They will not seek to make the working class the leadership of the struggle or seek to guide it to overthrow capitalism but will seek to thwart those that do.

To understand this it is helpful to defiine the class nature of the groups we are supposed to side with.  These can be bourgeois, or more often petty bourgeois, in which case it is necessary to see them as inimical to the interests we serve and as rivals, even if we sometimes are temporarily ‘on the same side’ with them in any particular struggle or issue at any particular time.  In all cases the socialist movement must organise itself separately from them and against them.  

‘In the 1950s we supported Eoka in Cyprus against the British. Likewise we supported the IRA.’

Here, I will limit myself to the Marxist approach to the IRA.  The political tendency I belonged to did not support the IRA.  We did not endorse its programme and did not support its armed struggle.  We took the view – going back to James Connolly – that, as with the whole tradition of Irish republicanism, it was a revolutionary nationalist movement that was united around the principle of armed struggle, a struggle that was parasitical on the mass anti-imperialist struggle and was bound to be defeated, which it was.

This did not mean that we were not ‘on the same side’ in a struggle against imperialism; did not mean that we did not defend it against charges of being a purely terrorist and criminal organisation; did not work with republicans in campaigns against British imperialist repression, or did not support a united Ireland and the smashing of the Northern State.  Tactical cooperation in united campaigns were possible and existed; but we organised separately and under our own banner and not as supporters of Irish republicanism or its movement.  The formula ‘unconditional but critical support’ did not apply.

To ‘give support’ must be taken to mean political support arising from political agreement and no such agreement existed between Marxism and Irish republicanism and obviously does not exist now that it has surrendered its own programme.

‘Lazare fails to understand that the nationalism of the oppressor and oppressed is not the same.’

Whether Lazare understands this or not is not what I want to address.  I want to agree that ‘the nationalism of the oppressor and oppressed is not the same.’  The former is reactionary, and the latter can have a democratic content that socialists would seek to advance.  However, not being the same does not mean that we support the nationalism of the oppressed, which is the usual next step that many mistakenly take.

We are not nationalists of any sort or variety and identification of some democratic content to any nationalist cause does not make us so.  Our support for the struggle against colonialism or imperialism is based on the interests and politics of the working class, which are universal across nations, both for the oppressed and the oppressor nations.

Nationalism, no matter what its variety, places primacy on the nation and asserts that it creates some separate and common interest that encompasses all its members.  Socialists and Marxists reject the claim that all the people within a nation have common interests, even (especially) in opposing colonial or imperialist rule, because they are impacted differently by this rule and thereby have different interests in removing it.

‘It is all very simple. We support the struggle of the oppressed.’

In general socialists and Marxists do ‘support the struggle of the oppressed’ but it is not ‘all very simple’ because we do not start from this assertion but from the interests of the working class and the struggle for socialism.  More will be said about this in a future post.

Supporting the struggle of the oppressed against their oppression (and not for any other reactionary objective) does not mean we necessarily support the organisations leading their struggle or their methods.  This is another step that many mistakenly take but this is based on assumed moral obligations and not on political accordance, unless one shares the same political programme and strategy as these organisations.

In the past this step has led the British ‘Troops Out Movement’ to move from support for the withdrawal of the British Army from Ireland – opposition to the oppressor – to essentially support for Sinn Fein, even after this movement had effectively abandoned its struggle against British rule.

This is itself an example of the mistake of supporting the nationalism of the oppressed because this nationalism will, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, be ‘defective, temporary and prone to betrayal’ even of its own proclaimed objective.  Even in success, anti-colonial movements have created new capitalist states in which ‘national liberation’ has encompassed the continuation of social and political oppression.

Marxism identifies the working class as the universal class that is the only force that can create the conditions to end all oppression.  This includes national oppression. The working class is not the most oppressed section of society so moral claims based on those suffering the most extreme poverty, exclusion, prejudice or discrimination, or some ideal of justice does not explain its role or potential emancipatory function.  This is true across the world, in all its struggles and applies to all of them.

Forward to part 2

The local elections – another step to a united Ireland?

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The local election results in the North of Ireland have given rise to more commentary that another step has been taken towards a referendum on Irish unity and a united Ireland.  The success of Sinn Fein in becoming the largest party at local government level in council seats and votes has provoked this reaction, as have its previous victories.  The two have almost come to seem synonymous.

At the same time the two are repeatedly separated by the selfsame commentators who argue that any vote for a united Ireland in a referendum would have to go way beyond Sinn Fein’s support.  If a vote for this party is an indicator of impending unity, then there is an obvious problem.  Its vote in the local elections was 30.9 percent of the ballot so even after an increase in its support of 7.7 percent it is not yet a third of those voting.

It is argued that other pro-unity candidates add to the forward movement of Irish nationalism, except that the other major nationalist party, the SDLP, is slowly dying.  Its vote fell by 3.3 percentage points to 8.7 per cent.  Together the two major nationalist parties gathered 39.7 per cent.  Even with the addition of the pro-unity parties on the left and right, People before Profit and Aontú, the total rises only to 41.5 per cent.  The total for the three main unionist parties is 38.1 per cent; Irish nationalism gained more votes than the these parties.

In the 2019 local government election the three Unionist parties plus smaller unionists gained 41.87 per cent of the vote while the comparable Irish nationalist and pro-unity parties won 37.73 per cent.  At this election the DUP was the largest party and the Unionist vote was higher than that of Irish nationalism.

Local elections, however, are the least accurate electoral indicator of the relative strengths of the two camps; the turnout in 2023 was only 54 per cent, an increase of 2 per cent on the 2019 vote.  Commentators have noted that the turnout in 2023 was higher in predominantly nationalist than unionist areas by as much as 10 percentage points in some places. Irish nationalism therefore won only 22 per cent of the electorate while many unionist voters stayed at home. During any referendum on a united Ireland it can hardly be expected that unionists will be so apathetic or demoralised, unless political circumstances make them so, unlikely to be a result of the vote itself.

In the 2022 Assembly elections, where the turnout was almost 63.6 per cent, the vote for the three Unionist parties was 40.1 per cent while the pro-Irish unity vote comparable to the most recent local elections was 40.7 per cent.  The recent local election results are not the first time the Unionist parties have fallen behind.

Twelve years ago in the 2011 Assembly elections, Unionism polled 47.65 per cent while Irish nationalism trailed behind at 42.81 per cent.  The decline in the Unionist vote over these years is therefore clear and it is this decline that has provided most of the impetus to claims that a nationalist referendum victory is a realistic prospect in the short to medium term.  The 2011 result however also reveals what the advance of Sinn Fein has hidden – that the nationalist share of the vote hasn’t increased:  42.81 per cent in 2011 and 41.5 per cent in 2023.

The missing piece of the jigsaw is the rise of the Alliance party: from 7.84 per cent in 2011 to  13.3 per cent in the recent local election.  The question then becomes the political nature of this party – unionist with a ‘small u’ or nationalist; or what it presents itself as – simply ‘other’.

So let’s start with the third alternative–that Alliance cannot be said to have a position on the national question.  Even if this were so the national question will face Alliance and its supporters with the choice sooner or later and ‘other’ will not be on the ballot paper.

Alliance is definitely not an Irish nationalist party, does not pretend to be or pretend to hide it, and while it has a significant Catholic support, this has consciously decided not to vote for Irish nationalism.  While it may be more likely than other Alliance supporters to vote for unity in a referendum, its existing vote is for the status quo and the status quo is continued British rule.

The party was originally set up as an openly unionist party that presented itself as non-sectarian; one that divorced its unionism from any religious identity.  It has moved from this to present itself as neither Unionist nor nationalist but with a soft, ‘small u’, unionist support that is repelled by the sectarianism of the Unionist mainstream, with many also rejecting Brexit.  In a referendum, all other things being equal, the majority of Alliance voters can be expected to support continued British rule, as will the party itself. 

The ’other things being equal’ is what will matter for many; the political circumstances will at some point be decisive.  These include the reality of what a united Ireland might offer and the configuration of the forces fighting for and against it.  This includes the approach of the British state and the extent of violent unionist opposition.  What the election results demonstrate is that this point is not yet near, whatever about Sinn Fein becoming the largest party and Irish nationalism garnering more votes than ‘big U’ Unionism.  This does not mean that nothing is really changing.

Unionism continues to decline.  Its support for Brexit and rejection of the deal negotiated by the British state with the EU indicates a political movement fighting against its own interests. These are still considered to include a sectarian supremacy that is no longer possible and opposition to economic forces that might make the Northern State more attractive, even while it strengthens the all-island character of potential economic prosperity.  No longer able to make its claims on the basis that it is the majority within the gerrymandered state, it simply declares its veto based on its own existence.  This existence has always been one of sectarian privilege.

The other significant change has been within Irish republicanism, which having ditched its armed struggle against British rule has found itself with no clothes it cannot discard.  From opposition to British imperialism it now stands foursquare behind the western imperialist  proxy war in Ukraine.  Its representatives have acclaimed its recent success as a result of its brilliant electoral campaign.  This put a united Ireland on the back-burner but purposively elevated its attendance at the British king’s coronation, ‘to show their respect’.

It seems not to occur to them that monarchy is the epitome of denial of democracy and deserves zero respect. When Celtic and Liverpool football fans demonstrate a higher level of awareness of very basic democratic and republican principles we can appreciate the level to which Sinn Fein has sunk (with all due respect to those fans).

If this seems a rather glib or flippant remark, we can recall the explanation by another Sinn Fein member who stated that its approach was anticipation of the mutually respectful attitude between an independent Ireland and Britain when it was united.  We are almost back to the original Arthur Griffith Sinn Fein that supported a Habsburg Empire-like dual monarchy.

What this illustrates is the relevance of the Marxist theory and programme of permanent revolution. This argues that the democratic tasks associated with the development of capitalism, such as national independence, should be part of a working class programme and struggle and that it was possible for this struggle to develop into one that went beyond purely democratic questions, and the limits acceptable to capitalism, to be a struggle for working class rule.

This does not mean that such struggles cannot be led by other classes, but that these could not be relied upon to advance the struggle in a thoroughly democratic way or for a consistent and comprehensive democratic outcome.  It matters who leads the struggle, because different classes will lead it to very different ends.

Marxists always defined Sinn Fein as a petty bourgeois organisation, which drew a reaction of complete incomprehension from republicans who were working class and living in solidly working class estates in Belfast, Derry or Dublin.  However, the movement’s political character was defined not mainly by its support considered in sociological terms, including its rural support or its ties to Irish American money, but by its politics.

This politics previously imagined a radically reconfigured capitalism, which the capitalist class opposed, while not seeking to overthrown the system itself, never mind forwarding real working class rule. The Irish capitalist class had no great interest in challenging British imperialism and the Irish working class has interests that go way beyond a united country that cannot provide for its needs.

As the possibility of a united Ireland is claimed to be approaching the democratic content to the struggle is more and more denuded of democratic content.  The obsequious kowtowing to British royalty does indeed show respect but not to democratic and republican principles.  The various scattered proposals to accommodate unionism in a united Ireland are also indicators of the inconsistent approach to a democratic outcome.

Many European countries have achieved unification after the defeat of the popular revolutions that sought to enact it in a more democratic way, such as Germany and Italy.  For socialists support for a united Ireland is a struggle to advance beyond a partitioned Ireland and not one that leaves every other component and trappings of the Irish and British capitalist states intact.

When measured against these tasks, the local government elections in 2023 are not even a minor tremble in the ground beneath the system that must be brought down.

Let the people sing their stories and their songs?

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(Photo By Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

Last week the Ireland women’s football team beat Scotland one nil to qualify for the World Cup, which is more than the men can do.  They celebrated by singing songs including ‘Celtic Symphony’, which includes a line ‘Ooh Aah Up the ‘Ra’ (repeated 23 times in case you missed it the first time).

Cue much declaration of outrage by a whole range of people forming a rather disorderly queue with much taking of offence.

For foreign readers, this phrase indicates support for the Irish Republican Army and in particular in its Provisional IRA incarnation, which is supposed not to exist anymore, and if it does, only in a much-reduced form that has no intention of renewing its previous armed struggle.  In fact, if the IRA was still blowing things up it is very doubtful the song would have been sung.  It therefore signals no meaningful endorsement of anything currently existing. 

Well, that’s not exactly true, since it is a football song and was written by the Wolfe Tones to celebrate 100 years of Glasgow Celtic which, unlike its Glasgow rivals, has never gone into liquidation and had to form itself into a new club. I’m not sure that all its listeners will understand its references to ‘Paradise’ or ‘the Jungle’ but the offending part is clear enough, although its meaning and significance is not.  As a football song it’s passable but even as a Celtic supporter myself it must be admitted that it will not win many Grammy awards.  I doubt it would even make a Eurovision song contest entry.

So, as explained above and for the avoidance of doubt, the IRA or ‘Ra in question is not the one which fought British rule in the War of Independence between 1919 and 1921.  That would not have caused offence, or at least not to the talking heads within the Irish State, which owes its existence at least partly to this earlier IRA.  Whether its violence was kinder, comparable, or even relevant is not something anyone wants to dwell upon lest it all get too complicated.  It’s harder to justify offence taken when it involves considerable deliberation and circumlocution to avoid explaining how some historical violence is ok and some is not.  For some if it’s not ok, well, it’s far enough in the past to consign to history.  The past is a foreign country as they say, so nothing to do with us presumably.

So, if it cannot be consigned to the past, even though, as I have said, the most recent IRA is mostly retired, this must be because the question is not really about this IRA directly but about the current embodiment of Provisional republicanism in Sinn Fein.  It’s about the present.  To quash even further doubt, it is not because anyone believes that Sinn Fein will seek to create the conditions in which a new IRA campaign can begin.  The party has shown often enough, especially in relation to dissident republicans, that it opposes armed action against the British state even if these assurances are laced with lies and hypocrisy.

No, it’s not about the prospect of renewed republican violence, not about the continuing argument over its historical legitimacy and not even about what reflection this has on the current representatives of republicanism.  It is more straightforwardly directed against Sinn Fein’s current project, which is actually light years from opposing British rule in Ireland through armed struggle, or any other political struggle if we think about it.  Today it is the major Party seeking to implement the favoured form of British rule in the North of the country, and if it has any complaint about the British, it is that they are not pushing this project hard enough against unionist opposition.

One can only imagine therefore how pleased Sinn Fein must be that the traditional expression of Irish nationalism through song is now associated so much with itself, knowing that nationalism dominates politics in the Irish State, as all its main parties are a variety of it, and its history of opposition to British rule is widely viewed, especially by the working class, as popular and legitimate.  We see this reflected in the fact that ‘Celtic Symphony’ reached number 1 in the iTunes chart and number 2, to be sure, to be sure that you can’t miss the message.

This shouldn’t be a surprise as controversy over a previous song – ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans’ – followed attempts by the Irish Government to go a step too far in equating Irish nationalist resistance to British rule with the defenders of that rule.  Ironically, this song is also not a very good example of the better strains of the Irish nationalist tradition, but the continuing hold of this tradition was shown when it too reached number 1 in the iTune chart.  Perhaps the outraged were seeking some revenge but if they were they failed, again.

However, much of the reaction against the faux outrage of the various constituencies ‘offended’ by the singing of the song is also missing the point, or several.  While it is absolutely correct to dismiss the hypocrisy of the British media, which laughably thinks the women need to learn Irish history; and politicians who lament its damage to the ‘shared future’ with unionism, which requires for example that the mass slaughter of the First World War is commemorated by nationalists as a symbol of respect for their politics, it is also important to look at what the controversy means for those rushing to defend its use.

Yes, this ‘outrage’ and ‘offense’ is synthetic and if taken at its word would prohibit any expression of Irish nationalist opposition to British rule.  This tradition did involve violence, but nothing on the scale of that perpetrated by British imperialism.  Many of those lamenting the glorification of violence, and its traumatic effect on some who are still living, are wilfully blind to the violence of the British state.  Their sensitivity to its cruel effects is very discriminating.  Almost all of them are incapable of explaining why this violence occurred, which means their expressions of sorrow are objectively so much cant.

But some of the defensive reaction to it is unsatisfactory, to put it mildly.

One of the Wolfe Tones is reported to have dismissed complaints by saying that some of it came from people who ‘aren’t really Irish’, which if it refers to Northern Protestants, and who else could it refer to, is exactly the argument of Irish unionism. More apposite however, it is in perfect harmony with Sinn Fein’s policy of ‘respecting the two traditions.’

So, one republican said in response that “I feel very sorry that anyone died in the Troubles.  I feel very sorry that the troubles were visited on us.’  It’s as if the Provisional IRA played no active part in creating what has been called ‘the Troubles’, which simply paid a visit on it.  It too has played the victim along with every other participant, playing along with the idea that we were all responsible (so no one was) and that we all have to move on – together. And moving on together means partnership with unionism and continuing British rule, all washed down with the hope that the Catholics in the North will out-breed the Protestants and enough will be true to what is expected of them and support a united Ireland.  

It has been argued that the young women didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t actually mean support for the Provisional IRA.  Well, yes and no, or rather no and yes.  They knew what they were singing and what, to them, it signified, and that very likely didn’t mean support for an IRA armed struggle that’s over.

What is represented, what it was, is increasingly common – young people expressing their rebelliousness and defiance of the conventions of older generations, as always happens, through support for an Irish republicanism that is increasingly popular among younger generations.  It expresses both increased confidence and increased anger.  Confidence that being Irish is no longer to be in a backward country compared to its neighbour and confidence that comes from almost full employment and many working for big US tech companies.  Anger that despite this they can’t get a house and renting means queueing with dozens of others for a viewing and paying enormous amounts for sub-standard flats.  What often results is young people having to live with their parents – no wonder there’s generational friction. 

‘Up the ‘Ra’ is therefore what has been called ‘an umbrella toast to republicanism’ which is now the politics they support in the belief that it will sort out their problems.  It combines both youthful rebelliousness, a common generational cultural meme, and a declaration of confident national and political identity with the measure of each varying by individual.

Like much youth rebelliousness it’s not as radical as it thinks it is.  Such republicanism has its support among older generations too and actually has a long history in various forms.  Sinn Fein is not going to lead any revolution and is keen to project its pro-business identity, most recently by declaring its consensus with the rest of the Irish establishment parties by supporting Ukraine and damning Russia.  US multinationals in Ireland have nothing to worry about.

The song from the young footballers is a cultural refection of the fact that, as the last Irish Times Ipsos opinion poll reported, while support for Sinn Fein among all voters was 36 per cent, it was 44 per cent among 18-24 year olds and 43 per cent among 25-34 year olds.

That this rebelliousness of the young against the precepts of older generations draws upon such old traditions and aligns itself with a party that has ditched its own rebelliousness should tell us something about the nature of the ‘offensive’ behaviour,  about those ‘outraged’ and ‘offended’, and about how we should respond to it as socialists.

There was no call to apologise for the singing and no requirement to make more of it than was there by those in sympathy with it.

4 Supporting the democratic content of nationalism

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In ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’ Lenin stated that 

‘The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support, At the same time we strictly distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness; we fight against the tendency of the Polish bourgeois to oppress the Jews, etc., etc.’

We have already explained in the previous posts the limits to such support but there are others that we have not addressed and that have further relevance when considering the situation in Ukraine today.  We should obviously be wary of claims of a democratic content to a nationalism that has already shown its reactionary character.

The recent history of Ukraine has demonstrated that the growth of nationalism in that country has been the product of the cynical strategy and policies of certain oligarchic factions in struggle with rivals.  It has been advanced not as the flag under which democratisation of Ukrainian society has advanced but as a cover for austerity and repression, and as a substitute for the failure of a number of bourgeois leaderships to carry out promises to rid Ukraine of corruption and systematic abuses of democracy.

As this nationalism has advanced it has not broadened the scope of democracy through inclusion of different ethic, linguistic and cultural groups but acted as a weapon to restrict the rights of minorities and impose a single ethno-nationalism.  This has included restrictions on freedom of speech through crack-downs on rival media organisations; the banning of political parties and silencing of particular political views; promotion of an ideology of anti-communism, and attacks on workers’ rights.

This nationalism has celebrated and legitimised fascist figures from its history (see above picture) and current political slogans from far-right organisations, going so far as to integrate their armed organisations into the state, and at times place significant figures in positions of power within the Government.  The significance of the far right has advanced under the banner of, and in lock-step with, wider Ukrainian nationalism.  It is not that mainstream Ukrainian nationalism and the state that promotes it have become fascist but that the mainstream has seen no need or want to separate itself from the far-right movement, which it has celebrated as its ‘best fighters’.

The Ukrainian state has faced a number of secessionist movements but the policy advocated by Lenin in dealing with such movements by offering the right of secession in order to forge democratic unity, as the best grounds for uniting its working class, has been rejected. When Ukrainian nationalism has demanded self-determination it has ignored its own responsibility to defend consistent democracy within the territory it claims.  Instead, it has moved further and further into alliance with the world’s greatest enemy of equality between nations – US imperialism and its NATO alliance.

In sum, there is no democratic content to Ukrainian nationalism and it cannot be defended.  If it currently wields hegemony, this is not only the responsibility of the far-right in the country, or the oligarchic and political factions who solidify their position with its support, but also due to the reactionary policy of the Russian state. This state can offer no democratic alternative because it too is headed by a corrupt and reactionary nationalist regime.  Between two such regimes the ‘instinctive and automatic rush to reach for the policy of self-determination of nations in order to justify the decision to support one side’, as explained in a previous post, is a betrayal of the working class of both nations.

The liberation of the Ukrainian working class will not be achieved in alliance with US imperialism, which is forging the strongest chains for this class through its superior economic and military power.  The utter dependency of Ukraine and its nationalists on US policy has now been firmly entrenched by the massive armed and associated financial support of the US.  Through this war Ukrainian nationalism has definitively made its country a client of the United States; so much for the promise of nationalism. 

Only by a struggle against this can the freedom of the Ukrainian working class be achieved, including in the East and South of the country, and only in conjunction with neighbouring countries including Russia.  This cannot be achieved by the US and NATO which seeks the permanent submission of Ukraine through radical diminution and debasement of Russia.

*                                  *                                  *

Unfortunately, some on the Ukrainian left acknowledge the reactionary character of US imperialism – ‘In this conflict, Russia can in no way be considered a different project than the US and the rest of the capitalist powers’ – but go on to frame the war as a purely anti-colonial struggle, with Russia as the imperial power.  ‘Ukraine needs to decolonize and de-Russify’, which neglects to explain how unity of the Ukrainian working class, including ethnic Russian workers with divided political loyalties, can be advanced.

Lip service is paid to ‘the centrality of Ukraine’s fight for independence from both Russian and Western Imperial domination’, and the war is presented as an ‘existential’ one for Ukrainians’ ‘very existence’, with war aims including the incorporation of Crimea and the Russian controlled Donbas republics under Kyiv rule.  Lenin’s policy of seeking unity through the right to secession isn’t on the table and the Ukrainian right to self-determination has simply become an example of the ‘refined nationalism’ that he warned against.

The article is therefore full of references to historic Russian oppression while defending Ukrainian ‘agency’ and ‘subjectivity’, all the while forgetting that it is now an independent state with its own capitalist structure and dynamics.  The war is framed as a national struggle, just as it is presented in the West; the war aims supported are those of the most rabid US neocon, and the current means of struggle by its capitalist state are endorsed.  How the war is understood, the appropriate war aims and means of struggle supported by Yuliya Yurchenko are the same as that of Western imperialism. 

What we have then is not a policy that will combat the most rabid forms of Ukrainian nationalism, which Yurchenko accepts is a real problem, even admitting the ‘risk [of] confirming Putin’s obscene lie that we are a nation of bigots and fascists.’  What it proposes is an idea that Ukrainian nationalism can be made progressive.  The problem with this is threefold.

First, Ukrainian nationalism is already presented as progressive in a very objective sense, although by no means only that, through the ‘spirit of collective solidarity’ that the war has inspired.  This is despite her acknowledgement that previous democratic protests and mobilisations have only led to the strengthening of different oligarchic factions and the far-right. She claims that ‘Russia’s invasion has stirred up a healthy degree of Ukrainian nationalism.’

Second, the view that a healthy nationalism can arise from the war understood in existential national terms is simply beyond any credible belief.  This is especially the case since Yurchenko’s war policy, being the same as the most reactionary nationalist, promises a ‘long fight’, one that can therefore be guaranteed to build up massive bitterness and resentment. The policy of reliance on imperialism and domestic austerity necessary to finance it, coupled with opposition to the right of minorities to secede, means that nothing progressive could emerge from such a war, unless it provoked a revolt against it and the policy behind it.  But Yurchenko is not proposing that.

Lastly, the idea that any sort of nationalism, however ‘healthy’, could be the cause that would carry the Ukrainian working class forward is simply absurd for the reasons enumerated in the previous paragraph.  Nothing in the answers given in Yurchenko’s interview indicates any strategy to expose the role of US imperialism or that of domestic capitalist and bourgeois political forces in bringing this war to the Ukrainian working class.  The war, she says, was ‘a completely unprovoked attack.’ Nothing about the moves towards joining NATO or the repeated attacks on the break-away regions in the Donbas. Nothing to indicate that the Ukrainian working class has separate interests in the war from its rulers.

‘Compromise’ is rejected and the Minsk peace process merely ‘so-called’ and also rejected.  There is no acknowledgement of any Ukrainian state responsibility for the failure.  Instead ‘we will not settle for anything less than the reunification and independence of Ukraine.’  How this can happen through subordination to the US and NATO is something she is no more able to explain that the rest of the Ukrainian nationalist spectrum.

Capitulation to nationalism means avoiding assignment of any responsibility, and hence any opposition, to domestic capitalism and its rotten state.

Ukrainian nationalism does not find any democratic content that justifies any defence of it just because some on the left support it, portray it as democratic, or think they can make it so.

Yurchenko declares that ‘the international left must put its decolonial hat on in thinking about Ukraine’; in other words, put on its blinkers and accept the progressiveness of a war backed by US imperialism, the corrupt Ukrainian capitalist state, and the ‘best fighters’ of the ‘Ukrainian resistance’–the fascists of the Azov regiment.

Whoever thinks there is any democratic content in this nationalist melange is irretrievably lost to the struggle for socialism.

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3 Lenin Against Nationalism

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In the previous post we noted that capitalism extends itself across the globe, leading to both bigger capitals and bigger states and then to international economic and political organisation.  Inevitably small capitals and small nations suffer.  This does not mean that socialists seek to halt or reverse such processes.

Within the Great Russian Empire, with its prison house of peoples, Lenin advocated the closest relations between its nations and the united organisation of the working class movement.  In his article ‘Corrupting the Workers with Refined Nationalism’ he states that:

‘Marxists, stand, not only for the most complete, consistent and fully applied equality of nations and languages, but also for the amalgamation of the workers of the different nationalities in united proletarian organisations of every kind.’

How far this is from some of today’s ‘Marxists’ can be seen in their championing of the likes of Scottish nationalism or Catalan nationalism.  Where Lenin argued that socialists should demonstrate their proletarian internationalism through membership of united organisations, these left nationalists have demonstrated their nationalism by leading the way in splitting their own organisations along nationalist lines.

Lenin emphasises the need for unity in ‘On the National Pride of the Great Russians’:

“No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations,” said Marx and Engels, the greatest representatives of consistent nineteenth century democracy, who became the teachers of the revolutionary proletariat. And, full of a sense of national pride, we Great-Russian workers want, come what may, a free and independent, a democratic, republican and proud Great Russia, one that will base its relations with its neighbours on the human principle of equality, and not on the feudalist principle of privilege, which is so degrading to a great nation.’

‘Just because we want that, we say: it is impossible, in the twentieth century and in Europe (even in the far east of Europe), to “defend the fatherland” otherwise than by using every revolutionary means to combat the monarchy, the landowners and the capitalists of one’s own fatherland, i.e., the worst enemies of our country.’ 

‘We say that the Great Russians cannot “defend the fatherland” otherwise than by desiring the defeat of tsarism in any war, this as the lesser evil to nine-tenths of the inhabitants of Great Russia. For tsarism not only oppresses those nine-tenths economically and politically, but also demoralises, degrades, dishonours and prostitutes them by teaching them to oppress other nations and to cover up this shame with hypocritical and quasi-patriotic phrases.’

It is not necessary to endorse Lenin’s remarks about ‘desiring defeat’ or ‘lesser evil’ to appreciate the motivation of absolute opposition to the nationalism of Great Russia; the nationalism that lives on today in the pronouncements of Vladimir Putin but which is ideological garb draped over the body of the Russian state and oligarchic capitals that it is designed to protect.

Just as Marx supported the development of united nation states such as Germany and Italy, because this involved the internal overthrow of reactionary feudal privileges and restrictions, so he opposed national oppression within nations and looked to the progressive social forces within the oppressed and oppressor nations to achieve this free unity and benefit from it.  Lenin in this article mentions the ‘freedom and national independence for Ireland in the interests of the socialist movement of the British workers.’

The idea that in Ukraine any positive nationalist programme could issue from a corrupt capitalist state, one more and more the supplicant of US imperialism, and this spearheaded by its ‘best fighters’ who are fascists, shows the drastic illusions consuming many on the left. 

In relation to his opposition to Great Russian chauvinism, Lenin said that:

‘The objection may be advanced that, besides tsarism and under its wing, another historical force has arisen and become strong, viz., Great-Russian capitalism, which is carrying on progressive work by economically centralising and welding together vast regions. This objection, however, does not excuse, but on the contrary still more condemns our socialist-chauvinists . . .’

‘Let us even assume that history will decide in favour of Great-Russian dominant-nation capitalism, and against the hundred and one small nations. That is not impossible, for the entire history of capital is one of violence and plunder, blood and corruption. We do not advocate preserving small nations at all costs; other conditions being equal, we are decidedly for centralisation and are opposed to the petty-bourgeois ideal of federal relationships.’

He goes on to say that this does not mean supporting the capitalist political forces that promote this economic development.  However, it also means we do not seek to reverse it either.

In ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’ Lenin states that:

‘The Russian proletariat cannot march at the head of the people towards a victorious democratic revolution (which is its immediate task), or fight alongside its brothers, the proletarians of Europe, for a socialist revolution, without immediately demanding, fully and unreservedly, for all nations oppressed by tsarism, the freedom to secede from Russia. This we demand, not independently of our revolutionary struggle for socialism, but because this struggle will remain a hollow phrase if it is not linked up with a revolutionary approach to all questions of democracy, including the national question.’

‘We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede.’

Many of today’s ‘Marxists’ see in self-determination only separation and not the objective of unity.  They see the creation of new states where Lenin saw the unification of nationalities.  They think the right to secede mean support for secession when it is the means to provide guarantees to unification.  They think self-determination is only expressed by separation and creation of a new capitalist state when for Lenin it was the means for ensuring voluntary unity and the avoidance of such an outcome. Lenin advocated this policy even in the case of colonies.

In A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism Lenin writes that:

‘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. We believe it is our duty and in our interest to do this, for otherwise socialism in Europe will not be secure.’ 

‘We shall endeavour to render these nations, more backward and oppressed than we are, “disinterested cultural assistance”, to borrow the happy expression of the Polish Social-Democrats. In other words, we will help them pass to the use of machinery, to the lightening of labour, to democracy, to socialism.’

‘If we demand freedom of secession for the Mongolians, Persians, Egyptians and all other oppressed and unequal nations without exception, we do so not because we favour secession, but only because we stand for free, voluntary association and merging as distinct from forcible association. That is the only reason!’

The failure of Russia to offer a powerful and attractive example to Ukraine lies behind its turn towards invasion to substitute for this failure.  Undoubtedly this has divided the Ukrainian people themselves whose attempts to clean their own stables have been frustrated time and time again by oligarchic factions.

Through some of these factions the country has been turned towards the EU and NATO, membership of which its oligarchs and bourgeois political parties have attempted to impose even when the majority of the people have opposed it.  So, an unconstitutional Government signed an EU Association agreement and IMF loans, with their consequent massive implications for austerity, without any elections following the Maidan overthrow of the previous Yanukovych Government. The prime minister responsible, Yatsenyuk, admitted that “I will be the most unpopular prime minister in the history of my country . . .’

Three weeks before the ouster of Yanukovych the most popular opposition figure was Klitschko with a poll rating of 28.7% while Yatsenyuk didn’t even reach 3%.  Yatsenyuk however had the support of the United States, whose plans to put him in place were famously discussed in the leaked phone-call between US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt days before formation of the post-Maidan regime. 

The current divisions within Ukraine are not simply externally imposed but prove the failure and hypocrisy of nationalist claims to further national unity and oppose foreign interference.  In February 2017 a Gallop opinion poll recorded that more Ukrainians considered NATO a threat than a protection.  Nevertheless, the Ukrainian Government changed the constitution in 2019 to add a stipulation on “the strategic course” of Ukraine toward NATO membership.

This course has played no small part in causing the current massive escalation of war and making Ukraine utterly dependent on US imperialism, exposing all calls for defence of this state and its regime on the grounds of self-determination to be deceitful lies.

It is ironic that this subordination to the United States has been accompanied by, and is the product of, the growth of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism, proving that Lenin was right to warn that bourgeois nationalism will happily ally with external imperialism while demanding sacrifice from its own people.  This nationalism disguised as ‘self-determination’ has inevitably infected its left supporters in exactly the same way; we noted at the end of the previous post the absurdity of some on the left declaring that self-determination requires the ability of Ukraine to decide its own international alliances, including subordination within NATO.

The result of such subordination makes all talk of self-determination by the left while welcoming weapons from ‘anywhere’ – read NATO – not so much utter delusion, or even mistaken, but treacherous betrayal.  Having invited the US to determine the outcome of the war does this left really pretend the US will not determine the outcome of the peace? 

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