International Worker No 240, Saturday October 11, 1997

The Socialist Workers Party:

Late converts to separatism

By Tony Hyland

The support lent to Scottish and Welsh devolution by all the middle class radicals has served to expose the counterfeit nature of their socialist and internationalist credentials. The only argument between them is over who can offer the most Marxist-sounding phraseology to justify prostration before nationalism. In the process they have been revealed as apologists for the main agents for its growth -- the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) held onto a formally correct opposition to nationalism longer than most, but their late conversion only highlights the unprincipled character of their politics.

Until recently the SWP's most comprehensive statement on devolution and the rise of Scottish nationalism was the pamphlet, Scotland -- the socialist answer by Chris Bambery. The author correctly explains how nationalism is being promoted to divide the working class and conceal the class issues. He adds that, "a devolved Scottish parliament will have no real powers over the key decisions which affect our lives -- over our jobs, our pay or the economy. Power does not reside in parliament. Real power lies with the unelected officials who control the Bank of England, the civil service, the police, the army, the secret services and so on. The economy is free from any democratic control whatsoever -- we are repeatedly told by the Tories and now by Blair that the market decides."

Bambery explains that the growth of Scottish nationalism is due to the undermining of class consciousness and the confidence of the working class in its own capacity to defeat the onslaught being waged by capitalism on jobs, wages and conditions: "In Scotland such pessimism is fed by the cross-class alliances and nationalism which has dominated and characterised many fight backs. This results from the past dominance of the Communist Party in the working class movement. Its ideas influenced many more in the Labour Party and the unions.

"Repeatedly they argued that it was possible to build pan-Scottish unity including bosses, the churches and sections even of the Tories to protect our jobs and services."

That was the formula used over the closure of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971.

"When it came to the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-5 the Scottish NUM argued against blocking coal going into Ravenscraig steelworks because any threat to production might threaten Scotland's steel industry. The Scottish TUC brokered a 'deal' whereby TGWU drivers brought 18,000 tons of coal into the plant each week in order to maintain production.

"The campaign to save Ravenscraig was conducted on a nationalist basis which ruled out strike action because it might alienate establishment support. The other side of this was acceptance that closures were necessary, but that they should happen in the north east of England or south Wales.

"Today the Scottish TUC is one of the champions of cross-party collaboration in the Scottish Constitutional Convention.

"Cross-class unity cannot benefit workers. We have nothing in common with the Scottish Tories or Scottish business figures."

This however was six months ago. In the issue of the Socialist Worker that came out before polling day it states in an article entitled "Vote Yes Yes":

"Nobody should be lulled into voting against devolution. How dare the bosses try to stop people for voting for a little bit more democracy, another avenue to raise demands for change".

The SWP have not only changed their position on the fraudulent claim that a parliament in Edinburgh would mean more democracy, but ditched their appraisal of Scottish nationalism being based on class collaboration and sowing divisions in the working class. Their occasional warnings against divisions between Scottish, Welsh and English workers sound as sincere as a government health warning on the side of a cigarette packet!

In line with this new perspective the SWP attempted unsuccessfully to join Scotland Forward, the cross-class front made up of the Labour Party, Liberal-Democrats, Scottish Nationalists, the trade unions and even disaffected sections of the Conservatives. This organisation was set up by the very Scottish Constitutional Convention they once denounced.

Apologists for Labour

The SWP justify their volte-face by claiming that it is impossible to take an independent class position because to oppose devolution would mean lining up with the Tories. They continue to maintain that the Tories are the sole authoritative voice of the ruling class, in keeping with their position that Labour is still a workers' party and not the preferred party of big business. Every quote they use is carefully chosen to reinforce the lie that there is universal opposition to devolution and conceal the significant support for Blair's agenda in Britain's boardrooms.

The SWP do not claim that Scotland is an oppressed nation, but maintain that separatism should be supported because anything which destabilises the British state is positive. This line owes nothing to proletarian internationalism and everything to middle class radicalism.

The nation state system is becoming increasingly obsolete. The globalisation of production has raised the fundamental contradiction between the world economy and the nation state to breaking point. The critical question is how will this be resolved? Will it be progressively through the combined movement of the international working class liberating the modern productive forces from the fetters of the nation state and private ownership or retrogressively in a new imperialist carve-up of the globe through wars and ethnic conflicts.

All over the world separatist movements have developed as rival bourgeois and petty-bourgeois cliques vie for international investment by offering the transnationals new havens to plunder natural resources and exploit cheap labour. The break-up of Yugoslavia and war in the Balkans began with the emerging capitalists in two wealthier republics, Croatia and Slovenia, demanding separation in order to establish more direct relations with the capitalist world market.

In the imperialist centres, sections of the ruling class and middle class no longer feel their interests are served through the old nation state structures. In Canada this has led to nationalist movements in Quebec, while in Italy the Lombard League calls for the separation of the richer north from the impoverished south.

The task of Marxists is not to say, "Amen" to all this because the old state structures are coming apart. The SWP do not even attempt to place the issue of Scottish and Welsh separatism within such an integral world analysis. In the past they have made correct points on these developments. Now they merely fall back on good old British exceptionalism, solemnly declaring that, "Britain is not Yugoslavia".

The Socialist Equality Party's opposition to Scottish separation is not based on the claim that the day after a parliament is established in Edinburgh, an ethnic bloodbath will ensue. Separatism represents the selfish interests of a wing of the ruling and upper middle class who want to establish a more direct relationship with the transnationals and the world market. They seek to deflect opposition to the social crisis down the road of nationalism in order to sow divisions in the working class.

In their drive to offer workers up as cheap labour for the transnationals, every opposition to the attacks on wages and conditions has been smothered by the STUC from Hoover to Timex. Devolution will only accelerate this process of pitting Scottish workers against their brothers and sisters in other countries, leading to a further levelling down of living standards. It will also create the political environment in which right wing forces will incite racism and nationalism.

Not the lesser evil

It is to prevent such a prospect that national separatism must be called by its right name. The SWP evade this elementary duty by stating that it is, "British nationalism which is the greatest danger not Scottish and Welsh nationalism". The responsibility of socialists is to oppose national divisions, not to operate a selective policy of supporting the "lesser evil". The SEP opposes British nationalism from the standpoint of the unity of the international working class. This is why we will have no truck with those who try to pull the wool over workers' eyes by attributing a progressive mission to separatism.

Even in Bambery's pamphlet, the SWP state that if people want it then their right to do so must be defended. This presents the rise in support for nationalism as some natural unfolding "will of the people" and ignores its root cause in the betrayals of the old workers' organisations. The legacy of Stalinism and reformism has left workers disillusioned in the possibility of a socialist answer to the crisis they face. That is why the main beneficiaries of growing social discontent have been nationalist and right wing demagogues.

What Rosa Luxemburg had to say on those who cite the "will of the people" to justify support for nationalism ably expresses the standpoint of Marxism and is a damning indictment of the SWP:

"The nation wants what the majority of the people want. But woe to the Social Democratic Party which would ever take that principle as its own yardstick: that would condemn to death Social Democracy itself as the revolutionary party. Social Democracy by its very nature is a party representing the interests of a huge majority of the nation. But it is also for the time being in bourgeois society, insofar as it is a matter of expressing the conscious will of the nation, the party of the minority which only seeks to become the majority. In its aspirations and its political programme it seeks to reflect not the will of a majority of the nation, but on the contrary, the embodiment of the conscious will of the proletariat alone. And even within that class, Social Democracy is not and does not claim to be the embodiment of the will of the majority. It expresses only the will and the consciousness of the most advanced and most revolutionary section of the urban-industrial proletariat. It tries to expand that will and to clear a way for a majority of the workers by making them conscious of their own interests. 'The will of the nation' or its majority is not therefore an idol for Social Democracy before which it humbly prostrates itself. On the contrary, the historic mission of Social Democracy is based above all on the revolutionising and forming the will of the 'nation'; that is, its working class majority." (The National Question, Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg Monthly Review Press. p142)

The SWP are not articulating the "will of the people", but that of Tony Blair, the Labour and trade union bureaucracy and the bourgeois interests they articulate. They can present a formally correct line on nationalism in one breath and signal their abject capitulation to it in the next because they will always sacrifice the independent interests of the working class on the altar of their support for the labour bureaucracy.

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