The Nation in the Transitional Epoch

This article is a discussion article and does not represent the position of International or of the IMG. It is an abridged version of a much longer article intended for subsequent publication, which we are printing in this form because of the urgency of initiating a serious discussion on the national question amongst revolutionary marxists. In the context of a new rise of national struggle in Europe, with the continuation of the ongoing struggle in Ireland, the need for clarity among British marxists on the national question has never been greater. We invite our readers to contribute to a very necessary debate on this question by submitting articles for publication in future issues.

1 INTRODUCTION

No area of human political action has demanded more clarity and decisiveness from socialists than national struggles — that is, struggles for the formation of nations, for the secession of nations, and of nation against nation. For one-and-a-half centuries, the hallmark of authentic class conscious socialism has been support for the struggles of the oppressed nations, vigorous opposition to the wars of conquest and enslavement waged by the imperialist nations, and rigid adherence to the principle of working class independence from all other classes. The last fifteen years have seen severe tests of these principles in the workers movement at the hands of the anti-imperialist struggles which opened up and inflamed the present phase of revolutionary ferment in Western Europe. A whole generation of revolutionaries owe their existence to the courage, sacrifice and successes of Vietnamese, Cuban, Algerian, Irish and Angolan fighters against the imperialist countries. This generation evolved outside the Social Democratic and Communist Parties precisely because these traditional socialist organisations refused to uphold the traditions of socialism. These same years have also seen the opening of national struggles of a new kind — in the imperialist heartlands themselves. Imperialism, in its phase of decay, is opening the lid which it closed a hundred years ago on the national minorities of Western Europe. Just as the struggle of the Catalan workers against Franco's forces developed into one of the most heroic, advanced and testing for the European revolutionary movement in the pre-war years, so the Basque struggle promises the same against Franco's heirs. In France, a new awakening of nationalist sentiment and struggle in Brittany and in Occitanie has now been joined by the eruption of national struggle in Corsica. In Britain, the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism has been equally pronounced; but instead of the direct action of the masses in struggle, it has taken the opposite form of a rise of parliamentary nationalist parties. But if anything, its effect on the stability of the bourgeois order has been equally spectacular. The Scottish National Party has virtually replaced the Tory Party as the electoral party of the bourgeoisie in Scotland, has brought on one of the major political crises of the Labour Government over devolution, and in regional council by-elections has shown that it can make serious inroads into Labour's working class electoral base. This was capped in January with the formation of a new devolutionist Labour Party: the Scottish Labour Party, which has so far involved two Labour MPs, a solid chunk of its apparatus, and appears to be well on the way to a four-figure membership.

A practical and theoretical challenge to Marxism

The emergence of these new nationalist movements throws down a challenge to Marxism. The challenge is very serious. On nearly every occasion when socialism has failed the working class, its failure has turned on one or other aspect of nationalist ideology; and all its major successes have made use of the subtle and difficult tactic of prising loose the weapon of nationalism from the hands of the bourgeoisie and harnessing it in the service of the revolution — without simultaneously tying the working class to it. The practical challenge to Marxism is clear; in the coming phase of revolutionary upsurge in Europe, it must satisfy three tasks: (i) win the workers movement to an understanding of its duties towards the national minorities and of their revolutionary potential, (ii) win over to Marxism those forces in the 'peripheral nationalities' of Europe who are being impelled by the march of events in a revolutionary socialist direction, (iii) fight tooth and nail in the workers movement against the use of nationalism by reactionary class forces. With this practical challenge comes a theoretical challenge. The collapse of the Second International shows how serious this is. In theoretical struggle on national questions, there is no room for any lack of clarity or principle. Only the most rigorous theoretical analysis can provide the basis for the practical victories which are needed. Any serious analysis of the national question in Western Europe must start from the positions of Lenin and the debates around them in the early 1900s. To do otherwise is not just to throw away the contribution of one of the most consistent, comprehensive and inventive Marxist writers on the national question: far more important, it is to throw away the accumulated experience of the workers movement itself. But Lenin wrote in the period of ascendance of imperialism, when it had just become a world system and laid the foundations of the world market. He therefore addressed himself to two situations which preoccupied Marxists of the time: the annexation of small nations during the formation of large nation-states of Europe, and the imperialist enslavement of foreign territory by the imperialist powers and by finance capital. The national struggle of each was dominated by the struggle of the national bourgeoisie, emerging out of backward conditions to become an independent political force. The proletariat was not as yet the dominant non-bourgeois force. Not only were the large mass of producers the peasantry, but they produced under either semi-feudal or petty-commodity conditions. Furthermore, the reactionary feudal classes still held a great deal of political sway and had to be overcome as the precondition for an untrammelled struggle against the bourgeoisie. In short, the bourgeois-democratic revolution in all these countries was incomplete. For this reason, the assertion of bourgeois-democratic rights and in particular the right to self-determination was the pivot of revolutionary strategy, not only in the oppressed nations but everywhere the bourgeoisie was struggling to conquer political rights against reactionary classes — as in Russia. Firstly, the workers had to ensure the completion of the bourgeois tasks of the revolution to secure the best possible conditions for their own independent role: elimination of reactionary classes and pre-capitalist production on the land; constituting large-scale industrial production to ensure the social predominance of the proletariat and the economic preconditions which would enable it to embark on the building of socialism; and securing minimal bourgeois democratic rights to give the workers freedom of operation and organisation in the class struggle. Secondly, they had to secure the most effective class alliance against the bourgeoisie and the reactionary classes. An alliance with the peasantry in particular was needed, and Lenin thought that the best way to do this was to offer them the completion of the democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution under the dictatorship of the workers and peasantry, without challenging bourgeois production relations in themselves. This position of Lenin, concretised in the slogan of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', was rejected by Trotsky, who instead advocated proceeding directly to the socialist tasks of the revolution after the seizure of power by the workers, maintaining the alliance with the peasantry through socialist and democratic measures in their favour carried through by the workers in power. But neither of these positions assist us in dealing with the actual problems of the nations of Western Europe today, where the tasks of the bourgeois revolution are complete, where we are dealing with imperialism not in the ascendant but in decline, where the bourgeoisie has generally abandoned national aspirations, and where its rare national projections (such as in Scotland) are attempts not to constitute itself a nation against a stronger and more aggressive external bourgeoisie, but on the contrary aim at reviving latent national institutions in an effort to escape the clutches of its more enfeebled and decrepit sections. When in 1917 Lenin abandoned his old positions and espoused those of Trotsky, he did not merely accept in practice the theory of permanent revolution. On the contrary, he fundamentally modified all his previous thinking with an understanding of the role of proletarian democracy as a qualitatively higher form of democracy than bourgeois democracy, which could solve both the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the revolution and its socialist tasks. This understanding, sacrificed by the Third International on the altar of 'building socialism in one country', has passed into the hands of the Trotskyist movement alone. All Lenin's writings from 1917 consistently incorporate this idea; but he never thoroughly reworked his positions [on] the national question — a failure which has cost the social[ist] movement dear, as it was never immunised against the disease of the 'stages' theory of revolution with which [Stalinism] has poisoned the workers' movement. This defines the scope of the present article. Practically it is aimed at opening a debate on the question of national minorities in Europe. Theoretically, it aims to demonstrate that a rich new vein of insight and clarity exists on the national question through a Trotskyist critique of Lenin's positions: through bringing to bear the Trotskyist movement's understanding of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in relation to democratic, bourgeois tasks and by applying this to and synthesising it with Lenin's ideas and doctrines on the national question. It aims to show that such a theoretical enterprise cannot fail to call for a new synthesis of Trotskyist thinking on the revolutionary process.

2 LENIN, NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

Lenin's position on the national question forms an integral part of his conception of the epoch, as being one in which the basic bourgeois tasks of creating a system of unified capitalist nations and a world market have been satisfied, in which it develops monopoly, imperialism, inter-imperialist wars, and in which revolutionary upsurges of the proletariat break out. Although his analysis of imperialism was not set out until 1914, the idea that capitalism has exhausted its progressive potentialities is a consistent theme throughout his work. His position can be summed up in two phrases: international unity and independence of the proletariat, [and] completely consistent democracy. From this standpoint, Lenin defends the three cardinal and inter-related positions we quoted at the beginning: support for the struggles of the oppressed nations, vigorous opposition to the wars of conquest and enslavement waged by the imperialist nations, and rigid adherence in either case to the principle of working class independence from all other classes. This is best illustrated by reference to the war of 1914-1918 and to the debate on self-determination. We do not, for the purpose of this article, propose to [enter] into the otherwise important debate on cultural-national [autonomy]. The great dividing line which separates Leninism from Social Democracy was drawn by the national question in 1914. The Social Democrats supported their own bourgeoisies, and the revolutionaries did not. And as Lenin pointed out, once a workers party espouses the nationalism of its own bourgeoisie, willy nilly it starts on a course which leads it to suppress the national rights of all those people oppressed by its own bourgeoisie; and willy nilly it subordinates the working class to the bourgeoisie. Because of the need for consistent democracy, the working class cannot support any bourgeoisie above any other: this does not mean support for no wars at all, but no support for wars waged to give special privileges to one section of the bourgeoisie — inter-imperialist wars or wars of oppression or annexation. Because of the need for proletarian internationalism, the working class cannot allow itself to be used in the special interest of one section of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat of another country: the only way in which the unity of the working class can be extended is through respect of each section of the workers movement for the rights of others. The Bolsheviks stood almost alone at the beginning of the war. Amongst those who stood with them, the figures of Luxemburg and Liebknecht stand largest. Yet Lenin took up the most determined opposition to Luxemburg in 1916 on the question of the right to self-determination, the opposite side of the coin to his position on wars of annexation or enslavement. The Polish social democrats had to deal with a Polish nationalism which played a pernicious reactionary role in the domestic and international class struggle, and even within the Polish workers movement itself — which was split along nationalist lines. Rosa Luxemburg developed a position in response to this, beginning in 1896, that no class had any serious political interest in Polish separation, and in particular not the Polish working class. From this position, which led her to argue (in agreement with Lenin) that Polish social democrats should not put forward the demand for Polish independence, she went further to reject support in general for the right of self-determination. In his polemic against Luxemburg, Lenin points out that sectarian rejection of support for the struggle of oppressed nations in fact leads quickly to great-power chauvinism: 'Then, in her anxiety not to "assist" the nationalist bourgeoisie of Poland, Rosa Luxemburg rejects the right to secession in the programme of the Marxists in Russia, she is in fact assisting the Great-Russian Black-Hundreds [in defending the privileges (to say nothing of the equal rights) rather than privileges] of the Great Russians.' (Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, p.23). He advocates a consistent application of the right to self-determination, without endorsing by this [the] slogan of independence in any particular case. From this it follows logically that the working class must support wars or struggles of the people of an oppressed country against attempts to annex it or to colonise it. To fail in this would objectively be to play into the hands of the large nation bourgeoisie in trying to gain special privileges, as opposed to supporting a struggle for equality. However, this does not mean universal support for the programme of the nationalist bourgeoisie. On the contrary, in general socialists are in favour of the ultimate disappearance of all national boundaries. However, Lenin points out that this can occur only after national boundaries have been redrawn under socialism 'in accordance with the will of the population', only after 'complete democracy in all spheres' has been achieved and the state begins to wither away — for precisely as the state begins to wither away, so 'national' boundaries which are synonymous with state politics [wither away], and administrative boundaries under such conditions will also wither away. What it does mean is a clear distinction between the tasks of socialists in the oppressed and the oppressor nations. 'This example brings us ... to the question of the internationalist education of the working class. Can such education be concretely identical in great, oppressor nations and in small, oppressed nations, in annexing nations and in annexed [nations? ... In the internationalist education of the workers of oppressor countries, emphasis must necessarily be laid on their advocating freedom for the oppressed countries to secede and their fighting for it. Without this there can be no internationalism. It is our right and duty to treat every social democrat of an oppressor nation who fails to conduct such propaganda as a scoundrel and an imperialist. This is an absolute demand, even where the chance of secession being possible and "practicable" before the introduction of socialism is only one in a thousand ... On the other hand, a social democrat from a small nation must emphasise in his agitation the second word of our general formula "voluntary integration" of nations. He may, [without failing] in his duties as an [internationalist], be in favour of the political independence of his nation, [or in favour of] its integration with a neighbouring [state, but in all cases he must fight against small nation] narrow-mindedness, seclusion and isolation, consider the general [interest and subordinate] the particular to the general interest.' (Lenin, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up, section 7 [Works, vol. 22]). Now it can be seen that Lenin offers no concrete guidance on the crucial question of when socialists in the oppressed country should or should not advocate separation, or indeed on their attitude to any national demand. So in relation to Poland he accepts that the slogan of independence should not be raised 'for the given period'. But he supports the Irish rebellion of 1916 precisely on the basis of the long existence of a mass movement against oppression of a popular character, and heaps scorn on those who termed it a 'putsch': 'The term "putsch", in its scientific sense, may be employed only when the attempt at insurrection has revealed nothing but a circle of conspirators or stupid maniacs, and has aroused no sympathy among the masses. The Irish national movement, having behind it centuries of history, passing through various stages and combinations of class interest, manifested itself, in particular in a mass National Congress in America, which called for Irish independence; it also manifested itself in street fighting led by sections of the workers after a long period of mass agitation, demonstrations, suppression of newspapers, etc. Anyone who calls such a rebellion a "putsch" is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon.' (Lenin, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up, section 10).

What is Left Unsaid: The Tactics of Revolutionaries in the Oppressed Nations

What is at stake here is the general conduct of revolutionaries in annexed or oppressed nations in relation to demands of separation and the demands of the national struggle. Lenin's formula is algebraic: it covers a whole series of possibilities and its practical meaning depends on the variant which occurs. In each particular case, socialists have to decide whether or not to raise the demand for separation and whether or not to support given national demands or movements. Today, for example, we would not raise the slogan of separation for Scotland but we support separation for Quebec and advance that demand in Quebec. At the same time we would support the struggle on concrete national issues, such as the struggle for an elected assembly, in Scotland; whilst in both Scotland and Quebec we would fight against offering any support to bourgeois nationalist movements and parties. But of course, it is on precisely this sort of question that all the key debates in the revolutionary socialist movement hinge. And as revolutionary socialists supporting a revolutionary International, with the task of winning the working class of the oppressed nations over to the side of the revolution, provided we are carrying out first the elementary socialist duty of consistent struggle against all oppressive actions of the bourgeoisie of the oppressor countries we have a second duty: to discuss and decide criteria for the slogans, [demands] and tactics of the working class and of revolutionaries in these countries themselves. Lenin's general position on this question is that the crucial issue is whether or not a given national struggle advances the working class and weakens the bourgeoisie on a world scale. This is why, for example, he is quite categorical that socialists must always support the national movements of colonial countries and advance the demand for separation in these countries. He repeatedly stresses that imperialism has 'divided the world into two great camps', and that there is a concrete, historical difference between Marx's time and his own as far as the alignment of world forces is concerned. In Marx's time the large capitalist nations of Europe were assembling themselves against feudal reaction dominated by Great Russian tsarism. In the epoch of imperialism, the main reactionary classes are no longer the feudal and aristocratic classes represented by tsarism, but the bourgeois classes of the major imperialist nations, and particularly those sections engaged in most actively promoting imperialist expansion, viz finance capital: 'In what way has the concrete situation changed between the periods of 1848-71 and 1898-1916 ...? Tsarism has manifestly and indisputably ceased to be the chief mainstay of reaction, first because it is supported by international finance capital, particularly French, and secondly because of 1905. At that time the system of big national states — the democracies of Europe — was bringing democracy and socialism to the world in spite of tsarism. Marx and Engels did not live to see the period of imperialism. The system now is a handful of imperialist "Great Powers" (five or six in number), each oppressing other nations; and this oppression is a source for artificially retarding the collapse of capitalism and artificially supporting opportunism and social-chauvinism in the imperialist nations which dominate the world.' (Lenin, ibid, section 7). It follows that almost all movements of national liberation against the main imperialist powers will have a progressive character (whilst of course this does not mean that the bourgeois leaderships of such movements are capable of carrying through any revolutionary struggle in the country concerned). In his 'Theses on the Socialist Revolution and the Right to Self-determination' submitted by the editorial board of Sotsial-Demokrat to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in April 1916, Lenin makes a threefold division: the advanced countries of Western Europe and the USA, the 'oppressor' nations; the Eastern European nations, where the 'bourgeois democratic revolution has begun but is not yet complete', and the 'semi-colonial countries, such as Chile, Persia and Turkey, and all the colonies, which have a combined population of 1,000 million', where the 'bourgeois-democratic movements have tardily begun, or have still a long way to go'. In the latter, the progressive role of national struggles is so clear for Lenin that he is prepared to advocate support for even bourgeois (never mind petty-bourgeois) movements of national liberation. However, this gives us no guide in the case of annexed nations which are not oppressed by the process of imperialist enslavement — as is the case in Western Europe today, where the small nations are either not oppressed to any great degree at present (Scotland, Wales) or where their oppression is the result of an entirely different historical process. More important still, it gives us no guide in either case as to the concrete tactics of socialists in relation to the bourgeoisie as far as the national question is concerned — and in particular, it says nothing about the relation between the socialist and bourgeois tasks of the revolution. It is this which we must now move on to examine.

Self-Determination & Revolution: A Critique of Lenin

Until 1917, Lenin and the revolutionaries posed the right to self-determination 'in a largely negative sense'. Not only is the world divided up by imperialism, but 'the proletariat is divided into two great camps': those who support the imperialists — the social-chauvinists — and the advocates of revolutionary internationalism, with the vast majority under sway of the social-chauvinists. A possibly prolonged, intransigent defence of principle is at stake. After 1917, the principles are the same but the emphasis is transformed: the proletariat is still divided into two great camps, but on the side of the revolution are no longer just the small band of internationalists but the whole 'sov[iet] movement' and the Soviet Republics: the epoch of wars [and] revolutions has become the epoch of wars and revolutions (or as Lenin elsewhere terms it, the 'Epoch of Dictatorship of the Proletariat'). And in this situation, Lenin abandons the caution of 1914-1916 and inscribes on the banner of the International the principle that in all colonial countries — i.e. for '1,000 million people' — the task of the revolutionaries is not only to pursue the national struggle but to proceed directly through it to the socialist revolution. Thus in the debate on the colonial countries at the Second Congress of the Third International, he states quite [flatly] (and the position is endorsed by the International): 'the Communist International should advance the proposition, with the appropriate theoretical grounding, that with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage.' (Lenin, Collected Works, vol 30). We are still in that epoch. Furthermore, we have entered — after fifty years of retreat — a phase of that epoch which is undoubtedly pre-revolutionary in character, i.e. in which clashes of a more or less pre-revolutionary character are developing in the metropolitan world, in which the bourgeoisie is entering an intractable crisis, and in which the question of socialism or barbarism is posed. We therefore have to consider the tasks of socialists in the oppressed nations, not from the standpoint of the bourgeois revolution, but from the standpoint of the socialist revolution: i.e. not in the negative sense of adding the peoples of the oppressed nations to the ranks of grudging opponents of the imperialist bourgeoisie, but of turning them into the enthusiastic supporters and leaders of the world working class. It is [here that we come to two] crucial critiques of Lenin's pre-[revoluti]onary writings. The first is this: Lenin's formulations on the relation of the bourgeois to the socialist revolution are undoubtedly based on the assumption that the two chronologically succeed each other, that there is a definite period in which the tasks of the bourgeois revolution are completed, including the tasks of creating political democracy, followed by the socialist revolution. Indeed, this is the core of the difference between Lenin and Trotsky. In Two Tactics of [Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution], the [determining] element of the revolution [before the] 'decisive victory of the revolution over tsarism' is the 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' ... 'There is no-one else who is capable of gaining a decisive victory over tsarism. And such a victory will assume the form of a dictatorship, i.e. it is inevitably bound to rely on military force, [on the arming of the masses, on an insurrection] ... it can only be a dictatorship for the introduction of the [minimum] reforms which are urgently, absolutely necessary for the proletariat and the peasantry will call forth the desperate resistance of the landlords, the big bourgeoisie and tsarism. Without a dictatorship it will be impossible to break down the resistance and to repel the counter-revolutionary attempts. But of course it will be a democratic, not a socialist dictatorship. It will not be able ... to affect the foundations of capitalism ... such a victory will by no means transform our revolution into a socialist revolution: the democratic revolution will not extend beyond the scope of bourgeois social and economic relationships.' (Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution). We can [now] see that this position holds that the [revolutionary] dictatorship of the proletariat [and peasantry restricts itself to] the revolutionary solution of democratic tasks without challenging bourgeois social relations in their entirety. If we accept the argument of Two Tactics, we are first drawn to [the] completely correct revolutionary position that it is in the [interests of the prol]etariat to see the bourgeois revolution [carried out and ex]tended to the maximum extent, and to organise to achieve the tasks of the bourgeois revolution [in] its own manner. [This means to] destroy the reactionary classes on which the bourgeoisie can call for support against the working class, preventing the creation of a military-bureaucratic repressive apparatus in the hands of the bourgeoisie, etc ... We are then drawn to the correct conclusion that the proletariat must push this process of independent pursuit of the democratic revolution to its logical conclusion by creating a dictatorship, in alliance with the peasantry. But then we are asked to accept that this dictatorship will carry through an entire phase of developing capitalism limited to the economic tasks of capitalism, during which the bourgeoisie will patiently and obediently bow to this dictatorship and go about its economic (and political?) business. The great value of Lenin's earlier formulations is that he admits and in fact fights energetically for the revolutionary organisation of the working class for bourgeois democratic tasks. Their great shortcoming, corrected only through the experience of history, is that they do not hit on the central crucial point which is at the core of all Lenin's post-April 1917 writings on democracy, that the proletariat, once it constitutes an alternative state, is necessarily obliged to embark on all-out war with the [bourgeoisie] at every level of society; that even in the political sphere, that even before the working class constitutes itself a state, i.e. even when its instinctive form of organisation (the soviets) and its mass interventions into civil life threaten the stability of bourgeois rule, the state organisation of the bourgeoisie and the embryonic state organisation of the proletariat constitute mutually antagonistic, interlocking systems at war with each other — dual power. The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry' which confines itself to 'democratic tasks' is therefore a historical [absurdity, ruling out the only real solution to the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, namely pro]letarian democracy, the proletarian solution to the tasks of the democratic revolution. After April 1917 Lenin hammers this home in passage after passage, which we shall come to later. But in order to give more concrete consideration to the alternative, we must examine in greater detail the role of democratic tasks in the socialist revolution, the manner in which Trotsky poses the organisation of the proletariat for democratic tasks, and the specific origins and nature of the national tasks of the revolution.

3 THE DEMOCRATIC TASKS OF THE REVOLUTION

It has always been an axiom of Marxism that revolution means the overthrow of one social class by another. Revolutionary Marxists have always pointed out that this involves, first and foremost, the overthrow of the state and its replacement by a new state, created by the new ruling class. The very term 'revolutionary party' means a party dedicated to this aim. With good reason: any ruling class sustains its rule through state institutions which maintain, not just the formal power of that class, but all those social relations on which its existence is based. For the capitalist class, for example, the state guarantees the right to own capital, to exchange and to exploit; and it stands guard over everything on which these cardinal rights of the capitalists rest: the structures of the family, customs boundaries, armed defence against other capitalisms, the enforcement of laws to safeguard property rights and guarantee civil peace, and so on. Because all others depend upon them, the most important relations are the relations of production, distribution and exchange. The capitalist class exists through the institution of private property, through production for the market using privately owned capital and hired labour power. Capitalist state structures defend private property. For this reason the first task of any revolutionary class is to transform the relations of production on which the existence of its rival class is based. The first task of the working class on attaining state [power] is to commence the destruction of private production for the market and hence of the capitalist, property-owning class itself. But production relations are not the only relations which exist or define a society. Nor are they the only relations which the revolution must challenge or transform. Nor are they even the decisive relations which actually provoke or organise revolutions. Any real revolution is, in the words of Lenin, 'a festival of the oppressed and exploited': a coming together of all strands of revolt in a mighty social upsurge which challenges the organisation of society from top to bottom. It is a peculiarly narrow-minded cast of thought which conceives of socialist revolution purely and simply as a seizure of power, as the creation of a workers state and the overthrow of market production and private property. It is very characteristic of the workers movement in Britain: the product of a class which has scarcely been oppressed outside of the oppression of wage-slavery itself, which has rarely been forced to raise its head to listen to the oppressed, and has more usually in fact been the partner, either willing or duped, in the oppression of others by its own bourgeoisie. Many of the particular weaknesses of British revolutionary groups flow from a narrow or one-sided picture of what a revolution actually is. Syndicalism and economism, both tenacious currents in the British workers movement, regard the social relation of exploitation as the key to opening the door to revolution. Revolution for them is a sort of mass factory seizure, as envisaged in the revolutionary general strike of the early syndicalists in which all workers would rise up against wage-slavery, seize the factories, and the wheels of capitalism would grind to a halt — to be re-started by the revolutionary workers. A revolutionary process is in fact accompanied by huge movements of social upheaval in all spheres of life: cultural, sexual, economic, juridical, political. The aborted Cuban revolution of 1933 was accompanied by a massive feminist revolt and led to a momentary student government. The Russian revolution of 1917 and the Cuban revolution of 1959 both brought with them cultural revolutions of massive dimensions. National, religious and sexual relations are thrown into the melting pot during the course of revolutionary process. If they have emerged from the furnace not transformed but merely distorted, it is not because the revolution never touched them but because it burned out before it could run its course. Furthermore, the initial driving force in any revolutionary process is never a struggle against exploitation pure and simple but comes from all manner of movements for social change, which may or may not spring from the working class but whose cause the workers movement takes up as its own cause: the struggle of the Russian women workers who struck on International Women's Day and started the February revolution; the peasants' petition to the tsar which initiated the 1905 revolution, the struggle against imperialist oppression which was the raison d'etre of the Vietnamese revolution, the struggle for elementary democratic rights which launched the Portuguese revolution and is now launching the Spanish. But of course these movements of social change do not occur simultaneously, in one big bang. Nor can any of them bring about any lasting change in society in isolation. The critical goals of any revolution are the seizure of power and the destruction of the old ruling class and the production relations on which it is based. The state contains an enormous concentration of power: to make decisions, laws, and to act to make or break any movement of social change. Left in the hands of the old ruling class, it will always be used eventually to turn each movement of revolt back on itself and finally eliminate the gains of the revolutionary process. Destroyed and with a new state born of the mass struggle triumphant, all the gains of the mass struggle can be concentrated, under the leadership of the new ruling class, in a single-minded assault on the basis of the old class and the old economic relations on which it is based. So Marxists have always asserted the primacy of class and state in making revolutions. We say to all forces in revolt against capitalism: 'If you want to make a revolution you must destroy the old state and build a new one; and you must destroy capitalist production relations, you must destroy the capitalist class. All movements of revolt, all movements of social change, must bend their energies to this end, or none will triumph. The only truly revolutionary class is the working class. This is the only class capable of creating new production relations and reorganising a true mass democracy. Therefore, you must fight for your demands to be taken up by the working class, you must declare your common interest with it and struggle beside it: you will only bring about the change you seek if you succeed in this end.' Marxism cannot stop at this assertion. It must offer to the working class, and to those social forces in potential revolt against capitalism, a programme for uniting these movements in a common anti-capitalist struggle, and a means for the working class to achieve leadership. To deduce this programme we must uncover the mechanism of each and every oppression and movement of revolt. At the core of the problem is the fact that capitalism sets itself a series of majestic social goals which it cannot in fact achieve: and creates the social forces which require the solution of these social goals for their self-realisation. It brings into being not merely the proletariat, but a whole series of new social goals on the part of existing social layers which demand, for their satisfaction, the destruction of capitalism and the complete victory of socialism. These tasks are the tasks of the 'bourgeois-democratic' revolution — and this is the meaning of the oft-repeated truth that the bourgeoisie cannot complete the tasks of its own revolution.

Why bourgeois democracy serves the bourgeoisie

Of course, the bourgeoisie does not offer all dispossessed classes at all times a simple choice between slavery and a struggle to the death. It constantly plays off one section against another; most significantly, it has been able to use the spoils of imperialism to extend very general social benefits and democratic rights to the workers movement of the metropolitan countries, whilst carrying out the most savage enslavement of the colonial world to make it possible. However, the methods which it offers the proletariat for the solution or even amelioration of the ills which afflict it are fundamentally illusory, because it offers a form of democracy which offers real power only to those who privately own the means of production and distribution, and whose essential function for the working class insofar as the working class has access to it through its reformist parliamentary representatives, is integrative — that is, it plays the role of persuading the working class to accept the goals and needs of the ruling class without open social conflict. The bourgeoisie knows full well that the differences between its various sections and between it and other classes are not settled at all by the debates in the parliamentary chamber, but by a series of extra-parliamentary [mechanisms], of which the most important are: (a) the fact that the economic laws of motion of society are governed by the market, which operates overwhelmingly outside the influence of both the state and parliament; (b) the fact that insofar as the state can influence the workings of the economy, the bourgeoisie can use the state to bypass parliament because of the independence of the executive from the legislature (i.e. the independence of the civil service, police and army from parliament); (c) the fact that working class parties, which have been integrated into the parliamentary farce, can be directly influenced by the bourgeoisie through the commitment of the trade union bureaucracy on which they rest to preserve capitalism. As a result, working class reformist parties are committed to the preservation of capitalism. What is at the core of these facts, well-known to revolutionary Marxists? The root of the problem is that the very system of bourgeois democracy itself, the very principles on which it is based, is integral to the private ownership of the means of production. Bourgeois democracy is based on the delegative principle, on the separation of the powers of legislation from those of execution, on the divorce of the masses from direct intervention in all aspects of civil life, on the separation of public from private life; on the idea that representatives of the various social classes should settle the conflicts of these classes 'above the heads' of the classes, 'in private'. And it is evident that this corresponds, not to a historical accident or freak, but to the very nature of capitalist production itself. What does the capitalist producer do? He produces for exchange. To have exchange value, a product must have use value, but what the capitalist strives for is the commodity free of all social obligation, the commodity as pure exchange value, the commodity to buy and sell whether its use is to burn Vietnamese, feed the poor or throw on beef mountains. For this he requires freedom, the right to exchange, the right to own. At the same time capitalist production necessitates a state (and hence promotes the formation of nations) in a more categorical, a more essential way than any previous production system: it has to combine guarantees of freedom to own, produce, and exchange with the defence of that ownership against other capitalists or anyone else who might come along and remove property by stealth or arms. So it needs a legal system and a police. It has to have a unified market within national boundaries; which implies also transport and communications, a unified language or a system for regulating the use of minority languages, a national currency, and so on. It needs a system for regulating its differences without recourse to violence, for arbitrating between its various factions. Finally, it needs a system for integrating social conflict with other classes without civil strife or open recourse to repression, where it can. The 'preferred' instrument for doing this is the parliamentary state. Side by side with this form of state go a series of democratic rights which have to be enshrined in the practice of the state and of society in general to ensure its smooth functioning and the freedom to operate of the bourgeoisie: the right of assembly, to form parties, and of free speech — essential if the bourgeoisie is to use the arbitrating role of the state, rights of peaceful protest and minority rights — essential if various social groupings such as national or religious minorities are to be integrated without provoking violent civil strife; and trade union rights — again essential if the antagonism between capital and labour is to be regulated and proceed without civil strife. Every single one of these rights, and every single one of the institutions which embody bourgeois democracy, is organised around the principle of minimising interference in the process of exchange and production both of the state and of the masses. And this is the key: the limitations of bourgeois democracy, even as a system of democracy as such, are imposed by the fact that the principles which minimise the intervention of the state in the process of production and exchange also minimise the intervention of society as an organised body into this process, and in particular the masses as a collective body; and by the same token they are also based on the principle of minimising the intervention of the masses as a collective body into all aspects of civil life. This is the fundamental reason why the bourgeoisie can never satisfy its own goals. The delegative principle in selecting governments is meant to ensure that the masses are awakened to the political issues of national society only every five or so years, that they participate individually instead of collectively at the polls, and cannot intervene until the next time. The separation of the legislature from the executive means that the day-to-day issues of society are in the hands of a non-elective body of specialists (civil servants, police) and do not come under the jurisdiction of even the part of the political apparatus on which the workers can get their hands once every five years. Political parties are constituted on the delegative principle to minimise the access of the masses to their own organisations. Indeed, this was the basis of the division between the Bolsheviks — who demanded the full participation of all party members in its activities — and the Mensheviks; it is at the core of what constitutes a Leninist revolutionary party. The bourgeoisie goes frantic about the prospect of even the minimal degree of subordination of the Labour Party to the masses which was involved in the sacking of Reg Prentice by his constituency party. Rights of assembly and demonstration are regulated by laws and principles which limit them to a purely protest function. Direct action — occupations, sit-ins, mass pickets — bursts the bounds of bourgeois legality and democracy, and bourgeois democracy howls in protest when the masses do it: because all these forms of mass action involve the direct intervention of the masses into civil life. The right of free speech is, for bourgeois democracy, a purely negative right — the right not to be silenced — and not the active promotion of democratic discussion. It does not guarantee the right to hear or to be heard. Polite defenders of the Tory faith point their umbrellas tremblingly in the direction of Speakers Corner and tell you that the thirty fanatics who can generally be found there on a Sunday represent all that is best in British democracy. They are absolutely correct, and nothing provides a more convincing demonstration of the bankruptcy of British democracy. In Lisbon until recently virtually every street discussion would provoke a street gathering. The setting up of an LCI bookstall on a Lisbon urban camp site and the attempt of the manager to disbar it caused not only the whole population of the camp to assemble to discuss the issue, but also caused the Copcon unit brought in to settle the matter to break up and join in the discussion. During any period of dual power or its onset the most passionate and continuous involvement of the masses in every political issue is the norm and not the exception. What a pathetic contrast is provided by British bourgeois democracy! Even trade union rights play an ambiguous role in the organisation of society. The strike is incontestably a form of mass intervention into civil life — the halting of production. Its accompanying activities always tend to draw the masses into action, into mass discussion, into confronting the realities of their situation. But bourgeois society and bourgeois trade union leaders try to enshrine, in trade union rights, a whole series of limitations on the activity of the masses. We have already dealt with the way in which mass pickets are treated. The whole process of free collective bargaining is conducted so as to produce a privy agreement without the participation of the masses, without strike action, without democratic discussion. The bourgeoisie always intervenes in any strike so as to try to atomise and individualise it: through the family, by campaigning for secret ballots, and so on. Mass assemblies occur only where the workforce is highly combative or where there has been a conscious intervention by revolutionaries against the reformists to fight for them; and the principles of accountability of the strike leadership to the mass meeting, of recallability, of no secret negotiations, are all the subject of bitter struggle between revolutionaries and reformists throughout the capitalist world.

Workers Organisation and Democratic Tasks

To sum up, capitalist democracy, born as a specific political form in the struggle against the absolutist state against the limitations on the free growth of capital imposed by the state is as resolutely and indissolubly resistant to the intervention of the masses. But history has shown that in the last analysis the capitalists will always revert to absolutist forms of rule rather than suffer the disruptive effect of prolonged mass intervention. The brutal and bloody experience of the working class, from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Chilean coup of 1973, provide a hundred years of testimony to this fact. And they bear testimony to a far more fundamental fact: not only is it impossible for capitalist democracy to satisfy the social goals of capitalism, they can only be satisfied by a qualitatively higher form of democracy or social democracy. It is in this fundamental sense that Lenin's formula of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' as advocated in Two Tactics — linked to the idea that the dictatorship would not undertake socialist tasks and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie — is not merely algebraic but wrong, and has to be profoundly modified through the incorporation of the role of soviet democracy in the struggle against capitalist social relations. Lenin, of course, understood this perfectly from February 1917 onwards, and prepares the way to an understanding of the role of dual power in all his subsequent writings. In his Letters from Afar, in the Theses submitted to the All-Russian April conference, and in countless other articles and speeches of the time he lays down a completely new strategy for the Bolsheviks. The most commonly emphasised aspect of this strategy is the break with any idea that the revolution will proceed in stages, that the bourgeois stage of the revolution must be carried through to completion before socialist tasks can be embarked upon. But in addition there runs right through the entire work of Lenin at this time and from then on, the idea that the soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers deputies constitute a new higher form of democracy, and a new, higher, state form in embryo. Thus, in the section entitled 'The New Type of State Arising in Our Revolution' in The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, he states: 'The most perfect and advanced type of bourgeois state is that of a parliamentary democratic republic: power is vested in parliament; state machinery, apparatus, and organ of administration are the usual ones; a standing army, police, bureaucracy, practically unchangeable, privileged, and standing above the people. But revolutionary epochs, beginning with the end of the nineteenth century, bring to the fore the highest type of democratic state, the kind of state which in certain respects, to quote Engels, ceases to be a state: "is no state in the proper sense of the word". This is a state of the type of the Paris Commune, a state replacing the standing army and the police by a direct arming of the people itself. [This] is the essence of the Commune, which has been so much misrepresented and slandered by bourgeois writers, which, among other things, has been erroneously accused of wishing to "introduce" [socialism directly]. This is the [kind of state] which [the Russian revolution] began to create in the years of 1905 and 1917. A Republic of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', Peasants' etc. deputies, united in an all-Russian Constituent Assembly of the people's representatives, or in a Soviet of Soviets, etc — this is what is coming into life now, at this very time, upon the initiative of millions of people who, of their own accord, are creating a democracy in their own way.' (Lenin, The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, Theses 11, April 1917). Even more succinctly, in State and Revolution, he writes: 'Here quantity is transformed into quality: such a degree of democracy implies overstepping the boundaries of bourgeois society and the beginning of its socialist reconstruc[tion] ... If really all take part in the administration of the state, capitalism cannot retain its hold.' In other words, mass democracy is intrinsically hostile to capitalism as a political form, regardless of its economic content — a far cry from Two Tactics. The crucial difference is the difference between soviet democracy and bourgeois democracy. Once this is seized, everything else falls into place. In fact we can go further than this, and say that Lenin clearly aims throughout to develop every conceivable form of mass action, every conceivable form of mass intervention into civil life, as a systematic alternative to bourgeois rule and as a great educational school for the masses in running society. One of the clearest illustrations of this is the 'Draft Revision of the Party Programme' submitted by Lenin to the April conference of the Bolsheviks in 1917. It is regrettably too long to include here, but is worth chasing up for its detailed redrafting of a programme so as to include precisely a formula for mass sovereignty in every sphere of civil life.

The Struggle for Soviets

We have so far shown that bourgeois rule is inherently hostile to mass or workers democracy. We have shown that Lenin clearly understood that soviet democracy, as it emerged in Russia in 1917, is a higher form of democracy than bourgeois democracy and an embryonic form of a workers state, in which the bourgeoisie can be eliminated and the building of socialism can begin. But in order to understand the full relationship between soviet power and the socialist revolution, we have to understand first how it is that soviets come about as a generalised mass response to problems faced by the workers. We can then go on to discuss how soviets can take on the socialist tasks of the revolution. There is a fundamental and frequent confusion in the revolutionary movement in relation between the two, which is a result of failing to understand the relationship between consciousness and mass action. Soviets are not an expression of the conscious desire of the workers for socialism. Quite the contrary. They express an instinctive, unconscious response to the catastrophic failings of capitalist rule, and have to be won over to socialism by the conscious activity of revolutionaries. Unlike the bourgeoisie, which first created an embryonic political and economic system and then created states to match it, the working class first creates an embryo state and then has to create a political and economic system to match it. This is often poorly understood because a section of the workers movement generally moves far in advance of the rest and begins to understand its historic role in a crude, unsophisticated way. A vanguard of the class can in fact move very far in advance of it, as happened in Portugal with the growth of ultraleft groups such as the PRP and a very rapid growth of revolutionary consciousness in sectors such as the army, who were confronted in its most direct form with the crisis of bourgeois rule. But this vanguard remains a vanguard, and if it tries to implement a programme of socialist revolution without winning over the soviets first, it brings disaster — as in Portugal on 25 November. The false equation of political consciousness with the existence of soviets leads to both sectarian and opportunist errors: on the one hand refusing to build or organise soviets unless they adopt advanced demands; on the other hand failing to fight within them for socialist tasks to be undertaken. In fact the emergence and leading role of soviets is dependent on the practical tasks to which they have to match up, and not on the level of consciousness of the workers. It is clear, for example, that in April 1917 in Russia the soviet movement was more developed in the provinces than in the towns. In Petrograd, where the revolutionary initiative was taken and the class consciousness of the workers was incontestably higher, and where there were greater concentrations of proletarians in large factories, the soviet movement lagged behind the movement in the provinces because — in the words of the April conference report — 'here the largest forces of the bourgeoisie are concentrated'. Where the bourgeoisie was weakest, and where it could not take the initiative from the soviets, the soviets took on the tasks which the bourgeoisie could not accomplish, sacking the old authorities, establishing a militia, distributing the land, ensuring the continuity of production through workers control, etc. Because the bourgeoisie could not accomplish these tasks or even offer instruction on the bourgeois way of doing it, the masses instinctively adopted revolutionary-democratic, mass-democratic methods, not out of Marxist education but out of necessity and instinct; a militia instead of a police force, seizure of land instead of redistribution by an 'independent' arbitrator, workers control, etc. In fact, of course, mass action and mass-democratic organisation provide a tremendous school of revolution in which political consciousness proceeds by leaps and bounds, as the Portuguese revolution shows. But this consciousness will only develop in a complete revolutionary direction if it has a revolutionary leadership. This process is reflected vividly today in the events of the Portuguese revolution. The creation of Europe's first embryonic soviets fell not to the unquestionably more educated, more politically cultured workers of Italy or France, but to the 'backward' workers, peasants and soldiers of Portugal. Yet it was the crucial weakness of the revolutionary leadership of the Portuguese people which led them to such a crushing setback on 25 November.

Soviets and Dual Power

It is obvious from the above, and from historical experience, that there is a huge difference between the kind of situation which existed in Paris 1871, Russia 1917, Chile 1973 and Portugal 1975, and the normal operation of a parliamentary bourgeois society. In the latter there are only occasional eruptions of mass activity into the otherwise calm surface of society, combined with a formidable latent proletarian democracy in the organisation of the workers which is diverted into bourgeois democratic channels by the workers' bureaucracy. Paradoxically, in an absolutist capitalist state, latent proletarian democracy if it exists is often more capable of spilling over into dual power when capitalist rule breaks down than in a parliamentary state, because the absolutist state cannot permit a bureaucracy to grow. Therefore, a situation of generalised dual power is a distinct phase in the development of any revolutionary process which socialists must both be able to fight for and to recognise. Once we grasp the idea that soviet democracy is an instinctive mass response to catastrophic failings of bourgeois rule and government, and not a politically advanced state of consciousness on the part of the masses, and that the essence for us of this response is its mass character, we can understand the meaning of a phrase in the transitional programme: 'The question of power is today posed.' In an epoch in which such catastrophic failings are the rule rather than the exception for bourgeois society, in which it is 'not merely ripe but rotten ripe' for socialism, the duty of revolutionaries is to prepare the masses to rush into each and every such breach: to substitute methods of mass democracy for the methods of the capitalists and their lackeys, the reformist labour leaders; workers self-defence, mass pickets, mass demonstrations, occupations, workers control, soldiers' committees, mass assemblies, the right of recall and the accountability of delegates before the masses, democracy in the workers parties and unions, popular justice for the fascists and police torturers where the absolutist state has fallen, mass mobilisations to deny a platform to the fascists and workers self-defence against them in the bourgeois democracies, opening the books and workers' scrutiny of the operations of capitalist concerns and of the state against profiteering, deceit, and corruption, and so on. Each and every such united action, each and every manifestation of united mass democracy in action, is a training, a preparation of the masses for soviet democracy. It is in this sense that the Fourth International correctly places the task of preparing dual power as the central task of revolutionaries today. In a more definite sense, the actual call for the formation and generalisation of soviets corresponds to a time when bourgeois rule in one of its aspects has broken down on a national scale, and it is therefore possible for the masses to offer a mass-democratic response throughout the whole of society to this crisis. It is instructive to examine the concrete historical circumstances in which soviets have formed to see how closely their formation follows this rule. First, a military invasion which the bourgeoisie cannot resist: the very basis of formation of the Paris Commune, the first soviet; the basis for the heroic mass struggle of the Catalan workers against Franco; and so on. Secondly, a mass strike, i.e. a general strike or a strike of a character which tends to become general, when whole areas of production and distribution are halted, when the entire normal regime of social life is ruptured — as in Turin in 1919, and to a much smaller extent in Britain in 1926. Thirdly, during a breakdown in government — e.g. when an absolutist regime falls, or during a prolonged governmental crisis. Trotsky proposed the call for soviets in Spain when the monarchy fell, side by side with the call for a Constituent Assembly, and argued against the lefts who wanted not to call for the Assembly. He argued that the function of the soviets would be to 'organise the distrust' of the masses in the Assembly: to supervise its local operations and see that the struggle against the reactionary classes would be carried through. Fourthly, around a defensive struggle against fascism when it organised to a sufficient extent to threaten the mass organisations of the workers — as in Germany in 1933. Fifthly, in relation to a breakdown in the production process, particularly when brought about by systematic sabotage by the capitalists — withdrawal of credit abroad, closing production, etc. The lorry drivers' strike in Chile, the crisis in food distribution, and the general sabotage of the economy, all provoked mass-democratic forms of organisation — notably the JAPs, which started regulating food distribution, and the cordones (local district and factory committees, which took on functions of workers control organisation against the fascists, resistance against the lorry drivers' strike, land seizures, etc). Sixthly, even a mass mobilisation of a directly political character — e.g. against a bourgeois military adventure abroad, against a repressive offensive by the ruling class, etc. During the 'Hands off Russia' campaign, Councils of Action were set up throughout Britain by the TUC, and the workers drew on the experience of this campaign when it came to the General Strike of 1926. This did not constitute fully articulated dual power because an astute bourgeois leadership withdrew before it could become so. But elsewhere in Europe the Russian revolution and the imperialist intervention stimulated huge eruptions of the masses up to dual power and even insurrection. Equally, we should not underestimate the effects which a revolutionary development in Spain will have on the working masses of Europe, even where they are heavily dominated by reformism. If we examine these situations, we see that in every single case it is the fact that political questions at a national level are involved. And this is what provides the crucial qualitative dividing line between a situation in which only the precursors of mass soviet democracy appear, and one in which a generalised tendency to dual power develops — in which the call for soviets is objectively realisable, in which the masses spontaneously go about creating soviet-type organs. To the extent that a crisis of bourgeois rule is involved, at national level, (and in the term 'bourgeois rule' we include the operation of the government, the state and the economy) dual power can develop. The deeper and more insoluble is this crisis, the more the alternatives to mass-democratic solutions are exhausted, the greater is the tendency to dual power. But to the extent that the crisis can be ameliorated or alternative solutions put forward and accepted by the masses, dual power will tend not to be realised. The task of the revolutionaries at any given moment is therefore to struggle for united action on each and every issue which leads the masses towards mass-democratic solutions of the problems posed for them by the crisis in bourgeois rule. This is the essence of the Transitional Programme, formulated by the Trotskyist movement in 1938 with the founding of the Fourth International, which combines democratic with transitional demands, relating to the immediate material needs of the masses and the crisis of bourgeois democracy and of the bourgeois economy. There is not space in this article to go into the byzantine maze of distortions and misunderstandings which the various sectarian groupings begotten by Anglo-Saxon Trotskyism have wreaked upon this notion. We can only paraphrase Omar Khayyam: 'Dual Power doth with logic absolute, The four and twenty jarring sects confute'. Suffice it to say for the purpose of this debate that: (i) There is no essential difference in function between transitional and democratic demands in the hands of revolutionaries. Each enables revolutionaries to intervene in the crisis of bourgeois rule in all its aspects with mass-democratic solutions to the crisis of bourgeois rule. The only difference is that democratic demands, since they relate to a crisis of state rule, are not in themselves opposed by the bourgeoisie at all times, although the bourgeoisie cannot grant them. What the bourgeoisie oppose is the way in which the revolutionaries struggle for them and the mass-democratic alternatives to bourgeois rule which tend to be thrown up by such methods of struggle. (ii) Such a conception of the role of revolutionaries in no way precludes them from making compromises on demands of their programme in the interests of united action. On the contrary, revolutionary duty demands it on three very simple conditions: that such a compromise aids the mobilisation of the masses, that this mobilisation leads towards and not away from mass-democratic solutions to the problems posed by the crisis in bourgeois rule, and that the revolutionaries use the mobilisation created to lead the masses in such a direction through the struggle for their programme within the united fronts of the workers movement. (iii) The prioritisation of one or some of the demands of the programme in the agitation and propaganda of revolutionaries is equally not precluded, but is determined not by the possibilities for mass mobilisation but by the objective nature of the crisis: in Germany 1927, economic demands against unemployment and inflation; in Germany later on, demands for the mobilisation against fascism; and so on. Where does this lead us? It is abundantly clear from [every]thing we have said until now that a prolonged situation of dual power is absolutely intolerable for bourgeois rule. Dual power therefore represents an unstable historical situation. Up until now we have referred to one outcome of this instability — a counter-revolution followed by bloody repression. But we have no interest in such an outcome. We do not accept the Stalinists' puerile apology for the Chilean tragedy that the repression of the Chilean workers 'exposed capitalism before the world'. It is already exposed a hundred times. Nor can we accept the sacrifice of any revolution on the altar of 'defence of Russia' or 'world peace'. The interests of workers the world over are served only by revolution wherever it occurs: this is the only guarantee of peace, the only guarantee of a future for the workers of Russia. If the Vietnamese had given up their fight, would world peace have been more or less secure than it is today, when Congress puts up enormous resistance to sending arms to Angola?

4 THE SOCIALIST TASKS OF THE REVOLUTION

For this reason we have to study and understand the vital question of how the workers can use mass-democracy to carry through the socialist tasks of the revolution. There is room for endless discussion of the nature of socialist production. It should follow, and not precede, the first socialist task of the working class: to seize and hold state power. The essence of the seizure of power is not that it is carried out by a working class ready to take on the administration of society, but that it is carried out by one sufficiently convinced and educated by the experience of dual power to have a go at it. This makes the task of revolutionaries pleasantly easy to define, and very hard to execute: (i) to develop dual power from its embryonic forms to an articulated system capable of overturning the bourgeois state apparatus and replacing it; (ii) to defend the new state against external intervention and counter-revolutions; (iii) to develop an economic and social programme to be implemented via the new proletarian state which will with the greatest expediency and mass involvement expropriate the big bourgeoisie, concentrate the running of the economy in the hands of the workers, institute social and economic measures to bring over intermediate, vacillating layers into the camp of the proletariat, and begin organising socialist production. Now, many of the tasks of the first character can be developed to the fullest extent under dual power: development of a militia, generalisation and federation of soviets up to a national assembly, generalisation of workers control, dispersion of the principal instruments of counter-revolution (fascist bands, police, reactionary classes, etc.) However, tasks of the second character cannot be completed until the seizure of power; and of course, only the possession of economic power renders possible the completion of the tasks of the first character, of creating socialist democracy. They can, however, be initiated by a workers' government in a capitalist state, and their logic then calls up the intervention of the masses: to defend these measures against bourgeois sabotage, and to carry through their implementation. (Up until now we have maintained an artificial separation between the operation of the economy and the operation of the state under workers democracy. This separation, as we have analysed, is inherent in the operation of the ideal capitalist economy, but not at all in the operation of a workers state. On the contrary, in the latter the workers must use the economic apparatus at their disposal to work qualitative extensions of democracy — for example, creating a system of guaranteed access to the media by taking it over, turning over the dwelling places and halls of the bourgeoisie for the workers to hold meetings and organise, financing democracy in terms of travel, publication, etc.). Therefore the revolution needs a programme for the economic and social re-organisation of society to place it under the democratic control of the masses. This is not at all to be confused with the old maximum programme of social democracy, which the social democracy undertook to implement when it took power. On the contrary, the essence of such a programme is that it can be fought for before the revolution through the struggle for a government which will implement it. The difference between such demands and transitional demands is that without being legislated by a government they cannot form the instrument of self-organisation of the masses. The masses cannot act as both subject and object of these demands, cannot undertake to implement these demands in the event of failure to implement them by the existing government, except by seizing power. On the other hand, if they are legislated, they provide tremendous opportunities for the masses to intervene in civil life, particularly when the bourgeois state and class recoil from their implementation. This potential can be realised only to the extent that a government bases itself on mass sovereignty i.e. makes itself accountable to the masses and their organisations. This is the tremendous educative value of these demands, but also provides their inherent practical limitation. This is so essential that an illustration is necessary. The demand for a sliding scale of wages allows the masses to act as both subject and object. They demand of the bourgeoisie that it grant it, they demand of the government that it legalise and enforce it, they demand to be the object of legal measures passed by the government and collective agreements entered into with the bourgeoisie. But they are also the subject of this demand. They organise in a mass-democratic way to confront the bourgeoisie on a day-to-day basis to achieve the demand. Assume even that the demand is formally granted by the bourgeoisie, say through a collective agreement between the TUC and an employers' federation. Or say that the government passed a law making it compulsory. The working class would still have to make itself the subject of the demand. It would only be realised to the extent that their self-organisation was successful in implementing it because the bourgeoisie would struggle in a million and one ways to evade it: haggling over the index or even falsifying it, failing to respect the agreement for weaker sections of the workforce, using the lag between price and wage rises to reduce the cost to themselves, etc. (as has indeed happened where 'indexation' has been introduced). The workers can only overcome this by organising to produce their own index or scrutinise the bourgeois index, entering into systematic agreements of solidarity and organising a workers' inspection to ensure weak sections of the workforce do not fall behind (something the AUEW-TASS used to do in the 1930s to implement its minimum wage — not at all a utopian solution): exercise workers control over price rises, and so on. The effect of this activity is that the workers become collectively responsible for the operation of the demand on a day-to-day basis. This is what is meant by being the subject as a class of the demand, considered as a social principle. The same applies to all the standard transitional demands and most of the democratic demands: sliding scale of hours (work-sharing), open the books, rights of assembly and speech, etc. The process of becoming the revolutionary subject of these demands is the process which Marx terms becoming the class 'for itself'. Under bourgeois democracy the class is merely the object of these principles. It is the subject only of these aspects of civil life which it negotiates in daily struggle — its wage rates, etc. Under proletarian [democracy it is the subject of its own destiny in produc]tion as well. Under a workers' bureaucracy it is once again the object and not the subject, but does not suffer the illusion of being the subject: society is atomised. The 'socialist tasks of the revolution' are therefore clear, and can be summed up very succinctly. They consist in making the working class the subject as well as the object of all aspects of social existence. This is to be carried out through the operation of a workers government based on mass sovereignty constituted on a mass-democratic state, i.e. a soviet state.

The National Question and Workers' Government

The role of the national question in the programme of revolutionaries now becomes much clearer. It is obvious that any solution to any national question, be it bourgeois-democratic or soviet, demands the constitution of a national government. Where no such government exists, its creation is an immensely perilous task for the bourgeoisie. It has none of the conventional trappings (reformist parties, a parliament, etc.) which it needs to ensure that the new government will respond to its needs. The creation of a government on a programme of revolutionary reorganisation of society even in a small European nation would be an enormous threat to the bourgeoisie, because of the electrifying effect it would have on the working class of Europe as a whole, not to mention all the other small nations. This is why it is so loth to start even minimal democratic reforms such as a local assembly. On the other hand, in cases such as Scotland where a determined section of bourgeoisie has decided it wants economic autonomy, it goes about it with the utmost circumspection. First it creates a parliamentary nationalist party. Then it traipses up to the English parliament to enter into a prolonged haggle about setting up a parliament. The first thing it settles is the meeting place of the parliament — the exclusive school which trained half the ruling elite of Scotland. The correct air of respectability being established, it can risk some open debate about the powers of the assembly. Even then it will be three years at the earliest before the elections are held — long after the whole parliamentary apparatus is fully ready. And during the whole absurd process there has not been a single mass mobilisation. Socialists clearly have to fight for the most direct and immediate action of the masses around their social needs relating to their national condition, up to and including the formation of their own government by any means necessary. In every way we want to struggle for the masses to be able to determine the character, composition, role and programme of the new national government. And it is this which enables us to determine the nature of the social and economic programme of the working class for the small nations. It needs to espouse those demands which give a solution to its most immediate burning needs, and which if legislated by a government would constitute the most direct assault on the power and freedom of the bourgeoisie, and which would provide the biggest possible stimulus to its own unity and self-activity: in essence, therefore, the revolutionaries should fight for the kind of solution which the immediate post-revolutionary society will be capable of offering. This gives the revolutionary programme the dual educative role of preparing the masses for the tasks of the socialist revolution — i.e. by explaining what socialism will do for them — and of preparing for the seizure of power, through the mobilisation of the masses for concrete economic and social demands drawn from the programme, through which they come to understand in practice the need to possess state power. It is in this sense that the totality of the economic, social, political, democratic and transitional demands of a revolutionary programme are aimed at leading the proletariat to become the subject of its own destiny through the seizure of power and the socialist transformation of society by means of socialist democracy.

Revolutionary Tactics and the Programme

Of course, all the remarks made in the earlier section concerning tactics and the programme apply to the national programme as well. However, the point must be made that when it comes to the demands of the programme of which the proletariat cannot become the immediate subject but which it has first to impose on a workers government, the danger of a compromise which leads the proletariat in a reactionary direction is far greater. The importance of this point will become clear when we discuss the economic section of the programme on the national question. We therefore have to enunciate a very clear and simple principle: socialists should compromise and offer support in a struggle for a given act of government legislation on condition it in no way compromises or impedes the independent action of the masses. We would support a struggle, therefore, for a Scottish or Welsh assembly to be constituted, but not a struggle to legislate the powers of the assembly through any parliament (including the assembly itself unless it was genuinely accountable to the masses) — above all, not through the parliament of the large nation, because this removes the right of the masses of people in the nation concerned to determine its powers, form and character. It is because of this that the revolutionaries' approach to the national question cannot just stop at fighting for a government and for the right of a people to determine how it shall be governed. Such a struggle on its own cannot draw the dividing line between the legitimate, democratic national sentiment of the workers and the reactionary, protectionist economic national sentiment of the capitalists. It is necessary for the workers' movement to contest with the bourgeoisie for the programme of such a government, and for them to enter their bid in struggle and not in parliament. The workers of each nation need a programme of national and regional demands — a programme of social and economic measures to deal with the particular oppression and discrimination which they suffer, to alleviate the particular social ills of their country. This is a programme to be injected into each and every mass struggle of the workers and to comprise the basis of its contest with the bourgeoisie in government. For the workers of a small nation integrated into a larger one, clearly such a programme is only part of the total programme of revolution of all workers of the large nation. But it is a vital part for workers of the small nation to struggle for, and workers of the large nation to defend: it is an essential tool in forging their unity. The failure to formulate such a programme is probably the biggest single historical failure of the Scottish working class, and one of the major reasons why the agitation of the outstanding Scottish revolutionary John MacLean for an independent Scottish Workers Republic never took root. It is therefore clear, in summary, that the tactics of revolutionaries in relation to the national question revolve around the struggle for a programme of national demands and for a workers government — basing itself on the masses and committed to that programme. We are now in a position to examine the concrete application of this discussion to the national question, by placing it under the general heading of the socialist reorganisation of society.

The National Question and the Socialist Reorganisation of Society

I will begin with a remark which is somewhat obvious at first sight, but in fact is the source of all the most profound insights which Marxism has to provide on the national question. That is that the constitution of nations, and the constitution of states, under capitalism, are inseparable. It is, of course, for this reason that any really thorough discussion of the national question unaccompanied by an understanding of the state is an absurdity. It also explains the incompleteness of Lenin's analysis of the national question and of his statement of the principle of the national question and of self-determination, which never grasps how the dictatorship of the proletariat fundamentally modifies the national question. It is for this reason that it is only possible to understand the proletariat's attitude to the national question via a discussion of the role of the nation under the proletarian dictatorship, in the era of the transition from capitalism to communism. What is the essence of the dictatorship of the working class on a world scale? It is a specific political form of organisation of society constituted and dominated by the proletariat on a national territorial base (i.e. within the state boundaries of districts, single countries) as the first essential step to international socialism. In it, centralised state ownership of the means of production for the first time offers the population a qualitative advance in their potential to become the subject, as well as the object, of their destiny — to determine as well as being determined. It clashes from the outset with the international character of production attained during the imperialist epoch. This is what gives the nation its distinctive, continued role as a feature of the transitional era from capitalism to communism. This is why Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, insists on the Communist Manifesto's description of the proletarian state as 'national in form but international in content'. It inherits a series of features inimical to the full realisation of its potential. Through the struggle against and conquest of these features, it proceeds through the phase of socialism, to communism. These features are: (i) Production is constituted on an international territorial base through the world market and the international division of labour, whereas the dictatorship is constituted on a national territorial base — its principal political inheritance from capitalism. (ii) The capitalist class still retains its hold on society through its existence outside the boundaries of the proletarian state; through whatever production it still dominates within the state boundaries, and through the vast network of loyalties, habits, vested interests and allies which conspire to re-establish its rule and thwart the workers. (iii) The elementary basis for centralised ownership of the means of production is not present for a large mass of backward producers who have not yet introduced large scale socialised production. This applies above all in the countryside, and is the dominant feature of the proletarian state in the previously colonial or semi-colonial countries. Centralised ownership and private or local ownership and production thereby coexist, in permanent mutual antagonism, and areas of production crucial to the life of the masses remain out of their collective control. (iv) The existing means of production and the social needs of the population are not in harmony with each other but are on the contrary in general conflict, a situation termed generalised want or generalised scarcity. This fact, reflecting both the incompleteness of humanity's domination over nature and over itself, means that in the process of attempting to determine social need and bring production into harmony with it, the proletarian state is constantly regulating social conflict and is obliged, as Marx points out in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, to rely on the bourgeois right in distribution — the continued use of wages and a money equivalent for the regulation of private consumption. To the extent that this brings social groups in society into conflict with the whole of society and with each other, their domination over their own destiny is incomplete. Special mechanisms of coercion therefore still exist, and the state plays a role of arbitrator of social conflict — what Trotsky has called a 'policeman role'. To the extent that the state subordinates this role to mass democratic control this has no adverse effect. To the extent that it fails to do so, it develops a specialised elite which dominates the state apparatus and usurps the functions of mass democracy — the bureaucracy. (v) The role in the production process and the situation of distinct groups within society are not equal; on the contrary, society is dominated by huge inequalities bequeathed by capitalism, which means that the simple exercise of mass democracy without safeguarding the rights of the underprivileged in fact confers special political privileges and reduces the effective control of the masses. Not the least of these inequalities, in fact one considered central by Marx, is the role played by the division between mental and physical labour in maintaining separate layers of the population differentially suited to the task of running the state, which for the functioning of mass democracy requires the participation of all the masses. This factor also tends to reinforce the development of bureaucracy. All these factors, which exist quite regardless of whether or not the dictatorship becomes bureaucratised, are the main features of the dictatorship in what Lenin terms 'an entire historical era of the transition from capitalism to communism'. They result, according to Mandel, in a transitional society manifesting neither the economic features of communism nor of capitalism but 'an original combination of both'.

The tasks of a workers government

A little thought reveals that these problems immediately confront, in one form or another, any workers' government. For any government under capitalism which sets about reorganising society in the interests of the workers cannot avoid the fact that its actions will lead to a revolutionary clash between working class and bourgeoisie which can only end in the victory of one or the other. The Chilean tragedy demonstrates this starkly. And it is clear that any post-revolutionary government must attack as its most urgent and immediate tasks all these problems and define its tasks from them. The principles of a revolutionary programme even under capitalism therefore stem from an understanding of how these fundamental problems will be attacked during the revolutionary process. Any concrete programme in a given situation consists of a compromise or selection based on the application of these principles to a given relation of class forces. Let us go through these features of transitional society, and see how they dictate the tasks of a workers government in a small nation.

The national base of the dictatorship

The first task of the revolution is to internationalise itself. This not only means, as is traditional, support for revolutionary movements the world over; it means that any workers government must define its relation to other governments and workers movements in such a way as to give the workers maximum control over the process of production. In relation to the small nations, and even the large ones, this means a persistent struggle for the establishment of socialist federation for the creation of centralised economic planning over the largest possible territorial base. From this comes the need not only for a United Socialist States of Europe, but for the states within that to be based on the federal principle; a Federal Soviet Spain, France, Britain, etc. with federal governments in all the small nations and even in any regions requesting them, relinquishing economic sovereignty over production to the governments of the large nations and eventually to a European government. This has immediate conclusions for tactics. It means, for example, that socialists should oppose separation in the small nations except in the exceptional cases where only separation can break national oppression on account of the backwardness or weakness of the workers of the oppressor nation — for example Quebec. It means, also, that the programme of a workers government in a small nation would be a rather unique one, for it would be defined as playing a vanguard role in that struggle. A Scottish workers government, for example, could not possibly hope realistically to carry through the nationalisation of Scottish industry alone. It could only hope to hold onto such gains and even make them at all if it waged a consistent fight for their nationalisation by the government of Britain, and saw any local nationalisation as a stage in the fight. Equally, it would have to place itself in the forefront of the struggle against every anti-working class act of the British government, whether or not directed specifically at Scottish workers. This is why, equally, the Basque comrades of ETA(VI) came to the Fourth International out of an absolutely correct victorious struggle in the ETA for the subordination of the national struggle to the struggle against Francoism and against capitalism as a whole, under the slogan of a Federal Socialist Soviet Spain.

The strength of capitalist production ahead and behind

Above all, this is what gives rise to the demand for immediate nationalisation of the large enterprises and banks, regardless of whether generalised workers control exists or whether the workers are ready to run industry. It is vital to get industry out of the hands of the capitalists: workers control can then be instituted if it does not exist to secure the co-operation of the technicians and managers and to train the workers in the running of the economy. In the small nations, as we shall see, this demand is an absolutely central dividing line between capitalism, economic nationalism, and the national programme of the working class. The capitalists wish to create a local protected market and currency in order to hold some portion of the surplus product under their control. They will not halt the plunder of the country by the banks and monopolies; they will merely get their fingers in the pie and withdraw a few crumbs. This makes them incapable of carrying through the measures of social reform which are needed so sorely in these countries. Quite the opposite — since they have overcome the crisis of profit rates they propose to exacerbate the social crisis by large scale reorganisation of industry without any concomitant social reorganisation. The increasing domination of the small nations by the monopolies and the perfidious role of finance capital in Scotland (where one third of Britain's financial wealth is concentrated, of which only a tiny proportion is ever spent in Scotland) means that the nationalisation of the large companies and the banks plays a particularly central role in the programme of any movement seeking the emancipation of the people of such a nation.

The continued existence of backward producers

This is still a major problem in the small nations of France and Spain, where not only is the agrarian question still alive, but the recent brutal attempts at a solution by capitalism have provoked the most vigorous resistance by the peasantry and new alliances of peasant and workers in struggle. Portugal shows how these producers can be won to the side of counter-revolution. Measures such as the nationalisation of the distribution network, workers and peasants control over the distribution and supply of agricultural materials, voluntary agreements between producers' co-operatives on sales and production quotas negotiated by committees of producers and consumers are clearly vital.

The existence of generalised want

It is this above all which necessitates a state apparatus, and which presents it with the dangers of bureaucratic degeneration or deformation. The only form of state which can offer true self-determination for all parts of society is the democratic centralist state. This means both the maximum decentralisation of execution of decisions and the maximum devolution of administration; it also means the maximum centralisation through due process and of democratic discussion, of decision making. In this sense it is completely different from decentralised self-administration on anarchist lines, which in fact reduces self-determination because it denies local units access to central processes which still dominate them whether they like it or not. Self-administration and a developed bureaucracy can co-exist as Yugoslavia shows. But generalised want also means something even more specific; it means that compulsion must still exist. Unlike bourgeois democracy which subordinates the majority to the minority, workers democracy with proper safeguards subordinates the minority to the majority. But it still operates compulsion. Generalised want and compulsion disappear to the extent, not that production is stepped up until it meets consumption needs, nor that compulsion is restricted to meet production. They disappear to the extent that each is brought into harmony with the other. This can only occur through the democratic organisation of society as a community of both producers and consumers, at all levels of the state. This guarantees the best specialist evolution towards communist society, in which production is for socially determined use and the bands of compulsion fall away. The organisation of the workers as consumers is an integral part of recent developments of dual power, provided it is understood that social consumption is also consumption — use of houses, schools, social welfare, and even the 'use' of factories as places of work. In Portugal and now Spain there have appeared neighbourhood committees to take up issues precisely relating to such consumption. In Portugal and Chile, consumers' co-operatives sprung up to regulate distribution of goods for private consumption. But consumption is constituted, unlike production, on a social territorial base — essentially, in an area defined by the distance which workers normally travel. Any locality is a complex of houses, hospitals, schools, and places of work organised around a stable community of consumers, as well as a community of producers. Self-determination requires that any social activity shall be controlled by the peoples of the communities who engage in it and are affected by it. So centralised control of production is necessary. Equally, decentralised control of administration and of consumption is required. Hence local control should be demanded of all aspects of social consumption: transport, schools, housing, education, hospitals, siting of factories and so on. From this it is an elementary step to see that the programme of a workers government in a small nation would include not only the demand for no external state interference, for complete autonomy in all these matters onto all democratic local institutions within its authority.

The continued existence of minorities and inequalities

It is from this very fact that the continued protection and right of representation for oppressed and minority sections of the population is vital even after the seizure of power: women's right to choose, national and religious minority rights, self-organisation and double representation of minorities and oppressed sections within the structures of soviet power, and so on. But it has special significance for the small nations of Europe, where regional inequalities of social wealth constitute one of the main forms of national discrimination. It is in this sense that Scotland, for example, is discriminated against but not oppressed. However, this discrimination is inherent to the workings of capitalism and the state is generally not implicated, and in fact tries through regional grants etc. to overcome it. We shall analyse its roots in the next section. The crucial point is that it is necessary for the state to alleviate it, but it can only do this by appropriating a far larger portion of the social product than it at present has access to. This is why the capitalist state is incapable in general of fighting this inequality. Therefore, finally, the programme of socialists must include the demand for a crash programme of social reform to alleviate this inequality, on the basis of a plan drawn up by the workers of the regions concerned. Such a programme can only be implemented and financed if coupled with the demand for the expropriation of the large companies and banks to which we have already referred.

5 NATIONAL MINORITIES IN WESTERN EUROPE

Now we have outlined the general principles underlying the tactics of workers governments in relation to the national question in the transitional epoch. But this still does not tell us what weight the national struggle assumes in the general class struggle, what priority socialists should give it. Nor does it say what the concrete tasks of the workers in each of the existing nations are. The answers can only come from a concrete historical examination of the conditions in which the national struggle reached its present stage of development in each such given country. This is what we shall now undertake in relation to the small nations of Western Europe. At the outset, we can lay down the conditions under which the national questions assume importance in the class struggle. This is when the solution of national tasks will advance the struggle of the workers on a world scale and when failure to solve them will retard this struggle. Historically this has required a combination in varying degree of two factors: (a) when there are specific social, cultural and economic needs generated amongst the people of a nation by the conditions of production and rule in that nation, which require for their solution a distinct set of social and economic measures and engender distinct aspirations in the various classes of that nation for the satisfaction of these needs (for example, recognition and use of a national language, provision of social welfare and amenities, constitution of an independent market, etc., removal of racial oppression etc.), (b) when there is a suppression of democratic rights which result from the intervention of an externally-based state apparatus against the satisfaction of these needs. Obviously such conditions will arise from a set of definite historical conditions. Let us turn to the examination of these circumstances.

The nation as the product of class and state.

The nation and nationalities appear as definite entities [through the operation] of the state and of production. In one sense, [we can say that] nations are products of the state: states tend to produce uniform administration and therefore the acceptance or imposition of common customs, morals, languages, etc.; distinct territories, and therefore stable communities — in short, the features of a nation. However, we are not Hegelians, and we do not believe that the state descends from the sky. The state as a distinct entity, autonomous from society, appears as the result of the action of classes. The state is the body to [which] the ruling class delegates the job of ruling. To be precise, it delegates those aspects of the job of ruling which have to be exercised collectively by the ruling class instead of individually. We cannot discuss the operation of the state without looking at the stage of development of the forces and means of production, and of classes, which gave rise to it. Furthermore, we should note that national communities are produced not just by the action of the state but by the social relations of production themselves, and hence by the classes which organise these relations. Commerce is an obvious activity which spreads and unifies language, customs and morals. In a crude sense, a capitalist state demands a nation because there is universal commerce within a national state boundary. More generally, we would say that nations are produced by the dialectic between the state and the action of classes on society through the medium of social intercourse: and that once a combination of factors produces a generalised social activity requiring a community of language and [customs on a] given territorial base, the conditions for the [nation exist. The ruling] class under whose rule [the] first systematic task of [nation formati]on began was the landed aristocracy, through the institutions of the monarchy. But the monarchy itself could be regarded in many ways as an intermediate social institution — an institution which was needed by the aristocracy for collective defence on the one hand; but which was clearly looked to by the emerging capitalist classes for entirely different purposes: as an instrument for building up commodity production in the towns at the expense of the country; for carrying out the clearances in England, for example, to create a class of free artisans, to provide protection for individual capitals and for property rights in the towns, and so on. The limitations of the monarchy from the point of view of the capitalist class soon become evident. Indeed, the monarchy played a totally ambiguous role, supporting feudal localism in Spain, oscillating between the emerging capitalists and the aristocracy in England, often arbitrating between fiercely independent centres of mercantile capitalism. As soon as capitalism had reached the stage of wanting to extend the market beyond the base of mercantile and petty commodity capitalism, the monarchy became an absolute obstacle. For a limited period, however, the actions of the capitalist class and the domination of the monarchy over the state co-existed, and during this period most of the modern European small nations were formed. Many mechanisms leading to local development of national communities existed, but the most important was probably the rise of the urban bourgeoisie. This created or used local political institutions which became part of the state structure — local provincial parliaments and the like. It was able to develop and maintain a stable territorial base for a unified language via the natural social intercourse brought about by the activities of the state and of commerce between the towns and the countryside. In this period emerged the distinctive nations of Occitanie, Brittany, the Basque country, Galicia, Catalonia, Corsica, Valencia, Scotland, Wales — all the small nations which now manifest national movements. It is noticeable that all of these nations are peripheral and seaboard nations, [each] organised around a large port or two. This [is explained] by the role of mercantile capitalism in the process of [their formation].

The Impact of the Industrial Revolution

The growth of the capitalist class precipitated a crisis not merely of class rule and state form, but also of state boundaries. Generally, the old imperial boundaries did not correspond to the development of the forces of production: they had been dictated by military, territorial and agrarian features, rather than by considerations such as access to raw materials, markets etc. And the system of perpetually squabbling statelets in places like the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Iberian peninsula, Italy, and Germany were totally inimical to the development of integrated capitalist industrial production. The industrial revolution therefore coincides with two great waves of bourgeois state development: a wave of democratic revolutions, whose role we have already discussed, and a wave of national unifications and annexations leading to the formation of large national states: notably Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Every conceivable set of relations between the monarchy, the nobility and the bourgeoisie developed. But the bourgeoisie which finally gained access to the state machine in this period faced a huge problem. The operation of a state requires, as we have said, a community of customs, morals, language, etc. The operation of the bourgeois market requires the extension of this into every sphere of society, as it carries through tasks like the extension of capitalist production to the land, creating a mobile education and literacy in the towns for the workers, and so on. This faces it with an acute choice in relation to every minority language or culture. It either has to integrate it into the running of society by giving guarantees of its use in education and administration, or it has to suppress it violently. And this is what happened. Countries like Switzerland, facing national minorities with a developed bourgeoisie and a stake in capitalist production, had no choice but to instigate multinational states which enshrined minority language rights. Countries like France and Spain undertook the brutal suppression of national minority languages and culture. The French bourgeoisie, for example, waged an absolutely systematic struggle against the Breton and Occitan language and culture. Signs in Brittany read 'Defense de Cracher et de Parler Breton'. Time and time again it was reiterated by the education department that it was necessary to eliminate these languages. More was at stake than this alone: what was involved was whether the local bourgeoisie would persist in an autonomous local development of capitalism or would desert its language, its roots and its culture for partnership with the bourgeoisie of the large nations. Local bourgeoisies therefore faced an acute choice also: merge with the bourgeoisie of the large nation, or fight for separation. Two main tendencies emerged, which converged historically. Where there was a successful bourgeois revolution in the larger state, small national bourgeoisies generally chose fusion, leaving the nationalities they had created to their fate — as with Brittany, Occitanie, Scotland, Wales, etc. Where the bourgeoisie faced an absolutist state, it prolonged its autonomous role for as long as it could, and developed projects for separation and political autonomy: as with Catalonia, the Basque country, many nations of Great Russia, and so on. With the important exception of Ireland, what went on was a more or less convergent historical process, whose [outcome was the suppression of] the small nations and their fusion to form large, unified national blocks operating within the state boundaries of the West European powers, each containing within itself suppressed but not destroyed national communities and institutions.

The Historical Convergence of 1707-1939

Let us therefore draw out the main features of this convergence: (i) The essential economic tasks of the bourgeois revolution are complete. (ii) The political tasks of the dispersion of the reactionary classes have been accomplished. (iii) The local bourgeoisie has been won over and assimilated politically and economically into the bourgeoisie of the large nation states, leaving only the petty bourgeoisie and peasants. (iv) The largest element of difference between the class structures of the small nations is the extent of the dispersal of the peasantry and the nature of production on the land. In Scotland and Wales, the peasantry has been almost totally eliminated. In Brittany, it is mainly small economic and middle peasant production, which until recently was a base for clerical-conservative reaction. In Occitanie and parts of Spain the main production is wine-growing, which comprises in the main owner-[occupier] farms or owner-producer cooperatives. The proletariat is either in or is moving into a position of social dominance. In Scotland it is a formidable [per] cent of the population (90 per cent in Glasgow — the highest in Europe except for Turin); in Spain the proportion of peasants to workers has reversed since 1936; in all the nationalities of Spain and France this process [has been] given a powerful boost by the forcing of peasants [off the] land and into large concentrations of new industry, [which has] built up a new and very combative proletariat, [providing] the basis for a whole series of new alliances between [worker]s and peasants. [It is there]fore absolutely wrong, both politically and, [how]ever, economically, to dub these nations 'internal colonies' of the large nations. It is wrong to equate their development and domination with the process of colonial enslavement. It is misleading to equate the nationalist revolt in these nations with the anti-imperialist struggle. The analysis of most socialist writers, in the regional movements have been wrong in this respect. In the first place, these nations were not absorbed in a phase of imperialist expansion, but before imperialism had taken its modern form. In the second place, the bourgeois revolution had in all cases gone through great development before they were absorbed, but had completed a political revolution, with the possible exception of Corsica. In the third place, the role of the bourgeoisie in these areas in the period of their absorption was not to develop a subordinate economy dedicated to the extraction of raw materials, but to develop all aspects of capitalist production. It is since this time that gross social deprivation, multinational super-exploitation, etc. have occurred. A new mechanism is therefore involved in the recent movements of national revolt in these nations, which lends them features in common with the struggles in the colonial world, but which has an entirely different historical origin. We have to analyse and understand the objective basis on which these movements have emerged, and judge from this whether they can play a historically progressive role.

The Centralisation of Capital and the New Historical Departure

The most important single process which brings on the new movements of national revolt is the centralisation of capital. This has produced two parallel and reinforcing results: firstly, the tendency to political centralisation focussed on the creation of the EEC; and secondly, the [geograph]ical redistribution of capital. Because of the general political and economic crisis of capitalism, the bourgeoisie finds itself unable to integrate national responses to regional disparities; and because of this crisis the move to political centralisation is also bound up with an inexorable drift towards strong state structures. The tendency to the strong state results firstly because the bourgeoisie finds it can no longer integrate the workers via economic concessions and occasional working class governments of social reform. It finds the working class too combative, too well organised, and its own political and economic resources too drained to continue this method of stabilising its rule. It results secondly because the profound crisis of profit rates which afflicts the capitalists of today can only be overcome by a centralised re-organisation of industry resulting from a major, preferably world-wide but at least European, defeat of the working class. It needs a state from which it can hold down and co-ordinate its different and warring factions and suppress or eliminate them where needed. But just because the bourgeoisie understands this, it does not mean that it will proceed mechanically to create repressive governments of bourgeois parties. The strength of the working class has forced it to resort to a whole series of stratagems and manoeuvres, and has in fact decentralised it so that it does not proceed in a co-ordinated manner. Also, many of the mechanisms bringing about a strong state are not produced through conscious effort by the bourgeoisie at all, but by the crisis of the state as an institution. Not only do all sorts of autonomous developments in the state apparatus begin, but all the institutions which integrate the working class go into crisis as they are called upon to turn from an integrative role to a repressive one. The crisis is caused by the fact that, contrary to Maoist mythology about creeping corporatism, they cannot complete this process without a huge victory over the workers movement and the destruction of its capacity to struggle for an extended period. The effect is therefore of an uncontrolled and decentralised development towards a strong state with great leaps backward and forward, and [a develop]ment which does not proceed with equal speed [everywhere]. [In Fra]nce and Spain, the effect in the peripheral regions [is] simply to continue the traditional repression of the minorities. The French bourgeoisie has reacted with [increasing violence] towards the Breton, Occitan and more [recently] Corsican nationalist movements — armed confrontation, mass arrests, etc. In Spain it is worth noting that in [many] senses what the Spanish bourgeoisie is trying to [put] through is a mutation from an absolutist reactionary [state] to a strong state, which can brook no national [inde]pendence at all. In both these cases the national institutions and customs of the small nations are revived as a vehicle for revolt. For the main challenge offered by a large state to local political institutions which are being suppressed is not armed suppression but its own local institutions or the rigid supervision from above and outside of existing ones. This extends in extreme cases from garrisons down to education departments, the legal system, and so on. The role of language, custom and culture in national revolt now becomes clear. Who is to staff these institutions? How are they to be rendered politically reliable? How is intercourse between them and the large state apparatus to be guaranteed? The best, most stable solution is to impose the language, customs and culture of the large nations on the officials of the state — either by importing them or by training them. This is clearest in the operation of outright repression. The English were particularly adept at placing garrisons which by virtue of their different evolution of customs and religion would be held loyal to the crown. Even today Scottish regiments are the most extensively used in Ireland. The Spanish state couples this with the use of the antagonism between the land and the countryside — peasants from the Estremadura and from Andalucia patrolling the streets of Bilbao, lost, sullen, rejected, taking their only pleasure in acts of repression to relieve frustration at social oppression. Therefore the first and the most important effect of the tendency towards the strong state is that it reconstitutes oppressed or absent national sentiment in all classes around the demand for an end to external interference and for local autonomy. It is this fact which above all has given the national struggle its potential revolutionary character in Western Europe. Because of the common national heritage of the populace, an absolutely immediate response is the demand for an end to all external interference by the state, and demands for the defence, restitution or creation of democratic national institutions, up to and including a national government independent of the external state. The revolutionary potential of this demand is apparent: it amounts to a demand for the removal of the bourgeois state apparatus as at present constituted from an entire territorial area and the constitution of a new one! The revolutionary potential will be realised to the extent that the workers in struggle around class and national demands create their own alternative state. In Britain, where the strong state has never been implemented and would still present tremendous difficulties to the bourgeoisie, the process is more complex, and involves a chronic crisis of all the integrative mechanisms of bourgeois rule. The effects can be very paradoxical. For example, there is frequently an increase in the number of administrators of the welfare state in the face of cuts in social expenditure, whose role is to repress instead of ameliorate social discontent. Effectively, local governments find themselves increasing administration in order to tell people to get stuffed more efficiently. There is a consequent increase in corruption as the policeman role of the state apparatus increases [the] opportunity to divert state money into the pockets [of] local officials. At the same time, the contradictions in the workers organisations increase as the bureaucracy faces up to the uncomfortable choice of repressing working class discontent and [losing] its base in the workers movement, or riding this discontent and rendering itself useless for the purposes of [repres]sing as far as its bourgeois mentors are concerned. This brings about a deadly combination of circumstances for the bourgeoisie: whilst its prized methods for integrating the workers decompose and are either lost to it or turn into repressive instruments, whilst whole sections of the bourgeoisie and state apparatus embark on independent projects for suppressing popular discontent, the bourgeoisie loses centralised control of the whole thing through its inability to impose a strong, central authority capable of combining the adroit and selective use of repression and concession. The result is that the erosion of democracy is greatest, decentralised attacks on the working class most concentrated, and corruption and abuse of the social consumption fund of the working class most widespread where social deprivation is most bitter and the risk of mass explosions of this revolt the greatest. Instead of applying the stick to the rear of the donkey and dangling the carrot in front of it, the disoriented bourgeoisie does the opposite, combining severe provocation with gross insult with the inevitable result — the donkey bolts. One condition for a progressive role of the national struggle has thus been met — a general suppression of democratic rights as a result of the repressive role of an externally-based state apparatus which intervenes against the satisfaction of local national needs. And it is indeed clear that the constitution of local governments free from veto or obstruction by the large states would present a huge obstacle to the current projects for political centralisation of the bourgeoisie. But we should now turn to the other condition for the national struggle to play a progressive role: are there specific national social, cultural or economic needs generated or preserved in the small nations of Western Europe in the new historical departure? The answer is a categorical yes. The reason lies with the same historical process which brings on the political centralisation of Europe — the centralisation of capital. In this case, it is the emergence of extreme regional disparities produced by the geographical redistribution of capital under the impact of centralisation.

Regional Disparities and the Centralisation of Capital

The international centralisation of capital has been dealt with in some degree by the Fourth International. However, its effects in the deprived regions have never been fully disentangled. These effects cannot be reduced to a simple exodus of capital from the regions. This does not explain, for example, the rise of multinational investment. What is actually involved is a geographical redistribution of capital in its various branches. This takes on the peculiarly anarchic form under capitalism of the collapse and run down of old traditional industry, which is integrated into the local market and contributes to the local social stock of capital; the build-up of centralised urban administrative and financial conurbations in the centre at the expense of the peripheral regions; the concentration of social wealth in the centre as a result of the higher proportion of salaried staff, greater expansion of service industry, etc.; and the creation of large industrial concentrations in the peripheral regions based on multinational branch plant investment and tending to the super-exploitation of the workers of the region. In fact this is not an accidental feature of capitalism in Europe, but an inevitable result of late capitalism. In the early stages of capitalist development the frontiers of capitalist development were established by mercantile capital based on the ports and seagoing nations of Europe. Thus the peripheral regions became the most advanced centres of capitalist development. Industrial capitalism could often follow in the wake of mercantile capitalism through the development and servicing of processing industries (e.g. textile and tobacco), shipbuilding and engineering industries, and where deposits of raw material were to hand (as in Scotland) extractive and refining industries such as steel, iron and coal. An integrated and balanced local development of capitalism could take place in the regions as a result. They often became prosperous and thriving centres of cultural and economic development. But capitalism then developed unified transport and communications and a world market. It was no longer advantageous to site production, processing and extraction side by side. Imperialism brought with it the international division of labour, with extractive industry, processing, primary and secondary production increasingly located in distinct centres according to their different needs for labour, technical resources, markets and supply. The frontiers of capitalism were no longer established by the merchants but by the financiers and the large cartels and monopolies, increasingly enlisting the state in their support. The growth of such a combination of class forces meant that the key urban centres of population and development became concentrated around the institutions of the state and of finance — hence the emergence of large urban administrative and commercial centres such as London, and in certain cases of whole nations organised around the finance bourgeoisie — e.g. Switzerland. At the same time extractive industry increasingly moved out to the colonial countries, where super-exploitation could yield higher profit rates, and as the old centres of industrial production became technologically relatively backward, the bourgeoisie preferred to build new centres based on modern technology rather than modernising and rationalising the old ones against the fierce resistance of the workers to the inevitable [attacks] on their living standards which such capitalist reorganisation would entail. Thus from 1958 to 1968 the number of yards on the Clyde dropped from seventeen to three with the loss of 15,000 jobs. In the same period the number of pits fell from 166 to 47, and the number of miners from 83,000 to 39,000 — with a parallel decline in almost all traditional branches of industry. This process did not result in the departure of [in]dustry. Quite the contrary — after a lag, it substituted new forms. What it destroyed was the old locally based industry, which because of its strong connections with the local market and because of local ownership added to the stock of social wealth of the community. This is strikingly clear in Scotland, where last century the bourgeoisie was able, without the apparatus of a welfare state, to complete a system of universal secondary education and embark on a project of supplying municipalised housing for the entire working class — a venture far in advance of the welfare state at its highest points. The departure of this kind of industry brought in its stead, after a long period of social stagnation lasting until the 1950s, an entirely new kind of production: branch factories linked into the world market and often the large multinationals, supplying, supplied and owned abroad, and channelling surplus product into the hands of external capitalists or [institutions] which promptly invested it abroad. The extremely informative article by Firn in the Red Paper on Scotland provides copious data on this in relation to Scotland. We reproduce here two tables which indicate the extent of external investment and ownership by size of plant and the ultimate location of this investment and ownership. These demonstrate convincingly that: (i) foreign-owned plants now constitute a decisive [sector of Scottish industry]; (ii) they are concentrated in the most advanced sectors of industrial production; (iii) that decisive proportions of the surplus product generated accrue not to the stock of social wealth but to either finance capital or externally-based enterprise; (iv) the result is not a specific exploitation by the large nation — England — but a general exploitation brought about by international monopoly and finance capital, particularly its most advanced sectors. An exactly parallel development of industry has taken place in nearly all the small peripheral nations of Europe, with only one important variation: the development of traditional local industry is less advanced elsewhere. The consequence is merely that social wealth is the less and social deprivation greater and also that modern industry takes its labour force from more backward sections of production, notably the land. The effect is the same — the destruction of those sectors of local production which add to the local stock of social wealth and the substitution of super-exploitation by externally-based and owned production. Hence the first condition which we laid down at the outset is met with a vengeance — in the combination of social deprivation, enforced migration, and super-exploitation by the multinationals which now dominate every small nation in Europe. Until recently, only three social forces had entered into struggle over these questions: the petty-bourgeoisie, the peasantry, and the working class. The [most recent movements have shown], above all in Spain a tremendous revolutionary potential [in the working class, and the nationalist struggle has increasingly become linked to the] working class movement. The most developed [expression] of this in Scotland, was made possible by the combination of independent sectors of finance and the discovery of North Sea Oil. The entrepreneurial role of finance capital meant [it could] rapidly accumulate disposable funds — through portfolio investment for example — far in excess of its real wealth. In this situation, faced with political and economic decrepitude of English capitalism, it was perhaps inevitable that sections of finance capital should fuse with the petty-bourgeois SNP to launch an original and so far highly successful struggle to secure financial autonomy by parliamentary means. Space does not permit us to lay evidence to this effect, except to refer to our previous publications in the series 'Scotland, Labour and Worker's Power', and to our analysis in Red Weekly (4 September 1975) of the secret SNP policy document leaked last year and circulated extensively by us in the labour movement. But it does allow us to point out in closing, and revolutionary duty insists on it, that the wheel has turned full circle since 1707 — just as the bourgeoisie led the masses by the nose into the union in 1707, so they are now trying to lead them by the nose out of it. The workers movement can no longer leave the leadership of the national struggle to the bourgeoisie; nor can it [subordinate] its world-wide interests to the narrow national struggle. Instead it must, through the fight for a Scottish workers government, breathe fresh life into the traditions of the workers movement on the national question and use the new situation facing it to move forward to the European Socialist Revolution.

See, for example Mandel's Late Capitalism (NLB 1975) and his article Capitalism and Regional Disparities [reprinted as] a pamphlet by the New Hogtown Press (Canada); see also the Scottish IMG pamphlet in the series Scotland, Labour and Workers Power. All of these are available from Red Books.

Figures from Johnstone, Buxton and Mair, Structure and Growth of the Scottish Economy.