On our editorial box slogans

Beginning with this issue, we are amending the slogans that have appeared in the inner masthead of our editorial box since Workers Hammer no 111 (November/December 1989): “For a federation of workers republics in the British Isles! For a Socialist United States of Europe!” Lenin insisted in his 1919 Draft Programme of the Russian Communist Party: “The workers of those nations which under capitalism were oppressor nations must take exceptional care not to hurt the national sentiments of the oppressed nations.” Our appreciation of Lenin’s injunction was sharpened by the recent struggle within the International Communist League, documented in Spartacist no 65 (English-language edition, Summer 2017), over longstanding adaptations to Great Power chauvinism. Thus we are rendering explicit the voluntary character of such associations of workers states.

Proletarian revolution will eliminate the material basis for national oppression, which is rooted in capitalist rule, but national divisions, the legacy of historic injustices and mistrust will remain after the proletariat takes power. Any union between historically oppressed nations and their former oppressors must be based on the right of the oppressed nation to join and to leave as it wishes. However, when secession is a cover for capitalist counterrevolution in a workers state, it is not a matter of withdrawal but of civil war.

Our call for a Socialist United States of Europe, united on a voluntary basis, is premised on the smashing of the EU bosses’ and bankers’ cartel, in which the weaker, dependent countries of Europe are oppressed and exploited by the dominant imperialist powers — primarily Germany, along with France and (for now) Britain. The EU is a sworn enemy of oppressed nations such as the Basques and Catalans that strive for independence. A workers Europe will be based on the full equality of all its national components.

As proletarian internationalists, we uphold the right of the Scottish and Welsh nations to self-determination and demand the withdrawal of all British troops and bases from Northern Ireland. We oppose the reactionary “United” Kingdom, which is based on the domination of the City of London over everyone else and drips with contempt for the working class, for the Scots, Welsh and Irish Catholics and for the black and Asian minorities derived from Britain’s former colonial empire. The monarchy, House of Lords and established churches are the linchpin for archaic values, servility and acceptance of the established order. With the first few sweeps of the broom a workers revolution in Britain will rid the country of these reactionary institutions, along with all the trappings of capitalist class rule.

Our call for a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles has an algebraic character; we do not presume to know in advance what the constituent elements of such a federation will be. In Scotland, and to a lesser extent Wales, there has been an increase in national sentiment driven by devastation of workingclass communities. A watershed was the defeat of the 1984-85 miners strike, which exemplified the unity in struggle of Scottish, Welsh and English workers. National sentiment was further fuelled in Scotland by Thatcher’s use of the Scottish people as guinea pigs for the hated poll tax in 1989. Jeremy Corbyn’s arrogant declarations against Indyref2 are wholly in the tradition of Labour’s English-chauvinist Unionism, which has driven many Scottish workers to support the bourgeois-nationalist SNP and has led to the virtual extinction of Labour’s parliamentary representation there.

A voluntary federation of workers republics allows for the only equitable resolution of the communal divide in Northern Ireland. The sectarian, anti-Catholic hell-hole that is the Orange statelet is a product of centuries of brutal British oppression of Ireland. The oppressed Catholics in the North are part of the Irish nation while the Protestants constitute a distinct community, defined against and opposed to incorporation into the Irish Republic. We oppose forcing the Protestants into a unitary Irish state. Given the conflicting claims of these two populations on the same territory, under capitalism the national aspirations of one can only be exercised at the expense of the other. Our slogan leaves open the question of where the Protestants will fall.

Against those elements of the Labour and trade union leadership who support the EU as well as those who claim to oppose it, we foresee a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles as a constituent part of a Europe united under the rule of the proletariat. As we wrote in our 1989 article:

“Above all, we seek to be guided by the experiences of the Bolshevik Party, which in the complex circumstances of the tsarist prisonhouse of peoples led the working masses and oppressed to power through proletarian internationalist means.”