The 'explosivel situations that have emerged, in the past period, around the Tories! attempts to 'confront' the miners and 'imprison' the five dockers in 1972 (under the Industrial Relations Act) are not unique. They are indicative of an instability that has permeated all areas of life as ever - wider layers have been drawn into a struggle to extend their rights - national, sexual, racial - against capitalist oppression.
Such a radicalisation - born out of a refraction in Britain of international trends - has necessarily proceeded in a complex and uneven way. very fact that it began originally outside the labour movement (which remained relatively quiescent until the late sixties) has caused many on the left to view it as a 'diversion', as 'peripherall to the 'real struggle' or as bound to die away as the fight against unemployment or wage restraint gathers momentum.
These views are erroneous. They do not grasp the fact that the present crisis is not merely an economic but profoundly social one which has eroded the stability of all social relations. Such an economist mistake is incapable of grasping:
a) that the struggle of these strata - of women, Blacks or other oppressed national minorities - is, potentially, anti- capitalist and can create large allies for the working class in the period b) that the rights pioneered by these strata will increasingly inter - relate with the radicalisation within the labour movement since a not insignifSOCIALIST ACTION
icant proportion of the latter is made up, for example, of women or Blacks;
such struggles, increasingly finding an echo within the labour movement, in overcoming the racist, chauvinist and sexist divisions in the class on which the ruling class will increasingly play, in the coming years, to weaken and divide.
Such views are essentially based on an inability to grasp that capitalism is not a mere system of economic exploitation but has inbuilt into it a whole complex of oppression characteristic of era and those inherited from previous historical eras which capitalism perpet -uates, extends and intensifies (e.g. oppression of women as a sex).
The ability to boldly move out, support - and pioneer - the struggles of such strata around the demands corresponding to their specific oppression is an acid test for socialists.
A) National Oppression The upsurge in national consciousness over the past decades in Britain is by no means unique. It is part of an international trend which has seen a rise against national oppression from the Basques in Spain to the Bretons in France. at greater capitalist economic concentration within the EEC exacerbates regional inequalities that tend to reflect historical political inequalities.
Although such movements may, initially, reflect the illusions and parochial interests of local capitalism, their unusually high degree of proletarian composition renders such struggles for democratic rights potentially explosive. 1. Ireland The spark that ignited the struggle in Northern Ireland can be traced back to Britain's decision to enter the EEC. 'De-structuring' the sectarian 'Ulster' state - created by Britain in 1921 - was seen as important in adopting a new relationship with Southern Ireland prior to entry. Westminstin this sense, unsympathetic initially to the Civil Rights Movement that grew up in the The Civil Rights Movement, inspired by similar struggles against the 'Jim Crow' system in the USA, rapidly got out of hand however. The fight to gain minimal reforms inevitably brought the Catholic minority - who were its most 'ardent' champions - into head-on conflict with Stormont which was incapable of granting even the most meagre reform without undermining the very basis of its sectarian existence.
It soon became clear to ever-wider layers of the Catholic community that the fight to win these rights could not be achieved within 'Ulster! created and propped up by the armed might of 3ritish Imperialism - but only in opposition to it. It was in this way that the fight for democratic rights merged into a continuation of the 700-year long fight by the Irish people to determine their own future aborted, temporarily, in 1921 when the 'men of property! in the South agreed to the Treaty of Partition.
Thousands of young fighters in the ghetto areas learned - from bitter experience - that the fight for elementary rights was inseparable from the struggle to achieve an Ireland free from British domination. In pursuing this fight, they have employed the most revolutionary tactics: mass demonstrations in defiance of state power; armed self defence, and mass non-cooperation.
The logic of the struggle that emerged out of the Civil Rights marches had, for Westminster, even more 'dangerous! implications. Not only did it threaten the precarious stability of Northern Ireland but - as it found increasing echoes in the South - the stability of the neo-colonial regime there which has proved itself incapable of satisfying the national aspirations of the Irish people. The logic of such a struggle pointed, in this way, to a United Ireland through anti-capitalist meas -ures.
It has been the potentially 'explosivel nature of this struggle which has prompted the continued presence of British troops on the streets of a Derry or Belfast. The main function of the troops, whatever tactical differences may arise between the British government and its Loyalist 'allies', has been to prop up the bigoted !Ulster! state by crushing the nationalist revolt.
Successive governments have attempted to ach¡eve this aim by various tactics. 'Concessions' to the oppressed minority to isolate the IRA and woo it to the myth of 'power sharing' have alternated with the most brutally repressive methods such as internment, harassment of the ghettoes & cold-blooded massacres as on Bloody Sunday.
Bloody Sunday: British troops open fire on peaceful demonstration.
Such tactics can produce down-turns in the struggle as over recent years when lacking an adequate leadership with a mass action perspective, the Catholic ghettoes have in part become demoralised under constant repression and have enabled the government to temporarily 'contain' the situation. The recent launching of the 'Peace Movement' was born out of this downturn as Imperialism eagerly utilised it for its own reactionary ends.
While obtaining downturns, however, such methods are incapable of solving the 'problem' of N. Ireland since it is the very state Britain created over fifty years ago - and which it continues to prop up today by force of arms - which continually fuels the nationalist revolt. While knowing its inevitable ebbs and flows, there is no lasting solution to the struggle launched by the oppressed minority within a neo-colonial framework.
The continuation of this struggle over the past decade has created an acute political 'dilemma! for the British ruling class. It undermines its credibility as it is forced to abandon the facade
of parliamentary democracy in favour of naked repression; it heightens the need to cut back on democratic rights at home (as in the Prevention of Terrorism Act) thus bringing it into conflict with masses in Britain; it creates divisions within its ranks as to the tactic to pursue - shown in the split of the Ulster Unionists from the Tory Party - and it remains a major threat to social stability which can, at any time, link up with struggles within Britain.
In this sense, the crisis in No Ireland has ever more become a factor in the ongoing class struggle in Britain. A defeat of the oppressed minority in their fight for democratic rights would give greater confidence to the ruling class in its ability to ram home its offensive against the labour movement and, conversely, a victory for the minority would seriously weaken and undermine the While not subjectively conscious of the implications of the struggle in the Six Counties - after decades of 'anti-Irish' propaganda - supporting that struggle is objectively in the interests of the British labour movement. Defending the democratic rights of the Irish people - by calling for the immediate withdrawal of all British troops - would help weaken British Imperialism not only in N. Ireland but in Britain where it would help change the balance of class forces in the interests of working people.
No doubt mobilising such defence will have to confront an ingrained anti-Irish chauvinism that has found a deep lechol in the labour movement. This fight cannot, however, be avoided or skirted round. Marx pointed out long ago that a nation that oppresses another can never itself be free. This is as true now as when it was written. If the British labour movement cannot be won to defending the democratic rights of its allies against the brutal oppression of its 'own' government, it will be increasingly disarmed in the fight to defend its own democratic rights in the period ahead.
2. Scotland The nationalist upsurge in Scotland - as well as Wales - has not revealed itself over the past decade in such a radically explosive way as that of the oppressed minority in the Six Counties. It has largely been confined to a parliamentary opposition which - as in the debate over 'devolution' - has adopted more constitutional methods of The roots of the difference are historical since England was much more able, through a high degree of industrialisation, to rely upon economic forces to integrate the Scottish people incorporated in the Union of 1707. The expansion of English capitalism into Scotland (and Wales) did not, as in the case of its colonial oppression of Ireland, stunt the economy. It helped to radically restructure it as a pre-condition for Imperialist expansion (creating, in the process, a large urban working class intimately linked with the development of the working class in both England and Wales).
Allowing the Scottish people to 'share' in the spoils of Empire was much more 'efficient' as a means of integration into the United Kingdom than the brutally repressive methods perpetrated on the Irish people. Scotland was, in this way, allowed to retain specifically Scottish institut -ions of social life and civil society (e. 9. Church, law, education and, later, civil administration). While economic benefits and a politically flexible attitude allowed England to subdue any mass sense of national feeling for a whole period, it has been an entirely different matter since these benefits have begun to 'dry up' as Britain has lost its colonial mastery and hegemony of the world market. This long-term decline has found a particularly sharp reflection in Scotland which, in the post-war years, was rapidly becoming an 'industrial desert'.
The slump of key industries under foreign competition and technological developments - particularly ship-building, mining & steel production -has resulted in a disproportionately high jobless tota!, urban poverty and growing migration. It is, in this sense, the new 'relation! of Scotland to England - within the decline of Britain as an Imperialist power - which lies at the root of the present nationalist upsurge. It also helps condition the form of this upsurge which has not revolved around cultural or language grievances as in Wales but around the need for greater 'autonomy! to offset economic decline. The SNP has made its main thrust the ability of Scotland controlling the assets of North Sea Oil through a National Assembly - to curb economic deprivatThe growth of this nationalist upsurge - making the SNP the single biggest party in Scotland -adds to the dilemma facing the ruling class. Not only does it threaten its 'control' over North Sea Cil seen as vital; in the period ahead, to remedying Britain's balance of payments deficit. It also - similar to the upsurge in Northern Ireland - weaker.s and fragments ruling class institutions (the state and Tory Party) and hinders its ability to work out a united strategy over the the 'dynamic! of the struggle threatens increasingly to get out of hand as the overwhelmingly proletarian nature of Scotland can root the struggle for self-determination with in a socialist perspective.
This is not to say, of course, that such nationalist feeling cannot be 'used' by bourgeois ( or petty-bourgeois) formations for their own ends. Such is the case with the SNP whose finance -capital leadership merely seeks to obtain for itself a more Ifavourable' position vis-a-vis the other sections of the British ruling class at a time of growing economic crisis.
While nationalist feeling can be channelled behind bourgeois formations - directly opposed to the interests of working people - it would be a serious mistake to downplay the objective validity of those feelings which have allowed the SNP to make serious inroads not only into the Tory but Labour Party as well whose electoral support has been eroded and which has undergone a serious structural crisis (resulting in the formThe only reason the SNP has been able to trap such large-scate support is due to the inability of the labour movement to pioneer the nationalist aspirations of the Scottish people within a clear class-struggle perspective. The Labour Party -in England and Scotland - has not only alienated large layers of Scottish workers through its refusal to fight the government's pro - capitalist policies but also through its thinly - disguised hostility to their national aspirations (as shown in the Iscuttling' of the Devolution Bill). It was only under mass pressure that they finally supported the idea of a National Assembly.
Such hostility! to growing nationalist feeling, SOCIALIST ACTION
which has also been evident among wide sectors of the 'marxist! left, can only convince the mass of working people in Scotland that socialism has no answer to their sense of national discrimination and thereby push them behind the banners of the SNP which can pose as the sole force fighting for their democratic rights.
Far from showing 'opposition' to the nationalist • aspirations of the Scottish people, the key task of socialists is:
a) to encourage, in Scotland, workers to grasp that these aspirations will not be realised by supporting the anti-working class policies of the SNP but only by fighting for them to be taken up in a clear class struggle perspective within the labour movement;
b) to defend, in England, the right of the Scottish people to whatever form of self-determination they so choose against the chauvinist attitude prevailing in the labour movement. It is the English labour movement showing, in practice, that it respects the rights people that the ground will be laid for a united ed by the Tory Party - and ultra-right groups such as the National Front - means that they are confronted with harassment and persecution that will deepen in the period ahead as the ruling class looks for 'scapegoats' to create divisions within the working class to divert its attention from the real cause of unemployment and declining living standards.
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