The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (10/18)
Paul's prescription in relation to Brexit for the next election, leaves a big gap between now and then. It also means a craven capitulation to the reactionary minority of the working-class, at the expense of alienating the progressive majority of the class, for whom EU membership and free movement are totemic. Even in terms of the psephological analysis that Paul cites that seems totally irrational, let alone the question of socialists arguing from the standpoint of principle and long-term interests of the working-class, rather than short term electoralism.
What should Labour be arguing in the intervening period? Its clear that Starmer is not really closing the gap with the Tories. At the General Election the Tories had 44%, and Labour 32%. Today the Tories still have 42%, despite all of the COVID chaos, whereas Labour has risen to just 37%, which represents the 4% points the Liberals have dropped, since the election, which, in turn is equal to the 4% points, the Liberals regained in 2019 from Labour, compared to 2017. But, that does not represent all of the Liberal votes that Labour gained from the Liberals and others in 2017. Part of the reason is precisely that he is not offering to the Liberal, SNP, Plaid or Green voters the potential of reversing Brexit, which is what won over millions of them in 2017. Even the most optimistic polls for Labour put them neck and neck on 40%, despite the fact that Johnson has led a chaotic government that even the Tory newspapers are now attacking for its incompetence and handling of COVID. Under these conditions, Labour should have been at least 20 points ahead of an incompetent Tory government in the middle of an epidemic, and having caused the worst economic slowdown in 300 years, as a result of the government imposed lockdown.
Continuing to roll over on Brexit, when the idiocy of it becomes ever more exposed, seems even more masochistic, and sure to prevent Labour being able to garner a coalition sufficient to win in 2024. The Liberals et al, must certainly see the potential to win over large numbers of progressive, internationalist, Labour voters, i.e. all those young workers in the metropolitan areas, on which Labour's future should be built, precisely by filling that void and fighting on the basis of reversing Brexit. It will be totally superficial, and based on a neo-liberal version of EU membership and internationalism, but that will not change its effect in stripping those votes from Labour. The same has already proved the case in Scotland. These supposedly “progressive” forces outside Labour are anything but, and searching after them, or their equivalents inside Labour, by watering down your own politics so as to create some vacuous broad alliance, is precisely the disastrous error that has resulted from such Popular Fronts in the past.
Unfortunately, what Paul sees as “progressive nationalism” in Scotland, and Wales, is, of course, nothing of the kind, because all such nationalism, today, is reactionary, as, indeed, is the nationalism of Brexit itself. But, by failing to address the concerns of progressive voters in Scotland and Wales, in relation to Brexit, Paul's strategy would, indeed, only act to encourage such reactionary nationalism in those countries as the only means of escaping it.
The policy of devolution in what was already a unified British State, has proved a disaster in encouraging such nationalism and regionalism, whereas it was supposed to undermine it. But, Paul's suggestion of federalism is even worse. It further undermines the unity of the state, whilst failing to address the main issue for many of those in those countries, i.e. the imposition of Brexit upon them. The real problem is the class nature of the British state itself, and the solution to that problem cannot come by simply replicating that class state on a smaller scale in Scotland and Wales, just as replicating it in Ireland has not resolved that problem for Irish workers. Seeking salvation in devolution or federalism is just a diversion from the real task of a unified struggle of all British workers against the British capitalist state itself, just as Brexit could never be a solution for British workers, when the real solution can only come from a united struggle of all EU workers to create a Workers' Europe.
As Marx puts it, warning against such federalism, as against a unified indivisible republic,
“The democrats will either work directly towards a federated republic, or at least, if they cannot avoid the one and indivisible republic they will attempt to paralyse the central government by granting the municipalities and provinces the greatest possible autonomy and independence. In opposition to this plan the workers must not only strive for one and indivisible German republic, but also, within this republic, for the most decisive centralisation of power in the hands of the state authority.”
Federalism can be accepted as a compromise position in the process of forming a one and indivisible Republic, such as in the case of the United States, or in creating a United States of Europe, but it can never be proposed by socialists to move in the opposite direction.
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