Ireland: Learning

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-TAIL-ENDING HAUGHEY Eng to give real substance to its socialism. This week we print a reply from the IRSP, sent to us by the editor of the IRSP paper Starry Plough. We hope that other Republicans and socialists will -contribute to a contining debate.

HAVE some British socialists Jearnt nothing from the last 14 years of Irish struggle?

John O'Mahony's attack 'on backward Irish nationalists' like ourselves and Provisional Sinn Fein, coupled with his defence of Sinn Fein, the Workers Party (SFWP) was a regurgitation of those prejudices of British reformism towards Irish revolutionaries dressed in the usual sociological jargon that so often masquerades as Marxism.

Like a World War 2 Japanese soldier emerging from some Pacific island in a later decade, O'Mahony mants to revive old Dattles fought over the years against the logic of anti-imperialist struggle in Ireland.

Today, however, those prejudices have earned a new currency with the rise, elec- nosis is wrong or that the torally at least, of two- Irish people are incorrigible nationists and anti-national in their backwardness. "socialists. This latter view, which those prejudices exist is the The lynchpin on which approximates to an unmen- tionable political viewpoint, abiding tenet of many is something that British socialists who take O'Mahony's favoured group, the model of British class SFWP, has erected as its new struggle as absolute and who "socialist' justification for berate Irish class protagon- supporting imperialism in its for not playing fair... Ireland. fair meaning British. SFWP's analysis of If only irish people and Ireland's industrial underrevolutionaries would behave imperainbut the inate not as if they lived in "advanced capitalist society" as parochialism of the Irish O Mahony postulates. The middle class. Progress lies fact that we do not conform with industrialisation from to the British model means outside by multinationals -that either O Mahony's diag- British, European or other• e- S)AD.

KRI wise - plus the rejection of any form of anti-imperialism (or nationalism as both SFWP and O 'Mahony prefer to call it).

It may interest Irish workers and British socialists to know that one of SFWP's criticisms of Irish capitalists is that they are incapable of extracting the maximum productivity or capitalisation from the Irish labour force.

SFWP's rejection of nationalism has led it. to support "majority" rule and RUC law and order in the six counties, while they condemned the hunger strikers as murderers and terrorists.

In the cosmopolitan scenTHE DECISIVE question Is whether Irish socialists and republicans have learned anything from the last 14 years of the Catholic revolt in the North of Ireland -and what they have learned.

The socialists of the IRSP, it seems to me, have learned for had reinforced the previous belief) that the national question is the major component and dynamic of the Irish revolution. That is the reason why they called in the 26 County election for votes for Fianna Fail, ruling party in the South for 40 of the last 50 years but still flaunting the tattered rags of a Republicanism it abandoned back in 19261 It means that their socialism, like the tattered 'Republicanism' of Fianna Fail, is unreal.

I will try to show this in briefly responding to some of the points in the IRSP's letter.

I did not 'defend' Sinn Fein the Workers' Party:

read the article. I cited the fact that the IRSP attacks SFWP for one of their strengths, their nominal hostility to native Irish capitalism. The SFWP. TDs voted for Haughey in the Dail, of course.

Who talked of 'backward Irish nationalists'? Not me.

What have 'the prejud'ices of British reformism Mitowards Irish revolutularios adopted by SFWP, Militant and the two nationists, the enemies are Republicanism, Catholicism and Irish capitalism. Imperialist capital is at worst neutral, and at best progressive because that industrialises the nation, builds up the proletariat and creates the prerequisites for socialism.

In Russia this type of ultimate stages theory was called Menshevism; in circles inspired by British reformism it is called socialism. To Irish republican socialists it is simply the age old imperialist argument that urges the natives to forget about their independence and garner the advantages of "advanced society" • To SFWP the national question is dead because imperialism can drag the Irish nation into the 20th century. To O'Mahony the national question is dead aries" to do with what f said about the IRSP? I argued that traditional physical-force-on-principle Republicanism, common as the main core of the politics of both the IRSP and the Provisionals (though the foliage on the trunk differs) is simply not revolutionary. I cited facts about the 26 Counties election to substantiate and justify this view.

Automatically

The write. " defend those facts rather wau denying them. Indeed, they try to define away the arguments and questions I raised.

They define what is revolutionary (physical force), so that critics of themselves and of the class-collaborationist 'anti-imperialism' that they graft onto physical-force politics are automatically reformists (and British as well!)

Why, and since when, is.

the class struggle common in all more or less normal capitalist societies (and not entirely absent even in the Six Counties) 'the British class struggle"? Again, the writer 'defines away' the problem and the arguments by way of sticking labels.

In fact the election reinforces the view that the Border does segment vastly Jiffanat mense of Troland because this has already happened. The conclusions are the same - at least in their negative aspects: reject republicanism and adopt the methods of class struggle which exist in advanced (British) society.

So Ireland according to O'Mahony, is an "advanced capitalist society" and has a southern government as stable as any in Europe"

We could say a lot about the 'advanced' nature of our industrial base and infrastructure, north and south. It is currently the subject of an anguished debate amongst the Irish bourgeoisie. But this is not the point. The bald phrase about İreland's "advanced capitalist society" even if it were true, says nothing about real politics which is about the relations of power between classes and nations.

Occupying

We have British soldiers occupying part of Our country and a border divides Irish territory. The Irish middle class regard this as a continuing source of destabilisation and a threat to their whole existence.

Leninists have always regarded the attainment of national unity and independence as the two central tasks of the national revolution. But O'Mahony seems to believe that this has been done in the north but not in the south; the most peculiar variant of two nationism we have yet encountered.

O'Mahony reveals the most appalling ignorance or revision of socialist attitudes towards this border which as Connolly predicted, has produced a carnival of reaction, north and south.

For while that border Arguments and facts are decisive, comrades of the IRSP, not labels and abuse.

"If only Irish people and revolutionaries would behave as if they lived in 'advanced capitalist society'" , then, comrades of socialist action appropriate to the 'advanced capitalist society' that exists in the South and is not warped, as is the 'advanced capitalist society' in the North, by communalism and British occupation.

We would not get the nonsense of supposed socialists supporting the main governing party of the bourgeoisie • because it spouts a hollowed-out nationalist rhetoric.

The point here, I think, is that commitment to the of the armed struggle there, shapes and moulds everything else: it is only seen from that angle that Fianna Fail and its 'antiimperialism' and 'Republicanism' can be seen as anything but the most bitter enemy of Republicanism and socialist republ icanism.

Avoiding

As well as avoiding arguent out of court with labels divides workers within one part of Ireland, namely the sIx counties, it also divides and retards the working class in the whole of Ireland.

The border is the basic reason for this division, not a result or some side effect. Workers unity depends on eliminating the cause of disunity, not ignoring it and hoping that it will disintegrate in the face of some economic onslaught from the 26 counties.

Economism

This should be self-evident. But O'Mahony and others whose economısm blurs their view of the national question, draw up tough sounding battle plans for socialist struggle which ignore this reality. In their scheme of things one fights for workers' power in the south in the naive hope that the border, along with its subsequent divisions, will simply disappear. In Britain this type of economism can lead to serious political errors. In Ireland it starts off as an ultra-left joke and ends up as a defence of loyalism.

Revolutionary politics in Ireland mean tackling the border and all its manifestations head on. In reality such an approach is working class and merely flows from our analysis which says that imperialism is the main enemy in Ireland. Yes, in this sense, we are nationalists first, to use an economist distortion of Marxist definitions.

The fact that Irish class divisions break down, electorally and otherwise, along mainly national lines is to SFWP an unfortunate obsession with civil war politics and the Irish people's domination by provincial ideas and backward political formaand spurious definitions, the writer uses the 'amalgam' . My views are linked with political trends with which I have little in common - Militant, Sinn Fein the Workers' Party, and the British and Irish Communist Organisation ('two-nationists'). It is just flak: what has Socialist Organiser got to do with the politics of Sinn Fein the Workers' Party?

But note the way it is put: 'In the , cosmopolitan scenarios adopted by Sinn Fein the Workers' Party, Militant and the twonationists, the enemies are Republicanism, Catholicism, and Irish capitalism" Out of your own mouths, comrades of the IRSP, you show I didn't misrepresent you. You identity on one side, yours, Republicanism, Catholicism, and..

Irish capitalism.

For myself I am a socialist republican, I defend the Catholics against the British Army and the Orange supremacists. I'll leave the IRSP to defend 'Irish capitalism' as part of the holy trinity!

The national question is not dead. But the idea that the national question is sufficient to itself, that it is the first stage, separable from or counterposed to the working class socialist struggle - that idea was already dead and stinking at the time of James Conntions.

And to O'Mahony?. An explicit answer would be interesting. One implicit view underlying his patronising • and anti-republican "socialism' is that the anti-imperialist movement is out of touch with "advanced capitalist society" To British reformists and the modern breed of liberal West Brits we have ever been backward.

Some specific points in reply to a catalogue of reformist jibes posung as 'hard Marxist' criticism:

1. We criticise SFWP, among others, not for criticising Irish capitalism, something we do constantly ourselves, but for doing so to the exclusion of and as a diversion from attacking imperialism.

2. The IRSP's election programme pointed to specific economic links between Irish capitalism and imperialism. That programme was conveniently and dishonestly ignored by O'Mahony in his rush to dismiss republicans as "reactionary"

What he also ignored in his lengthy article was mention of a single constructive point or proposal for a socialist election programme.

Was this because any attempt to do so would have revealed a shift towards Militant, whose British and Irish sections both refused to support the H Block campaign or hunger strike?

The use of a quote from James Connolly, which attacked the physical force tradition and which doubtless mesmerised putative students of Irish labour history, conveniently ignored two facts among others.

First, it was written 17 years before Connolly, like Lenin, broke from the Second International on the olly.

Even in the 1840s, Fintan Lalor proclaimed that the land question contained the seeds of liberation for the Irish people and the national question alone did not. Today it is the class question.

Unify

The IRSP writers state that national unity and independence are the two tasks of the national revolution. This would certainly hold for backward, pre-capitalist societies. But Ireland is not such a society.

The Irish bourgeoisie have shown themselves historically incapable of uniting Ireland's people or relations with British imperialism, but both segments of the divided Irish bourgeoisie have, in their different ways, helped to perpetuate the communal divisions that imperialism fostered or created in Ireland.

The problem is to unify the Irish working people - and to conduct the national liberation and socialist movement in such a way as to achieve this unity, or at least to maximise the chances of achieving it.

The main charge I made against the IRSP (and others) about their activity

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Socialist Organiser no.81 April 22 1982 Page 11

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centrality of the struggle in the North, and within that

ment about the real issues by way of ruling the oppon-

territory. Split themselv- es, they have had different