Blocks Struggle

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in the South is that their tailing Haughey militates against the action that could be taken in the South which would react back on the North and help change the situation of chronic communal antagonism there - action on the lines of socialist politics, according to the model of the international class struggle (which the writers ridiculously call 'British'). There are, after all, wo different types of nationism'. There are those who see Orange reaction as the legitimate expression of a 'Protestant nation' • And there are those who' pursue the national struggle as a purely national struggle, on the basis of the historic Catholic-based Irish nationalism of the last 150 years which has not attracted the Protestant people. They pursue the national struggle only as a struggle of the existing 'nationalist population' , implicitly forever excluding the 25% Protestant minority as outside the Irish nation.

Thus they can conceive of 'anti-imperialist' unity with Charles J Haughey or someone like him; they can choose 'nationalist' unity as against working class unity, North and South. This is Catholic two-nationism.

It is the technique of defining out again - this time used to forget about one million Protestant Irish men and women, most of them proletarians._ Opposite This 'Catholic twonationism' is the opposite of the Republicanism of Wolfe Tone and Patrick Pearse, not to speak of James Connolly.

'The Border' is a social institution, the product of the interaction of British imperialism, the Catholic Irish majority, and of the Orange community. The writers use it to explain everything. It must itself be explained.

It was only possible for British imperialism to do what it did and continues to. do to Ireland because it found or created communal divisions in the Irish people. The problem for Socialist relutionans, is to 1s to combine the struggle against imperialism with socialist struggles inside Ireland that will unify the Irish working class and link it to the small working farmers, against those in Ireland who, north and south, have been the imperialist garrison, the bourgeoisie.

Thus the politics of the IRSP have no chance of actually removing the border. In 60 years rightwing Republicanism (which had, at one time, some ruling-class support) and populist republicanism, have not been able to remove the Border. That's the problem that we are arguing about!

Define away

I don't say: fight for workers' power in the south and 'hope' the Border disappears. I say: fight for workers' power in Ireland, and unify the Irish working class, North and South, on the politics of socialist anti-imperialism, linking and uniting the struggles in the North and the South while taking due account of the different conditions.

Abandon the Catholic two-nationist politics which lead you to talk and act as if one million Irish Protestants do not exist (and the political method that seeks to 'define them away' with political labels like Unionist, pro-imperialist, etc.) Stop. extrapolating your political programme from the exigencies and limits of commitment to an immediate physical-force solution. Stop making the physicalforce struggle the all: shaping core of your politics — not a tool but a fetish, the overriding commitment to which undercuts and devours your socialism and even your nationalism (in 1 'one's sense Pearse do not say that this is an easy road, or that it offers the prospect of quick results. But it is the only socialist republican road.

The IRSP policy of united fronts with Fianna Fail (or left wing Fianna Fail, or rank and file Fianna Fail, or Blaney's independent Fianna Fail) decisively turns its back on these politics.

Influenced

Comrades of the IRSP, you do not meet the Border 'head on': you called for a vote for the party that has been the garrison of imperialism and Irish capitalism on one side of the Border for 50 years. "It is utter nonsense to say "Irish class divisions break down... along mainly national lines' as if Fianna Fail is part of the 'proletarian nation' and the Northern Protestant workers are - what? And this from people who accuse me of 'two-nationism'!

When James Connolly wrote what I quoted, he was influenced by one of the precursors of communism within the Second International, Daniel De Leon. Plainly he was not just referring to the heroic terrorist sect, the Invincibles.

The writer seems to think that James Connolly ceased to be a socialist : first on Easter Monday 1916. This is the view that the Irish bourgeoisie have peddled since they made James Connolly, after his death, one of their plaster-of-paris icons.

Yet James Connolly told some of the Citizen Army men in 1916: 'The chances are a thousand to one against us, but in the event of victory hold onto your rifles as those with whom we are fighting may stop before our goal is reached"

Connolly was a revolutionary socialist who understood the importance of the national question in Ireland. He was not a born-again Irish nationalist who subordinated socialism to nationalism, or put it away from him 'for the duration' Committed to the view that there had to be two distinct stages in the Irish revolution - first national liberation, then socialism - the Stalinists developed their own version of this. The IRSP, following through the right wing logic of their politics, now pick it up.

It is simply not true -as the events of the election prove - that. the IRSP engages in both political and physical-force struggle, in James Connolly's tradition. In basic substance, the IRSP in the election was hardly distinguishable from bourgeois politics, despite the rhetoric.

The writers know what is wrong with the comparison of Fianna Fail and the Labour Party. The Labour Party has a working-class character, despite the bourgeois politics of its leaders and despite its role as a governing party of British imperialism, because it is rooted in the bedrock working-class organisations, the trade unions, responsive to them, and potentially under their control. Fianna Fail is a machine, originated by exrevolutionaries, , which relies on a certain populist and Republican appeal.

It is a radically different social organism. It is 'in a different country", but it certainly isn't the Irish equivalent of the Labour The writers' defence of Fianna Fail against the 'trite label' Green Tory is as instructive as the holy trinity of Republicanism, Catholiciam, and Irish capitalism. So is the notion -in 1982 - that the 'Irish people' implies a republican potential distinct from the socialist republican one implied in the term "Irish working" class' • An Irish people that includes Fianna Fail and not the Northern working class majority? An Irish socialist republic coming after 'the republic'?

John O'Mahony replies to the IRSP First the Republic, then the Socialist Republic, as the ideological precursors of the IRSP, the right wing of the Republican Congress, put it in the mid1930s?

I gave quotations to back up what I said about the IRSP's attitude to a broad front with Fianna Fail. Other Jesuitical minds reading Socialist Organiser can check for themselves (Socialist Organiser, March 4, 1982).

There were higher figures for the IRSP than I quoted. Anyone who thinks that 800 (Dublin West) is qualitatively higher than the 343 and 232 which I cited as examples, is free to accuse me of misrepresentation (in fact, it was a slip-up).

The writers say: "O'Mahony wants to revive old battles fought" over 10 years ago.

In the present state of the Republican movement and of the Catholic revolt in the Six Counties, only a stern devotion to an inner vision can lead the writers to the conclusion that the debates of the late '60s and early '70s about the relation of socialism and the Republican movement are a matter of history, decided in favour of the physicalforce republicans.

Quite the opposite. The impasse in Northern Ireland makes them burning questions of the moment.

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Organiser no.81 April 22