Engels on Ire and

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PETER Flack in his letter in. Socialist Organiser no.119 accuses John O'Mahony of "lying"' and rewriting the history of Ireland. This seems slightly imprudent if we examine more closely some of the assertions that Peter Flack makes.

He asserts that British conquest in Ireland remained only 'a conscious policy' until the 1640s, and had not AS I AM usually impressed by John O'Mahony's realistic grasp of the British political scene, I was all the more startled, on reading his recent writing in Socialist Organiser on the nature and history of the Soviet Union, to discover in these matters he is the prisoner of a time warp.

The recent casual exchange of views on the nature of the Soviet Union suggests that O'Mahony believes the controversy on that subject to have been closed by the Trotsky v. Burnham/Schachtman debate of 1939/40.

Another 40 years of history and a mountain of literature on the subject goes unheeded. There is no cognisance of recent debates on the subject, such as in the pages of Critique.

To encounter such a curiously closed mind on the question that-has most vexed socialists for nearly 60 years is rather disturbing.

Not that I believe it is possible for such a discussion to be fruitfully pursued through a series of brief letters to a socialist newspaper. The matter requires more extensive and thorough treatment than such a medium will allow. But the exchange was instructive in that it • confirmed the impression that the claim that the Soviet Union is a workers' state is "not Marxist theorising in search of a correct these; it is merely defending k. position" (Tickten).

•The same naive dogmatism was again revealed in the series of articles on Leninism. Apart from taken place in the 1590s. In fact, Elizabeth 1, motivated by a fear of the Spanish using Ireland as a stepping stone in war against England (5,000 Spanish soldiers did in fact land in 1601) destroyed the last bastions of the Irish chiefs, the O'Neills, in Ulster, by 1602.

Peter Flack also ridicules the idea that 'it was James sections of the final article, there was little in the series that would not have found space in publications of the Soviet Academy of Historical Science.

Many who have been in the socialist movement for a considerable period will have read similar turgid pieties over and over again. There was no attempt to encounter the thorny, questions - contemporary socialist criticism of Lenin's concept of party building, the justification for the decisions of the 10th Congress, the ambiguity of Lenin's position on political pluralism _ these and many more questions which have absorbed socialists and bourgeois historians of the period.

Relevance Nor had the authors anything to say on the relevance of the Leninist concept of the party to the British political scene in the 1980s. This is even more curious when we consider that in one of the issues of Socialist Organiser containing these articles there were forthright attacks upon democratic centralism by left wing members of the Labour Party interviewed about their views on the current offensive by the What is the relevance, if any, of Lenin's concept of the party to the British labour movement today? Let us have an open and honest debate on the matter.

JOHN CAMPBELL Glasgow