08.02.1996

No short cuts

Against imperialism, for the working class

Last week Gino Gallagher, Irish Republican Socialist Party national organiser and staff officer in the Irish National Liberation Army, was murdered in cold blood.

The RUC immediately labelled the killing part of an internal feud within Inla - a line slavishly followed by most of the media, despite angry denials from the IRSP.

The media were able to recall the bloody split in 1986-7, when the so-called Irish Peoples Liberation Organisation launched a vicious assault on their former Inla comrades. That feud centred on the IRSP’s determination to transform itself into a Marxist-Leninist organisation and its insistence on the primacy of the political over the military. It correctly stressed that disputes within the movement should be settled through open discussion, not by the bullet.

The IRSP re-launched its paper, The Starry Plough, and entered into intense discussions with the Leninists of the Communist Party of Great Britain, culminating in a week-long joint school held in Belfast in August 1987. However, hopes that the IRSP could begin the urgent task of laying the basis for a genuine communist party for Ireland were short-lived. The Starry Plough stopped publication and the organisation ceased to exist in all but name.

The discontent among militant republicans over the orientation towards the imperialist ‘peace’ process has recently resulted in something of a revival for the IRSP. But it is still far from making a break with left republicanism in favour of communism. It still produces no publication and enters into no serious discussions with the CPGB - or any other pro-Party organisation.

On the contrary, IRSP leaders last month complained that the Progressive Unionist Party was ignoring its attempts to engage it in dialogue. The PUP has been closely associated with loyalist terror gangs, notorious for their indiscriminate attacks on catholics. They acted as an unofficial arm of the British state, determined to cow the republican population and crush any organised opposition to imperialist rule.

But the PUP has long declared itself for ‘socialism’ (the type of ‘national socialism’ which gave its name to a well known German fascist party). It sees its own role in the ‘peace’ process as helping to set up a cross-community, ‘respectable’, working class-based political organisation - extremely useful for imperialism, as it attempts to transform the Six Counties along ‘normal’ bourgeois lines.

We have pointed out on many occasions that there is no such animal as a pro-imperialist socialist. The interests of the workers will indeed be served when protestants and catholics can unite in the name of the working class. But such an organisation must define itself against imperialism. There can be no short cuts to unity through cosy chats with the likes of the PUP.

The Irish working class, like its British brothers and sisters, needs its communist party.

Jim Blackstock