14.03.1996

‘If not with a bullet ...’

The recent controversy between the Communist Party majority and one of its supporters branches over the thorny question of Ireland poses important questions. Here Ian Mahoney answers some of the most common objections raised against our support for the liberation struggle of the republican forces in the north of Ireland.

Marx and Engels told us that ‘workers have no countries’. Shouldn’t we be against the proletariat being dragged into any sort of nationalist struggle? Surely as internationalists we must tell the nationalist masses that they are being diverted into a cul de sac by Sinn Fein/IRA?

Actually, the position of Marx and Engels was far more subtle - both in relation to Ireland and the nationalist struggle more generally.

Of course, nationalism is a poison to the revolutionary working class. It acts as an alternative pole of loyalty to class and it blurs the fundamental differences of interest between the working class and other - ultimately antagonistic - classes. It posits an ‘imaginary community’ of interests between the proletariat and others.

Sure, all of this is true. Yet if we take a simple-minded approach to this question, we can slip into a chauvinist position ourselves and end up supporting the oppressive nationalism of the great powers.

As Marxists we must draw a sharp distinction between the nationalism of the oppressor and the oppressed. The nationalism of the oppressor represents a justification of robbery and exploitation. The nationalism of an oppressed nation or nationality is a spontaneously generated ideology which can represent a striving for freedom and have a fundamentally democratic content.

Precisely as a democratic question, the national movement of oppressed peoples and nations can be a potentially very important item on the agenda of the revolutionary working class movement. It is a movement that the working class must struggle for hegemony over.

Why should we struggle for this leadership? Why do we fight for this acceptance of the role of the vanguard, not simply from the mass of the proletariat but also from other strata and classes?

The need for proletarian hegemony in the struggle for revolution springs from the objective reality of the existence of other oppressed strata and classes within the nation, layers whose democratic aspirations and struggles must be utilised for the revolution. As Lenin puts it:

“We would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the great liberation war of the proletariat for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement against the various calamities of imperialism in order to sharpen and extend the crisis” (Lenin on Ireland, p34)

Indeed, we would not simply be ‘poor revolutionaries’, we would reduce the revolution itself to a utopia as

“The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything but an outburst of mass struggle by all and sundry oppressed and discontented elements ... Without such participation, mass struggle is not possible, no revolution is possible ... Objectively they will attack capital ...” (Ibid, p33)

So when we are faced with a national struggle, what criteria do we apply to decide whether it deserves the support of the working class? After all, ostensibly we may be faced with a mass movement with - as Lenin points out - manifestly reactionary prejudices and petty bourgeois idiocies.

Fundamentally, we must look at what class forces the revolt sweeps up into action. Are the popular masses involved in a struggle for democracy, or is the movement simply the political reflex of a reactionary class, a stratum with no progressive aspirations or potential? This decides our attitude to the revolt, not the tactics or the relative sizes of the belligerents.

But what about Ireland specifically? You may be right that each national struggle must be judged concretely. But then, didn’t Marx and Engels simply believe that the liberation of Ireland relied - pure and simple - on the struggle for the revolution in Britain? Doesn’t the terrorist struggle of the Irish in this sense give a stick to the British bourgeoisie to beat the revolutionary proletariat of the country that holds the key to socialism in the British Isles?

It is true that in the 1840s and the 1850s Marx and Engels thought that Ireland would be liberated through the triumph of proletarian revolution in Britain itself. But later, in the 1860s, they came to the conclusion that, if anything, it would be the other way around. The victory of the national movement in Ireland would be the spark that would ignite the class struggle in Britain. With the “loss of Ireland”, wrote Marx, “the class war in England, till now somnolent and chronic, will assume acute forms” (Marx and Engels Ireland and the Irish question, p404).

This in no way implied some stageist approach to the revolution, however. For Marx a central component of revolution in Britain became the necessity of breaking the political/ideological chain that bound the working class to the policy of the bourgeoisie over Ireland. In fact, for workers in Britain “the national emancipation of Ireland is no question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment, but the first condition of their own social emancipation” (Ibid p408). What Marx was talking about was not necessarily a fixed historical sequence of events - that is, first Ireland must achieve its liberation with the help of the proletariat of Britain; then and only then can this proletariat proceed to revolution.

No, this would be a mechanical approach. What Marx and Engels pointed to essentially is the need for the working class of Britain to construct an independent political line from the ruling class over Ireland. Without this, its struggle would be fatally compromised. Ireland expressed in the most chemically ‘pure’ form the difference between a proletarian and bourgeois approach to political questions. Unless - and until - the working class of Britain could distinguish itself on this question, it was doomed to be a subordinate, slave class on every other.

Of course, in Ireland as in every other country subjected to imperialism, the demand for national self-determination against imperialist oppression is in the interests of a number of classes: it is therefore a democratic demand. It is not a demand that contradicts the struggle for socialism either in the oppressor or oppressed nation. In fact, in both it can be a lever to open up the road to socialism if the working class fights for its revolutionary hegemony over the struggle.

Marx speaks of the content of the revolutionary struggle being the working class winning the struggle for democracy. In Britain the democratic question that historically has been the key to the revolution has been the struggle for self-determination of the Irish nation.

Thus, according to Marx, “It is the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland ...” (Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish question, p397). This is simply because the exploitation of Ireland constitutes “one of the main sources of the English aristocracy’s material welfare: it is its greatest moral strength” (my emphasis). The domination of Britain over Ireland was “the great means by which the English aristocracy maintains its domination in England herself” (Ibid, p406).

Through the creation of a reactionary consensus between the British ruling and working class, bourgeois hegemony over society as a whole is maintained and strengthened. Again as Marx put it, when a worker in Britain regards himself as a member of the ruling nation in relation to the Irish, he turns himself into a “tool of the aristocracy and capitalists of his country against Ireland, and thus strengthening their domination over himself”

This consensus is “the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation” (Ibid, p408). Until the workers’ movement in Britain draws an implacable line of demarcation between its attitude to the struggle of the Irish liberation movement and that of the imperialist bourgeoisie, it will never be able to strike out for revolution, it will never win.

OK, that may be so. But didn’t Marx and Engels actually condemn the tactics of the Fenians, the IRA of their day? Didn’t they condemn the indiscriminate bombing of the English workers?

In a word, no. Of course, opportunists of various sorts have seized on the incident of the Clerkenwell bombings of December 13 1868. In an attempt to free two imprisoned Fenians, a barrel of gunpowder was ignited, blowing up the prison wall and wrecking a number of nearby working class homes. Some 12 workers - including women and children - were killed and 20 more seriously injured.

Marx was incensed by what he called the “melodramatic folly” of the Clerkenwell explosion, especially as it followed so closely on the heels of a massive torchlit meeting held in defence of the Manchester Martyrs on nearby Clerkenwell Green just a short time before. He commented quite correctly that this act was likely to alienate working class opinion just as it was beginning to move in the direction of support of the Irish struggle. Yet these comments - so eagerly seized on by subsequent generations of anti-republican ‘communists’ - were made in private correspondence and were never intended for public consumption.

The open pronouncements of Marx and Engels continued to express their solidarity with the Fenian struggle. Their recognition of the objectively progressive nature of this struggle greatly outweighed the harm they judged that individual misguided tactics pursued by the movement might cause. The job of communists was not to stand platitudinously for the right of the Irish to self-determination... then condemn them for the means they chose to pursue that just aim.

As Engels had remarked in a letter to Kugelmann on November 8 1867,

“The London proletariat declare every day more and more openly for the Fenians and, hence - an unheard-of and splendid thing here - for, first, a violent and, secondly, an anti- English movement” (Marx and Engels on Ireland, pl55, my emphasis).

Today communists have the same approach as Marx and Engels. It is because we recognise the democratic content of the struggle of Sinn Fein and the IRA that we have given them unconditional support, whatever tactics they have used historically. Those ‘communists’ and ‘revolutionaries’ that have rushed into print in the aftermath of the Canary Wharf bomb to condemn the republican forces illustrate nothing but their own implicit pro-British-state chauvinism.

As with the Fenians of Marx and Engel’s day, we are not dealing with acts of individual terror when we observe the operations of the IRA. These military actions are a particular tactic employed in a protracted armed and political struggle against the forces of British imperialism. They are an organic product of a section of the nationalist working class in the occupied Six Counties of the north of Ireland, a risen people fighting in a revolutionary way against our common enemy.

No doubt those like our ex-comrades of the North Herts Communist Party supporters branch would take a basically correct approach to the military actions of liberation forces in other countries. The problem is when the revolution comes home, of course.

But when we speak of Marx and Engels, we are dealing with a fundamentally different period. By the time of Lenin and the Communist Parties, the period of national liberation was beginning to wane. The epoch then was one of socialist revolution.

On the contrary, Lenin suggests

“the policy of Marx and Engels on the Irish question serves as a splendid example of the attitude the proletariat of the oppressor nation should adopt towards national movements, an example which has lost none of its immense practical importance ... ” (Collected Works, Volume 20, p442).

For instance, the Easter rising of 1916 was greeted with condemnation and dismissal from many quarters of the international workers’ movement. Within the ranks of Russian revolutionaries, leading figures such as Trotsky and Radek - while recognising the heroism of the insurgents - wrote that the defeat of the Easter rising marked the death knell of the national question as an active element of the proletarian struggle for liberation: “The experiment of an Irish national rebellion ... is over,” wrote Trotsky (cited in Lenin on Ireland, p3-4).

In stark contrast, Lenin underlined:

“To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolt by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and non-proletarian masses against oppressions by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc - to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, ‘We are for socialism’; and another, somewhere else and says, ‘We are for imperialism’ - and that will be a social revolution!

“Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is” (Ibid, pp32- 33).

Thus, Lenin underlines that

“If we do not want to betray socialism, we must support every rebellion against our main enemy, the bourgeoisie of the big state, providing it is not the rebellion of a reactionary class. By refusing to support rebellions of annexed territories we objectively become annexationists” (CW, Vol22, p333).

But what about workers’ unity concretely? How can we fight for this by supporting the armed struggle of a communalist movement? The IRA murders protestant workers; they murder workers in Britain. How can we call for the unity between the working class in this country and people who potentially will be blowing them up on their way into work tomorrow?

First, we must state a very simple principle. War is the pursuit of politics by other, violent, means. Our attitude to any particular armed struggle is therefore not decided in the first instance by the particular military tactics employed. Our criteria are fundamentally political: are the republican forces fighting for a democratic demand? Or are they the representatives of politically reactionary forces?

Secondly, the struggle of the republican military forces has been - in general - a remarkably ‘clean’ one. Even the British army intelligence has confirmed this in leaked internal documents. Overwhelmingly, the IRA and Inla have attacked legitimate military targets. Civilian causalities have either been a result of botched operations like the recent explosion on a London bus or the failure of the security services to act on warnings. Of course, there have been exceptions to this. Occasionally what could be called ‘terror’ targets have been chosen: targets which necessarily entailed civilian casualties.

It must be said that these have been relatively rare exceptions to the rule. The equation of ‘orange and green terror’ that some left organisations draw is a despicable distortion of the reality of the conflict. The armed action of the protestant paramilitaries on the other hand has been overwhelmingly directed against the catholic community - a reactionary communalist war aided and abetted by the occupying imperialist forces.

But again, this is a secondary question. Our attitude to the military actions of the republicans is not dictated by their tactical astuteness: it flows from our support for the revolutionary democratic elements of their programme.

What about the protestants? Speaking of democracy is all very well, but they represent the majority in the north of Ireland. We should promote working class unity rather than advocate their forcible assimilation into the reactionary southern Irish bourgeois state through a nationalist war supported only by the catholic masses.

Our support for the democratic struggle of the republican movement has never meant that we looked forward in a sanguine way to the ‘inevitable’ prospect of a united 32-county bourgeois republic or that we believe that Sinn Fein is an adequate political vehicle for the working class.

Far from it. The winning of self-determination for Ireland would mean - in practical terms - a defeat for our common enemy, the British state, on part of its own territory, an area it regards as part of its own. Under the hegemony of the working class, such a victory for the revolutionary forces could call into question existing class and power relations throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. In Ireland, the rise of revolutionist forces was described in the past as threatening to create “a Cuba off Britain’s western shore” (Jim Prior, Northern Ireland secretary, The Times, July 17 1984). In other words, the social revolution is inextricably linked - in Britain and Ireland alike- to the question of self-determination.

Prior’s fears notwithstanding however, the politics of petty bourgeois nationalism represented by Sinn Fein have proved incapable of developing an all-Ireland revolutionary movement against British imperialism. Such a movement would need to rally to its banner both those experiencing repression most severely - the catholic masses in the Six Counties - and all oppressed and exploited sections of the Irish population. This must include at least a section of the protestant working class in the north.

Because of its petty bourgeois nature, Sinn Fein has oscillated between reformism and guerillaism, as it has attempted to fight Britain with physical force on the one hand and gain wider support on the other. The latest imperialist-brokered ‘peace’ initiative is not exceptional. For example, when the guerrilla struggle was crushed in 1923, Sinn Fein spawned the reformist nationalism of de Valera. Similarly, after the failure of the Border Campaign of 1956-62, Sinn Fein again slowly slipped back to mainstream constitutional nationalism. This process was rudely interrupted by the outbreak of the ‘troubles’ in 1969, an eruption that sharply split the organisation into two.

Because of its oscillating politics and its inability to unite the broad masses, petty bourgeois nationalism is by itself unable to actually resolve the national question. This is simply because of the extraordinary mass of different but interlocked contradictions that exist in Ireland -a collaborating green bourgeoisie, a pro-British loyalist bourgeoisie, a labour aristocratic protestant working class, the division of the country and so on.

The fundamental weakness of petty bourgeois nationalism - however heroically it has fought the revolutionary war - is that by its very nature it must subordinate working class interests to that of Irish unity. Because this unity is to be on the basis of capitalism - “Labour must wait,” in other words - not only has the working class in the south been kept as auxiliaries to the struggle, but there has been no chance to win at least a section of the protestant working class from loyalism. A united capitalist Ireland dominated by green nationalism has understandably had little attraction for protestant workers in the north.

Our intervention in the field of Irish politics has never been premised on the assumption that Sinn Fein will ‘do’. Despite our defence of the revolutionary struggle of the petty bourgeois Sinn Fein/IRA, we have also fought for the creation of an all-Ireland revolutionary Communist Party, capable of winning genuine working class unity and the unity of all the oppressed of Ireland around its banner. A central element of this must be the fight against imperialism - the historical task of self-determination of the Irish nation that must be completed under proletarian hegemony.

However, the notion that the precondition for this unity is the cessation of the revolutionary struggle of the republican military forces is rubbish. For example, this implicitly assumes that the reason for the division between the protestant and catholic workers in the north is the military campaign of the IRA. The letter from the North Herts supporters branch (Weekly Worker, February 29) is useful if only for the reason that it expresses this mundane reactionary idea very succinctly. Since the ceasefire, we were told, a qualitative change had begun in the north of Ireland: “The old sectarian divide which maintained the imperialist status quo has started to dissolve” (my emphasis - IM).

Or in other words, what separated the two communities was a sectarian schism, an irrationalist division in the ranks of the workers. This divide, exacerbated and made all the more bitter by the armed struggle of the paramilitaries on both sides (who presumably simply pursued the politics of “sectarianism” through violent means), was responsible for the “imperialist status quo”, the occupation of the Six Counties by the British army.

Without the armed conflict, this old irrational division in the working class was beginning to spontaneously “dissolve”.

This rubbish is quite a neat summation of the pro-imperialist prejudices that have coloured much of the British left’s approach to Ireland. Militant Labour in the past, for example, has predicted that the immediate withdrawal of the troops would mean mass murder, a potential “Beirut”, it assured us. British imperialism’s role - despite itself - has been a progressive one, to keep the peace between two warring sets of ‘paddies’. British soldiers are therefore a little like heavily armed social workers.

In fact, Britain has been the architect of the divisions in Ireland and the source of all the subsequent violence. The British state has never been an impartial body - it has been in Ireland to crush the forces of revolutionary nationalism, to shore up the Six County statelet created by Britain to cripple the struggle for Irish national liberation.

The protestant working class has been a relatively privileged section of the proletariat. It has defined its politics through its alliance with Britain and through the systematic oppression of the nationalist minority in the north. The notion that this division - between the labour aristocratic section of the class and the layer that it has joined its ‘own’ bourgeoisie in oppressing - can now “dissolve” spontaneously is a nonsense. Objectively, it absolves British imperialism from any blame for these divisions.

Also implicit in this is the idea that now- at last - those troublesome Irish have the chance to get ‘proper’ politics. They can forget all about that silly self-determination claptrap and get stuck into the trade unions like us real socialists and revolutionaries, the British. Engels in 1872 crushingly answered similar chauvinist arguments:

“If members of a conquering nation called upon the nation they had conquered and continued to hold down to forget their specific nationality and position, to ‘sink national differences’ and so forth, that was not internationalism, it was nothing else but preaching to them submission to the yoke, and attempting to justify and perpetuate the domination of the conqueror under the cloak of internationalism. It was sanctioning the belief, only too common among the English working men, that they were superior beings compared to the Irish ...” (Marx and Engels on Ireland, p419).

Irish politics is changing in the context of a new world order totally dominated by imperialism. Given the nature of the forces at the head of the struggle for Irish self-determination, the manoeuvres of the republicans should not surprise us. Petty bourgeois nationalism in Ireland has always contained within itself the tension between armed revolutionary force and constitutional nationalism.

The hypocritical cant spewing forth from the bourgeois media and political establishment about the latest bomb ‘outrages’ should fool no one. The Canary Wharf bomb and the suspension of the ceasefire by the IRA is part of a complex diplomatic minuet of bluffs, counter-bluffs, feints and bluster. The IRA’s bombs are ‘peace process bombs’; they in no way herald a return to the declaration of outright hostilities and another 20-plus years of war.

Those in the ranks of the workers’ movement who rush to add their voice to the hypocritical chorus of bourgeois condemnation for the armed actions of the IRA do nothing to construct the type of genuine working class alternative in Ireland and Britain which will fight undeviatingly for self-determination. On the contrary, they make the task more difficult for communists, as they provide a ‘left’ or ‘revolutionary’ cover for supporting the British state in Ireland.

We can do no better than reproduce the words of Trotsky on such ‘socialists’, incorporated into the manifesto of the second congress of the Communist International held in Moscow in 1920:

“The British socialist who fails to support by all possible means the uprising in Ireland ... against the London plutocracy - such a socialist deserves to be branded with infamy, if not with a bullet.”