10.08.2005
Nothing predetermined
Philip Ferguson replies to Peter Manson's article in last week's Weekly Worker
Hopefully the three pieces in last week's Weekly Worker by Liam O Ruairc, Peter Manson and myself will stimulate some wider discussion and debate, and not just in Britain ('Ireland needs Marxism', August 4). Hopefully these and earlier pieces, mainly by Liam, are being read within Ireland itself. In a comradely spirit, I would like to make a couple of comments on Peter's article. I always have a problem when British leftists refer to the Provos as a 'petty bourgeois' movement, especially when so many of these comrades regard the British Labour Party as a workers' party (albeit of the deformed and degenerated sort). In fact, for most of their existence, the Provos are far more of a working class movement than the British Labour Party is today. I'm aware that Peter is referring to the Provos' politics, rather than their social composition. Interestingly, the British Labour Party has never transcended petty bourgeois politics, yet I don't see too many British leftists continuously using terms like the bourgeois British Labour Party or the petty bourgeois British Labour Party. British leftists have a strange double standard of calling the British LP 'working class' on the basis of its supposed social composition/base and yet calling Irish republicans 'petty bourgeois' on the basis of their politics. I might also add that while British capital provides substantial funding and support for the British Labour Party, no major section of capital provides funding for the Provos (although that will most likely change over the next few years). In short, describing the Provos as 'petty bourgeois' is neither correct nor helpful, especially when a different stance is taken to the far more pernicious British Labour Party. Peter also argues they were never revolutionary nationalists. Yet if you look at who Lenin described as revolutionary nationalists in his time, it is rather difficult to deny that description to the Provos in the 1970s and 1980s. The practical problem with some of Peter's terminology and analysis is that it actually treats the evolution of the Provos as a straight line from 1969-70 to what they are now. Everything is predetermined because, after all, that's what the petty bourgeoisie and petty bourgeois politics do. This approach was not of much use within Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s. The problem of the Provos was certainly, as Peter more helpfully indicates, a lack of a serious revolutionary programme. This, of course, is also an affliction of left groups more close to home, like the British Socialist Workers Party which, unlike the Provos, made - and still makes - the claim to be Marxist and whose social composition is far less proletarian than that of the Provos during their evolution leftwards phase. In terms of his comments about the Irish Republican Socialist Party, I hope that there will be a response to Peter's criticism. I don't think the IRSP has any vested interests in defending errors, any more than Peter's own current has in defending a number of wrong and bad positions in the past. I certainly agree that Marxism is the basis for building a revolutionary movement in Ireland in the 21st century and, as I've said before, Marxism in Ireland means a positive engagement and identification with the republican tradition. It's impossible to be a revolutionary in Ireland without being a republican, although there's no shortage of gas-and-water socialists over there at present. Lastly, we come to the 'British-Irish' question. I gather that there are differences about this within the CPGB/Weekly Worker current and I assume that my position is pretty similar to the minority view. The problem is the entire conception of the 'British-Irish'. While this is supposed to be a recognition of an historical reality, it is no such thing. Nobody in Ireland, apart possibly from a few neo-fascist cranks, would describe the unionist population in the north by such a term. It is basically an invention of the old British-Irish Communist Organisation in the period in which they moved away from republicanism and towards capitulation to British imperialism. The actual historical process that has gone on in Ireland is the fusion of various peoples arriving on the island at different times into a single people we call the Irish. The Irish nation only emerged in the 1700s - an objective historical process which was reflected politically in the formation of the United Irish movement. It's no accident that this movement was almost totally founded and led by protestants. The separation of much of the protestant population was the conscious policy of the British state in reaction to the tendency of historical development to create a single nation and unitary nation-state in Ireland. This process was artificially blocked by British control of the island, in a similar way to how the imposition of apartheid retarded the development of a single South African nation and attempted to break it up into discrete 'races'. The idea of a 'British-Irish' nationality in Ireland is as erroneous as the idea of a 'white' nationality in South Africa with a right to self-determination (I might add I have the same attitude to the two-state position the CPGB majority holds on Israel, but I'll leave that for another time). The political implications of concocting a 'British-Irish' nationality are to make a major concession to the imperialists: eg, to advocate a two-state 'solution' to the Irish national question, a solution the imperialists themselves attempted in 1921. Your majority's position just seems to want to alter the border. Anyway, while critical of some of your analysis in relation to Ireland, I am heartened by your existence as one of the few currents around which is prepared to openly discuss and debate these vital questions in your paper. My own donations go to the Anti-Capitalist Alliance here in New Zealand, but I'd certainly urge people in Britain to donate to your Summer Offensive appeal. The Weekly Worker is surely a must-read for any serious leftist in Britain. Philip Ferguson
Worker