06.08.2008

Nation, not class

Mark Fischer spoke to Kevin Bean about the background and objectives of his latest book on Sinn Fein

First, could you tell us a bit about your own political evolution, and why you felt it necessary to write this book at this juncture?

In some ways, it was an interest in Ireland which went back to the start of the early civil rights movement. I was very young. I followed politics from the late 60s. I have many family connections in Ireland and have spent some time there - particularly in the south. I think it was this that initially prompted my interested in these movements and how they had evolved.

More particularly, I was especially interested to explain Sinn Féin’s contemporary evolution. Many of the explanations on offer seemed partial to me, although I don’t think my account is by any means the last word. Ed Moloney’s book is an excellent piece of primary research which gets inside the movements, as it were, but there are two emphases which I was unhappy with.

One was simply a focus on the idea that Sinn Féin and the IRA are where they are today as a result of skilful manoeuvring and manipulation by the leadership.

There is a funny parallel from my political history - ie, the people who claimed that the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of CIA agents and ‘bad man’ revisionists like Gorbachev.

That leads on to the second theme - it kept on recurring because of my interest in the left in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The reasons for the betrayals that characterised these centuries were and are being constantly debated. My position would have been broadly the Trotskyist position on questions like Spain - that the Spanish revolution failed because of the lack of a revolutionary party. But you therefore create a very circular argument - there was no revolution, but why wasn’t there a revolution? Because of the lack of a revolutionary party!

In particular, I was concerned to explain why forces such as Stalinism or revisionism were so strong. I kept coming back to these issues and found that similar sorts of charges could even have been levelled at the pre-1914 German Social Democratic Party. There are a couple of footnotes in the book where I draw direct parallels with that party, because I am interested in the process through which similarly active and militant movements change into their opposites.

The so-called ‘great man’ or ‘betrayal’ approach to history is not serious (although it would make for an interesting dramatic device in a play featuring Gerry Adams alone in his room being visited one night by numerous ghosts à laChristmas Carol!).

I was also interested in the background of the 1990s, when for many people politics seemed to have disappeared under the banner of the ‘end of history’, etc. People were constantly bombarded with the message that the old forms of politics had disappeared and we had entered a new phase. I tried to make sense of that, even if - methodologically - my approach threw up more questions than answers. I looked at two things:

First, what I might loosely call ‘objective circumstances’. I looked at the political economy of Northern Ireland and was quickly struck that there were new economic developments and that the nature of Northern Irish society was itself undergoing change. Other people had touched on this and it was often referred to. However, nobody seemed to grasp the political implications. For example, the role of the state was changing.

This led on to my second point. The terrain on which the Provisionals were operating was very much shaped by the state in its widest sense. A type of interaction between the Provisionals and the state had developed. Then I explore what we mean by the state. I touch on this in the book, but do feel that it is an area that I definitely need to develop. It struck me that the idea of the state in the classic sense - “armed bodies of men” enjoying a monopoly of violence -obviously existed in Northern Ireland. Yet there were a growing number of non-confrontation interactions between the state and the nationalist population in many areas.

Increasingly, I looked at areas in social life and in particular the idea of civil society. I saw that there were insurrectionary organisations, or at the least very militant organisations, which were now not only interacting with the state, but in some senses carrying out the functions of that state. Community organisations, for example, were not only applying for funding to keep themselves going, but actually in terms of education and training were carrying out functions normally provided by the state.

Given the mood music of the 1990s, I thought that in one sense this chimed in perfectly. That the state was omnipotent, that the previous political paradigm had ended forever and therefore any revolutionary challenges were doomed to defeat. On another level, it showed both the strengthand weakness of the state. It could attempt to incorporate, to subvert, but it had been unable to physically crush these movements. It is an analogy, but probably the most interesting point - this was a similar process that happened to both the trade unions and the social democratic parties.

I am trying to move away from the idea of, to use the old phrase, ‘buying off’ leaders and movements. This is quite common in republican critiques of the Provisionals - they all have holiday homes, so, ipso facto, they have lost their edge. In the book, people who were involved in community groups explain and justify their strategy. I asked if they were aware of the dangers involved in this for their politics - I was trying to get into their mindset.

Interestingly, most of them were quite aware of the dangers; they didn’t go into it with their eyes completely closed. They thought that this would, in the words of one interviewee, be a new battle front for the struggle. A new arena in which you could, by very clever manoeuvring, take the money and run.

On top of that, I was also interested to chart what you might call the social psychology of the republican base and indeed the wider nationalist population. It may seem a rather crude analysis, but the economy was changing. For the nationalist population there would have been high levels of unemployment, although it was not comparable to, say, Welsh miners or Yorkshire steel workers. But there were new forms of employment and in particular the state at its lower levels was employing increasing numbers of nationalists as white-collar workers.

It may sound like a cliché, but what has been characterised as the rise of the new middle class was politically important. Other people have looked at that sociological development - even journalistic commentators - but the political impact of that has yet to be fully understood.

No movement can sustain itself purely on the basis of oppositionism - by definition it generates some sort of positive counter-culture, which is why the SPD analogy resonates. It develops its own alternative state, if you see what I mean …

Yes, I actually use that phrase ‘alternative state’ because I have studied some German history. I was struck by one thing when I began to visit particularly Belfast in the mid-90s. The analogy with the SPD works because of the cultural depth of the movement that made it possible to live almost exclusively within a republican framework - ie, through the alternative press, the Irish language, the clubs, etc.

To understand why this counter-culture was not particularly resistant we need look at its political level. It was an oppositional movement to the state, but it held within it many disparate currents. There is some evidence that suggests that even in its earlier, militant phase - from the late 60s to the fall of Stormont in March 1972 - it encompassed many whose main aim was simply to get rid of Stormont. Once that had gone, there was lack of clarity and even conflicting views about what should replace it.

That is not merely the clash between the socialist current and the more nationalist trends. This addresses a central problem of Irish nationalism itself. Often, it seems to be more of a discourse about the particular terms of a relationship to Britain, as opposed to a complete break. You can often understand Irish nationalism, going back to the time of home rule, as about the terms of trade, as opposed to no bargaining at all.

This is frequently dramatised as some sort of historical tragedy - de Valera versus Collins; in the modern period the Provos versus the Officials; Parnell and the Fenians; and moderate home rule against militant Fenianism. At its core is still the relationship to Britain.

So this has been a movement with different elements in it straining in different directions. But what do you think the chances were for a different outcome? Could the contradictions been resolved more positively and what do you think of the role of the British left in that?

Well, this is the sort of speculative game I used to play as a student - what if Lenin had been late for that train, and so on. I think it does come back to the issue of agency and real individuals. In particular historical circumstances, individuals can be key. Obviously things could have been very different if there had been different sorts of people around.

The case of Brian Keenan is quite interesting. Keenan and a number of other people were seen as the ‘irreconcilables’, particularly around the time of the Good Friday agreement. These are the type who would look after ‘our interests’ at very senior meetings and ‘not let us down’.

This is interesting because, as Moloney in particular shows, many of these figures were either out-manoeuvred or just went over to the strategy. If you read Keenan’s three-part series not long before he died, he attacks those who are critical of the constitutional turn and implicitly renounces some of his earlier positions when he states that “wish lists are for Christmas”. Revolutionaries have to be pragmatic, he says.

In many ways we come back to the start of our conversation - individual psychologies, their relation to wider social movements and the impact of failures of attempts at fundamental social change elsewhere. One thing that struck me about the militants in the 1980s and 90s was that in their internal debates they referred to the defeat of projects such as Nicaragua, South Africa or Palestine.

The African National Congress was actually a very important actor is this process. It sent large numbers of officials and former members of the its military wing to Ireland to describe their own ‘decommissioning’ experiences. This happened both inside and outside Long Kesh.

Effectively, they added their revolutionary prestige to the new politics. But again, despite the enormous revolutionary gravitas of these individuals, why were people willing to listen to them expound a profoundly non-revolutionary message? You think back to the Bolsheviks and Lenin having to convince the Bolsheviks with the ‘April theses’.

The internal debates changed and the general theoretical level of the movement declined from what had been very high politically. There were forces within the Provisionals that could have led it in a very different direction. Essentially, it comes back to the problem that republicanism really contains within itself such a broad range of currents. So we have the ongoing debate between the socialist revolution and the national democratic revolution. Contained within that dichotomy and the forms it took were all the problems which came out later.

For example, on one side the form used by nationalism to express itself in some trends is cognate with the particularism you find in identity politics. Plus we have the models of catholic nationalism that stressed identity, as opposed to political democracy. These are elements that both the state and other forces were able to draw out and develop into the ‘multicultural’ form we see today.

Again, there is a parallel, if you look at the SPD’s defencism in 1914. It was justified by referring to Engels’ arguments on the nature of tsarism. The existing ideological material was utilised. There were always trends within the Provisionals - but particularly from the 1980s onwards - that emphasised the particularist catholic experience within Northern Ireland rather than the universalist aspects of republicanism. I use those terms very deliberately, because these currents were increasingly articulating catholic and communal notions, as opposed to those of class.

It is very easy to contrast what this or that person said in 1982 to what they were saying in the 1990s. But if you look even at the high point of the language of class in the 1970s, when the Provos were accused of being Marxists, there was a problem. In many ways, it was nothing more than an appeal to sections of their own militants who were moving left. Looking back, it was always quite unconvincing.

The republican tradition was always quite an elitist one (and I don’t just say this to single it out - the same could be said of many revolutionary groups of that era, where you have armed guerrillas acting as a ‘catalyst’ or substitute for the mass). But there was also mass activity and mobilisation. However, it was activity only up to a certain level - to get people elected, for example. The idea of going beyond, towards ongoing independent mass initiative, just didn’t happen.

So the potential was certainly there for a left development. You can see that in the trajectory of many individual militants (Phil Ferguson is a good example). But in general people were very reluctant to abandon the ‘traditional’ republican paradigm. When this has happened historically with left movements within republicanism, either they become quite ideologically fossilised or they make such a total break that they go off in quite strange directions.

So, despite the great political ferment and the presence of intelligent groups of activists, the militants I have spoken to regard the possibility of a left development as very unlikely. Open discussion in the movement was not really possible - it was still run as a fairly militaristic organisation. Partially as a result, when people did become aware of the problem, it was too late. Militants were embroiled in the daily struggle of the movement precisely during the time when they needed to sit down and examine it critically.

I use the comparison repeatedly - although it is one based on different historical conditions - between the Irish situation and the politics of the 60s. There only seemed to be time for wider political questions when the movement had been defeated or was in retreat. I think your own experience and that of your own group would contain a lesson about that. Nobody really looked at what they were building: they just got on with the daily graft.

I remember making a joke to one comrade who was very critical of the new direction, but he was a loyal oppositionist. He said that this conception is an oxymoron in the republican movement. People didn’t mobilise at a branch meeting to get a resolution to the party congress, but were bureaucratically blocked. You did not really have resolutions and you did not really have party congresses.

Also, when people were trying to formulate political ideas, despite them often being very sophisticated contributions, it was very easy to use the loyalty and the prestige of the leadership to stymie critical thinking about them. This is a point Phil Ferguson made in an article in theWeekly Worker which I quoted in the book.

He was trying to say that the analogies between the new Sinn Féin and New Labour and Blairism are wrong. The people telling the members what to do were not slick-suited ex-students: these were people who had fought, had done time and had the prestige of self-sacrificing comrades. I keep coming back to this social psychology of organisations and their political level as a key factor.

This can be traced back to traditional republicanism, which was very non-theoretical, much like Labourism in Britain. Remember Herbert Morrison’s remark that “socialism is what a Labour government does”. In a similar way, republicanism is what the republicanism leadership says it is.

As to the second part of your question, I did touch on the left in Britain, but not the revolutionary left. I will look at that as a separate issue. It struck me that at some stages there was obviously some ideological influence - there is a particular section of the book I call “Green Ken and Red Gerry” about the connections between Ken Livingstone and Gerry Adams. This is not conspiracy theory, but what struck me was that some of the GLC-type models of identity politics and even local government politics were copied by the Provisionals.

Again, this is a symptom of the decline of that period of mass mobilisation. In a sense, when they were looking around for models to develop this type of identity politics and electoral politics, they drew those from sections of the Labour left. So, if you are looking for connections, it is more with those types of organisation than the groups that had previously been calling for revolutionary solidarity with the Provisionals.

What next for the republican movement? Do you see the potential for Sinn Féin to develop in very different directions in the north and south? Or will it become more coherent, as it becomes more and more mainstream?

I think that Sinn Féin was then and is now two parties. That partly reflects the founding movement. Very crudely, this was the insurrection of sections of the catholic working class and the rural poor, and was very much born out of the events of 1969 and that decisive period from 1969-72. That gave Sinn Féin and its republican militants in the north a very different character from the south.

There many republicans there would have been quite “ideologically conservative” - I have to be careful with that term because it was a phrase later used by Adams to attack opponents of his course. Also the people in the south were not as catholic-reactionary as people portrayed them. But these would certainly be people who had a very different perspective from their fellow republicans in north and I think this came out in the abstentionism debate in the mid-80s.

The approach of those in the north had to be different because they lived in a different society in many ways. Plus there was a different theoretical background to republicanism north and south of the border. Thus, although at some points, like Bloody Sunday or the hunger strikes, it was possible to engender mass support, I think the south has taken on a very different character. This is something Adams recognised. He made the point that for most southern Irish the south is:‘their state’ and therefore many of the anti-state arguments of northern republicans seemed almost theological.

Although this split was always rooted in the movement of the Provisionals, I think in some ways this has become even more apparent during the peace process and the function of Sinn Féin in the south. The last general elections were a disappointment for the party and, although the EU referendum is being portrayed as a victory for its form of left nationalism - pointed out in a interesting piece in your paper by Anne Mc Shane - I think it shows that republicans have the potential to evolve differently in the south.

Given the failure of the Labour Party and the collapse of anything to the left of that (despite the Socialist Party’s presence) in the urban areas, it could become a protest voice for sections of the working class, especially as the ‘Celtic tiger’ period comes to an end.

On the other hand, it has a different sort of social base in rural areas. It will always be pulled in different directions. Also, its attitude towards the southern parties is quite ambiguous, particularly its attitude to Fianna Fáil. There is the possibility of some sort of coalition or at least support for this party. A decisive break from this form of politics is highly problematic - they see themselves as left nationalists within a spectrum of politics that starts with Fianna Fáil and moves left.

I think a lot of this will depend on how the southern economy develops and how the social psychology of the mass of people in the south responds to any coming crisis. This will be very interesting. I think people will start to look for alternatives and Sinn Féin could benefit from that. However, its whole evolution as a left nationalist party poses a huge problem - how can republicanism maintain its relationship with other nationalist trends?

Historically, this is the nub of its problem and will continue to be so - namely, that Sinn Féin views the world through the prism of nationalism, not class. In the debate on Europe, for example, the language of republicans was devoid of class content and promoted this dangerous myth of ‘neutrality’. Ultimately, this is the problem with a whole series of nationalist movements, no matter how left some of their instincts - the primacy of the nation, as opposed to class.

I hope that doesn’t sound too dogmatic and unreconstructed for our contemporary, ‘post-politics’ world!

Kevin Bean will speak at Communist University on Saturday August 9 at 4.45pm

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