18.11.2010

From Stalinism to social democracy

Chris Gray reviews Brian Hanley and Scott Millar's 'The lost revolution: the story of the Official IRA and the Workers Party' Penguin Books 2010, pp601, GBP9.99

They talk about it here, and they talk about it there;
They talk of revolution everywhere,
So it’s, working class, unite and come and join the fight,
We’ll fight for the socialist republic now.

This recent publication lifts the curtain on a political formation which wielded considerable influence (while it lasted) on politics in both the 26 counties and the UK, popularly known as the ‘Stickies’, from their practice of sporting Easter lilies with adhesive backing (p107). The authors’ very detailed account makes extensive use of sources, including interviews with involved participants (both members and opponents), as well as British intelligence and garda reports. They have not told the full story, much less chronicled the vicissitudes of the Irish left as a whole over the last 50 years, but they have made a major contribution to our understanding of the subject.

When it comes to analysis, however, they are less surefooted. To start with, I would argue that the title is misleading: there was never a winnable revolution in the period in question, not even in the late 1960s and early 70s, for the simple reason that at no stage did the would-be revolutionaries win the support of the majority of the Irish working class, much less the majority of Ireland’s inhabitants. There was, admittedly, a popular uprising, with ‘no-go areas’, in parts of the six counties around 1968, but it remained isolated. The book sheds some light on these events, but does not directly address the question of why the achievements of that uprising were not more substantial.

Secondly, while the final chapter is entitled ‘The flight from socialism’, the authors never define this word. They appear to equate socialism with state ownership of industry, in which case Bismarck and the ancient Egyptian pharaohs would qualify as socialists. No conception of democratic working class power with the object of instituting a new mode of production ever surfaces.

The book has much more to offer, however, and is especially useful in revealing the background to the emergence of the Irish Republican Socialist Party and its armed wing, the Irish National Liberation Army, in 1974. This is shown to have developed from two different perspectives on the struggle emerging around 1972 from within the ranks of the Official IRA (referred to throughout the book as the OIRA):

“Two major competing views emerged. One, based on Marxist ‘stageist’ theory [sic], held that a ‘revolutionary situation’ could be brought about only by achieving a series of goals: equality, then national freedom, then social freedom, and eventually socialism. Those who held this view prioritised the rebuilding of the civil rights campaign and the push for reform within Northern Ireland. They tended to place a great emphasis on the need to split unionism and win Protestant working class support. Premature military action only increased sectarianism and gave the British the excuse to introduce more repression. Once sectarianism had been overcome, new political alliances built around a united working class, north and south, would push for a united Ireland. Only then would the movement concentrate its entire energies on achieving socialist revolution. This, broadly, was the view of Goulding and Mac Giolla, among the leadership of the Official movement, and of some of its leading intellectuals, such as Eoin Ó Murchú and Eoghan Harris.

“Others believed the outbreak of violence in the north had resulted in the civil rights struggle being replaced by a direct confrontation with British imperialism. This analysis held that it was possible to push towards a revolutionary situation in the immediate term by political action combined with armed struggle. Adherents of this analysis, most prominently Seamus Costello, stressed that republican-socialism’s greatest icon - James Connolly - had concluded that British state interference in Ireland must be removed as a prerequisite of wider social change. Winning Protestant support was not considered likely as long as loyalism held sway over that section of the working class. While critics denounced this as sectarian ‘ultra-leftism’, its supporters held that the ‘national question’ could not be ignored” (pp220-21).

Inadequate

In my opinion both these formulations fail to deal adequately with the problem - and both are, in their different ways, “stageist” (ie, the stress on activity in one stage tends to prevent movement to the next stage). The emphasis on “equality” in the first formulation is sound enough. I assume what is meant principally is equality between the nationalist and unionist sections of the working class in the six counties. But then, having conceivably achieved that - a difficult enough job in itself - what is the motivation for the merging of this unified northern working class in a bourgeois, 32-county Ireland? How do you sell that on the Shankill Road? The great Irish historian, JC Beckett, used to say that Irish history can be explained largely as “Catholic hopes and Protestant fears”. Very true and very basic.

The first formulation mis-states the situation: the problem is the attachment of the Protestant working class to the British state, which has historically tended to support them in a privileged position. Unless they come to see the UK state as their enemy and the rest of the Irish working class (north and south) as their friend, they will not move in the desired direction (ditto, as friends, the working class in the rest of the UK and on the European continent). It follows that abstract propaganda for a 32-county republic - even a workers’ republic - is counterproductive: what is wanted is joint action against capital and against the British ruling class government (currently, the ‘demolition’ government) in the six counties - again, not the easiest thing to achieve, but a sine qua non if socialism is to triumph in Ireland.

In this context much depends on what happens in the rest of the UK and in the 26 counties - Northern Ireland is not hermetically sealed off from other parts of the planet. To return to the 1970s, to the extent that the leaders of the Official IRA conceived their strategy in nationalist or Irish republican terms - first civil rights, then cooperation across the communal divide - to that extent they tended to undermine the valid points of their own analysis.

Such considerations apply with redoubled force to the Costello perspective ostensibly taken up by the IRSP. Once the British army gets introduced into the conflict, it necessarily becomes part of the problem, but one cannot ignore other dangerous animals in the wood, even if one has to reckon with a new and potentially lethal one. My acquaintance with the history of the IRSP from its formation in 1974 is regrettably very fragmentary, and I am sadly unaware of what political action it engaged in. What hit the headlines over here in Britain was the INLA. The reference to Connolly is inapposite: Connolly was active at a time when the whole of Ireland was under direct British rule, and clearly in such a situation a movement directed at British occupation would afford favourable ground for advancing the demands of the Irish working class as a whole.

The current situation is different: a united Ireland indeed makes sense, but it can only be achieved in the context of a struggle against capital on both sides of the border. The slogan, ‘Tories out, north and south!’, retains its relevance. The Costello perspective was, if anything, third period Stalinist and dogmatically short-sighted.

Unfortunately those of us standing further to the left at the time tended to be equally dogmatic and short-sighted. The key event here was the People’s Democracy Belfast-Derry march of January 1969. In November 1968 the Northern Ireland prime minister, Terence O’Neill, following discussions with British Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, announced a five-point reform programme: viz, the replacement of Derry corporation by an appointed development commission; a points system for housing allocation; the repeal of some sections of the Special Powers Act; the appointment of an ombudsman, and the possibility of universal suffrage in local government elections. This is covered in Jonathan Bardon’s remarks: “In just 48 days since October 5 1968 [the date of the civil rights march in Derry] the Catholic minority had won more political concessions than it had over the previous 47 years” (J Bardon A history of Ulster Belfast 1992, p657).

Obviously the really objectionable part of the O’Neill reform package was the mere promise of universal suffrage rather than the immediate granting of it, but there was clearly an argument for setting O’Neill a time limit on this; the time limit would also have given an opportunity for people to raise additional grievances, which they felt were not being addressed. Instead certain people felt that they had to keep up the pressure, come what may: “Even the People’s Democracy, at a large meeting in December, had voted against the march, but the Young Socialist Alliance declared its intention of going ahead. Michael Farrell feared that without direct action the civil rights movement would expire as ‘O’Neill’s miserable reforms’ would be found acceptable, as Bernadette Devlin explained afterwards. ‘Our function in marching from Belfast to Derry was to break the truce, to relaunch the civil rights movement as a mass movement and to show people that O’Neill was in fact offering them nothing’” (ibid p659).

Clearly the last assertion was not strictly true. What was true was that what was being offered was by no means enough, but the question remaining in the minds of unionist or loyalist workers could well have been, ‘That’s what the Taigs [Catholics] are getting, but what’s in it for us? Isn’t this an unwarranted concession to Irish republicanism or, in other words, part of a conspiracy against Ulster?’

Legitimate

Ideas have their own logic. If you assume that legitimate Irish nationalist demands can be forced through against reactionary opposition, then the logical end result is a resumption of struggle for national liberation by any means necessary. On moralistic grounds I, as a citizen of an imperialist country, cannot condemn such an approach, but I do think legitimate anti-imperialist aims should be promoted via the use of effective tactics, and the fact is that the IRA campaign of 1971-95 was ultimately just as ineffective in achieving Irish unity as the previous campaign of 1956-62.

Which brings us back to the Stickies. One of the virtues of Hanley’s and Millar’s book is that it answers some of the damaging criticisms of the turn in IRA policy set in motion by Cathal Goulding and his supporters, a turn which, despite its limitations, was in the direction of socialism. The authors deal effectively with such insensitive comments as, ‘Who needs the Brits? We have the Officials’ and ‘IRA - I ran away’. The most telling rejoinder to these canards is a comment by former Provisional prisoner Anthony McIntyre in 2002. Speaking of the Officials, he said, “They ultimately came out on top. We, who wanted to kill them - because they argued to go into Stormont, to remain on ceasefire, support the reform of the RUC, uphold the consent principle and dismiss as rejectionist others who disagreed with them - are now forced to pretend that somehow we are really different from them; that they were incorrigible reformists while we were incorruptible revolutionaries; that killing them had some major strategic rationale. And all the while the truth ‘sticks’ in our throats. They beat us to it - and started the peace process first” (quoted pp598-99).

This chimes in neatly with a wry remark by Cathal Goulding apropos of the peace process; the authors record that Goulding observed, “We were right, but too soon. Gerry Adams is right, but too late - and Ruairi Ó Brádaigh will never be fucking right” (quoted p596). Ó Brádaigh, one of the founders of the Provisional IRA, left the movement late in 1986 when, on advice from Gerry Adams, Provisional Sinn Féin voted to take seats in the 26-county dáil.

So, yes, the Officials and their political offshoot in the 26 counties, the Workers Party, took certain steps in the direction of socialism. But they fell short. The reason can be given in one word: Stalinism. I do not wish to imply for a moment that one should dismiss the political literature and political initiatives of this movement out of hand on that score - far from it. The fact remains, however, that the Stickies ended up anchoring their vision of socialism on the political practice of the Soviet Communist Party: in other words, on the state known to history as the USSR and on the legacy of Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, better known as Stalin. It was the collapse of this system in 1989 which led indirectly to a crisis within the Workers Party and a subsequent very damaging split. Indeed the break-up of Sinn Féin-the Workers Party (or WP for short) is strongly reminiscent of similar convulsions in the British CP - with the difference that no effective revolutionary tendency emerged from the death-throes.

The crisis was sparked off by the party’s intellectual éminence grise, RTE producer Eoghan Harris. Having been one of the party’s principle stalwarts in its advocacy of state ownership and the command economy, Harris took the collapse of the Soviet bureaucracy’s economic arrangements as evidence of the failure of socialism per se. His response was to write a pamphlet entitled The necessity of social democracy, invoking Marx in justification of a reformist approach (!). Harris was at pains to lambaste a collection of party members coalescing around Des Geraghty, Pat Rabbitte and Eamon Gilmore, which he referred to as the “SIPTU tendency” (the SIPTU union being formed from the 1990 merger of the ITGWU and WUI).

These comrades, however, appear to have been equally seduced by the femme fatale of leftwing social democracy (see p550). Sean Garland and Des O’Hagan were not convinced by the arguments for revisionism and remained in favour of what they conceived of as a Leninist (rather than Stalinist) revolutionary party, but could not offer anything except the mixture as before. We are given a tantalising glimpse of another contemporary tendency, led by Fearghal de Rossa and Colm Breathnach, which opposed both “actually existing socialism” and social democracy (p551), but this group does not seem to have managed to build anything durable. A further factor in the situation was the continued shadowy role of the Official IRA - ostensibly on ceasefire since 1972 but still active both as a fundraising body carrying out robberies and as a defence force against attacks by members of the Provisional IRA and INLA.

Seasoned political observers were well aware of the organisation’s ongoing existence and operations, but the WP publicly pretended to know nothing about it - an attitude which damaged it politically. It would have been better either to have stood the organisation down or to have acknowledged it and defended it. A case for armed defence in the six counties could certainly have been made; justification of armed appropriations was more difficult, especially given the fact that by gaining as many as seven TDs in 1989 the party became entitled to state funding (see pp492-93), but even there an argument could possibly have been made in terms of the inevitable imperfections of bourgeois democracy.

The crunch came at the 1992 ard fheis (conference) around a proposal by party president Proinsias de Rossa, the party’s effective leader, to “reconstitute” it as “an open democratic socialist party unambiguously controlled by the members” (p582). De Rossa’s proposal won a majority, but not the necessary two thirds one (p587). The De Rossa faction responded by leaving the party and forming the so-called Democratic Left in March 1992 (p589). The 26-county government fell at the end of the year. In the ensuing dáil election DL, which had had six TDs, saw its parliamentary strength cut to three, as the electorate, unsurprisingly, decided that, given a choice between two social democratic parties, DL and Labour, the larger one was preferable. DL won four seats in the 1997 general election, but a year later voted to merge with Labour (p595). The rump WP described this move - plausibly - as a “betrayal of the working class” (p596), but seems to have been unable to capitalise on it.

Due to what looks like distinctly sloppy proofreading some of the small amount of Irish in the book has come out mangled. On page 14 keen Irish speaker Sean South is made to say, “An e seo rud atha meid ath feitheamh le fada?”; whereas in all probability what he said was: ‘An e seo an rud ata muid ag feitheamh le fada?’ (‘Is this what we have been waiting for for so long?’). There are also repeated references to a publication named as An t-Oglac, whereas the correct spelling is An t-Oglach (The soldier). A passage in Irish spoken by Cathal Goulding is printed without length accents over the vowels, whereas in other places these are correctly shown. All this is completely unacceptable. If the book were about Hungary, say, such mistakes would very likely not appear, so why should they appear in a book featuring words in Irish? (Hungarian, incidentally, also uses length accents on vowels).

Despite its disappointing ending the whole Official IRA/Workers Party experience is very instructive - and not just for Irish comrades. At one stage the WP actually held the balance in the dáil: the problem of what a would-be revolutionary party should do in such circumstances is an important question. Also whatever success the WP gained was undoubtedly due to an analysis of Ireland developed by the much maligned industrial department (directed by Harris) and the elaboration of concrete policies in specific areas linked to campaigns - very likely an exact mirror of the rise of the German SPD at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

As an Irish NCO is reputed to have said while giving instruction in the use of a rifle, “If I’se can do it, ye’se can do it”.