26.10.2011

Questioning Irish tactics

Our history: The CPGB faced the urgent task of developing a policy towards Ireland.

Comrades who have followed this series will recall our reprint of the Communist Party of Great Britain executive com­mittee statement of November 25 1920, which took a strong stand in solidarity with the forces of Irish revolutionary republicanism against the British occupation.[1]

This statement boldly declared: “In such a case as Ireland’s - the case of a small nation held in forcible suppres­sion by a great imperialist state - the national struggle and the class struggle are inseparable ... The struggle against imperialism for national independence is a necessary phase of the struggle against capitalism for the workers’ in­dependence.” Even more significantly, it asserted: “The republican movement is essentially a working class movement. There are, it is true, middle class men as well as bourgeois by the chance of birth. But they do not mould it. They are being moulded by it. The strength and vigour and inspiration of the movement lies in the workers ...”

The solidarity and internationalism evidenced in this statement stood in stark contrast with the shameful stance of much of the rest of the workers’ movement in Britain - in particular, both the left and the right of the Labour Party. Ireland was the key to the British revolution, Marx had written.[2] So this statement from the new CPGB leadership was refreshing - but was it politically accurate? Sociologically, the class composition of the republican movement may have been largely working and popular classes, but what about the political content of its programme, its policies and methods of work?

In a contribution to the party’s weekly newspaper, comrade PL Gray offered a different take. He warns of the dangers for the workers’ movement of tailing nationalism and urges the CPGB to assist the formation of a Communist Party of Ireland. The task was to win the workers for a workers’ republic, he underlined. The comrade’s contribution perhaps hints at an economistic underestimation of the importance of the working class in Ireland winning a hegemonic role in democratic struggles, such as the national question.

However, it is also a useful corrective to the rather crude definition of the republican movement as “essentially a working class movement” contained in the CPGB leadership’s original statement.

An Irish policy

What is to be our attitude towards the Irish revolution? Shall the Communist Party in Britain simply support Sinn Féin on the ground that the Irish work­ers’ republic will not come before the nationalist aspirations of the Irish are satisfied (The Communist March 26 1921)? Or because Connolly decided in 1916 that “an Irish republic was the precondition for an Irish workers’ struggle” (The Communist April 2 1921)? And is the only alternative to such a policy, apart from helpless neu­trality, to support the terrorist activity of the British government …?

These are questions demanding a speedy answer. It will not do to post­pone clarifying our ideas on them; just as the capitalist world is beginning to point the finger of scorn at British im­perialism, so the workers’ International will begin to look askance at a Com­munist Party which fails to grapple in a practical way with one of the most pressing problems discussed theoreti­cally at the last congress of the Third International,[3] the problem of the ‘subject race’.

The kind of easy formula for solv­ing the problem which was quoted above will not do. It is too easy; it is too automatic in its operation; precisely because it is a formula, of a type often heard on Marxist lips, it tends too frequently to lead to absolutely non-Marxist - ie, non-revolutionary - conclu­sions. Communists can only be guided by principles whose form may change from week to week, but whose essence remains unchangingly revolutionary; and the form of 1900 or 1916 may not be suitable for 1921.

Here are a few tentative suggestions on what the policy of 1921 should take as its foundation.

In all countries in which the politi­cal subjection of a whole race helps to maintain the supremacy of an exploit­ing class belonging to another race, it is natural and revolutionary that com­munists should wholeheartedly sup­port the nationalist struggle of the subject race. By supporting it they are striking a blow, and often a deadly blow, at the military or political power of the exploiters, and thereby relieving the pressure on the proletariat of the ‘ruling race’; which is assisted by this means in its battle for the complete overthrow of the ruling class and the es­tablishment of its own rule.

That rule alone can and will com­pletely set free the subject race; and, if it is still in the first stages of economic development, it becomes possible for it to step straight on the road to commu­nism, with the fraternal help of the proletariat of the ‘dominant race’. That is why the communists support the struggle of the Koreans against the Japanese exploiters; of the Persians, Turks, Tartars, etc against the Russian tsardom; of the subject races of the British empire against our own rulers; of the Filipinos and negroes against the United States capitalists, and so on.

But there is another type of nation­alist struggle in which we must act more circumspectly. It does not always happen that history gives us the oppor­tunity of dealing with her changing phases at one time. She is capricious; she works dialectically; in other words, she often brings forth, at one and the same moment, both the movement which is ‘next on the agenda’ and the movement which logically is its nega­tion. Even before the bourgeoisie has had an opportunity of shaking itself free from all fetters and impediments to its expansion, history may produce the strong proletarian movement which, in all previous cases, she taught us to believe could only come after the vic­tory of the bourgeoisie. Consequently, providing the proletariat possesses a political party which has done its duty, it can become class-conscious and self-confident enough itself to strike the blow that at once removes the national enemy and opens the road towards socialist reconstruction of society.

It was in their inability to grasp this as practical politics that the Mensheviks in Russia were distinguished from the Bolsheviks from the very first. They repeated, and repeat today, that, accord­ing to the gospel, “a bourgeois revolu­tion must precede the proletarian revo­lution”; and even today they continue to assert that the Bolsheviks have perpe­trated a gigantic hoax upon mankind - their revolution is not a proletarian - it is a bourgeois - revolution, “and the poor fellows do not know it”.

We in Great Britain must guard against any self-inflicted mental castra­tion. If the national Irish insurrection had come, on the scale and with the enthusiasm it has today, not today but 20 years ago, it would have been the duty of the communists to support it as unhesitatingly, with as little mental reservation, as it is their duty today to support the Koreans and the Cingalese. But economic progress, that does not wait for communist parties, has pro­duced in Ireland an exploiting capital­ist class; and British political sagacity has produced in Ireland a strong capi­talistic farmer class; their activities, in their turn, have produced a true indus­trial and agricultural proletariat, with its own specific requirements, and even its own (joint) organisation, the ITWU and the Irish TUC.[4] We have had good proof during the last five years - Connolly’s ‘Citizen Army’, Limerick, Belfast, last year’s ‘soviets’ during the Mountjoy prisoners’ strike[5] - of the independent revolutionary capacities of the Irish workers. The rank and file of the IRA is composed of workers, who, in the large cities at any rate, have definitely divergent views from their leaders. Once this is so, communists cannot pursue the same tactics as before.

It would be absurd, of course, to deny that the Irish workers at present have ‘nationalist aspirations’; and it would be a crime on that account to slacken any agitation against the mili­tarist and reactionary horrors that are being perpetrated in Ireland at the present moment.

It would be a crime, whatever their mistakes, to refuse Irish workers our support, merely out of lofty theoretical considerations. But the fact remains that those nationalist aspirations, to the extent that they exist, have become a deadweight, and became so when Connolly spoke for the first time of the “workers’ republic”; they are being made use of by the Irish bourgeoisie, and, in so far as they prevent the Irish workers from clearly seeing their own peculiar revolutionary role in Irish affairs, they are preparing the way for the rule of an Irish class of exploiters in place of the British - a class nonethe­less determined and powerful, by the way, because it is composed of solid farmers, with a stake in the country and a share in an agricultural cooperative society (to say nothing of the industrial capitalists for whom Sinn Féin is burn­ing to provide an opportunity).

Objectively, actually, the Irish workers are quite capable of taking over affairs themselves. It remains, therefore, to prepare them psychologi­cally, which is the function of the party.

What, then, are the duties of a prac­tical and revolutionary Communist Party at such a moment? I submit that they are:

• To recognise that the ‘nationalist aspirations’ of the Irish workers, to the extent that they exist today, are danger­ous illusions.
• To recognise that they do exist to­day.
• To agitate ceaselessly amongst the British workers, explaining that the cause of Dublin Castle is the cause of the British capitalists.[6]
• To agitate seriously amongst Irish workers, with a view to getting them clearly to realise that they themselves, if they only decide on it and organise accordingly, are capable of taking over their country when the opportunity offers, and running it as a workers’ (soviet) republic, instead of allowing it to become the prey of Sinn Féin farmers and bankers and Sinn Féin manufacturers. Perhaps such agitation should take the form of helping the Irish workers to build a Communist Party of their own despite all the obvi­ous difficulties at the present moment; that is for the party or the Communist International to decide.

The Communist April 16 1921

Notes

1. 'Solidarity with Ireland', Weekly Worker July 28.

2. “The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general” (Letter from Marx to Engels, December 11 1869).

3. This was the second congress of Comintern, held in Moscow in July-August 1921.

4. The Irish Transport Workers Union, whose secretary, James Larkin, was described by Lenin as “a remarkable speaker, a man of seething Irish energy, who has performed miracles among the unskilled workers” ('Class war in Dublin').

5. In 1914 the Irish Citizens Army proclaimed its intention “to arm and train all Irishmen capable of bearing arms to enforce and defend” the fight for Irish liberation. After a two-week mass hunger strike by republicans in Mountjoy jail in April 1920, the British had been forced - briefly, it is true - to concede them political status.

6. Dublin Castle was the fortified seat of British rule in Ireland until 1922.