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In his reply to our thesis on The National Struggle and the Irish Labour Movement our critic loftily relegates the desire for the national liberty engendered by 700 years of oppression to the “plane of psychology” – a phrase taken from one of Lenin’s polemics against Rosa Luxemburg, we believe, and completely misconstrued. Does he mean by this phrase that the idea of national liberation is merely an emotional factor having no roots in the present-day social relations of Ireland but thriving only on the soil of tradition? If so, we wish to remind him that the Catholic section of the North is oppressed in a most material sense – both politically and economically. The Southern workers and peasants are indirectly exploited by British capital but the point is, they are acutely aware of this foreign exploitation. Moreover, the British garrison, which our critic ignores in his reply, provides a constant menace of direct intervention in the affairs of Éire as well as of the North.
We would fully concur with the contention that concretely national liberation for the masses cannot be achieved until British Imperialism is undermined at its base – England! – through the actions of the British and Colonial workers, together with the Irish workers. The point we have taken into accounts, however, is that the concept of national liberation is a burning reality in the minds of the oppressed masses. If there were no bitter hatred against Britain, and no militant Republican force to be reckoned with, the Labour movement in Ireland could pursue a straightforward course, as in England. But the hatred of the foreign oppressors and the existence of the militant Republican movement are living and powerful forces.
“The working class should be the last to make a fetish of the national question since the development of capitalism does not necessarily awaken all nations to independent life. But to brush aside the mass national movements once they have started and to refuse to support what is progressive in them means in effect pandering to nationalistic prejudices, viz., recognising one’s own as a model nation.” (Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol.4, Page 276)
We believe a mass nationalist movement exists in Ireland. Our critic speaks of the Irish socialists who realise that only socialism can free Ireland. Yes, but the masses have to learn that through experience and disillusionment. Socialists must not trail behind the masses, but neither must they run too far ahead of them. Incidentally, the assumption that socialists in Ireland have a clear-cut line on this question is untrue.
According to our critic, we abstracted the question of national liberation from its economic base. It is difficult to discover precisely what point he is endeavouring to make here. It seems to us that he has simply misunderstood another section of Lenin’s polemic against Rosa Luxemburg. The struggles for national liberation carried on by the Jews against the Babylonian and Roman Empires, for instance, were founded on entirely different economic relationships from the struggle waged by Holland against Spain in the 17th century. The national struggles of the imperialist epoch are once again fundamentally different from the European bourgeois national freedom movements between 1793 and 1871. As Lenin says:
“But does Rosa Luxemburg raise the question as to what historical epoch Russia is passing through, as to what are the concrete peculiarities of the national question in theft particular country, in that particular epoch?”
Our critic’s reference to the bourgeois-democratic movement from 1793 to 1871 is utterly irrelevant to the subject under discussion. We have nowhere suggested that the Irish bourgeoisie of today can play any sort of progressive role inside or outside Ireland. The struggle of the petty bourgeois nationalists, however, may provide a powerful stimulus to the international working class movement and the colonial struggle.
Before our thesis was published we wrote the following passage for inclusion in it. “Our attitude to the petty-bourgeois nationalists may be summed up by the following quotation from Lenin: ‘Not to amalgamate organisations, to [march] [1] separately and strike unitedly, not to conceal the conflict of interests, to watch our allies as much as our enemies’.”
Apparently this arrived too late to be included, but it makes it perfectly clear that we do not stand for any form of organisational or programmatic unity with the Republicans. As our article emphasises more than once, the Labour movement must link up the national issue with immediate demands and the fight for socialism. This alone would preclude the possibility of any sort of tie-up with the Republicans unless some form of Stalinist Popular Front were proposed. When we speak of the anti-Imperialist front we mean a front in struggle. When we call for solidarity with the national cause we mean “Release the Irish prisoners” etc.
Incidentally, it is true that our critic makes passing reference to the Irish prisoners in his article, but in the first issue of the Socialist Appeal there was no mention of the two men sentenced to be hanged almost a week before the paper was published. We underscore the need for conducting consistent anti-Imperialist propaganda in order to win the rank and file nationalists to the banner of socialism.
The fatal consequences of the Stalinist policy of 1925-27 and again today in China are well known to us. Yet surely the Chinese Communists would be pursuing a correct strategy in fighting side by side with the Kuomintang, providing:
“To the extent that the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation struggles against the oppressing one, to that extent, we are always in every case and more resolutely than anyone else for it because we are the staunchest and most consistent enemies of oppression. In so far as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism we are against it.” (Lenin, ibid., Page 266)
That is our attitude towards the petty bourgeois nationalists in this country. Side by side with the demand for segregation and socialism we must fight for Workers’ Defence Corps, etc. Obviously the demand for socialism will at no time be liquidated in the interests of national unity. The constant stress on linking the national issue with the struggle for socialism clearly proves that this is no apologetic afterthought on our part. In our article we point out that we can conceive only a remote possibility of the victory of socialism until partition is ended. Our critic mechanically interprets this to mean that: first the Border must be eliminated and the British garrison removed, then the Republicans must form a Government, while the Socialists of North and South convene programmatic conferences, and then at an altogether later stage must come a struggle for socialism. In our opinion the first upsurge of the Irish masses will be fought under anti-British and anti-capitalist slogans – and, by the bye, the Republican demagogues will exploit the anti-capitalist sentiments of the masses to the full. Our policy is the policy of permanent revolution. Revolutionary socialists must struggle alongside the petty bourgeois nationalist movement, popularising their socialist slogans and, of course, if strong enough, translating them into practice. The hegemony of the Republicans or the revolutionary socialists will depend entirely upon their relative strength during the period of struggle. If the Labour movement is too weak to gain hegemony, it will be guilty of sabotage in our opinion if it stands aside from the struggle which will have colossal international repercussions, besides providing a better national soil for organising the class-conflict.
At present the working class movement in Ireland is weak, as of course to a greater or lesser degree is the case in other countries, but with this added peculiarity, that in Ireland the class demands are cut across and distorted, if one may employ such a term, by the national issue. Our critic calls attention to the rapid growth of the Trade Union movement between 1932 and 1937. During that period there was a world-wide revival of the Labour movement; the amazing growth of the French Unions, the Asturia revolt, the lightning rise of the CIO in America, etc. The Irish working class movement is still weak because partition divides it and because, as yet, it possesses hardly the beginnings of a revolutionary party. We say “hardly” because we are accepting our critics group as an embryo. Revolutionary cadres require a considerable period of growth and a period to sink roots in the general Labour movement – mass support in the Labour movement can be gained very quickly in a period of social crisis. It is conceivable that in the interim period between now and the first serious social upheavals a sufficiently strong revolutionary movement may be built, able to exercise decisive influence over the most important sections of the general Labour Movement; we hope this will be so, but we think it unlikely, and that is why we laid the main emphasis in our article upon the probability of an intermediate stage – a phase of divided power, with the petty bourgeois nationalists probably exerting a greater mass influence at the beginning. But even if the revolutionary socialists grow immensely strong it will still be a correct strategy to put forward anti-imperialist slogans and to enlist the support of the Republican rank and file.
Our critic mentions the split in the Republican Movement in 1934; he even has his facts wrong, for Peadar O’Donnell and his supporters drew a small minority, and not a majority, out of the Army. This semi-Stalinist tried to draw the rank and file sections away at an unfavourable time. But this is the important point; he was only able to win over this minority because he associated himself with their national aspirations, linking up the national struggle with the economic issues and the fight for socialism. In the same connection our critic refers to the two Orange Lodge delegates who contended at the Rathmines conference that they could get support for the Workers’ Republic but not for the Irish Republic.
This is simply priceless! He hints strongly that the Republican movement is an incipient fascist organisation, but quotes the opinion of two Orange Lodge delegates with relish! Elsewhere he expresses strong opposition to the use of force on the part of the oppressed minority of the North, supported by the Éire Republicans against the Orange Order, the puppet of British Imperialism and an admittedly fascist organisation. This would be a progressive struggle even without socialist participation – because it would strike a powerful blow at British Imperialism and help to unleash the forces of colonial revolt. For our part, we believe that the havoc cause by the war, side by side with socialist propaganda, will create such demoralisation among the present passive supporters of the Orange Order that only the most reactionary, die-hard Tory elements will remain. Nevertheless, the remnants of the Lodges, supported by British capital and arms, will still remain a potent counter-revolutionary force, and one which will have to be crushed. Whatever the composition of GHQ, the rank and file Republicans are certainly less under clerical influence than the majority of the Irish people; they are not Marxists!
Our critic draws attention to the reactionary, strike-breaking, anti-semitic outlook of the Republican leadership. The rank and file is far from being anti-semitic, but in any event we recall that Marx extended support to the anti-semitic Polish aristocrats because in waging the national struggle they were unconsciously assisting the workers of the world, and particularly the Russian workers. We must point out that if Irish capitalism remains on the saddle for several years longer a ruthless strike-breaking dictatorship will develop, whether organised by Craigavon, Cosgrave, de Valera or Seán Russell. The difference in Russell’s case is, however, that he will have to wage a bitter and protracted struggle in order to come to power. This will have a might liberating effect throughout the world. In India, Trinidad, etc., the oppressed masses will not stop to ask if GHQ is anti-semitic. What they will see is a struggle against British tyranny. And, of course, this in turn will exercise a profound influence in the struggle of the European proletariat.
“The proletariat values most the alliance of the proletarians of all nations and evaluates every national demand, every national separation from the angle of the class struggle of the workers.” (Lenin, ibid., Page 265)
Our critic strives to prove the correctness of his standpoint by quoting Connolly. What was Connolly’s attitude towards the petty bourgeois leaders of the national movement? We know he ruthlessly condemned such “patriots” as Grattan, O’Connell, Meaghar, Duffy, Doheny, William Smyth O’Brien, Parnell, Redmond, Griffith, etc., who desired to secure for the Irish bourgeoisie a better share in the exploitation of the Irish masses, but who feared, nevertheless, to provoke even a nationalist revolution in case the masses got out of hand. These patriots have their modern prototypes in de Valera and the Éire Government, who, as representatives of Irish capitalism, fear any mass struggle against Ulster reaction for precisely the same reason.
Whatever Connolly’s attitude towards the leaders of the Irish Volunteers, we know that he accepted support for the 1913 strikes from such ardent Republicans as Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and Seán Connolly. Countess Markievicz, organiser of Fianna Éireann, ran a soup-kitchen in Liberty Hall, headquarters of the Transport and General Workers Union, in aid of the strikers, with the help of women as deeply engaged in the Republican movement as herself. Connolly has consistently pointed out that only socialism can emancipate the Irish masses, nevertheless the socialist movement under his leadership, whilst putting forward its own separate demands and preserving its organisational independence, supported the proclamation of the Irish Republic with arms in hand. The Citizen Army fought and died with the Republicans, but they took orders from none but Connolly. The order to surrender had to be countersigned by Connolly, otherwise it was realised that the Irish Citizen Army would not have laid down its arms.
Why has the Irish socialist movement, once strong and militant enough to provide Connolly with an armed guard for the publication of his paper, the Irish Worker, not succeeded in building a mass revolutionary movement? In large measure this is due to the recession of the workers’ movements throughout the world under the paralytic influence of Stalinism; but the present-day weakness is at least partly due to the incorrect policy of the leadership in the years of the Civil War. After the Dáil Éireann had recommended the Irish people to compromise with British Imperialism, by a majority of 64 to 57, the Republicans took up arms. The Irish Labour Party stood aside from the and attempted to reconcile the two sides. In a manifesto issued in April 1922 its National Executive declared:
“The Labour Movement resolutely opposed and will use all its power against any body of men, official or unofficial, regular forces or irregular forces, who seek to impose their will on the people by virtue of their armaments alone.”
Our critics objection to the employment of force against the arch-imperialist Orange Order is strangely reminiscent of this unfortunate manifesto.
The Labour Party’s peace proposals in 1922 stipulated that the IRA should be responsible to a Council of State, and that no armed parades should be held except by authority from the Council of State. The Republicans felt that the Labour Party revealed a lack of realistic thought. The militant workers, the remnants of the Irish Citizen Army, saw that while the Republicans were determined to defend the right of the people to govern themselves, free from foreign domination, the Labour Party insisted upon the right of the people to submit to a measure of domination should they prefer that submission to the risk of a war of intervention. These working class militants saw no alternative but to support the Republicans and, bereft of an independent class banner they accepted the Republican leadership.
No one can say what would have been the outcome had the Labour movement adopted Connolly’s strategy, relating their own class demands to those of the Republicans and raising the struggle to a higher plane. There is no doubt in our minds that, given a correct revolutionary leadership, the flight of the militant workers to the IRA would have been averted and the socialist movement today would be much stronger.
So far as our critic’s economic arguments are concerned, we will deal with them point by point.
First of all there is an apparent inconsistency in his contention that the increased domestic demand for manufactured goods will tend to decrease the unemployment arising from the collapse of the small importing industries, and the conclusion that “In the North this process will not be so pronounced, and the number of unemployed there may be increased.”
Surely if there were any increased home demand for manufactured goods, the North would be the first to benefit as, besides being the most highly industrialised part of Ireland, it is also the biggest manufacturing centre. It is the duty of a Marxist to look at facts as they are, and not to accommodate himself to the wishful thinking of the peasantry. Éire as well as Ulster is under the heel of British capitalism; the British bourgeoisie is fighting for its very existence.
There is not the slightest doubt that civilian purchasing power in Ireland as in England will be cut down to the bone. Real wages will be systematically lowered, and unorganised, cheap female labour introduced into industry. Ireland imports all her major raw materials from England. Her demand for these will compete with the constantly increasing demands of the British Government, and consequently Irish importers will be faced with continuously mounting prices. Alternatively, she may look for other (neutral) sources of supply, and there she will have to face the consequences of the depreciation of sterling, to which her currency is tied and the ultimate absorption of all countries into the war. The depreciation of sterling and the increased cost and uncertainty of ocean transport will also restrict the importation of animal feeding stuffs etc. Add to this the inevitability of inflation, which will affect the small-holders more than any other class. It is true that the peasants’ mortgage to the bank will not be greatly reduced, but on the other hand, small-holders are not paid weekly. They receive payment for their crops at the end of the harvesting season, and, apart from the comparatively small sums they may receive from dairy produce, the sale of an occasional batch of pigs, etc., this payment must provide for all expenses during the ensuing year – but, meanwhile, under the uncontrollable effects of inflation, their money will have become almost worthless.
The argument that the land in small-holdings is mainly untilled because of uneconomic prices and lack of capital equipment is rather a strange one in view of what follows, i.e. “The biggest farmers will still base their farm economy on cattle.” If the biggest farmers are cattle-ranchers, and the small-holdings are mainly untilled, as our critic suggests, where do Ireland’s 5 million acres of land under crops come from? We quote Joseph Hanly, ARScI as authority for the following information:
Ranching is uneconomic from the individual small-holder’s as well as the national point of view. The return from an acre of pasturage is about 50 per cent of that from the same land bearing a crop of oats or wheat. Hence it is that small-holders cannot be graziers, because the return from a very small farm under pasture would not support a man, much less his family. Only is a small farmer is not completely dependent upon his holding – if he or his family are semi-proletarian – can he over-indulge in grazing. The large holders, of course, make grazing yield a high individual profit, because a cattle-ranch requires only one tenth of the wage-labourers who would be necessary if the land were to be tilled.
As we pointed out in our thesis, the victory of the English workers preceding an Irish struggle, would solve the national question almost automatically by divorcing Craigavon from his financial and military support from Britain. Our critic suggest that British imperialism may affect a compromise with de Valera in order to gain Irish manpower for the war. Such a cynical bargain would not deceive the Irish masses, in our opinion, and if de Valera attempted to enter the war as a result of such a compromise he would immediately find himself stranded from his mass basis. The sudden restoration of the Six Counties, and moreover under such suspicious circumstances, would not eliminate overnight the bitter hatred of the rank and file of the Fianna Fáil for British Imperialism.
Why should “Can the Border be eliminated under capitalism?” be an un-Marxian question, as our critic scornfully remarks? We posed that question because many comrades – Stanton, for instance – have contended that only social revolution can eliminate the Border. In the sense of economic and political emancipation of the masses, national liberation cannot be achieved and consolidated until Britain or the USA, let alone Ireland, ceases to be a capitalist country. National liberation in a limited political sense, however, could be achieved under capitalism, though whether or not it will be, we cannot say.
The Éire bourgeoisie, our critic points out, has organised a Republican form of Government, and an independent military force, etc. Incidentally, it is not a Republican Government, but a Government with rather wide Dominion rights. The Irish masses must overthrow their own bourgeoisie in order to gain economic and political emancipation in the socialist sense. Nevertheless, national liberation, in the more limited sense of the self-determination of nations as distinct from the liberation of the masses from capitalism is a progressive slogan, though socialists must link both slogans together. In our article we certainly did not neglect to relate the demand for secession to the struggle for socialism.
To sum up:
1) We stand for the complete organisational and programmatic independence of the working class under all circumstances, and would resolutely oppose any form of class truce in the interests of national unity. We are first and foremost socialists, appraising every issue from the standpoint of the Irish and international working class. It is precisely because we are socialists that we are partisans of the nationalist cause.
2) We recognise the importance of conducting anti-imperialist propaganda from the socialist angle in order to win the rank and file of the Republican movement to the cause of socialism and to endeavour to unite the toiling masses under the banner of Labour. We think the socialist Press should conduct large-scale agitation on such questions as the release of the militant nationalists imprisoned by the British Government or its puppets, Craigavon and de Valera.
3) We stand for supporting a struggle for national independence in the traditions of Connolly, for endeavouring to turn such a struggle into a social one. Even if we are not strong enough to go forward directly to socialism we maintain that socialists must still support the struggle, enhancing and consolidating the power of the Labour Movement to the utmost of their ability, because:
Our article in the Appeal was deliberately vague and loosely phrased because, when we wrote it we were unaware of the type of paper the Appeal was going to be; also we could not examine all aspects of the question in one limited article.
The Editorial Note below our article states: “We print the foregoing article from a comrade in Belfast in pursuance of our editorial policy of printing material of interest which we do not agree.” But our critic in a letter to us dated January 3 wrote, “Isolated as we are, recognising our own limitations, I think it is essential to seek the guidance of the centre on problems such as these, for I am first and foremost a ‘Winner’.” We would prefer to submit every article to London before publication, stating our position as such on the national question was submitted at the end of December. Between then and the publication of the Appeal there was ample time for him to submit both viewpoints to London. True he wrote to us saying that he would not have time to submit his criticism to us before publication, but at that time we understood the Appeal was going to be published on January 5th.
Our line is surely in accordance with the propaganda carried out in our press all through last summer. Perhaps this policy has been reviewed and the conclusion arrived at that it was a wrong one. If so, why haven’t we been notified? If not, what right has our critic “first and foremost a ‘Winner’” to treat our line as an outsider’s while his own line is put forward as the official attitude? He may, of course, have a majority supporting him in the Dublin Group, but even so, as he himself repeatedly emphasised, new cadres are still immature.
For our part, we wish to know what your opinion is on this question. We assure you that we have no desire to magnify small issues, but we regard this question as of great importance. We will, of course, carry out whatever policy the Editorial Board lays down, while preserving the right to carry on internal polemics, if necessary.
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With best wishes, |
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1. In the text downloaded from the Workers’ Republic Website the word here reads “smashed”. “Marched” is proposed as a correction.
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Last updated on 16.8.2004