[Marxism] Back to Fred on Irish National Liberation Struggle

["DoC" <donaloc@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fred, a chara,

I will step through your arguments - they are deserving of a detailed
response. I have to say however that prognostications from people like
Phil Ferguson from afar that the IRA would wind up in x months, or that
SF would be coalition or on Police Boards in the near future made over
the past have all been proven wrong with time. These statements arise
from an idealistic approach to understanding what is a very complex
situation in Ireland at present. It is unique and cannot be correctly
analysed by applying catch all theories as many intellectual activists
like to do. We have to get into the nitty gritty of detail and concrete
analysis of circumstance to understand exactly where we stand and what
is likely to happen.

Having said that I will attempt to approach this with an openness of
mind. Without doubt, the Republican movement have made mistakes in the
past (possibly are continuing too?). But who doesn't. The question is
whether they are capable of moving on from them. What is critical is
that the movement remain unified so that if they go down the wrong path
together they will remain united and go right back up the path and then
down what they hope will be the right path. The overall trajectory of
political development in Ireland cannot be reduced to electoral score
sheets but they are indicative of underlying changes in our society. As
such, the growth of SF north and south represents a significant
undeniable fact which has been the single most important factor in Irish
political life over the past two to five years. It is now so great that
all other political parties are defining themselves and their activities
in relation to those of SF. As a final point in this precursor
discussion, I would have to point out the relationship between SF's
membership and the most disadvantaged groups in Irish society. SF
remains dominated by progressive and aggressive proponents of Irish
unity and independence who come from the working class or other
disadvantaged groups. SF's internationalist position in support of
progressive policies has not been dented the unavoidable relationship
which Irish republicans have with Irish America and other Irish
diasporic groups around the world. The party sent its two MEPs into the
United Left/Nordic Green alliance grouping within the EU on a programme
to use the parliament their to build campaigns against militarism, EU
integration and neo-liberalism. Thus far, they have been very effective
in that arena.

> My "scurrilous innuendoes" had to do with the fact that, from several
thousands of miles away, I have growing doubts that the IRA is any
longer leading a determined struggle for independence from Britain and
united Ireland.

On what are these doubts based. The IRA are not militarily active right
now but so long as the primary (and most immediate) cause of our
problems remain, i.e. continued British occupation, the potential for
conflict to arise will remain. From a Republican perspective, the Good
Friday Agreement represented only an architecture to undermine that
situation. It also presented a constitutional change in the status of
the occupied six counties - from one dependent on the British parliament
alone to one where all that was required was a simple majority vote for
Irish unity in both partitioned statelets on the island. Many will point
to this as little improvement with the current 'inbuilt' unionist
majority, agreed, but it was a concession which had the potential if
fully developed to take the British gun out of Irish politics forever.
Other aspects of the agreement offered significant opportunities to
advance equality between the populations in the north across the board
and to thereby undercut the basis for the continued allegiance of the
'protestant community' to British imperialism. It is this political
space which I believe is being reflected in the growth of irreligiosity
amongst unionist youth as they become increasingly alienated by a system
which underpins privilege and which consorts with the most vulgar racism
and sectarianism. That is what I hope to see develop and grow - as a
revolutionary optimist. It is also something which Republicans have a
duty to facilitate and encourage wherever possible. Again, however,
people may view the tacit acceptance of majoritarianism as an
ideological concession from Republicans. I cannot agree as no Republican
I know accepts this as an argument. The GFA is not a republican document
just a vessel through which change can happen. As such, it represented,
as any agreement does from a marxist perspective, a representation of
the balance of forces at a particular point in time. As SF has grown in
strength north and south, both electorally and organisationally, and as
Republican hegemony has become more established and stronger, the old
framework embodied within the GFA has become outworn and outmoded. So
much so that the British and Irish governments had to step back from
implementing it with consequent dialectical implications for their
ownselves and Republicans and every other group. From that perspective,
the situation where both Governments are back talking to Sinn Fein today
despite themselves is informative. Excluding Republicans is no longer a
viable option. The 'virus' has taken too great a hold on political
realities. Make no mistakes, the two Governments entered the GFA and
prior negotiations with the determined aim to shore up the middle-ground
for the next decades, isolate and fracture Republicanism which failed to
adopt to their regime and mop up a militant fringe. Instead, they have
had to grow used to a singularly determined and ever more powerful
Republican movement. If you don't think that Republicans are serious
about removing the British from Ireland, then I think you are very
poorly informed altogether. That is beyond question for anyone living in
Ireland today - a fact also reflected by the increase in votes for
precisely those parties who state this fact the most openly.

>  As for fighting for "socialism," I see even less sign
of that.  I actually don't demand that the struggle for struggle for
independence be a struggle for immediate socialism, so I am actually
less concerned about that. But I also don't see consistent struggle
taking place against discrimination against Catholics and poverty in the
north.

I am glad that you don't adopt a permanent revolution approach as a knee
jerk appropriate to all places and times. However republicans adopt
Connolly's approach which is I feel appropriate to Ireland and is,
unexpectedly, rather closer to the Trotskyist PR position, in this
concrete case, than that traditionally associated with Lenin (and
appropriate as were most of Lenin's theories to Russia of his day).  It
was formulated with regard to the specific circumstances in Ireland
which require socialist campaigns to split the unionist political
hegemonic bloc and is still appropriate in my view. It is also clear
that the socialist demands are much further advanced in the Twenty-six
Counties than they are in the Six Counties - which is natural
considering the immediacy of the impact of occupation on the northern
and border counties compared to the impact of neo-colonialism on the
rest of Ireland.

The statement that Republicans are not consistently opposing
discrimination or inequality is really absurd in my view. I feel that
this is what Republicans often get stuck at without moving towards
making any critique of our current economic system generally. Some would
argue that to fully remove discrimination and inequality between the
populations will likely require the adoption of proactive Government
intervention and the introduction of significant elements of socialist
property relations. Were such a statement to be valid, it would be of
the gravest consequences given that such a campaign is precisely what
predicates the current Republican strategy which focusses on undermining
the characteristic inequalities in the Six Counties as a mechanism to
undermine the stability of the Six County statelet itself. If you remain
unconvinced, a weekly brouse through the pages of An Phoblacht should
convince most that SF is, IMHO, singularly effective in fighting this
sort of action a fact reflected in the adhesion of large numbers of even
petit-bourgeois nationalist elements in support of the movement in
addition to its working class base.

> I don't claim that the national movement in Ireland has disappeared,
> or
that their aren't lots of people in and around the IRA who are trying to
advance it, but frankly I am not convinced that Adams etc. in practice
-- leaving aside how he sees his role -- is doing this.

The process of negotiations understood in the marxist sense is about
engaging with one's opponents in a trial of strength. The success of
Republican negotiators is reflective of that relationship of forces but
also their theoretical grounding and the relative disparities between
the two. The fact that the Republican movement has grown in strength
with time is reflective of success in that contest. The fact that the
British Government has been forced to shut down institutions is
reflective of their failure to get Republicans to compromise from their
steely determination to get to their objective and that this failure is
reflected in a change in the social stability of political unionism in
the north. I would add that to think that any particular leader or set
of leaders acts in isolation from the party would be to underestimate
the movement. However, I would concede that there are gaps both temporal
and in terms of quality of knowledge, of necessity, between negotiators
and general levels of discussion in any similar process.

> I also do not believe and an independent and united Ireland can be won
> without a mass
struggle for them and against the military occupation.  I don't believe
that Britain is going to give these away in a negotiation process. (That
is, I do not believe that the British rulers have already decided to let
Ireland unite, and therefore that the struggle for socialism is now more
important than the national struggle in Ireland, as some claim.)

I would have to agree with this with a few caveats. Firstly, I think
that there is not a single monolithic British state interest but a
series of conflicting state interests which all want resolution (through
varying means) of the 'Irish problem'. Some would reintroduce internment
and repression and are represented by the Tory faction, some want rid of
the thing so long as it doesn't leave Republicans in charge and some
want to maintain occupation through successful normalisation. There are
a variety of currents out there all of which surface at times. Exactly
which faction is strongest is dependent on external factors - not least
Britain's immediate imperialist interests e.g. the war in Iraq. I am not
sure that a mass struggle for Independence is necessary or sufficient in
our situation. We have had that before and it was shot off the streets.
The reality is that sometimes the conflict has to be taken forward, but
not completed, through an effective guerilla apparatus. I believe that
the GFA was reflective of the stalemate which existed in the military
plane as a result of that. Clearly, Republicans need to keep building a
groundswell of support and clearly that can't reduce to 'parliamentary
cretinism' as Lenin would call it but it certainly does include
electoral gains, ongoing negotiations and extra-parliamentary activities
and activism. Seen in this prism and against the realities of the
destabilised Six County statelet, the negotiations have the potential to
carry the struggle forward. Similarly, growth in the South and the
secondary impact that this has on Twenty-six County political parties,
cannot be ignored. The last point I would make is that it can be
difficult to enact such levels of mass struggle - although that is not
to say nothing is happening. Separating the work of negotiations from
the realities on the ground is to fail to realise the significance of
negotiations.

> It was what looks to me like a retreat from mass struggle and
irreconcilable opposition to British rule and occupation that led me to
speculate that some Catholic priests might someday try to fill the gap.

I don't think SF has retreated from mass struggle but rather that it
never really engaged in mass struggle in the recent past. Not understood
in the normal 'marxist' sense of the term anyhow. The reality is one of
a mass involvement in the struggle which probably is more accurate in
many places. The struggle itself, of necessity, was carried forward by a
limited number of people. To say that there has been a move away from
political struggle would be to run against the reality of an
ever-extending republicanisation of society. I would have to agree that
Republicans have a long way to go forward in terms of proactively
building and interacting with mass campaigns. However, I would not set
that as an immediately limiting obstacle at this stage of the process.
It is something which will develop as the party and the process of
change does. This is a dialectical process - let us never forget that.
Also, SF is really only in its formative period as a modern political
machine despite the propaganda of our opponents and despite its
formation in 1905. The Republican activist base was more used to
levelling pejorative slogans against British occupation than building
political campaigns. It is not an overnight process to change from
cheerleading a guerilla campaign to building political strength in the
widest sense and advancing change. At the same time, the party has been
very successful at times when it mightn't be expected.

> What I see is the IRA getting more and more tangled in diplomacy and
parliamentarism and forms of collaboration with British rule. There have
been quite a few years now of experience with the new orientation of the
IRA and the agreements with Britain and the unionist parties and so far
I don't see it leading to a stronger popular movement.

The IRA is not involved in parliamentarism or any form of collaboration
with British rule. To date that is anyway! Diplomacy is a by-product of
reality that the conflict was inconclusive. There is little here of the
detail of the development of those agreements. It is being portrayed as
a uniform development whereas in reality the whole basis of the old
agreement is no subject to huge pressures. The possibility of a working
'coalition' arrangement in the Six Counties looks as remote as it has
ever done today. Yet things must move forward - they cannot remain in
limbo indefinitely.

As for building a popular movement. I of course agree that this does not
conflate to relating this to SF's electoral gains. However, these gains
are reflective of changing circumstance. If a party with a platform such
as SF existed in most countries with its level of support, then I think
anyone would think it significant. The process of building strong
popular movements is not as simple as that. Getting 30,000 to go to
Derry this Sunday for the Bloody Sunday campaign is not sufficient
either. The movement must orientate towards building localised campaigns
for social justice alongside its natural campaigns for a full British
withdrawal of their occupation units, and equality as per and through
the framework of the GFA. But that would be insufficient if it failed to
see the underlying reality of struggle in Ireland today. It would be a
voluntaristic approach. What really needs to be done is to study
precisely where the contours of struggle reside today and to focus on
those. This is a difficult task and again all the more difficult for a
relatively undeveloped political cadres. The reality is that the social
and national liberation aspects of our programme need to be integrated.
The case for unity must be presented as the case for social justice (or
socialism for pedants). The case for socialism must be presented as
being predicated on national self-determination. I do believe that the
party is engaged in precisely all those aspects of struggle but clearly
much can be done to improve the quality and level of that engagement.

> So far as dismantling a reactionary order is concerned, I see no sign
> of anything
comparable to the achivements of the ANC in the South Africa
negotiation/struggle process in the 90s. That course has been quite
controversial in South Africa and abroad, especially since the ANC
regime seems to have consolidated in support of a neoliberal economic
agenda, which means not dismantling a lot of the social consequences of
apartheid, while getting rid of the laws and political setup.

This is hopelessly ill-informed. The whole Peace Process has been
characterised by precisely such gains. The ongoing reform of the Police,
Judiciary, the demilitarisation process, the establishment of seedling
structures of all-Ireland governance, the continued struggle to include
judiciable social and economic rights in the proposed Bill of Rights,
the fight for an all-Ireland Constitutional court to judge on an
all-Ireland Charter of Rights, the progress of rights for Irish
speakers, the inclusion of Republicans at the heart of devolved powers,
the demand for devolution of Policing and Justice powers, the ongoing
exposure of the nature of the British state through the Truth campaigns
on British Collusion, Links with Loyalist deathsquads, etc. I could
increase this list almost indefinitely: campaigns within council
structures to clear out imperialist paraphrenalia, a truth and justice
process, the establishment of an all-Ireland Parliamentary forum - all
of these are aspects which could and have been progressed under the GFA.
In terms of equality, all decision making (with a few notable
exceptions) are subject to 'equality impact assessments', there's a
section 75 requirement for equality, the operation of the Equality
Commission and the Human Rights Commission which were established under
the GFA. This is a process of ongoing struggle. To say that nothing has
happened to redress inequality on the basis of a complete absence of
knowledge of the realities is truely appalling. True, these structures
aren't republicanised yet, but we aren't dealing with a standing still
reality. This is a dialectical process in which the voice for justice
and equality is growing rather than diminishing. These are precisely the
sorts of measures which ultraleftist opponents have criticised SF for
'settling for'. They, unlike yourself, appear to fail to see the
importance of such measures in acting as a precursor to more fundamental
change. As for the ANC, it is a widely known fact that the leadership of
the Republican Movement remain very substantially in contact and take
advice from that group - whatever its failings in my opinion. Relations
between Republicans and Latin American organisations (particularly with
Cuba), the Palestinian leadership and between Republicans and Basque and
Catalonyan nationalists are well commented on in the bourgeois press. I
see no need to expand further on this.

> DoC is convinced that the IRA is on a course that leads to
> independence and the road to socialism. He may be right.  I
> increasingly tend to doubt it.

I am convinced that this is the best route available at this time. I am
also convinced that Republicans have a lot more to do and that there is
a need for a significant reorientation away from merely campaigning on
equality and nationalist issues towards making the case for the
inextricable relationship between social progress and national
liberation and unity. I also believe that Republicans need to learn how
to listen for the voices of independent campaigners and become more
adept at building mass campaigns which are cohesive with that
relationship. Examples include the need for progressive agricultural
policy on an all-Ireland basis but equally things like anti-incinerator
campaigns and the issue of community-led responses to waste disposal -
both of which require all-Ireland formulations.

> Mostly what people dismiss as assessments from afar -- which this
> is --
is views that are actually being hotly debated in the country itself, as
seems also to be true in this case.

I wish that people were hotly debating these issues which such a level
of understanding and such a level of theoretical development. Instead
the only ones pushing this are a handful of ultraleftists who have
little understanding of either (a) the need for national liberation or
(b) the need for non-voluntaristic and realistic policies in tune with
the feelings of people.

> However, the denunciation of this
reflection of debates by others abroad is unfailingly treated as though
all the patriots in the oppressed country were united around one view --
in this case, Donal's -- and the reflection of a different view is
simply ignorant imperial arrogance.  Could be, I guess.  But the debate
over the IRA continues regardless, and  the debate is based in Ireland
above all. Within the framework of recognizing that the decision will be
made in Ireland and nowhere else, everyone is entitled to look at the
situation and have an opinion in the matter.

IMHO, the highest level of debate is within the Republican movement
where the greatest number of activists remain active and engaged. I am
not against people raising questions. I thought that your more extensive
email deserved a developed response. I hope I have given it such.
However, what I am against is positions which seek to transpose
realities and strategies inappropriately - these need to be exposed for
the hot air that they are. I am open to criticism but not without
evidence. I hope that this helps you see where I am coming from.

Le meas,
DoC.

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