From The Starry Plough  April 1982

 

Immediately after the General Election in the 26 Counties,Socialist Organiser published a series of articles which attacked the Irish Republican Socialist Party, Provisional Sinn Fein, and PD. In those articles “John O’Mahoney” dealt with a number of political points that the Starry Plough decided to answer.

Socialist Organiser is the paper of a group of “enterists” in the British Labour Party.

Many of our readers will wonder why the Starry Plough should spend any time at all with small English left groups. We believe that there is a definite Republican Socialist approach to politics, both in Ireland and in other countries that we are controlled by imperialism.

The articles in Socialist Organiser raised many of the fundamental questions about anti-imperialist socialism and we believed they had to be answered.

This article has been sent to Socialist Organiser in the form of a letter  from Seamus Ruddy as Editor of the Starry Plough. We have asked that it be printed in full. As there has been no Ard Comhairleto ratify the article it is being printed as the position of the Editorial Board.

Have some British socialists learnt nothing from the last 14years of Irish  struggle?

John  O'Mahoney's attack on "backward Irish nationalists" like ourselves and Provisional Sinn Fein coupled with his defence of Sinn Fein the Workers Party (SFWP) was a regurgitation of those prejudices of British reformism towards irish revolutionaries,dressed up in the usual sociological jargon that so often masquerades as marxism.

Like a World War II Japanese soldier emerging from some Pacific island in a later decade O'Mahoney wants to revive old battles fought over the years against the logic of anti-imperialist struggle in Ireland. Today, however, those prejudices have earned a new currency with the rise, electorally at least, of two-nationists and anti-national "socialists".

The lynchpin on which those prejudices exist is the abiding tenet of many British socialists who take the model of British class struggle as absolute and who berate Irish class protagonists for not playing fair . . . fair meaning British.

If only Irish people and revolutionaries would behave as if they lived in "advanced capitalist society" as O'Mahoney postulates. The fact that we do not conform to the British model means that either O'Mahoney's diagnosis is wrong or that the Irish people are incorrigible in their backwardness.

This latter view, which approximates closely to unmentionable political viewpoint, is something that O’Mahoney's favoured group, SFWP, has erected as it's new "socialist" justification for supporting imperialism in Ireland. SFWP's analysis of Ireland's industrial underdevelopment blames not imperialism but the innate parochialism of the Irish middle class. Progress lies with industrialisation from outside by multinationals — British, European or otherwise — plus the rejection of any form of anti-imperialism (or nationalism as both SFWP and O'Mahoney prefer to call it).


It may interest Irish workers and British socialists to know that one of SFWP's criticisms of Irish capitalists is that they are incapable of extracting the capitalisation  from  the Irish labour force.

SFWP's rejection of nationalism has led it to support "majority" rule and RUC law and order in the North while they condemned the hunger strikers as murderers and terrorists.

In the cosmopolitan scenarios adopted by SFWP, Militant and two nationists the enemies are Republicanism, Catholicism, and Irish capitalism. Imperialist capital is at worsts - and at best, progressive because that industrialises the nation, builds up the proletariat and creates the prerequisites for socialism. In Russia this type of ultimate states theory was called menshivism; in circles inspired by British reformism it is called socialism.


To Irish republican socialists it is simply the age old imperialist argument that urges the natives to forget about their independence and garner the advantages of "advanced" society. To SFWP the national question is dead because imperialism can drag the Irish nation into the 20th century. To O'Mahoney the national question is dead because this has already happened. •

The conclusions are the same — at least in their negative aspects: reject republicanism and adopt the methods of class struggle which exist in advanced (British) society.


So, Ireland according to O’Mahoney is an "advanced capitalist society" and has a Southern government as stable as any in Europe. We could say a lot about the "advanced" nature of our industrial base arid infrastructure North and South, It is currently the subject, of anguished debate amongst the Irish bourgeoisie, But this is not the point. The bald phrase about Ireland's "advanced capitalist

true, says nothing about real politics which is about the relations - of power between classes and nations. We have British soldiers occupying part of our country and a border divides the Irish. (The Irish middle class regard this as a continuing source of destabilisation and a threat to their whole existence). Leninists have always regarded the attainment of national unity and independence as the two central tasks of the national revolution. But O'Mahoney seems to believe that this has been done in the North but not in the South; the most peculiar variant of two nationism we have yet encountered. O'Mahoney reveals the most appalling ignorance or revision of socialist attitudes towards this border which, as Connolly predicted, has produced a carnival of reaction, North and South. For while that border divides workers within one part of Ireland, namely the Six Counties, it also divides and, retards the working class in the whole of Ireland. The border is the basic reason for this division, not a result or some side effect. Workers unity depends on eliminating the cause of disunity, not ignoring it and hoping that it will disintegrate in the face of some economic onslaught from the 26 Counties.


This should be self-evident. But O'Mahoney and others whose economism blurs their view of the national question, draw up tough sounding battle plans for socialist struggle which ignore this reality. In their scheme of things one fights for workers' power in the South in the naive hope that the border, along with it's subsequent divisions, will simply disappear. In Britain this type of economists can lead to serious political errors. In Ireland it starts off as an ultra-left joke and ends up as a defence of Loyalism.


Revolutionary   politics  in Ireland mean tackling the   border   and   all   it's manifestations    head   on. In   reality   such   an approach   is   working class and   merely   flows from our   analysis   which says that  imperialism  is the main   enemy   in   Ireland. Yes, in this sense, we are nationalists first, to use an economist   distortion of marxist definitions.


The fact that Irish class divisions break down, electorally and otherwise along mainly national lines is to SFWP an unfortunate obsession with Civil  War politics and the Irish peoples'   domination   by provincial ideas and backward political formations. And to O'Mahoney? An explicit answer would be interesting. One implicit view underlying his patronising and anti-republican "socialism" is that the anti-imperialist movement is put: of touch with "advanced capitalist society”. To British reformists and the modem breed of liberal West Brits we have ever been backward.

Some specific points in reply to a catalogue of reformist jibes posing as "hard marxist" criticism:


1. We criticise SFWP, among others, not for criticising Irish capitalism - something we do constantly ourselves - but for doing so to the exclusion of, and as a diversion from, attacking imperialism.

2. The IRSP’s election programme pointed to specific economic links between Irish capitalism and imperialism.  That programme was conveniently and dishonestly ignored by O'Mahoney in his rush to dismiss republicans as “reactionary".What he also ignored in his lengthy article was mention of a single constructive point or proposal for a socialist election programme. Was this because any attempt to do so would have revealed a shift towards Militant whose British and Irish sections both refused to support the H.Block campaign or hunger strike?

3. The use of a quote from James Connolly which attacked the physical force tradition and which doubtless mesmerised  putiative students of Irish Labour history, conveniently ignored two facts among others: Firstly it was written 17years before Connolly like Lenin broke from the 2nd International on the appropriate grounds that it had shed its internationalism 17years before Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army  took up  arms against the British Crown.

More specifically, Connolly was ostracised by British socialists for his stand on Irish sovereignty and armed struggle in 1916, something which Lenin defended to the hilt.


Secondly, Connolly's polemic was "pitched against the late 19th century Invincibles who in the middle of perhaps the only Irish generation not to launch a serious armed assault against British rule emphasised political adherence to physical force without seriously engaging in either political or physical struggle. Connolly understood this and  criticised it. But what O'Mahoney, like  other British socialists before him, has done is to use that understandable criticism to condemn present day revolutionaries engaged in both types of struggle. Anyone who wishes to compare the Invincibles and this generation to the IRA or INLA is either seriously misinformed or maladjusted. Or both.

4.Yes we distinguished between  Fianna Fail and Fine Gael in the election. The latter earned the full backing of all sections of unionism, the British media and such as Conor Cruise O'Brien. Workers in the 26 Counties  also  distinguish between the two in a similar way as do the British working class between the two main imperialist parties in Britain. One. Labour, bases much of it's appeal on the aspirations of the working class while the Tories make no such pretence. In lreland Fianna Fail pitches much of it's propaganda at workers and small farmers (partly through economic and partly republican propaganda) while basing itself primarily on Irish capitalism and thereby ultimately on imperialism. Fine Gael, once again, makes no attempt to even pretend to be in favour of either workers or the republic in the same way as do Fianna Fail.

Fianna Fail, not the IRSP, is the nearest thing to a populist party in Ireland today. Doubtless O'Mahoney would riposte by pointing to sociological and even class differences between Fianna Fail and British Labour ( the fact that they are in different countries may occur to him). What he cannot do is dispute the essential political and historic division between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael; a division which most closely approximates to that between Labour and Tory in his own country.

An understanding of Irish class politics demands more than the trite label "green tory" used to describe Fianna Fail. Such an understanding would also explain why the phrase "Irish People", which the marxist O'Mahoney objects to, is as legitimate as that of  the "Irish working class". The former implies a republican potential; the latter implies a republican, socialist one. In Britain it would be wrong to appeal to the British people, for obvious reasons. But, — and this is deliberate repitition — we live in Ireland, a country dominated by imperialism.

The fact is that both Fianna Fail and British Labour have aspired to the description designated to Fianna Fail by O'Mahoney, ie. "the main government party of the bourgeoisie for 40 of the last 50years'*.Pious condemnation for making the distinction we have made in Ireland is a little rich coming from someone who, however understandably, has actually joined such a party in Britain.
We distinguish between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. We also distinguish between ourselves and all bourgeois parties. Does O'Mahoney really not understand these distinctions or is he just making political capital from the misconceptions of British reformists? If he does not understand these categories in Irish politics he should cease posturing as some learned marxist.


Incidentally, from where we stand, there is no difference between the imperialism of respective British governments, be they Labour or Tory. Once again, while we do not condemn   British socialists for involvement in the British Labour Party it is hard to stomach platitudes from the same quarter on the distinctions we draw between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. 


5.The IRSP never called for a Broad Front with Fianna Fail or the national bourgeoisie. A careful perusal of O'Mahoney's text and his misleading use of single quotes indicates a
Jesuitical mind at work here.

6. O'Mahoney's depiction of IRSP's attitudes during the hunger strike is similarly dishonest; Unlike others we regarded- the main target as Thatcher, not Haughey.


7. In O'Mahoney's  previous article on the. elections he spoke uncritically of SFWP's left opposition to the government. Since then SFWP have gone into government with Haughey as Taoiseach on the basis that his economic programme is more generous to the working class than that of Labour or Fine Gael!

In the same article O'Mahoney dismissed the IRSP's election effort by quoting two of the three, lowest voting figures achieved by our candidates.


We realise the limitations put on British socialists arguing inside the party of Mason and Concannon (incidentally, whatever happenedto the threatened campaign to oust Concannon)

but your coverage of Ireland could at least bear some resemblance to socialist reality. We sincerely hope that your readers and supporters inside the British Labour Party do not derive any inspiration from such "left" philosophy.

In summary: the development, or degeneration, of SFWP and Irish Labour has to be seen against the arguments inside the Irish working class of the 26 counties on how to provide jobs, houses and a general level of prosperity. The arguments are the same as they have always been in oppressed countries. One argument says that investment, financial solvency and so on can only be provided by outside forces. The alternative argument is republican and claims that only an independent nation can properly provide such things in the long run. The socialist republican viewpoint is that only in the framework of independence can socialism develop. And vice-versa. Put crudely, how can the working class control the forces of production without  controlling  the nation?

At the same time one cannot seperate the struggles for independence from workers’ emancipation. This had led in the past to the failure of both struggles.


O'Mahoney would have us  walk into this trap. While condemning De Valera's message that Labour must wait he turns it around to conclude that the republic must  wait.
We wish forto be postponed and unlike straight nationalists or British economists refuse to counterpose one to the other.Today much of the
Irish Labour movement is still polarised by this false choice. SFWP believe that to be socialist involves rejecting everything, not "much of the republican tradition".


The essential political debate inside the Irish left today has not changed since the turn of the century. On the one hand there are those who see the way forward via British methods of class struggle within the status quo of imperialist domination. On the other hand revolutionaries in Ireland realise the centrality of the national question in Irish class politics. Over 60 years ago that debate was exemplified in the Connolly-Walker controversy. Walker demanded that Connolly and his Irish Socialist Republican Party reject their backward nationalism and join with the army of British Labour. Is John O'Mahoney issuing the same invitation? What was that remark by Karl Marx about history repeating itself?

Republican Socialism

versus

British Reformation.