Workers Must Crush Sectarian Terror
British Troops out of Northern Ireland
A talk by David Strachan of the London Spartacist Group delivered in New York on 14 March 1977. This edited text was published in Workers Vanguard No. 156 (6 May 1977) and Spartacist No. 14 (Autumn 1977).
Our topic tonight is “Leninism, the National Question and Ireland.” Why Ireland? It’s a fairly small place, only about four million people. The death rate is very low—much, much lower than Lebanon or Cyprus recently. In fact the murder rate in Glasgow presently is much higher than in Northern Ireland, and I imagine it’s much higher still in New York. So why Ireland?
Well, first of all, the fact that things are very quiet there at the moment does not indicate relative social peace. There are between 15,000 and 20,000 British troops in Northern Ireland. It is a very fragile social peace imposed by the brute force of the British Army. And if the British Army were removed immediately, the prospect would be one of massive bloodshed.
There is a more important reason which we’ve had to deal with in London, and that is the impact in Britain. The question of Ireland is a crucial test of the revolutionary integrity of the British left-wing groups, and the ability to analyze Ireland is a touchstone for self-proclaimed Marxists everywhere. Currently the question of Ireland provides a crucial test, and I believe a confirmation, of the unique position of the international Spartacist tendency in upholding Leninism on the national question.
For internationalist communists who reject the simple, ultimately genocidal logic of the nationalists, the complex situation in Ireland may seem to be utterly intractable. There have been 800 years of English oppression in Ireland and we have a situation there today which combines features which have been classically associated with a variety of types of colonial and imperial oppression. The situation in Northern Ireland resembles in some ways the classic colonial situation, in which a colonial administration administers, oppresses and exploits the native population. But it also resembles the situation where you have a colonial settler people who wipe out or expel the original native population. And, as well, it resembles the features which are classically associated with the multinational empires in eastern Europe.
However, tonight, rather than giving a run-down of the history of Ireland and an up-to-date account of the current events there, I want to concentrate on the programmatic questions.
British Troops Out!
Toward the middle of last year the eminent British historian A.J.P.Taylor was interviewed on the BBC. He had a number of things to say that considerably disturbed bourgeois opinion in Britain. He said quite simply and bluntly that the British should get the hell out of Ireland. He said that the presence of the British Army fundamentally oppresses the Catholic Irish people and that nothing progressive can come through the presence of the British Army. So I want to start by asserting that an essential plank for any revolutionary analysis and program for Ireland must be the demand for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of the British Army.
That should be obvious to revolutionists, but unfortunately it isn’t very widely held. In the British Labour Party, with all its “lefts,” who are forever willing to sign this and that petition and to take up this and that socialist cause which is as remote as possible from their immediate interests, there is not one MP [Member of Parliament], no matter how left he claims to be, who is clearly for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of British Army. The Communist Party of Great Britain [CPGB] has a position that the British Army should withdraw to the barracks. The “Official” wing of the IRA has a position that the British Army should withdraw from working-class areas; and a number of other organizations, including the “Provisional” IRA, have a position that the British Army should set a date for its withdrawal.
Even among the organizations of the far left, the ostensibly Trotskyist organizations, there is a readiness to abandon this essential plank. For example the International Marxist Group [IMG], the fraternal organization of the American Socialist Workers Party [SWP], which was formerly on the extreme left of the United Secretariat, is currently moving more and more rightward. At the time of the Bloody Sunday commemoration marches last year it had a position not for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal but for “End British Involvement,” a nice vague plank. They hoped through this to attract some sympathy from the Communist Party. They didn’t, but their willingness to take up some vague slogan like this in order to get a little bit closer to the Communist Party is indicative not only of their opportunism but of their inability to confront and stand up against British imperialism.
It should also be obvious that the “Troops Out” demand by itself will not solve the problem. The historian Taylor recognizes this to his credit. He says that, of course, there will be some sort of settlement reached after the troops get out: but then he was asked if he thought there would be unity of the people on the island. His answer was that this is a matter of relative strength. He acknowledges that the solution may be imposed by one party or another. He acknowledges that civil wars and bloodshed can solve these questions.
Now almost all the British groups of the far left present the “Troops Out” demand either as having some inherently revolutionary connotations or else as an application of the demand for self-determination for the Irish people as a whole. The assumption that if you just demand “Troops Out” everything will go fine is tied to their understanding of the applicability of the demand for self-determination in Ireland.
I want to take as an example the International Marxist Group again. It says in one of the IMG newspapers, “The right of Ireland to national freedom is merely the basic democratic right of all oppressed peoples to determine their own destiny, free from all outside interference and control. It means the right to control their own economy, decide on their own political system in relation with other countries and the right to develop their own national culture.”
That is not the Leninist position on self-determination. Leninists are opposed to all forms of national oppression and to all national privileges. The right of self-determination means simply the right to establish your own political state. It does not say anything about economic independence, or about some conception of utopian freedom from outside interference.
In the general sense the demand for self-determination is unconditional. That is, we do not when we raise it place conditions with regard to the question of the class nature of the state that emerges or of the leadership. However, the demand is not a categorical imperative to be raised everywhere and at all times, even for oppressed nations. It is a subordinate part of the whole revolutionary program. It is one of a range of bourgeois-democratic demands which must be a part, but only a part, of the revolutionary program.
So we can recognize the right of self-determination for a nation and then argue against its exercise. For instance, that is the position of the international Spartacist tendency at this time with regard to Quebec. The demand must be subordinate to the overall considerations of the class struggle.
No to Sectarian Slaughter!
I wanted to make these points to establish that the demand for self-determination is not something that must always be raised. It has to be evaluated in terms of the general considerations of the class struggle. And, in particular, where the exercise of self-determination for one people means that they will, in fact, deny that right to another people, then it ceases to be a democratic demand. This arises with interpenetrated peoples where two peoples are living intermingled on the same territory.
I want to argue that this is the case in Ireland, that if you simply demand self-determination (a demand which does not transcend the bounds of capitalism), you are condemning the working masses to further rounds of communal bloodshed, massive population transfers and genocide. Those who want to argue that in Ireland the crucial demand is “self-determination for the Irish nation” must face the implications of what they are saying. That is, they are for the forcible reunification of the island under a bourgeois regime, irrespective of the wishes of the Protestants.
Many of the British left-wing groups don’t want to face up to this, so they argue that there’s some transcendental dynamic that will make everything work out fine. Sixty percent of the population of Northern Ireland—a quarter of the population of the whole island—will just give up or get caught up in this revolutionary dynamic and, as the IMG claims, “The working class will have the opportunity to unite for socialism and peace.” Just like that!
It ought to be obvious to everyone but the most myopic and the most nationalist that getting the troops out will not by itself solve things. There are more than 100,000 registered guns in Ulster. The vast majority of them are in the hands of the Protestants who are well-trained, well-organized and quite determined. As the “Unionist” slogan goes. “Ulster will fight. Ulster will be right.” And they very well might win, certainly against the IRA and even against the Irish regular army.
The reality of the situation is that a number of possibilities are posed if the British troops get out. There can be the consolidation of a Protestant “Zionist” state, accompanied by forcible population transfers, genocide, etc. There could be a reversal of the terms of oppression. That is, the Irish Catholic state consolidated on the whole island, with the Protestants becoming the new Palestinians. There could be a situation like Cyprus, a new boundary change.
We should also keep in mind what happened in Lebanon, where the most “progressive” Arab state, Syria, the supposed best friends of the Palestinian liberation movement, intervened and blocked with the Christians to smash the Moslem forces. No doubt it will turn around and smash the Christian forces as well. The Irish Catholic state might act in the very same way: intervene in Northern Ireland (with, of course, the support of British imperialism), smash the radical Irish nationalists and then turn on the Protestants. After all, the Irish bourgeoisie has already fought a civil war with the more radical nationalists, so why shouldn’t that happen?
Now I don’t want to speculate on what is the most likely possibility. All these possibilities pose the likelihood of massive communal bloodshed. So I want to stress that the “Troops Out” demand must be linked to a revolutionary, communist program that can set the basis for working-class unity.
Britain Playing the Orange Card?
In association with the call for “Troops Out” and the false assumption that this will lead to the collapse of Protestant opposition, there is an argument that maintenance of the artificial Orange statelet, the six counties of Ulster, is absolutely essential to the interests of British imperialism in Ireland. So I want to look briefly at the motivations of (and tensions within) British imperialism. It’s clear, at this point, that the Northern Ireland statelet is not necessarily part of the British strategy in Ireland. They have used the Orange card in the past but it’s a nuisance today.
British imperialism’s approach to Ireland has always been much more complicated than the simplistic analyses that are often put forward. Up to 1912 the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie was aiming for a near-colonial “independent” state. This was stopped and opposed by a block of the Protestants, the officer corps of the British Army and the landed aristocracy. Nowadays the border is anachronistic to the general intentions of British imperialism. It gets in the way of business: the desire to invest in the south and the fact that the industry in the north is decaying, run down.
They have a problem. If they try to hand over Northern Ireland to the southern Republic they are going to run into a civil war, because the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie is not strong enough to control the situation. And given the hostility of the Protestants there will be one. So what British imperialism is trying to do is continue business as usual, invest as much as possible and try and keep the lid on things.
They made a big attempt last year at power-sharing, to get the moderate Catholics and the moderate Protestants together, that failed due to opposition from the Protestant hard-liners. So they are now trying a mixture of economic pressure, increasing the power of the police forces and agencies in Northern Ireland (for instance, rearming the Royal Ulster Constabulary) and calculated use of the British army. The result is that Ian Paisley, the most prominent mass leader of the Ulster Unionists, currently accuses the British government of conducting psychological warfare against the Protestants. Just to give you an idea of the discrepancy between the interests of British imperialism and the Ulster Protestants, if you look at the figures of March last year for political prisoners in Northern Ireland, there were 900 Roman Catholics and 600 Protestants. It indicates that there’s not exactly agreement between the militant Ulstermen and British imperialism at this time.
What Are the Protestants?
The key question is what are the Protestants. There are a number of ways to avoid this question, and you will find that they have all been tried by various left-wing organizations. One way is to say that the Protestants are just backward workers, and then follow this up with lots of “unite and fight” talk and vague rhetoric about how the dynamic of the class struggle will solve everything. That is, you don’t address the communal and national divisions at all. Another way is to adopt the real position of the extreme Irish nationalists and to say, in effect, they are just agents of British imperialism, so drive them into the sea. Or if you’re a little bit shamefaced about it you say something along the lines of, “I can’t tell the Irish people what to do.”
There’s a variety of other excuses put forward for plumping for the Catholic nationalists, the Republicans, and I would like to run through them briefly. There’s the argument, for example, that only oppressed people have the right to self-determination. Now that is not so at all. For Marxists all nations have the right to self-determination. But the problem with raising the demand for self-determination in Ireland is that it doesn’t resolve the Catholic-Protestant conflict in a democratic manner.
Obviously, when India was fighting to separate from Britain, British self-determination wasn’t in question. In that situation it would be a reactionary slogan, just as it would be if the Germans and the British each argued that they were fighting WWII on the basis of their right of self-determination.
But in the case of interpenetrated peoples, where one or the other is likely to be immediately either the oppressed nation or else the privileged nation under imperialism, it’s a lot more complicated. There are two peoples here and whatever way you work it, if the oppressed gets its self-determination under capitalism, then it will simply become the new oppressor. There’s no equitable solution within that framework. And if you want to say that only the oppressed people have the right to self-determination, then you’re really saying that what happens to the Protestants after self-determination in Ireland doesn’t matter at all, because after all right now the Irish nationalists are progressive and the Protestants are reactionary and that’s the end of it. Too bad, Protestants!
There’s another argument, to the effect that Loyalism (which is the common term to describe the Protestant communalist ideology) is simply an imperialist ideology. That is, it’s just really British chauvinism given a little slightly different tinge in order to attract a mass following amongst a certain misled section of the Irish workers.
I don’t think any of these arguments I just dealt with deserve serious attention from Marxists. But there are some other arguments which attempt to present a more sophisticated Marxoid type of analysis. The one that’s most frequently heard is that the Protestants are a labor aristocracy. This theory is essentially the same one as the New Left guilt theories about the American white working class being bought off because of “white skin privilege.”
To begin with it ignores the fact that, with or without the Catholic population, in Northern Ireland you have one of the highest unemployment rates in Britain, and the fact that housing for the whole of the working-class population in Northern Ireland is the worst in Britain and amongst the worst in Europe. It also grievously distorts Marxism. The term “labor aristocracy” was used by Lenin in a very precise way, to indicate a layer of the working class, largely trade-union bureaucrats, that had sold out. To describe the whole of the Protestant working class, including the large percentage unemployed, as a labor aristocracy is obviously not just an extension but a gross distortion of the meaning of that Marxist term.
Thirdly, it suggests that the Protestants are nothing else but a stratum of one class, ignoring the fact that the Protestants are a trans-class grouping. With that methodology you would have to look at the tsarist empire before the Russian Revolution and argue that the Great Russians and the Poles were labor aristocracies. After all they enjoyed relative privileges if you want to put it that way. They were better off, they were more advanced sections of the society. You’d have to say on these grounds that, because the Poles were amongst the most advanced and had privileges compared to so many other peoples in the tsarist Empire, they didn’t have a right to self-determination! But of course, the people who have such arguments like to avoid these little problems.
New Left Moralism
In association with these attempts to explain why we don’t have to worry about the fate of the Protestants, there are two other things I want to look at. One is the argument that the Ulster state is an artificial imperialist creation, that its borders were designed to ensure a Protestant majority.
Now that’s true, and prior to the partition, revolutionists in Ireland would have fought for a unified independent Ireland and to transcend the sectional differences that existed at the time.
But with the partition and the communal bloodshed that accompanied it, with the establishment of a bourgeois Irish republic and the state boundaries, to argue for unification after that point is to ignore what had clearly become consolidated communal differences. This argument often goes with the position that not only was it an imperialist partition but, as well, the Protestants are a colonial-settler people. You know, they threw out the native people, they don’t really have a right to be there. So, the American people don’t have a right to be here now; you’ve all got to go home. The Australian people don’t have a right to be there; they’ve all got to go home, too.
But if the colonial settlers have no rights, then you’ve got to argue that the Vietnamese people have no rights. Do you know what the Vietnamese did in the nineteenth century? There’re only two villages left now in Vietnam of the Champa kingdom. The Vietnamese were slaughtering them in the nineteenth century: they were throwing out the Cambodians. The Cambodians’ national existence was saved by the arrival of French imperialism. So why not give back most of South Vietnam to the Cambodians, too? The point is that almost every modern nation has been consolidated on the basis of slaughtering and wiping out and throwing out other communities and peoples. If you want to argue in these terms, it’s simply a form of nationalist, liberal moralism, and leads straight into the typical irredentist arguments about our “holy” land which we’ve got to save or get back.
Now while I’m on the subject of the New Left and New Left moralism, there’s another argument, which is presented as anti-economism. That is, the Protestants are so bound up in their reactionary ideas that they can never be part of a proletarian revolutionary mobilization. There is a small British group, called the Revolutionary Communist Group [RCG], which puts forward this argument and prides itself on having a Marxist understanding. It recently split, largely because, while it claimed to have a Marxist understanding, it never had any programmatic conclusions. The RCG says:
“It is the height of naivéty to expect the two sections of the northern working class to unite on economic issues when it is precisely these that divide them. As the crisis begins to bite, the Protestant workers will pursue the traditional way out—the expulsion of Catholics from employment. Only later, when the Unionist regime is visibly unable to preserve the position of the Protestant workers, will the possibility exist of breaking the Protestant workers from Loyalism and drawing them around the programme which emphasises economic issues.”
Now that ought to be absurd for Marxists.
That’s full of back-handed support to Irish Catholic nationalism, because what you’re saying is that the workers can never transcend their sectional interests; they’ll always be narrow and selfish and they’ll always want to throw their non-communal class brothers out of employment. So rather than attempting to transcend that type of attitude with a system of transitional demands, you come up with a position which says: narrow trade-union consciousness plus nationalism is revolutionary consciousness. And what that leads to inevitably is a two-stage Stalinist theory of revolution. Because in order for the workers to have revolutionary consciousness, first of all, as a precondition, they must fight for national liberation.
Protestant Communalism and the Union Jack
The Protestants have their origins as a settler colonization. They’ve generally fought for the British connection with one important historic exception: the 1798 United Irishmen uprising, which was led by Protestant Presbyterians—in particular clergymen and merchants—and was defeated by mobilization of the peasantry by the Catholic priests and the growth of the Orange Order stimulated by the landed aristocracy and British interests. That was effectively the opportunity for the establishment of a united nation in Ireland and it failed. Since that time there have been these deep communal divisions.
I want to make the point that Unionism and Loyalism i.e., Protestant communalism—should be understood as a means and not an end. That is, the Protestants are acting in what they perceive as their own interests; they’re not just agents of British imperialism. This can be graphically shown by looking at quite a number of examples. I only want to give one—Sir Edward Carson who was the first prominent leader of the Protestants in this century. He was actually a representative—to be more precise—of the old landed aristocracy, and he differs significantly from later people like Craig and Paisley in terms of his origins. But he, as a leader of the Protestant interest in Ireland, was willing to threaten British imperialism and to say that he would seek German aid. So he saw the connection in a way that wasn’t just acting on British imperialism’s behalf.
And you can see a series of other things happening, which I’ve mentioned already—the 1912 opposition to British plans for Irish home rule, the Ulster Protestant workers’ strike in 1974, the number of Protestant political prisoners—which all indicate that Protestant communalism in Northern Ireland is not identical with support for British imperialism.
So the Protestants have a separate identity. It’s defined largely negatively, as against the Irish Catholic nation. Religion plays an important part; you’ve noticed I’ve been using the term Irish Catholic nation to make the distinction. It’s not so much that everyone goes to different churches, but the religious question provides an ideological form for the dispute between the communities. And it’s deeply involved in the cultures and the nationalism of both communities.
Let me make one thing clear: the Protestant bigotry (and its religious qualities) necessarily exceeds the worst excesses of Green nationalism, of Irish Catholic nationalism. Take Rev. Ian Paisley—this is from one of his speeches:
“Watch the Jews. Israel is on the way back to favour. Watch the papist Rome rising to a grand crescendo with the Communists. The Reds are on the march: they are heading for an alliance against the return of Lord Jesus Christ.”
And these are headings from his paper:
“The Love Affairs of the Vatican.”
“Priestly Murders Exposed!”
“Children Tortured, Monks Turned Out as Sadists!”
Now Paisley is not some sort of fringe crackpot religious fanatic. He’s a mass leader of the Protestants. He expresses and is a manifestation of the attitudes amongst the Protestants.
The Protestants have a self-image as being hardy and self-reliant while the Catholics they see as being dirty, indisciplined, lazy and breeding like rabbits. The Orange Order, which is a sort of Masonic formation amongst the Protestants, is the epitome of the Ulster Protestant culture. It was created as an instrument of counterrevolution around the time of the United Irishmen’s uprising and has been used ever since as such. Its rituals, its exclusion of women, its marches represent a way of life and a social focus for the Protestants.
No to Forced Reunification!
At the same time we look at the Republic and we find a reactionary, clericalist regime. You don’t need to go very far to notice that. Take the best of the bourgeois papers in Ireland—and none of them are very good—the Irish Times. You find that on every single issue, no matter how insignificant, the thing that is absolutely necessary is the opinion of a priest. The Protestants see themselves as getting nothing from a unified bourgeois Ireland. And they make a great deal about the clerical nature of the state.
There’s a whole series of things that are not very attractive about the southern Irish bourgeois state: the prohibition on divorce and contraception, the role of the Catholic church in education, its influence in the higher circles of government. Its influence is not limited solely to the most reactionary circles, but is found in the more plebeian organizations as well. For example, in 1969 during the height of the civil rights movement, when there were some layers of Protestants willing to support it at that time, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association refused to dissociate itself from the Irish Republic’s constitution, which contains provisions guaranteeing rights to the Catholic church, and from Irish government policies vis-à-vis the church and contraception.
Leaving aside the empirical facts of the nature of the Irish Republic, apologists for unification argue that presently and in general the Protestants have been treated better in the South than the Irish Catholics in the North. Now in the quantitative sense this is certainly true. Presently, the Irish Catholic state is obviously much more reasonable and liberal than the Protestants in Northern Ireland.
However, there’s a more basic point involved here. It’s not a matter of looking at the present relative reaction of each nationalism, but seeing that religion is a core component of the nationalism of both groups, and understanding an elementary Marxist principle: that all nationalism is reactionary. To suggest that the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie will treat the Protestants well is to argue that somehow this particular nationalism is progressive, because it’s going to be good to people who are not of the Irish Catholic nation. There’re no historical examples of nationalist regimes doing that, so why should the Irish be the exception?
The Protestant communalists are not any better, and in the Northern state there is systematic discrimination in housing, hiring and education. That’s all well-known. The majority of the sectarian murders that have taken place in Northern Ireland in the recent period have been carried out by Protestant gangs. Let me give you one example of the bigotry in this situation. A gang kicked in the door of a house, lined up a family and shot them—kids and parents alike. Before they shot the woman, one of them raped her. This particular man was subsequently arrested by the British Army and received a long jail sentence. When he arrived in jail, he was viciously beaten up by his own comrades and almost killed. The reason he was beaten up was not that he’d shot the Catholics, but because he’d had sexual contact with a Catholic.
So there is obviously a series of urgent democratic demands with regard to the Catholics in the Northern Ireland statelet. In particular I want to mention housing and employment, because just by arguing that it should be more equitably shared, you say to the Protestant workers: you should suffer some more. That’s obviously not going to solve the problem, so even in terms of immediate urgent democratic tasks, these will have to be linked to demands that have been classically associated with the Trotskyist Transitional Program. For example, for a sliding scale of hours and work-sharing on full pay.
There’s a problem of distinct communities. We recognize that there are distinctions, and we don’t want to just ignore them but seek to transcend them, and to offer some way out of the vicious communal cycle. The one million Protestants can be defined largely negatively, as against the Irish Catholic nation, as being not part of the English and Scottish nations any more, and not in a strict sense being a nation either. But they do have a separate identity, and the concerns of this community must be taken into account.
The definite resolution of what the Protestants are exactly is most likely to occur at the time that the British Army gets out, and will depend on the circumstances accompanying that. That is, there could be the consolidation of a real Protestant nation, based on a sectarian, communalist bloodbath in the Irish Catholic community; or they could be wiped out; or else they could, in the context of a revolutionary working-class mobilization, transcend these divisions.
We want to oppose the forcible reunification of the island and reject the call for the “self-determination of the Irish nation,” demands which give preference to the claims of one of the interpenetrated peoples. We call instead for an Irish workers republic within a socialist federation of the British Isles, which at this point leaves open exactly where the Protestants will fall.
We counterpose the algebraic formulation of an Irish workers republic to the common left-nationalist slogan (e.g., of the IRA officials) of a “united socialist Ireland.” We do not insist that the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland must be part of an all-Ireland workers state. Furthermore, the slogan of a “united socialist Ireland” has become a left cover for Green nationalism implying forced reunification under bourgeois rule and a two-stage revolution—first unity, then socialism.
For Anti-Sectarian Workers Militias!
There’s another important plank in our program which I want to emphasize, and that is the demand for an anti-sectarian workers militia to combat indiscriminate terror, both Green and Orange. Now this has to be seen in its proper context. There’s a group in Britain called the Militant group—a deeply opportunist organization inside the Labour Party—which has a call for a trade-union militia. Unfortunately, our slogan is sometimes confused with this. Their slogan is coupled with the demand for withdrawal of British troops, but they say that until there’s a trade-union militia the British Army should stay. And they see this trade-union militia as growing out of some sort of organic unity of the working class based on trade-union economism.
If you take a look at the Armagh shootings last year, where you had five Catholics shot in one night and, I think, two nights later ten Protestant workers shot up in a minibus, you can see a problem. Suppose the Protestant workers had been an armed self-defense group. What you would have had was simply a sectarian shoot-out between Catholics and Protestants. So obviously in each defense squad you must have at least one member of both communities.
But the question of an anti-sectarian workers militia is also very much tied in with the rest of your program. It’s not just a matter of disliking the killings; what about the British Army, what about indiscriminate terror? It has to be linked to the revolutionary mobilization because otherwise the trade-union militias would simply become the armed adjunct of the peace movement, which doesn’t have a position on the key question of whether the British Army should stay. Effectively the Militant group’s demand ends up supporting the status quo—that is, the British Army stays, and capitalist law and order is maintained.
There are objections to the demand for an anti-sectarian workers militia. One is that it’s not practical. I think the comrades are probably all familiar with this type of reasoning—I believe it’s one of the props of the Socialist Workers Party’s position on troops to Boston, that is, labor/black defense is not practical. Really it is a form of reformist methodology used to justify capitulating.
The other argument is that it is wrong to equate the terror of the oppressed and the oppressor. That’s true, but what it leads these people into doing is justifying any act by an oppressed group. That is, as long as you say you are fighting against imperialism, it doesn’t matter what you do, we give you a blank check. That means you have to justify Grivas in Cyprus, who was a neo-fascist, not only when he fought British imperialism, but when he went out and slaughtered Turks. And you’d have to defend the Stern Gang, not only its actions when it fought British imperialism, but when it slaughtered Palestinians. And, of course, in Ireland this means taking the side of the IRA, not only when they are fighting the British Army or the Royal Ulster Constabulary, but also when they blow up Protestant pubs.
The two sides are obviously different in Northern Ireland: the Catholic minority is oppressed and you can’t ignore this. It’s also true that the question of Irish self-determination was not fully resolved by the establishment of the Irish republic. We defend the IRA against the British Army, but we need to distinguish between terrorism directed against the imperialist oppressor and what is purely indiscriminate, indefensible terrorism. We would not want to defend the perpetrators of such barbarous acts. An anti-sectarian workers militia would be interested in stopping pub bombings which just slaughter workers, the tube—subway—bombings and the Armagh shootings.
It’s obvious that the analysis of terrorism is crucial to the ability of that anti-sectarian workers militia to act in a way that is supportable by Marxists. So that any anti-sectarian workers militia is not only going to have to attract at least one member from each community into each such formation, but it must also have a strong component of cadre from the revolutionary party.
Opportunities for Class Unity
I touched several times on the argument that it’s not practical to mobilise the Protestants. There’s a difference between on the one hand recognising the complexity of the situation and the fact that mass consciousness has been poisoned, and on the other hand a view of profound historical pessimism which says that the working class doesn’t have the potentiality as a force for revolutionary change.
If you look at the history of Ireland you can see a number of contradictory phenomena. In 1907 there was a series of strikes led by Jim Larkin which managed to keep significant unity of Protestant and Catholic workers. In 1919 there was a Belfast engineers’ (metal workers) strike. The bourgeoisie managed to smash it, and in the sequel 12,000 Roman Catholics lost their jobs. But that wasn’t all that happened: 3,000 Protestant socialists and militants lost their jobs, too. In 1933 there was massive unemployment, and for a brief period you had joint mass unemployed marches in which it is reported the Green and Orange flags flew together. This fleeting unity was preceded by massive sectarian violence and followed by massive sectarian upsurge, which destroyed the unity.
Things are not going to get better automatically. We made the point in Workers Vanguard that in Cyprus there was one period of 48 hours—at the time of the attempted reactionary coup inspired by the Greek colonels’ junta—when the question of nationalism was flatly counterposed to democratic issues, and there was a potentiality of uniting the Turkish and Cypriot workers. It was only one short period where the class struggle asserted itself and subordinated these massive communal tensions, but it was an opportunity.
The same is true in Ireland. In the absence of a revolutionary party we might get some transitory unity on pacifist or reformist grounds. The sequel to the Armagh shootings is that there were joint marches of Protestant and Catholic workers, but they were marching on a quite unsupportable plank: they were demanding strengthening of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which we want to see smashed!
In the absence of a revolutionary party the prospects are bleak. But an organization which for many years may remain isolated, generally hated and impotent can seize such opportunities in the class struggle as I’ve outlined. That means defending a Leninist perspective. It means refusal to capitulate to British chauvinism, to Orange loyalism and to Irish nationalism. If we have that, then we can expect that when the opportunities do come, when the class struggle reasserts itself in some form, such upsurges will not be immediately drowned in communal bloodshed. Nor will the workers have a transitory unity on the basis of waving Green and Orange flags together—there will be an opportunity for revolutionary cadre to see that the flags they’re waving are red flags. Such opportunities are a part of the mobilisation towards the only progressive solution for the bloody sectarian/communalist conflict in Northern Ireland—proletarian revolution!
Supplemental Remarks by Reuben Samuels
I just gave a forum on colonial-settler states and the permanent revolution, which I would like to relate to the Irish question. An interesting point about the colonial-settler question in South Africa is that the “great treks” of the Boers and, just a little later, by the Zulus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wiped out a great many peoples whose economic livelihood was at a lower level of development than either the Zulus or the Boers, such as the Hottentots and Bushmen who were almost exterminated.
ln fact, this has been the entire course of human progress over the last ten thousand years. The history of class society has been one of the subjugation or extermination of less advanced peoples by a more advanced people—those people who had the bigger hatchet, the longer ax, the ones who developed gunpowder and so on. As Engels said, human progress is indeed a cruel chariot that rides over mountains of corpses.
There are a lot of petty-bourgeois vicarious nationalists, very often at a great distance from the struggle they claim to support, who have picked up the ideology of the “wretched of the earth” from Bakunin to Fanon, and who would like to reverse the chariot of human progress. They dream that the less advanced societies will rise up against the more advanced societies and create another mountain of corpses, but at least the chariot will go downhill this time.
Their politics are basically moralism, so for them what makes the Protestants an oppressor people—or for that matter the Israeli Hebrews, or the South African whites—is their higher standard of living. In the case of the Protestant workers in Northern Ireland, this is not much greater than that of the Irish Catholics, and it’s significantly less than the standard of living of anyone in this room.
Let me point out that the average standard of living in Northern Ireland is 25 percent below the standard of living for all of Great Britain, and I assure you that this is a very low standard indeed for northern Europe. Furthermore, if you compare Protestant to Catholic on the basis of income differentials (which tends to exaggerate the difference), the Protestants have a differential of about 15 percent over the Catholics. Of course, there are percentagewise more poor Catholics in Northern Ireland, but in absolute numbers there are more poor Protestants than poor Catholics.
There is a book by Geoffrey Bell, published by the International Socialists in Great Britain, which claims that the Protestants are a labor aristocracy. He uses the following reasoning: if you look at the labor aristocracy, it’s predominantly Protestant; therefore all Protestant workers constitute a labor aristocracy, or are part of the labor aristocracy. If you look at the labor aristocracy in the United States, by comparison, it’s predominantly white; therefore supposedly all white workers are part of a labor aristocracy, as the New Leftist Noel Ignatin told us some years ago. This kind of logic, which I call Geoffrey Bell logic, has superseded both Aristotelian and Hegelian logic. It runs as follows: most or all donkeys are animals, therefore all animals are donkeys.
These are the arguments of people who have despaired of a proletarian solution, that is, a solution other than the mounds upon mounds of corpses that the chariot of history has gone up or come down in the past. This solution, which has only been opened up in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is counterposed to the way in which the national question has been resolved historically, namely through genocide, forced population transfers and subjugation of the oppressed peoples.
And if you don’t think the terms of oppression can be reversed, just look at Cyprus. Two thousand years ago Cyprus was colonized by the Greeks; five hundred years ago it was colonized by the Turks, who became an oppressor people under the Ottoman Empire. The British imperialists cultivated both peoples at one time or another. So who were the oppressor people after the British left? The Greeks. And who are the oppressor people in Cyprus today? The Turks. The terms of oppression can definitely be reversed.
This is not the Leninist solution to the national question. This is the Bakuninist/Fanonist solution: to reverse the terms of oppression, to call for a unified, necessarily Catholic-dominated Ireland without a proletarian revolution.
The 1973 Ulster general strike, a 14-day general strike that totally shut down Northern Ireland, demonstrated that the social power and the social weight of the proletariat is there, even if in this particular case it was used for reactionary ends. It was also an entirely anti-British strike. The British had set up the Council of Ireland, which was a scheme for a peaceful, if forcible (through economic pressure) reunifying of Ireland and dumping Northern Ireland, which has become a liability for British imperialism.
The strike was entirely reactionary, but that was a demonstration of real social power, social power that can be welded to the chariot of human progress, which in this epoch can only be drawn by the proletariat as an international class. And those people who have posed the proletarian solution as opposed to the nationalist solution have gotten a hearing in spite of the communal hatreds. We stand in their tradition, in the tradition of Jim Larkin and the Palestinian Trotskyists.
Supplemental Remarks by James Robertson
Life is complicated, comrades. In the past generation, in the attempt to defend the just struggles of oppressed peoples, there’s been a tendency to lose the context in which, for proletarian revolutionary Marxists, that struggle must be undertaken. What we are seeking to do is to defend the core of revolutionary Marxism, the proletarian solution, against those who would simply embrace the “good” nation against the “bad” nation.
I believe that there’s very little that can be added to Comrade David’s talk in the particular framework of Ireland. I’d like to underline one thing: he spoke of the metal workers’ strike in 1919, in which 12,000 Catholics and 3,000 socialist, class-struggle-oriented Protestants were fired, driven out of the industry. Ireland is a very small country, so that is probably more than half the metal workers. Driven out!
What then do you have? We thought we had a bad purge in the late 1940’s in the United States where 10,000 communistic elements were driven out. But that’s 1/100th of one percent, not over 50 percent. So those who think that the Irish are simply locked into endless sectarian killing should examine the historical record. The metal workers could have been and were trying to be the leadership of the proletariat on the island, but over 50 percent of them were socially annihilated. That’s a defeat in a struggle, not the organic chauvinism of the priest-ridden and the arrogant!
That’s where the function of the revolutionary party comes in. Every generation there recurs the opportunity and the loopholes where an international Leninist formation that is alert can intervene. You must not take what is at present as the inevitable product of history which cannot be changed, ever. It’s necessary to fight, not to be passive.
And in the case of Ireland, it’s particularly easy. On the island of Cyprus, a Greek is a Greek and a Turk is a Turk. How many of you have had the same experience that I have had, of working with young militants, either Ulstermen or from the Republic of Ireland? As soon as they’re broken from the nationalist ideologies, and you encounter them and work with them as comrades outside that poor island, they are simply components of the English-speaking nation. That’s the truth. It is only when locked into this poverty and oppression that they’re thrown at each others’ throats. They may become separate nations, in the defeat of the proletarian goal. But not yet.…
Last point: when I talked here last time, some young woman, who I’m sure was entirely well-meaning, said, “Does any people who oppresses others have a right to exist?” That’s the only thing that I took away from the discussion that I’d been brooding about. And then I thought, if one wants to be idiosyncratic and make trouble, what’s the most chauvinist people on earth, who absolutely have the right to exist? I think it’s probably the Chinese. ln 2,000 years they developed no other term for foreigners except “the barbarians.” Do you understand the conception behind that? But they have the right to exist. They were just a very powerful people, used to suppressing those on their borders and never running into anybody from a culturally higher standpoint, even if they were occasionally conquered by “barbarians.” It’s the nature of the world in the framework of a class-divided society.
I have two observations to end with. For many minorities that are powerful—the young woman put it the wrong way around—it is seen as necessary to oppress in order to exist. That’s one of the lessons of life that we have to shatter, but it does give some insight into the question. Finally, what should be very obvious, something that precedes Marxism but was encompassed within it: we do not believe that any baby born into an ethnic, religious or national group thereby deserves or merits a death sentence. That’s the answer to that young woman.