Originally posted by Permanent
[email protected] 23, 2007 09:13 pm
Whatever their stance on taxes in the South (I believe it is a lowering for higher earners i.e. the petit and big bourgeois) they are clearly shifting to the right to make themselves more appealing to the ruling class and big neo-liberal parties.
They only favour tax decreases in the Six Counties. In the twenty six counties they favoured tax increases until recently, but dropped their economic policies like a ton of bricks when they realised that it was standing in the way of their chances of entering coalition.
Sinn Féin follow bourgeois Nationalism, they divide the working-class in the North of Ireland which is incompatible with creating a mass Socialist working-class movement.
Again, how do they divide the working class? And why does their "bourgeois" nationalism (by which I presume you mean that it lacks a class analysis) divide the working class? This is an important question to ask.
Obviously what it comes down to is change. A united, capitalist Ireland is not going to change much for the working class of the country, and so a lot of people don't want it. Only through socialism can real fundamental change come, of course. The problem though is that the six county state is not a normal state. At its very heart is sectarianism and discrimination.
The state was created to foster a class union of Orange protestant unionists, with catholics disenfranchised at every turn. Protestant workers weren't exactly living in a utopia, but as long as they had one up over their catholic counterparts in terms of jobs, housing, etc. they could be kept in line. All that was needed was to remind them of the "threat from below".
So the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s came along and demanded equality for catholics. (Were they responsible for dividing the working class?) This was of course met by brutal violence from the state and by pogroms from loyalists (pretty much all of whom were working class). And today isn't necessarily much better. The CAJ report published last year showed that catholic were still being discriminated against on large scale, despite all the talk of "equality" and "change". And it's not sectarian to acknowledge that catholics are discriminated against, just as it's not racist to acknowledge that black people are discriminated against in the US.
And so there is a large section of the population of the six counties who want a united Ireland. (Are these people responsible for dividing the working class?) Many of them lack a class analysis but their experience of the nature of the six county state gives them enough reason to want change.
And there's even the "bourgeois" nationalist argument that protestants would have a more democratic representation in a united Ireland than in the United Kingdom (17% of the population vs. 1.6%) - I suppose so may ask if the 26 county state traditionally treated protestants as poorly as the 6 county state treated catholics, and the answer of course is no, even though the 26 counties has a far smaller protestant population that the 6 counties does catholic.
So I guess a united, capitalist Ireland would have one benefit in that systematic religious discrimination would end.
We cannot abandon the Protestant working-class because they hold reactionary views, this is a rejection of broad working-class organisation and the Socialist revolution.
And yet you completely wrote Sinn Féin off above for having reactionary catholic members.
Here is a fundamental problem that all socialists must come to terms with. There will always be a section of the working class that will oppose progressive change. In an Irish context, why is it so important to get the protestant working class on board? There are 5 million people in Ireland who aren't unionist, why not look to that part of the population to build a working class movement?
It has to be said that I don't agree with the argument above necessarily, but it's a question that socialists need to ask themselves. If you want to build a mass socialist working-class movement then you have to address the national question, and that will lead to complications from the start.
I suppose you could argue that nationalism and unionism are as bad as one another, two sides of the same coin. But this is the type of argument you'd get from a British civil servant, a middle class liberal, or an ultra-leftist. Unionism is reactionary. It has no progressive traits at all. Nationalism, on the other hand, has traditionally had democratic and even internationalist characteristics. This is not to say that there haven't been reactionary or sectarian nationalists, but the tradition of the United Irishmen and the Young Irelanders, of Connolly and Pearse, shines far brighter than that of Daniel O'Connell or Gerry McGeough.
Here is another problem that I believe affects many of the liberal left, that if you try to build class unity on purely bread-and-butter, gas-and-water or ringroad politics, then you're simply being facetious. If, and it's a big if, you were able to build some kind of mass movement around say water charges (and despite the rhetoric a mass movement does not exist) what would happen if the 'socialists' turned around and then said, "Oh, by the way, we're against imperialism and monarchy and sectarianism and partition"? The likes of the SP and the SWP, and their various fronts, are incapable of doing this and I personally believe that they're showing contempt for the working class when they don't nail their colours to the mast honestly.
Now I personally believe that only a socialist movement offers any hope for the people of Ireland, but it must be anti-imperialist too (and consistently so). Sectarian discrimination exists in the six county state, but the SP and SWP won't address it for whatever reason (maybe because it's not conducive to workers' unity) but of course ignoring problems has always been a great way of resolving them! :rolleyes:
On top of this they take the liberal bourgeois position of never daring to criticise one 'side' without criticising the 'other', thus implicitly accepting the imperialist two-tribes notion that the six county question is a completely internal one and that imperialism is a non-issue. Neither party as far as I'm concerned is up to the task of building a socialist movement in this country.
I agree it is the result of Imperialist machinations that the working-class is divided in such a manner though. There is no need to be so defensive.
I got defensive because I'm tried of the infantile, not to mention sectarian, argument that uppity táigs are responsible for the division of the working class. You never mentioned imperialism.