from the Cedar Lounge blog: reactionary unions

  1. PRC-UTE
    PRC-UTE
    http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/200...-party-c-1981/

    This document from the Revolutionary Communist Tendency (UK) is perhaps worthy of
    particular consideration as an example of Irish related material from the UK, and
    not merely for its content but also for the fact that the RCT eventually underwent a
    transformation into the Revolutionary Communist Party which later birthed the
    contrarians of Spiked. Although the RCP was infamous for its policy positions, and
    Living Marxism later still for its, one often unnoticed aspect of their platform –
    at least subsequently – was a very strong identification with Irish independence.
    This document here can be viewed within that context and while its overall purpose
    is one that is linked to UK internal politics, and particularly that of the left and
    the TUC, it is in its analysis of Ireland that it is of most relevance to the
    Archive.

    Very briefly this takes a line that ‘the official labour movement has failed to
    support eh demands for political status of republican prisoners of war in the Six
    Counties of Northern Ireland… yet the British TUC interferes in the affairs of the
    Irish people through the Better Life for All Campaign and the call for a Bill of
    Rights. TUC Irish policy is simply a cover for its complicity in British repression
    throughout the Irish War’


    Worse again, from the RCT perspective, the TUC refused to endorse the Smash the
    Prevention of Terrorism Act Campaign “TUC Hands off Ireland!” conference, and had
    actively barring trades councils from participating in it.

    Inside the document takes a strongly pro-Republican movement viewpoint couched in
    the language of class struggle (and note a message from IRSP prisoners to the
    Conference)…


    Anybody who has read and thought about the conflict in ireland, or visited Belfast
    or Derry, knows that the two main adversaries in this war are the republican
    movement and the British State, and yet the media always present ‘the troubles’ as a
    sectarian feud between Catholics and Protestants. The first peculiarity of the Irish
    War, therefore is that its real character as a national liberation struggle is
    always obscured and denied in Britain.

    And the pamphlet argues that ‘what is so special about the Irish War that its
    existence has to be denied… the answer is simple. The War in Ireland is an immediate
    and mortal threat to the British ruling class’.

    Intriguingly, bar a reference to the RUC and the UDR – referenced as the ‘local
    paramilitary forces’ – there is no mention of political Unionism.

    Also included with the leaflet was a reproduction of Legal Rights for Those Detained
    issued by Fr. Denis Faul which you can find in jpg form at the foot of this post.

    Those of us who have followed the RCP and its metamorphosis into that exotic entity
    known as Spiked, will recognise that a faint echo of this line has survived their
    refashioning as contrarians and libertarians, indeed look no further than here for
    evidence of same…



    Another interseting piece from the splintered sunrise blog:



    We’re going to take a momentary break from The Lost Revolution, although this post
    will touch on one or two relevant points. What I want to ponder is a simple matter
    of political strategy. There are two quite serious strategic conundra that face
    anyone interested in progressive politics in Ireland. Let me state at the outset
    that I won’t be putting forward any answers to these issues, because I don’t have
    any. But, quite honestly, neither does anyone else.

    The first of these issues is how to break Fianna Fáil’s grip on the southern working
    class. I don’t mean weaken it conjuncturally, but break it for the longer term.
    Sure, FF are undergoing a torrid time in the polls at the minute – currently
    registering fourth in Dublin, unless I’m mistaken – and Biffo Cowen looks like he’s
    heading up a dead government walking, but it would be a fool who would predict that
    this was permanent. FF have very deep social roots, and a couple of years of a
    useless Fine Gael-Labour government could quite easily see the buggers bouncing back
    again. What would be needed would be to get FF down, keep them down and for some
    other formation to capture their base before they could make a comeback. I find it
    difficult to see that happening any time soon.

    The second, and much more tricky, issue is that of how to end partition without
    armed struggle. One may object that armed struggle hasn’t been very successful in
    ending partition, but that’s hardly the point, at least if you’re worried about more
    generations coming along and taking up the physical force tradition. During the
    Troubles, you used to have these meetings organised by the left where the left
    speakers would attack the armed struggle as being either morally wrong or tactically
    counterproductive or both. Inevitably, there would be some Provo sympathisers in the
    audience who would ask the leftists to produce an alternative strategy. And they
    could never do it convincingly.

    The left, in its approach to the north, has been quite heavy on schemata and has had
    a whole array of tactics, but a plausible strategy has never really been
    forthcoming. You found this even – perhaps especially – with people who prided
    themselves on their theoretical sophistication. The old-time Peoples Democracy used
    to have a schema, derived basically from Trotsky’s permanent revolution formula,
    whereby the national struggle in the north would create shock waves in the south
    which would in turn open up an all-Ireland revolutionary vista. That,
    self-evidently, did not work out, not least because the southern bourgeoisie was a
    lot stronger and deeper rooted than PD allowed for. PD’s successor group, when not
    impersonating Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, seem to have turned that schema on its
    head and now look to industrial militancy in the south to create shock waves in the
    north. You’ll notice that this is still a schema, and doesn’t really have much in
    the way of empirical evidence to support it.

    Militant/the SP developed quite an elaborate schema which was, if I interpret Peter
    Hadden correctly, designed as a counter to the republican and official communist
    stages approach of resolving the national stage of the revolution and then
    progressing to the socialist stage. Peter claimed to have broken with that whole
    approach, but to the sceptical outsider it looked as if he had simply reversed it –
    by positing the national question as an epiphenomenon of capitalism, what was then
    required was for the working class to achieve power north and south, with economic
    militancy as the motor, and thereafter the national question would be easy to sort
    out. By way of contrast, the SWP (who have long had to negotiate the difficulty of
    an extremely anti-republican leadership and a membership containing a fair
    percentage of hardline republicans with an embarrassing tendency to talk like PD
    members circa 1973) put forward a schema that was quite appealing in its crude
    clarity – these issues would be solved in the course of the revolutionary process,
    so the task of the moment was for the revolutionary party to get more bums on seats.
    This would seem more convincing if the vanguard was a little better at keeping bums
    on seats for longer than five minutes.

    Of course, the foregoing is a massive generalisation, and there is plenty more that
    could be said – in terms, for example, of how Militant expected a mass left split
    from the Labour Party, or how PD expected a mass left split from the republican
    movement, both of which hopes were obviously disappointed. But these are on the
    level of theoretical schemata. There has never been any shortage of tactics either,
    but strategies properly speaking have been thin on the ground. I mention this not in
    an accusatory way, because it’s not as if I have any ready-made strategy either.

    The classic socialist strategy for ending partition has been to try and break the
    Protestant working class, or a substantial section of it anyway, away from unionism.
    It’s the most obvious alternative to physical force, and it’s not rocket science or
    any great novelty – the CPNI, probably under Greaves’ influence, wrote this
    perspective into Ireland’s Path to Socialism in the early 1960s. But then you come
    up against the question of how exactly to go about doing this. Republican and
    communist participants in NICRA were very much informed by the Greaves perspective,
    but it quickly became apparent in the course of the civil rights movement that
    splitting the Unionist Party and winning over the Protestant working class were not
    at all the same thing. That the Protestant working class, under the impact of civil
    rights, turned not to socialism but to Paisleyism demonstrated that.

    A lot of this comes down to how you perceive unionism. There’s been an element of
    traditional republican thinking that has a serious blind spot in respect of
    unionism, basically seeing it as a function of the British presence rather than an
    autonomous entity. Recognising unionism as a thing in itself was obviously a
    conceptual breakthrough, but one that doesn’t answer any questions but simply raises
    a whole lot of new questions. There’s also been this tendency, not only amongst
    republicans but also on the Marxist left, to see unionist identity as something
    quite shallow and easily discarded – as a form of false consciousness which
    Protestant workers will see through when they enter into class struggle, for
    instance. No, there’s more to it than that, and seeing unionism as a reactionary
    ideology doesn’t mean, uncomfortable as this may be, that it isn’t organic.

    This is where Henry Patterson scored points in his attack on republican civil rights
    thought in The Politics of Illusion. (Henry was still a member of the Workers Party
    when he wrote it, but there are specifics about his background – he’d previously
    been in the Workers Association, a BICO front group, and was something of an apostle
    of the late Bill Warren – that are as relevant, and probably more so, than the WP’s
    positions.) Basically, the Greaves strategy saw that discrimination was the material
    basis of unionism, and since discrimination against Catholics necessarily meant
    discrimination in favour of Protestants, it cemented the Protestant working class to
    the Orange state. Remove discrimination, and you kicked away unionism’s material
    prop, and therefore (so the thinking went) removed the Protestant worker’s
    motivation for supporting unionism.

    This didn’t work. The schema failed to take into account the stiff resistance the
    Protestant working class would put up to a movement against discrimination, for
    precisely that reason. Henry also derides as wishful thinking the idea that, in the
    absence of discrimination, unionism would fade away – unionist identity was a lot
    more deeply rooted than that, as he ably pointed out. The trouble with Henry’s
    critique is that he has an equal and opposite blind spot, which is the assumption
    that, if discrimination was abolished, northern nationalism would fade away – that
    there would be no material basis for a separatist project and so northern Catholics
    would simply retreat into a sort of cultural Irishness. In essence, this following
    the line of least resistance leads only to Walkerism, and that doesn’t work either.
    It also leads to the world of endless Barry White columns in the Belfast Telegraph
    wondering bemusedly why northern nationalists couldn’t be satisfied with a
    Welsh-style recognition of their cultural identity (actually, unionism even finds
    that difficult) or why prosperous Catholics on the Malone Road weren’t becoming
    unionists.

    Disappointing as though it may be for the thoroughgoing historical materialist,
    ethno-national identities do have a life of their own, and are usually very
    entrenched. And while some purist Marxists may say that the workers have no country,
    with the wish being father to the thought, in fact it’s elements of the capitalist
    class that have moved most swiftly into a sort of post-national Europeanism, the
    charms of which the actually existing working class so far remains resistant to.

    Could things change? Hypothetically, yes, but in unexpected ways and not necessarily
    with the working class at the centre. Here I’m going to do some shameless
    speculating, but it’s no more off the wall than some of what gets argued as quite
    serious politics.

    Firstly, Newt was mentioning just there about some of the interesting noises Big Ian
    was making in his fairly brief stint as first minister. That is to say, the Dochtúir
    Mór seemed to be hinting at an idiosyncratic sort of Ulster nationalism, which might
    involve close relations with the south but which also embraced Paisley’s very chummy
    relationship with Alex Salmond. This however proved too heady a brew for the DUP,
    and Peter Robinson’s mood music is much more conventional. This is not to say that
    the logic of devolution, and perhaps developments in Scotland particularly, might
    not work itself out in an unpredictable way.

    Secondly, one should not dismiss out of hand the idea that a conservative Catholic
    movement might find common cause with culturally conservative Protestants – although
    probably not these guys – in resisting the tide of secularism. Bernie Smyth has
    actually had some success along these lines on the single issue of abortion. One can
    only imagine the horror of our bien-pensants at such an appalling vista.

    Finally, there’s a class aspect here, and I’m thinking in a sense about something
    that Malachi mentions every so often, about the middle class’s abdication from
    politics and whether this might be reversed in a post-Troubles environment. I was
    struck by Garibaldy’s account of the appearance of Chris McGimpsey at the WP NI
    conference, where Chris mentioned how his electoral base on the Shankill owed a lot
    to the old NILP base, which by now is dying out through old age. But, while
    socialist unionists like Chris McGimpsey or Roy Garland seem like quixotic figures
    now, there are other possibilities which are more likely to manifest themselves in
    North Down than in Belfast.

    Allow me to explain. The North Down constituency is the wealthiest in the north by
    some distance, and contains within it a very large concentration of liberal
    unionists. These people have a liking for quirky independent candidates. They are
    also prepared to vote in large numbers for Catholic candidates – historically
    Alliance, but there would be some logic in UCUNF trying its hand with a Catholic
    candidate. (It’s the Shaun Bailey strategy. There is little evidence that Shaun
    Bailey appeals much to black Londoners, but he just might appeal to liberal-minded
    white folks who want to be reassured that the Tories aren’t racist any more.)

    This mix of factors has led to some delicious unpredicability in North Down
    politics. In the latter half of the 1980s the area was the major stomping ground for
    the Ulster Tories, which makes sense. Then the good burghers elected Bob “Cream Bun”
    McCartney, who not only surrounded himself with Conor Cruise O’Brien and veterans of
    the British and Irish Communist Organisation, but on being elected to Westminster
    promptly declared his hitherto unsuspected leftwing sympathies and proposed to take
    the Labour whip. (They didn’t let him.) Big Bob was then unseated by Lady Sylvia
    Hermon, who has been a most assiduous supporter of New Labour. The thinking now is
    that the UCUNF lash-up, with its appeal to pan-UK unionism, may have a strong appeal
    in the area.

    But there is another, admittedly hypothetical possibility. Up in Derry, PSF have
    been running a unionist outreach programme for years, but this seems to encompass
    relatively few Prods from the estates and rather a lot of businessmen and clergy.
    And in fact, it is the business class who are most open to the all-Ireland context,
    and just might be willing to look south. One might argue that, if Fianna Fáil were
    serious about their northern mission, they wouldn’t be farting about in Derry and
    Downpatrick talking to clapped-out SDLP types, but heading to Bangor and Holywood to
    make a business case for a united Ireland. Then again, maybe FF isn’t fit for
    purpose, and you would need it to be a particular sort of candidate to make the
    right impact there. I believe Declan Ganley is between political projects at the
    moment…