Terrorism or Class Struggle?

7th July 1996

TERRORISM OR CLASS STRUGGLE?

INTRODUCTION

The difference between Ireland's growing Socialist Workers Party, the party of revolutionary socialism, and Sinn Fein the party of militant nationalism, is a difference in principle and in tactics. On the one hand the Sinn Feiners have hoped to - and have evidently failed - to build an all-class "alliance" of Southern Irish showband millionaires, American tycoons and Northern Catholic workers. On the other hand, the socialist movement is building a united working class movement North and South in fraternal alliance with the working class of the Western world.

The armed struggle is going through its dying motions. In its death throes terrorism has struck at the heart of the industrial city of Manchester. Through three decades it has sought and failed to frighten the British Government into submission. It has failed because the heroic actions of small groups of armed men cannot disturb the balance of power in the British Isles. They are predestined to failure as were the pyrotechnics of the fFenian dynamiters in the 1860's. A new struggle is dawning - the struggle of the united working classes of Ireland, North and South for emancipation from wage slavery and grubbing employers.

Finally the reality is dawning on Republicans that struggle begins on the streets and in the work places and that only the working class will carry the banner of national liberation and social emancipation in the new century.

Where does terrorism come from?

The terrorist tradition is deeply rooted in Irish history but is renewed by the great events of Irish and world history.

The armed struggle i.e. terrorism began with the revolt of the Northern Catholics against the state, police gangsterism and the loyalist murder gangs spawned by the British Army. The inspiration for the foundation of the Provisional IRA was the police shooting of two teenagers in the Divis flats in 1969. (The police opened fire with a machine-gun.Socialists supported the huge movement of progressive workers to abolish the sectarian distinctions and unequal rights of the Northern sectarian state. Indeed the socialist leaders of the 1960's led these protests by calling illegal marches and acting on their own initiative. The marches for civil rights brought forth from the state provocations designed to stir up sectarian tensions and a terrorist response. We can say this only now, with the benefit of hindsight but in the same breath we repeat, after Marx, that such insurrections are the forerunner of all successful revolutions. Lenin referred to the wide experience of struggle both industrial i.e. strikes and terrorism which formed the revolutionary experience of the Russian proletariat. The wealth of experience led to the workers gaining the knowledge, the consciousness, to distinguish between successful methods of struggle and those which were futile. We are learning today in the same way and our experience will lead to the same result - a heightened revolutionary consciousness and effectiveness in action and clarity in theory.

We leave behind us the failed methods of terrorism in pursuit of more revolutionary objectives.

The History of Republicanism

Republicanism has behind it a long history of renewing armed struggle and insurrection stretching back over almost two centuries. It is an eighteenth century doctrine which  grew out of the French Enlightenment and the experience of the English bourgeois revolutions. These revolutions brought the new possessing classes of capitalist landlords, industrialists, financiers and moneylenders to power in England. History has been unkind to Republicanism. Republics and nation states have been won all over the globe but Republicanism has been gutted of its social content. The unity of "men of no property" has not brought the overthrow of wage slavery, ceaseless exploitation of private capital which creates the social conditions of mass unemployment, poverty and crime.

Why do Socialists oppose Terrorism?

Terrorism has a long history as a fore-runner of the development of revolutionary socialism but this is not to say that socialists should embrace it. Indeed we must fight tooth and nail against the cult of terrorism while trying to win over its practitioners if we are to build a revolutionary movement.

Let us turn briefly to Russian terrorism. In the 1860's and 1870's the Russian Narodnik movement was the foremost revolutionary movement of its day. In the early twentieth century it was succeeded by the Socialist Revolutionaries who believed that by killing Tsarist ministers they could frighten the autocracy into submission.

Trotsky the leader of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the St Petersburg Soviet in 1917 had this to say of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in November 1911,

"In our eyes individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission". 

                                     

Plus ca change, plus la meme chose! It is no different today when we argue against terrorism.

Trotsky goes on to tell us that the danger of terrorism is that it "reduces the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education".

The practical politics of Republicanism.

Republicanism i.e. Sinn Fein is a centrist type of political activity. This means that it swings between revolution and reform never finally or conclusively committing itself to one or the other.

There is an obvious contradiction between Adams being feted by the American moneybags and the spectacle of Sinn Fein leaders like Carron speaking against a backdrop of a banner of James Connolly, the revolutionary socialist.

In An Phoblacht of Thursday 16 May 1996 we hear of the imprecation of Republicanism for "a free, democratic and Socialist Ireland".

In short,republicanism is inherently inconsistent and unstable in theory. As one Derry Republican remarked, "We are the SDLP with guns!" The inconsistency and cowardice of a party of the Second International is not a fair comparison with the heroism of the republicans but this statement tells us where the Republican Movement really stands.

We can, as Lenin advised in Left Wing Communism, make common cause with republican centrists but we cannot allow them to call the shots. Only the party of the revolutionary and class-conscious workers can lead a revolutionary struggle to success.

National liberation and terrorism.

The Republican struggle is often presented by left doctrinaires as a national liberation struggle which should command our "unconditional but not uncritical support "to use Lenin's famous phrase. We can say that there is a test which the Republicans must pass before they claim the name of a national liberation struggle: Do they seek to mobilise the mass of people behind their struggle?

Unfortunately, we can see too clearly that they play with the people. They still encourage passivity on the part of the mass of the people while leaving the actual armed struggle to small groups of armed men. Can it be any other way when there is no promise of social emancipation for the vast majority of people i.e. the working class. However in playing with mass mobilisation and mass activity the Republicans have, during internment in 1971 and the hunger strikes of 1981, twice generated a mass movement in the first period for the ending of internment and in the second place for a programme of five prisoners rights. The struggle for political status in 1981 came after a decade of armed struggle. With the benefit of hindsight we can say again, that these opportunities for a revolutionary collision were brought to nothing by a lack of clear revolutionary leadership. The demands were too narrow. In the Northern Assembly elections of 1983 the opportunity to renew a mass struggle was again missed when Republicans began to call themselves nationalists and stood under the slogan of "One nation, one people, one party". These slogans belong to the adolescence of the revolutionary movement. In truth, there is never one people but two diametrically opposed interests and classes - the property owners and the toilers.

Furthermore, the interests of the toilers are never national but cut across all national boundaries to form an international interest. The words of Marx are forever inscribed on our banner "Workers of all Countries Unite”.

The economic basis of Republicanism

A Marxist examination of any political trend or current searches for its basis in an economic and social strata of society. This is not to say that a party cannot be built on more than one class. Indeed every historic experience of republicanism and national liberation movements shows them to have a foot in both camps i.e. property owners (usually petty proprietors) and workers.

The revolt of the Northern workers who always carry the brunt of the fighting was in alliance with the Catholic middle class who were also sorely aggrieved. These latter gentlemen rarely took any active part in the military fight but drowned the political world with their cowardly perorations and sighs of despair. While happy to take part in Civil Rights marches when the state permitted them, they baulked at illegal protest and very soon fell for the thin attractions of parliamentary cretinism. (This is not to say that parliamentary activity is entirely worthless. It is merely secondary to mass struggle in the form of political and economic strikes which are the schools and universities of the working class. Elections play an essential role in building up a professional political party of the working class).

 It is in the small proprietor that Republicanism finds its truest champion. Crushed by the pressure of big capital it vents its anarchistic frustrations on the visible representatives of big business the banks, the big hotels, the major stores and a plethora of other lesser targets.

The proletarian element in republicanism diverts its energies into revolutionary justice against the petty criminals, hoods and drug dealers-provocateurs. But it is the demand of the lower middle class which always takes first place in the demands of the republican party. It demands political representation, constitutional reform, low taxes and cheap credit. As the first two demands are answered or fobbed off by the representatives of constitutional democracy the latter couple came to the fore. Everywhere the cry is for democratic socialism, never revolutionary socialism.

Republican Sinn Fein - passivity and nationalism

All great revolutionary upheavals generate a multitude of splits and sects. The crisis in Republicanism - and it is a more or less permanent crisis since the interests of the lower middle class and the workers cannot be reconciled within it - has thrown up an ultra-nationalist split. Republican Sinn Fein - a trend which is much smaller than the revolutionary socialist movement, I am glad to say - disavows elections and urges a boycott. It is bizarre to have to inform the reader that these Republicans are in favour of parish pump politics and contest town and municipal elections! This trend in Republicanism is not above making democratic appeals for workers support in a dubious fashion. Its manifesto, Eire Nua, calls in its opening lines for a programme that

"provides for a system (sic) in which all creeds and traditions can be represented and all citizens can exercise real power, without any group infringing on the rights of others". (Eire Nua, P. 1)

This appeal to "Clanna Gael" (Foreword, Eire Nua) violates every principle of revolutionary socialism and class solidarity. It appeals in the time- honoured manner of nationalist hack penny-a-liners to national "sentiment" (at the cost of course of workers interests) and to 'national' unity and 'freedom' (P. 1 Eire Nua). This appeal to "all Citizens" claims that its programme "will make it possible to bring together all the positive forces in the country". As a sop to workers who are already wise to such nationalist flights of fancy, RSF promises "progressive social, economic and cultural policies".

This empty document clinically portrays the sectarian demography of Ireland and promises national government, regional government, regional boards, district councils and community councils. The last we do not object to but autonomy can best be served by a national and indeed international soviet not soapboxes for parish pump politicians of low calibre and no integrity.

It is of course, very relevant to point out at this stage that this old current was the founding thesis of the provisional republicans until thrown overboard with O'Bradaigh and his crew in 1983.

The Irish Workers Group and the Armed Struggle.

The cast of political castaways would never be complete without mention of our very own Irish ultra-leftists, the Irish Workers Group.

This group is the other face of ultra- leftism. It denounced the calling of the IRA ceasefire in August 1994 when the armed struggle was exhausted and the loyalist murder gangs roamed freely. What is to be said of this sorry crew which clings to the epithet of member of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International? They are as small in numbers as they are wayward in theory.

Larragy, McWilliams and Johnston should read again the works of Marx and Lenin starting with the Communist Manifesto and taking in Left-wing Communism an Infantile Disorder.