What is happening in Ireland?

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN IRELAND?(27 August 1998)

Ireland today is being drawn firmly into the ambit of large scale production, bourgeois democracy and the imperialist system of the United States and British Big Capital.

Today Irelands industry is being expanded horizontally i.e. factories are extending and the expansion of capital is being conducted by fewer enterprises although the flood of new investment (which has been ongoing since the fifties) has not yet come to an end.

The climax of this development has been the Anglo-Irish Agreement Mark 2, cobbled together by the lower middle class nationalist parties both of which style themselves socialist - they are certainly not Marxist rather they cling to the tenets of democratic socialism — and the Unionist middle class, which is out to suppress and disarm the democrats, and the party of financiers, accountants and big business in the sout, Fianna Fail and the British variant of liberal labour politics. This agreement was negotiated under the direct supervision of the American emissary George Mitchell.

Today Fianna Fail which was founded as the party of a declining small proprietor class is following in the footsteps of European parties of the right and seeking its representatives and bankers in the big financiers and industrialists. It is abandoning its democratic roots to become the"otherwise intelligent" and pleasant while spewing out his nostrums about Irelands "neutrality" being a matter for the Irish people in a democratic referendum.

Today that neutrality has never been so perilously balanced. The collapse of Stalinism has created for the middle classes a unipolar world - the world revolves around Washington. Nowhere is this clearer than in the acceptance by the old revolutionary democrats, Sinn Fein, of Washington’s plans for the more extensive exploitation of Irish Labour. Profit i.e. the self expansion of capital is the only driving force behind capitalism as a world system and Irelands rapid upward ascent has attracted the attention of the US vulture class. It hopes to build American prestige and profit on the ruins of a failed democratic upheaval.

As the small proprietor i.e. shopkeeper and medium and small farmer class recedes into Ireland’s history a straight fight between capital and labour will develop. Already the Irish Labour Party has revived and to gain some of the allure of radical ideas, the leader of Ireland 's Christian Democrats, John Bruton, quotes James Connolly to an empty parliament. The Irish Labour Party long ago prostituted itself for high salaries and government cars and will be sought out as a willing partner by Fianna Fail and Fine Gael to provide a "popular" dimension to a future coalition. Irish Social democracy offers nothing to workers.It is time for a new force, the revolutionary proletariat freed from its Stalinist and petty proprietor appendages to makes its appearance on the stage of Irish and world history.