Monthly Archives: July 2019

From Civil Rights to ‘the Troubles’ part 1

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Last year marked fifty years since the civil rights movement hit the headlines.  This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the troubles in 1969.  If the first was remembered as the harbinger of hope the second will be recalled for dashing these hopes.

It is important to recall these events in order to inform those too young to have been there of just exactly what happened and what the political significance of the events was; and to remind everyone of events that occurred that have not only been forgotten but deliberately no longer recounted because they do not fit the now standard narrative of how the troubles started.  This is true also for socialists because there are lessons that can be learned, or at least discussed, which challenge many elements of today’s received wisdom.

Reading about the period again puts into place certain personal episodes which I have remembered imperfectly as isolated events but which can be located within the broader narrative.

Since I was only a child when these events happened impressions are all that I have.  The most dramatic is of hunkering under the table with the lights out and internal doors placed over the front windows of the house to protect us from stray bullets that were exchanged up and down the street in a gun battle between the British Army at one end and the IRA at the other.

Earlier in the year I recall wondering where my two friends in the street had gone when I returned from my annual summer holiday spent with my granny in Glasgow. It turns out that the two girls had, with their family, been forced to leave their house because they were Catholics in a predominantly Protestant area, one that pretty soon was to become a centre of loyalist paramilitary organisation.

That year my sister can remember being caught up with my mother in a riot at the bottom of the Shankill Road as loyalists attacked the predominantly Catholic Unity Flats at the bottom of the road. Only the kindness of an unknown man meant that they were shepherded away through the backstreets of the Shankill Road up to our home in Woodvale.

It was not until a couple of years later that I became aware that I was not really in sympathy with the wider unionist ‘culture’, as it is now called.  My parents were socialists, and whatever limits there were to their politics, it didn’t include belief in the compatibility of socialism with monarchy and anti-Catholic sectarianism.  They had attended meetings in support of civil rights and voted for the Northern Ireland Labour Party.

I later learned that at a house party in our street at around this time, when everyone had been asked to sing a favourite song, my mother sang ‘We shall Overcome’, the anthem of the civil rights campaign.  God knows how that went down.  I also later learned that my Father would get drunk and sing the ‘Red Flag’ in pubs on the Road, which would normally lead to getting a severe hiding were it not for his friends and his lifelong residence confirming his provenance as really ‘one of ours’ – a Prod from the Road.

None of this makes for an understanding of the political dynamics of the period and how they should be judged by socialists, which is what I want to write about.  It does however allow me to make two important points.

First, that the civil rights movement had some, if limited, sympathy within the Protestant working class. And two, that this sympathy expresses progressive impulses which should not be besmirched by later attempts to pretend that working class loyalism is in any way progressive, when it is this loyalism that is an immediate obstacle and threat to the development of socialism in the Protestant working class.

One of the worst experiences of the last 40 years of my political activity in Ireland was sitting at a Socialist Party meeting in a Dublin trade union hall listening to an SP leader praise the political wing of the Ulster Volunteer Force – the Progressive Unionist Party – for introducing socialism into Protestant working class areas. This included parading Billy Hutchinson as the embodiment of this, despite him being a sectarian killer who declared in an interview that he had no regrets, since his actions had prevented a united Ireland.  According to his Wikipedia page he also participated in the riots at Unity Flats.

This does not mean that I subscribe to the view that there is a relatively straight-forward political programme that answers the problems posed by partition and sectarian division. In fact I have written a number of posts beginning here that point to the problems posed today in elaborating a socialist perspective.

This series of posts is an exercise in being, what I hope is, wiser after the event, which is infinitely better than not being wiser.  If you can’t do this after the event there is really no hope of you learning anything.  As the very un-Marxist philosopher Kierkegaard said – “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”  We will learn from history in order to make whatever attempt we can to change it better next time – “fail better” perhaps, in the words of Samuel Beckett.

What must strike anyone reading of the period, and current reflections on it, is the ready acknowledgement by many of the participants that they didn’t fully understand what was going on at the time. So one examination of the lessons of the civil rights campaign accepts that –

“We were blind to the complexities. We believed in our new enthusiasm that we could appropriate ready-made tactics of moral persuasion and mass nonviolence resistance. We were unaware of the complexities of the American black and radical movements and of the sharp debate around very real differences. We did not realise that the tactics and strategy of the civil rights movement in America were contested there and that that strategy would be contested in Ireland also.”

Another prominent participant, Eamonn McCann, admits that:

“Anybody who looks back on 50 years and says, ‘I never made a mistake’, is a liar or a fool. We all make mistakes. Huge mistakes were made in the 1960s in the course of the broad civil rights movement. But I think the civil rights movement achieved an awful lot.”

And it is not that this confusion and lack of clarity, leading to disagreement and mistakes, was not obvious at the time.  One only has to read the New Left Review interview with the leaders of Peoples Democracy in 1969 to see the obvious lack of coherence.

So, Eamonn McCann says in the interview that “the consciousness of the people is still most definitely sectarian” while the next answer from Michael Farrell states that “we have radicalised the Catholic working class to quite a considerable extent and to some degree got across to them the necessity of non-sectarianism and even the fact that their Protestant fellow workers are almost as much exploited as they are”

To which McCann replies – “I think this assessment is very wrong . . . I believe we have failed to get our position across in the last six months”.  Bernadette Devlin (as then was) then says that “People outside Northern Ireland fail to appreciate the confusion that exists here; nobody knows what they want or how to achieve it . . .”  And then she goes on “we are totally unorganised and totally without any form of discipline within ourselves.  I’d say there are hardly two of us who really agree . . .”

Today this lack of agreement continues, with the first writer linked above stating that “the CRM [Civil Rights Movement] was defeated”, while Eamonn McCann makes a less clear-cut judgement – “It was by no means perfect, but I do think it emerges with great credit from the history of the last 50 years and it is arguably the most successful movement that there has been in the North, certainly since the coming of the women’s movement . . . I think it was a very significant success which didn’t last. That’s the way I look at it. It absolutely failed to create a new politics in Northern Ireland.”

I think a movement that “is arguably the most successful movement that there has been in the North” but which absolutely failed to create a new politics in Northern Ireland” might be close to the truth.

In any case, this series of posts is premised on the view that the issues and arguments that arose during the period from civil rights to ‘the troubles’ is still relevant not only to understanding what happened then but to socialist strategy today, not only in the North of Ireland but more generally.

So traduced has this history become that we have seen Sinn Fein claim ownership of the civil rights campaign when the creation of the Provisional Republican Movement was based on the militants who rejected the political course of the existing Republican Movement which supported that campaign, and rejected political struggle in general as a way forward.  The civil rights movement issued at least partly out of the Republican Movement that the Provisionals rejected and preceded their birth.

This series of posts will not present a comprehensive narrative of the history of the civil rights campaign and start of the troubles but will look at the most important themes and developments that should be re-examined today.  The next post will look at the creation of the civil rights movement.

Forward to part 2

Brexit Socialism

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The left argument for Brexit starts and ends with the observation that the EU is a capitalist construct devoted to neoliberalism.  The British State must free itself from it so British workers can use it to their benefit.

That this is a nationalist project is obvious, since it prioritises national sovereignty and the freedom of the British state over the sovereignty and freedom of the working class. In this view the sovereignty of the British capitalist state is the mechanism to advance and achieve the interests of British workers.

‘We’ must reclaim our nation in the form of the freedom of ‘our’ state even when, as socialists, we are not supposed to let nationality define our politics, or regard as ‘ours’ a state that is the instrument of capitalist rule.  But unfortunately the Brexit illusion is not uncommon within organisations that describe themselves as Marxist, an illusion applying equally to support for Scottish nationalism and ‘our’ prospective free Scottish state.

In this approach only the interests of British workers are considered (or Scottish, when it comes to creating a new Scottish capitalist state), which is why exiting the EU is advanced rather than any reform to it, or even any international campaign to achieve referendums across the EU seeking similar leave votes in France, Slovenia, Finland etc.

The organisations in Britain supporting Brexit have been careful not to trumpet and advance this agenda in Ireland because of its unpopularity.  Of course, in demanding a deep Brexit and no hard border within Ireland, they are effectively demanding that the Irish State significantly remove itself from the EU, without acknowledging it and without having to openly and honestly argue for it amongst the Irish people.

The problem for any such pan-European campaign isn’t that it would fail, and would garner support mainly from the extreme nationalist right – so exposing even further the primary source of support for Brexit in the UK. The more embarrassing problem would arise from success.  Because if such a campaign of mobilisation of a united working class across Europe were successful there would be no excuse for Brexit, or any other exit.  The task would so obviously be to reform and transform the EU by strengthening the political and organisational unity of Europe’s working class.  Returning to local nationalist designs would be seen for what they are and narrow projects for national sovereignty would be toast.

Lenin took up similar arguments in ‘The National Question in Our Programme’ when he argued against the Polish Socialist Party position on the separation of Polish socialists from others in the empire ruled by Tsarism, and on the question of separation generally. The Polish Party, he says, believes that the Party “can only weaken tsarism by wresting Poland from it; it is the task of the Russian comrades to overthrow it.”  In doing so Lenin unfavourably compared the increasing unity of the capitalist class internationally with the weakening of the unity of the working class through separation of its national components

British left supporters of Brexit in effect take the same approach, and in their opposition to the EU seek not to overthrow it or reform it or transform it, but simply to walk away from it, with the vacuous claim that they are offering an example to the rest of Europe.  In fact, as we have seen, Europe’s workers have looked on in bemusement at the mess that Brexit has created and viewed the threats of a dumbed down society it promises as a warning not to do it themselves. Far from encouraging the break-up of the EU the experience of Brexit has confirmed the necessity to counter the unity of Europe’s capitalist class with increasing the unity of Europe’s working class.

Lenin makes a similar point in relation to the Jewish socialist organisation – the Bund – and does not accept the existing weakness of working class unity as an alibi to weaken it further:

“What we have said on the Polish question is wholly applicable to every other national question. The accursed history of autocracy has left us a legacy of tremendous estrangement between the working classes of the various nationalities oppressed by that autocracy. This estrangement is a very great evil, a very great obstacle in the struggle against the autocracy, and we must not legitimise this evil or sanctify this outrageous state of affairs by establishing any such “principles” as separate parties or a “federation” of parties. It is, of course, simpler and easier to follow the line of least resistance, and for everyone to make himself comfortable in his own corner following the rule, “it’s none of my business,” as the Bund now wants to do. The more we realise the need for unity and the more firmly we are convinced that a concerted offensive against the autocracy is impossible without complete unity, the more obvious becomes the necessity for a centralised organisation of the struggle in the conditions of our political system—the less inclined are we to be satisfied with a “simple,” but specious and, at bottom, profoundly false solution of the problem.”

The primacy of the international unity of the working class is made very clear:

“As the party of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party considers it to be its positive and principal task to further the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than that of peoples or nations. We must always and unreservedly work for the very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a looser federal unity, etc., for the complete political unity of a state.”

In a separate article – “Corrupting the Workers with refined Nationalism” – the requirement for the unity of the working class and its organisations is stated clearly:

“The class-conscious workers fight hard against every kind of nationalism, both the crude, violent, Black-Hundred nationalism, and that most refined nationalism which preaches the equality of nations together with … the splitting up of the workers’ cause, the workers’ organisations and the working-class movement according to nationality. Unlike all the varieties of the nationalist bourgeoisie, the class conscious workers, carrying out the decisions of the recent (summer 1913) conference of the Marxists, stand, not only for the most complete, consistent and fully applied equality of nations and languages, but also for the amalgamation of the workers of the different nationalities in united proletarian organisations of every kind.”

Brexit provides no rationale for the unity Lenin sought, and as we noted, is not even considered by its left supporters as a means of trying to unite across countries to reverse the internationalisation of capital that is the purpose of the EU, which anyway would also be wrong.  The complete escapism of Brexit explains the failure of both its right and left supporters to have the least realistic or practical plan how to implement their chosen vision, and especially how to deal with increased national isolation Brexit must inevitably bring. Slogans are all that are provided, with a blind faith in the power of the British State to fashion a new society.  The vision is so backward it is reactionary not only from the standpoint of the working class but also from the point of view of the development of capitalism.

It is understandable that some sincere socialists might follow the political line of the Brexit supporting organisations that they are either members or supporters of; or that there are those who can’t otherwise explain the fact that the small left organisations are mostly in support of it.  But there is nothing very new about such reactionary socialism and it has been contested right from the start of our movement.  As Marx said in ‘The Communist Manifesto’, such reactionary ideas arise again and again on the basis of the petty bourgeois class from which they emanate.

He identified three forms of such reactionary socialism which exhibited properties that are today expressed in left support for Brexit.  These included petty-bourgeois socialism:

“In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.” (Emphasis added – SM)

Of ‘True Socialism’ it is noted that “It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character.”

So, for both right and left supporters of Brexit, Britain will bring a new internationalism to the world in the shape of either globalised free markets or a socialist British State. Replace German with British and one has replicated Marx’s caustic remarks in relation to this latest manifestation in Brexit socialism.  As before, a “Socialistic interpretation” of this Brexit and its supporters are ”the exact contrary of its real character.”

‘The Communist Manifesto’ sets out the principles that still inform socialists today, even if some of his disciples seem determined to prove Lenin right when he declared that no one can discredit revolutionary socialism as long as it does not discredit itself. For Marx and Engels the first of the distinguishing hallmarks of such socialism is that “In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.”

We have seen that Brexit starts and ends with opposition to an expression of international capitalism and starts and ends with a form of national socialism, which because it is national is nothing to do with socialism.