solidarity Time to Unite!
The TTG Show in June was the first major public event it organised in 1989. In December 1988 its senior members were anticipating an attendance of two thousand. In fact it was attended by about 600 people.
That the organisers deliberately chose the same weekend as the CND-sponsored Glastonbury festival and the Socialist Movement's conference cannot have helped. Nevertheless the SWP had, by their own admission, 150 comrades present and the bulk of the audience was made up of members and supporters of other left currents. As well as Socialist Outlook, most of the Communist Parties were there, as were Socialist Organiser (though in the light of their line on Ireland nobody quite understood why) and Socialist Action.
The event did not bring along the substantial numbers of the people who have recently become active on the question of British withdrawal. In particular, the large numbers of young Irish people in evidence on last year's Bloody Sunday march were absent. Indeed some of the local. meetings organised by Year of Action groups have attracted similar numbers of people, and certainly were attended by much larger number of Irish and black people.
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IN DEPTH
As well as failing to provide the focus for large numbers of activists and the newly interested, TTG is also failing to win the support of large numbers of labour movement bureaucats. NALGO conference may have voted to affiliate to TTG, but that was in the teeth of the leadership's opposition, and Clare Short herself admitted at the show that NALGO had not wanted to put themselves out on a limb by becoming the first bureaucracy to hold what would be widely understood as a 'Troops Out' position.
Nevertheless, despite all the problems with the way in which the policy was adopted, the happy truth remains that one of the largest unions in Britain has adopted what is generally interpreted as a policy in favour of getting British troops out of Ireland. That is something no other campaign has managed to do in the past 20 years. It is also one of the reasons why TTG will be an important part of the withdrawal movement for some time to come.
On top of this, the Gaelic Athletic Association, which contains many thousands of working class, immigrant Irish youth has declared its support for TTG, something no other solidarity movement has achieved.
However if TTG wants to continue as an important component of a broad withdrawal movement, there are a number of problems it is going to have to sort out. The first of these is that it appears to be entirely self-selecting, both in a positive and a negative sense.
The positive sense is that anybody who wants to can set up a TTG group in an area or union. The negative sense is, that having done this, you are given no opportunity to participate in the national organisation's decision making processes. At the show there was no discussion about electing officers, AGMs, nor of an active, conscious membership. The leaders had already elected themselves, won the support of some left groups for the project and are content to let the foot soldiers follow orders.
Realistically, we have to accept that the campaign for British withdrawal will be a long haul. Can the leaders of TTG seriously believe that any campaign can have a future without the involvement of its membership? To state the question bluntly, what will they do if, Page 24
Karat Forty for example, the Socialist Workers Party decides to move on to pastures new, thus depriving them of large numbers of unquestioning activists? It will not be possible to create a large, dynamic, campaigning organisation without democracy.
But the question of democracy is inseparable from the kind of organisation the organisers of TTG want it to be. At the moment it sees its primary purpose as that of building a movement which will switch the debate on Ireland from whether or not Britain should withdraw, to how and when the withdrawal should take place. Unfortunately, too much of the debate which took place at the show was about the shape of Ireland after British withdrawal, because some on the left in Britain forget that they do not have the right to impose their schemas.
That is not simply a consequence of Britain's imperialist history, it is also a result of the parameters that TTG has set itself. If TTG wants both to remain in existence and a credible part of the withdrawal movement, it must begin to clearly distinguish between its supporters who are committed to British withdrawal and those, mainly in the labour movement bureaucracy whom it wishes to persuade. This would best be achieved by clarifying its political basis as being support for the two demands of British withdrawal and Irish self determination.
It must also abandon the megalomaniac pretensions of some of its leaders to hegemonise the withdrawal movement. This is sectarian and disruptive. Experience, most recently the rally with Bernadette MoAliskey in London, shows that all the elements of the withdrawal movement are able to work around common events. This unity in action shows the real way forward to building a mass campaign for withdrawal, in which the orientations of the various trends complement each other and will bring tens of thousands of people onto the streets of Britain.
If, after the August 12 march in London, the strengths of TTG and the Year of Action can be brought together in this way, there is real potential for a new growth in the movement for British withdrawal and Irish self determination.
Liam Mac Vaid SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
Nicaragua under the
Marking the tenth anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution, Will Mo- Mahon looks at strengths and weak- nesses of what has been achieved. The political landscape of the 1980s has been fashioned by US im- perialism attempting to roll back the gains made by the workers and peasants since 1945. In Asia, Africa, Latin and Central America this has often taken the form of proxy wars fought by counter-revolutionary groups financed by US imperialism. At the eye of this storm has been the Sandinista revolution. It is ten years since the Frente Sandinista Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) destroyed the Somoza dic- tatorship. They replaced it with a popular regime that was anti-im- perialist and claimed to be intent on building a new, socialist country. Any discussion of the nature of the 5 revolution must begin by recognising that the achievements of the Frente have been wide ranging and sig-3 nificant. We must also recognise that the fight for national self-determination is still a living process in Nicaragua. It is essential that internationalists defend that revolution and the interests of the workers, peasantry and op- pressed within it. This implies unconditional solidarity with the workers and peasants in all of Central America. However, unconditional solidarity does not imply a straightjacket being placed on the critical faculties of internationalists. Neither does it imply that the leadership of the revolu- tion should be regarded as the equivalent of its mass base or that it is above criticism. One of the key lessons of the counter revolution in Grenada is that there must be open and honest discussion of the problems that a revolution faces. It is pointles whispering in comers when the labour movement needs collectively to understand what is occuring and why. Internal reforms, external war The Sandinista government has faced problems qualitatively greater than those con- fronted by the Cuban leadership and even per- haps the Bolsheviks. Yet despite geographical vulnerability and the absence of a politically experienced urban proletariat the revolution in its first phase managed to deliver substantial increases in living standards to the poorest in SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
FEATURES 1979-1989: ten years of struggle