Through Irish Eyes - The SWP and the Stormont Agreement - The bread and butter of revolutionary politics?
The SWP and the Stormont Agreement
The bread and butter of revolutionary politics?
David Coen
The process of creating stable bourgeois rule on the island of Ireland is in crisis once again. Even after the Republicans destroyed some of their weapons, elements of the Unionist Party demanded evidence that this would quickly lead to total disarmament.
So the Alliance Party, which claims to be neither "Unionist" or "Nationalist", was forced to declare itself as Unionist in order to save David Trimble from his less sophisticated Assembly members who threatened to blow the deal by demanding a more complete and public surrender on the part of the Republicans.
As in 1974, the current British attempts to stabilise Northern Ireland (what Republicans, until recently, called "a failed political entity") are in constant danger of foundering on the rocks of die hard Unionism.
Their slogans from the founding of the original Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912 have been "No Surrender", and latterly, "Ulster says No", for the very good reason that any compromise with Nationalists would undermine the whole 6-county statelet.
Increasingly the left in Britain seems to be rowing in behind the efforts of Blair to keep the whole unsteady edifice standing. In a recent issue of Socialist Worker, Kevin Ovenden explained the process thus: "[The] process is about reaching an accommodation between politicians representing Catholic and Protestant communities. It can reproduce the sectarian division that is built into the Northern Ireland state. But it does provide a space for working class people, Catholic and Protestant, to fight for their interests against sectarianism"
There was a debate in the 1970s about whether or not there were two nations in Northern Ireland. Official Sinn Fein – now disappeared into the southern Irish Labour Party – agreed with the Communist Party in Britain and one of their offshoots in Ireland, the British and Irish Communist Organisation, that the main problem in Ireland was not the British presence (the national question) but the division between Unionists and Nationalists.
The solution to this problem was to focus on "bread and butter" issues, in the belief that once working class people from both sides worked together to defend their material interests (jobs, housing, wages and conditions of work) they would in time be able to resolve their political differences over the national question.
Variants of this "solution" can be seen in Sinn Fein’s previous (and now Republican Sinn Fein’s) concept of a federal Ireland, whereby the Unionists would be entitled to a their own state within a united Ireland.
Most recently it reappeared in John Hume’s description of the problem in Northern Ireland as being not a geographical division but a division among the people.
The British of course have always been keen to portray the problem in their last colony as really a religious divide, a problem of backwardness whereby religious conflicts, which have died out elsewhere, persist in Ireland because of a kind of irrational throwback into pre-modern times.
The parallel with their view of the Arabic world is very interesting in this respect. It enables them to maintain their rule by posing as peacekeepers between the two "divided communities".
The solution is the "peace process" whereby the warring "communities" will be tutelaged in working together by the British until such time as they mature enough to decide how they will be governed.
The problem with this view is that it locates division, not in class or even politics, but in the "irrational" attitudes of people in the North of Ireland: in other words, it is idealist.
We might say with Marx that it is not consciousness which determines social being; rather it is social being that determines consciousness.
This is not to say that the attachment of people in Northern Ireland to ideas about religion or nation are unimportant and can be ignored. Plainly they cannot, nor should they be. But the fundamental division in the North is one of class and if socialists lose sight of that we will be lost.
This can be seen most clearly if we look at Loyalism – working class Unionism. These have been among the fiercest and sometimes the most sectarian opponents of any concessions to Nationalists. Culturally they are the most attached to the British Crown, often to the embarrassment of the more "refined" opinion here.
At the same time, while they provide the foot-soldiers for Trimble and his ilk, they feel continuously betrayed by his "sell-outs". Their violence has always been claimed to be a reaction to that of the IRA, though they were effectively used by the British as death squads against them in the early 1970s and again in the period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s.
There is nothing in the current settlement for them. In the past they had sectarian privileges from their Unionist masters. Now the pacification funds from the EU, Britain and the US go mostly to better-off Nationalists.
They fear a united Ireland because what they are being offered politically is a watered down Fianna Fail-ism – worse than Unionist clientist politics because of its reactionary Catholic and fake green politics. In other words, they have nowhere to go, other than increasingly into gangsterism and trading in illegal drugs.
To pretend that these people are going to be won over to socialism by working with their Nationalist neighbours around "bread and butter" issues is the worst kind of economism. It’s insulting to their culture and their traditions.
Solving the national question is not something that can be postponed or avoided: it is a class question. On the Loyalist side the problem for socialists is how to win them away from their alliance with the Unionist ruling class that derives most of its strength from its alliance with the British ruling class.
This is very – even at times impossibly – difficult: but at least it understands the right direction we need to go. It doesn’t make the mistake of seeing the imperial power (Britain), the main obstacle to achieving socialism on these islands, as a benign partner in creating the conditions for the struggle for socialism.
Britain, which claims to have "no selfish, strategic or economic interest in Ireland" has a very definite political interest, that is a stable capitalist government.
There isn’t a "contrast", as Kevin Ovenden claims, between what Blair and Bush are doing in Afghanistan, the Middle East or anywhere else.
This is the war against "terrorism" in exactly the same way, except in a different phase. War is politics by other means, to misquote Von Clausewitz. Blair, a much more Christian, caring, cultured and generally nicer imperialist than say, George Bush II, is consistent in his politics in Ireland, Britain and in the World Trade Organisation. He only bombs people when he has to.
He’d prefer if they just sat down and talked about their differences. He wants peace … as long as it’s on his (or rather, US) terms.
It used to be said that Ireland was the acid test for British revolutionaries. It’s easy to be militant on behalf of struggles going on elsewhere, much harder to confront your own ruling class, not just on the "bread and butter" issues but on the question of who owns the bakery and creamery.
In Ireland, it was not the hand-over of weapons that signalled the end of Sinn Fein as a revolutionary nationalist force but they fact that they did so in order to continue their coalition with the Unionists (and the British) to run the rotten sectarian statelet they spent 30 years trying to destroy.
The working class, nationalist and loyalist, have not yet contemplated this betrayal.