Splintered Sunrise

Just a brief stopgap post today, and I assure you a longer piece will be along shortly as time and energy permit. I just wanted to say I was deeply saddened to hear about the death of Kurt Vonnegut, whose novels I used to devour on a regular basis. He was a standing example of what was good about American culture, and American socialists aren’t so thick on the ground that the loss of an articulate radical is easily missed.

I expect there will now be something of a run on sales of Slaughterhouse Five, and rightly so. But do yourself a favour and dig a little deeper. Check out Mother Night or Cat’s Cradle. Maybe even Bluebeard. But certainly don’t miss Mother Night.

Rud eile: From What Next?, this sterling defence of James Connolly by Rayner Lysaght may be of interest to regular readers.

Sorry about the move to moderated comments, which I hope will only be temporary and shouldn’t slow things down too much. It’s a pain in the arse I know, but no more so than my cyber-stalker from the Socialist Party, who is hell-bent on getting me to confess to affiliations I don’t have and “facts” he’s just made up. I suppose I should feel flattered to have attracted the attention of a heresy hunter, but to be honest I’m more irritated.

At any rate, to cushion the blow, we will be resuming our popular series on the revolutionary programme. I should, I realise, explain why we’re taking Éire Nua as the source for this discussion. This is partly for biographical reasons, because I’m familiar with the attempts to marry the programme to revolutionary practice, and partly because, whatever criticisms I may have developed in the interim, I still have some affinity for the old orange pamphlet. (This is why I can’t easily discuss the very interesting programmatic history of the Officials. I agreed with the first page of the Irish Industrial Revolution, but it seemed to go downhill after that.)

In the summer of ’71 I hove down to Leitrim, singing songs nobody knew and stories left undone. To metropolitan Dubs, Leitrim is Ireland’s answer to the seventh circle of hell, but if your roots are in South Derry it holds no terrors. Actually, heading out west was dead useful, as I was just in time to play a small part in the Dáil Chonnacht movement. No only did that mean spending some time with the wonderful Mayo and Conamara republicans, who really are a different breed, but getting a real taste of revolutionary political agitation. Those young people who think revolutionary politics is all about roads and hospitals don’t know they’re born.

Regional differences come into play here. As I’ve explained before, in the 1969/70 split the Officials had almost total domination of Dublin and the east coast, while the Provos were based mostly in the rural South and West. The North was in play for a while, depending on who could get guns to which areas. This tended to reinforce the stereotype that on one side were radical political sophisticates and on the other were conservative Catholic gunmen with no concept of politics beyond what you would hear on a Wolfe Tones LP.

There was of course some truth to this, particularly in the North where many, many Provos were essentially apolitical Defenders, and where the needs of Defenderism reinforced the apolitical trend. Above all, in the North the supremacy of the army was absolute. You could be in Sinn Féin, and lots of people were regardless of the party’s illegality, but the party was basically a front-cum-support network for the army. You had little standing if you weren’t a military man, and political nous was a poor substitute for a reputation as an operator. (As Grizzly himself has reason to know. If you can find anyone who was on an operation with the Dear Leader, I’ll buy you a pint.) In the South things were different, and the stereotype was much less applicable. The party had a life of its own, and you could play a useful role as a political agitator. This is the contradiction at the heart of republicanism, being a popular democratic movement and at the same time a military conspiracy.

Anyway, the programme. Even 50 years after the War of Independence, you could still find a pretty substantial population of irreconcilables who had never given allegiance to the Saorstát, and never would. These weren’t by and large “men of no property”, but men and women of little property, small farmers, schoolteachers and the like. If you had gone to the big Dáil Chonnacht meetings around the province, you would not have noticed an overabundance of rough-and-ready Ballyfermot types, but rather an awful lot of corduroy slacks and tweed sports coats. This was really the republican base outside of the Pale.

And the thing was that we had a programme that was perfectly attuned to the needs of that base. The Sticks called it Poujadism, or green fascism; we called it Comhar na gComharsan and linked it back to Pearse’s Sovereign People and the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil. The nationalisation of natural monopolies, workers’ control of industry, rural cooperatives and radical federalism might have seemed like an eclectic mix, although, with the exception of federalism, practically everything in Éire Nua had been part of the common discourse of the united Sinn Féin in the mid-to-late 1960s (we dumped the tincture of Communist Party Stalinism and kept the rest).

How this programmatic discourse melded with the larger revolutionary project is a subject I’ll be explaining in more detail. This involves quite a bit of thought about political methodology, and about problematic issues in both republican and socialist ideology, not to mention the difficult overlap between the two. I hope readers will get something useful out of this.

Rud eile: In mentioning the Defenderist nature of the Northern Provos, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Northern Sticks were also rather different from their Southern comrades. Anyone who’s been in the WP will bear that out.

I happened to catch Grizzly’s oration to the broad masses at Clonard last night – you may have seen it on the telly. This is the latest and biggest of the mass meetings the Provos have been holding all over the shop in order to reassure their base ahead of the Ard Fheis vote to embrace the peelers. Even though the meetings have been carefully staged, the publication of the O’Loan report – I’m reading it now and will write something presently – hasn’t helped the apparatchiks, and widespread discontent at the base has been evident.

Gerry, though, was at his smoke-blowing best. I’ve had occasion on this blog to write about the various Machiavellian manoeuvres and rhetorical tricks that our boy uses to hoodwink the base, and they’re on full throttle at the minute. Most prominent at Clonard was the backslapping ploy. Gerry made a point of remarking how intelligent and sharp and politically engaged the West Belfast community was, and that’s the giveaway. When Gerry protests loudly that nobody can pull the wool over West Belfast’s eyes, it almost – but not quite – distracts you from the knitting.

It took me back to some of the spin-mongering tactics that Gerry used between the late 70s and mid-80s to outflank his opponents within the Provos. If you want to know the military gossip, you won’t get it here, so go and read Ed Moloney. In any case, control of the army is straightforward – the North dominated the army, Belfast dominated the North, the Ballymurphy mafia dominated Belfast, and the Murph was Gerry’s personal fiefdom. With that setup, all you need to do is invoke military discipline – and a lot of volunteers weren’t terribly political in the first place. No, Gerry’s big problem was with Sinn Féin, which was allegedly democratic and as strong in membership terms in the South as the North. This is an important distinction, because while in the North (pre-H-Block at least) SF was little more than a support network for the army, in the South it consisted of political activists who had a well-defined programme – the various iterations of Éire Nua – and were building around that programme.

So to turn what was a relatively serious political party into a cynical personality cult, it was necessary to undermine the programme and sideline those closely identified with it. Thus it was that, almost from the moment the Cage 11 boys made their pitch for the leadership, one could hear wild talk of a new generation of young, hungry radicals, influenced by Marxism forbye, challenging the old, tired, out-of-touch rural conservatives (not only Dáithí and Ruairí, I should point out, but almost the entire elected leadership of Sinn Féin). This spin was promoted heavily by Eamonn McCann, but lots of other people who should have known better fell for it. The reaction from the old guard, who the spin was intended to infuriate, is what caused Gerry to make his famous statement that there was no Marxist influence in the republican movement. For once Gerry came passably close to the truth. I do seem to remember Bangers Morrison describing himself as a Marxist-Leninist, but I strongly suspect that Danny was extracting the urine. Same goes for Tom Hartley’s infatuation with Fanon – few people read his essays, and I’m not sure even Tom took them that seriously. No, Gerry was right, the new ideology was not Marxism – it was Grizzlyism.

The point about the “left turn”, which so many people still seem to think was real, was that it was a means to an end, the end being the grabbing of power. I don’t know, and I really don’t care, whether Gerry and his satraps were still sincere republicans at that point. But they played silly buggers with politics for the sake of their own advancement, and playing silly buggers with politics always carries the danger of turning you into an unprincipled cynic. Most of the leftist posing of that period (opposition to standing for election, for example) was simply that. Ruairí is fond of saying that a militant slogan is no substitute for a worked-out programme, and whether or not you agree with Ruairí’s programme the argument still holds good. Having got rid of their established programme without putting anything substantial in its place, the Provos were left with an ideological vacuum, and as we know nature abhors a vacuum. Nonetheless, the ultra-radical posturing served its short-term Machiavellian purpose, and that was all that mattered to the Gerryites.

A similar point could be made about the infamous “grey document”, introduced by Gerry into a discussion on the updating of the programme. Written by a Provophile British Trotskyist, this little squib was a mess of wild ultraleftism completely unsuited to Irish conditions. The most notorious provision of the document was for nationalisation of the land, with farmers only having “custodial ownership”. This went down like the proverbial lead balloon with republicans in places like Donegal and Conamara, who had been having some success agitating among small farmers in impoverished rural areas. More than that, it cut at the very base of the southern Shinners, many of whom actually were small proprietors. But then, Gerry never intended the “grey document” as a real contribution to the republican programme. Having served its purpose of outraging the “conservative” southerners and burnishing the Gerryites’ radical reputation, the mad ultraleft proposals were quietly buried.

Then there was the Women’s Department. It was nearly impossible to argue against a Women’s Department, especially after the role played by prisoners’ families during H-Block – but then that was the point. To a big extent, the Sinn Féin Women’s Department served as a playpen for feminists, many of them former members of Peoples Democracy, who could bum and blow to their hearts’ content about women making their mark on republican politics and refusing to accept their traditional tea-making role any more. Its other functions were to wind up traditional republicans, who believed they had joined a revolutionary movement and not a consciousness-raising group, and to provide a loyal cadre of Gerryite hatchet-women. While Provo political correctness ensured that lots of women, some of them hilariously inept, got to fill prominent positions, none of them achieved any real influence, let alone transforming republican politics. (The same goes in more general terms for the PD defectors, who quickly found out who was boss.)

One of the great examples of this sort of legerdemain was of course the abstention debate in 1986. I don’t propose to go into the gerrymandering of the Ard Fheis, or the unconstitutionality of what was done at it, or even the pack of lies fed to delegates by McGuinness, Doherty, Maskey and the rest of the stooges. What’s more interesting, for the purposes of this discussion, is how the debate was cast in rhetorical terms. A shining vista was held out of “revolutionary TDs” holding the balance of power in Leinster House and lending invaluable support to the armed struggle. From today’s vantage point, it’s enough to make a cat laugh. But do you see what they were doing? Accepting the institutions of the Banana Republic was supposed to be the radical, even “revolutionary”, position, while revolutionary opposition to the southern state was “conservative”. I’m not an abstentionist, but even I knew at the time what a load of cobblers this was. Gerry’s “revolutionary” position was reformist to the core.

The point being that you can get away with this sort of thing for a long while – as John McAnulty says of David Ervine, it is indeed possible to fool most of the people most of the time. And if your rhetorical tricks are good ones, you can keep on using them to good effect for decades. But there comes a time when concrete reality rudely interrupts and the good old smoke and mirrors don’t work any more. My sense is that, at least for a significant number of people, the policing issue is that time.

Today’s topic was determined on the flip of a coin, either Jean Baudrillard or a trip down Leftist Memory Lane. So any readers hoping for some French philosophy of a Monday have my sincerest apologies – instead, we’re going to put the Scorpions on the stereo, dig out the Rubik’s Cube and the old copies of Power Man & Iron Fist, and party like it’s 1982.

Nearly 25 years ago a major ideological shift took place in the Socialist Workers Movement, one that virtually nobody in today’s SWP will be aware of. This was of course the “neo-colony” debate, although debate may be putting things a little too strongly. It was decided, on the basis of a hefty document from Kieran Allen (The Nature of the Southern State), that the Free State was not in fact a semi-colonial, “imperialised” state but rather an advanced European capitalism much like any other.

The debate was unusual in that, if memory serves, the initiative did not come from Britain. One irritating thing about the SWM was that our conference could decide what it liked, but big shifts in policy would normally arrive with the Pooka, as Cliff would have a brainstorm in the run-up to the British SWP conference in November and this would then be translated into Irish terms. Now, Kieran was always basically a Cliff man – Cliff had elevated him to the leadership, after all – so it can be safely assumed that the Poms were consulted before the change was taken to the Irish membership. I wasn’t in the inner circle, so I can’t be certain of this, but I would lay money on it. Nonetheless, the drive for the change came from Ireland, though Cliff’s methodology was much in evidence.

Cliff used to have a rationale for arriving at new theoretical positions, which was based on working back from a bad position to its supposed theoretical roots, and then formulating a new theory which would safeguard his organisation against the bad position. A lot of the supporting argumentation for the state capitalist theory of Russia took the form of arguing that the Healy movement’s pro-Stalinist position during the Korean War derived from their holding a degenerated workers state position, and the adoption of state capitalism would allegedly protect us from this terrible deviation. (See also the Harman-Mandel debate in the 1980s, when Chris Harman, a very intelligent man, was forced to systematically falsify the history of the Fourth International.) Kieran’s document on the Southern state was really an application of the same method.

What exercised Kieran was the Provos’ embrace of electoral politics and a (largely rhetorical) leftism, and the magnetic pull that was having on the far left. Already we had seen Peoples Democracy, a much stronger organisation, go into a state of virtual collapse as the majority of its militants went over to Sinn Féin. We were also leaking members, albeit on a smaller scale – partly because we had fewer people to lose, mainly because PD’s concentration in the North and much more intimate links to the Provo base rendered them more vulnerable. The dominant view in the SWM was that we had to guard ourselves against the danger of defections to the Shinners, and it was that pragmatic view that informed the ideological shift.

Kieran’s basic argument was that PD had got what was coming to them because they had “tailed” republicanism – a pretty tendentious view given their and our comparative records over H-Block. But then, for reasons best known to himself, he chose to aim his fire at our theory of the Southern state, which had been pretty well established since the SWM’s formation in 1971. Of course, the preceding SWM position was not dealt with directly, as Kieran’s polemics were mostly aimed towards the extravagances of republican politics, such as the Provos’ argument that the Southern ruling class were direct puppets of Britain, or some of the absurdities developed by the Sticks under the baleful influence of Eoghan Harris. The positive argument for the new position was simply a few tables showing that various characteristics of capitalism applied to Ireland, while failing to hide the fact that this was a very peculiar sort of capitalism.

But, as you might expect, the debate centred not on the empirical evidence or lack thereof, but on the supposed consequences of neo-colonial theory. It was argued that, if we accepted the South as a neo-colonial state, we would inevitably be driven towards Stalinist-style popular front politics, towards unity with Irish capital and specifically with Fianna Fáil. This ignored the fact that in the previous eleven years we had never felt the urge to unite with Irish capital – nor for that matter had Peoples Democracy, the IWG or the LWR, all of which had substantially similar positions.

At the time I didn’t challenge this, nor did I seriously question the new position until after the SWM had dispensed with my services some years later. I was much more concerned with our line on the North, and the general view was that not only would this not weaken our position on the North, it would actually strengthen it, as we would have no illusions in the possibility of there being a “patriotic bourgeoisie”. Actually, as it happens, there were consequences flowing from the new line that we weren’t really aware of at the time, and that did serve to weaken our politics in the longer term.

The basic consequence was that the national question was confined to the North. Without really noticing it, we moved away from a perspective of a nationwide struggle for national liberation and socialism, and towards a view that in the South there was a class struggle pure and simple, with only a platonic connection to the North. That became the consistent line. It also strengthened economistic tendencies in the Northern SWM, although less consistently as reality had a tendency to impose itself. Opposition to imperialism, which was the outcome of an all-Ireland perspective, came to be reframed simply as opposition to sectarianism, which I think is the logical outcome of a perspective confined to the North. Not that we ever went over to the West British Marxism of Militant – even the most strident economists balked at Militant’s conclusions – but we gradually developed premises that weren’t a million miles from theirs.

And the moral of this story? I suppose that you have to try and base your politics on empirical reality, and think through your conclusions before you jump. And if you believe that adopting a particular dogma can ward off political sin like a cross repels a vampire, you’re likely to find the unintended consequences of that hastily adopted dogma turning round and biting you in the ass.

Readers of a certain age will probably recall the wee pamphlet pictured here. Yes, it’s Éire Nua, just when you thought it was safe to read a socialist blog. You’d tried so hard to forget it, hadn’t you? You thought that this was something that only Ó Brádaighite dogmatists cared about, and if those guys wanted to discuss theology in a smoke-filled room you could pretend it didn’t exist. But, begging your indulgence, I intend to reflect a bit here on the question of federalism and decentralisation, and how this might fit into the elaboration of a revolutionary programme in today’s Ireland. This will be a multi-part post, so please bear with me.

We should begin with the historical roots of the federalist policy. First you have to consider that in the republican split of 1969-70, the Sticks were totally dominant in Dublin and in satellite towns like Bray and Drogheda, while the Provos drew their strength from the West, the South and the border counties (the situation in the Six took a lot longer to be clarified). There is a standard view that this was a tidy split along lines of urban/rural, left/right, radical/conservative. This view is strengthened by ex-Stick elements now integrated into Dublin 4, who adopted the classic D4 sneer about “Rural Ireland” (anywhere more than half an hour out of Dublin). But things were more complicated – the Sticks’ rapid evolution into a rightwing Stalinist sect is a cautionary tale in its own right, while the early Provos, at least in the 26, were by no means as apolitical as usually assumed.

So we have in 1971 the publication of Éire Nua I, which was basically a social and economic programme the united Sinn Féin leadership had been working on before the split. It was a mildly socialist programme without the extravagancies of hyper-Stalinism that the Goulding-Garland faction later developed. The next year this was followed by the bit of the programme everybody knows, properly Éire Nua II, which was the bit about federalism. That was the part of the policy that was jettisoned by the Gerryites between 1979-82 on the grounds that it was a sop to the dílseoirí. I’ll get onto the northern issue in a future post, but for starters we’ll consider how decentralisation tied in with social and economic radicalism as part of an overarching revolutionary project.

Because, and make no mistake, in the early to mid-70s the situation in the North, and the ever-present possibility of it destabilising the South, did provide a revolutionary opening. In the so-called “no-go areas” in the North, there were moves, albeit very rudimentary ones, towards setting up alternative popular structures of government. The idea of linking these up via Dáil Uladh to form a revolutionary government – in essence dual power – was far from outlandish. The shadow assemblies sponsored by Provisional Sinn Féin in the other three provinces were conceived of as part of the same 32-county revolutionary process. And if the Leinster and Munster projects were little more than Provo fronts with no real life of their own, it was demonstrated that there was a potentially serious reservoir of support for Dáil Chonnacht.

The reason for this is not only that republicanism was relatively strong on Connacht, but the social conditions there could sustain a rural radicalism that included but wasn’t limited to republicanism. This flows into the reason why federalism was appealing to people in the West who weren’t necessarily republicans. The problems associated with the West – underdevelopment, depopulation, remoteness from the centres of power, the lack of a voice for the Irish-speaking minority – have been historically connected to the unevenness of Irish economic development, and in particular the overdevelopment of Greater Dublin. These problems are further accentuated by the neutered – virtually powerless – local government structures inherited by the Saorstát from the old British system. (We also have a clue here as to why radicalism in the West would express itself in a republican form, while the Dublin-based Sticks would move ever further away from republicanism.)

So you can see that a genuine popular movement in the West – the Cearta Sibhialta movement in Conamara springs to mind – would find itself open to republican proposals for radical decentralisation. Leaping forward to the present day, and even without talking in terms of socialist revolution, there is a reasonable possibility that a Dáil Chonnacht would have handled the Rossport fiasco better than the Dublin kleptocracy. To make sure of that, of course, you would require a serious overhaul of the Irish social and economic system. I will get onto those aspects of a decentralising programme presently.